Posted by Anna Ikeda
Today is a public holiday in Poland, the Feast of the Assumption, which is an important Catholic celebration, I presume. Though when I asked my friend this morning about the reason for a day off, she mumbled something about the Battle of Warsaw instead. That battle, also known as the Miracle at the Vistula, took place in August (naturally) of 1920 and is considered as the most decisive turn of the Polish-Soviet War. A guy by the name of Józef Piłsudski was one of the Polish commanders. You might have heard of him. Some Polish-Americans think of him as “the George Washington of Poland” with which I must respectfully disagree. Piłsudski was definitely better looking.
But neither one of these occasions can match the truly important event that happened on August 15 in 1898. That day a guy named Jan Wiktor Lesman was born in a podunk little Galician town somewhere in the middle of nowhere. My Polish readers will recognize him as Jan Brzechwa.
And here I can just imagine them emitting loud snorts and feeling sorry for those of you who are not fluent in Polish.
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Posted by Anna Ikeda
Lately I have been hearing a lot about what it means to be Polish. It seems to be a trendy discussion topic, both among my countrymen and foreign expats living in Poland. And while neither side can agree on what exactly characterizes a typical Pole, they are both of the same opinion when it comes to pride. Polish people are fiercely proud of being Polish. We’re proud of our history, culture, language, food, music, country, weather, alcoholic beverages and everything in between. Where that pride comes from, I’m not really sure. But in order to try to understand what it means, you need to take a closer look at the thick volumes of Henryk Sienkiewicz.
You might have heard of him, he’s the guy who wrote “Quo Vadis”. Yep, the same “Quo Vadis” that in the 1950s was adapted into a movie with Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov and a whole bunch of other stars. Actually, “Quo Vadis” has been turned into several film versions, including a couple of silent ones, in addition to just about everything else – stage plays, TV miniseries, and even an opera.
This book has definitely contributed to Mr. Sienkiewicz’s Nobel Prize for literature in 1905, which he got for his “outstanding merits as an epic writer”. There are other Poles that also got the prize – Władysław Reymont in 1924, Czesław Miłosz in 1980 and Wisława Szymborska in 1996, but we’ll talk about them another time.
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). And young people often use it's shortened form "nara" (just like you said) 