Bohin Manor

...She opened the cover and on the first page saw the crooked letters she had penciled there a quarter of a century ago...

...In some ways in fact it is the antithesis, and appears in stark contrast to Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz, the great verse epic also set in Lithuania and learned by every Polish school child...

...She looked out the window...

...We learn that this is a personal exploration, a fictional hypothesis, of his grandmother's life, which has always been unknown to him...

...While Poles and Jews occupied the same plot of earth for centuries, and interacted on a daily basis, the most personal and hence fundamental aspects of their lives were seldom shared...

...What does freedom mean for an ordinary person...

...Will I still be free...

...It is not necessarily distaste or distrust which Helena feels for Jews but rather an unbridgeable distance from them...

...Books like A Minor Apocalypse and The Polish Complex took a harsh, uncompromising look at modern Poland...

...He writes frequently on Poland.ites frequently on Poland...

...It is on hearing of his daughter's pregnant state that Michal Konwicki utters his first words since the uprising, and seeks revenge...

...It is an old theme-American readers will think of William Inge's Picnic-here with particular Polish overtones...

...She gets no help from her father, whose defeated shrugs betray no opinion one way or the other...

...Here you get the sense that Poland is so much in flux that it is impossible to comment on it, or, rather, that Konwicki is finally tired of doing so...

...she asks herself, swimming one day in the Wilia River...

...This reflection comes toward the very end of the book, after Helena, almost against her will, gives in to Elias's advances...

...She is Helena Konwicka, the author's grandmother, who, at the age of thirty, is, we are told, the most beautiful unmarried woman in the district...

...And I don't know how to reach my grandmother and immerse myself in that long forgotten commonality of life, when there were few people and many gods, or when there will be many people and no god...

...The father, Michael Konwicki, stopped talking the day after that desperate revolt, promising not to utter another word until his country was free...

...My head is bursting, and my heart too may be coming apart at the seams...

...Thomas Swick "No one can have any conception of what boredom really means until he has been to the tropics," Evelyn Waugh once wrote, an assessment that occurred to me while reading this account of a late nineteenth-century Lithuanian summer at Bohin Manor...

...Konwicki at times alludes to the work-Elias tells Helena he wants to be called "Tadeusz"-and even includes a writing from the young Mickiewicz...

...REVIEWERS LEE SIEGEL is a free-lance writer living in New York City...

...out of a land desperately aiming toward the future, he gives us a beautifully disturbing look at the past...

...Pilsudski appears as a young boy hitching a ride, Stalin shows up as the omnipresent police inspector, and Hitler is embodied in a horrible, man-eating monster haunting / am bleary now and this is my last voyage in literature, a senseless trip without fixed destination...

...Helena Konwicka lives with her father at Bohin Manor "in a horrible province that no one in the world has ever heard of...

...And so, now, from this country so eagerly looking to the West, he directs our attention to the East...

...His unromantic view of marriage is shown, toward the end of the book, to be downright calculating: he needs to take a wife so as not to lose his own estate...

...My empty life which wouldn't even tire out a cat...

...Walking through the Jewish quarter of Bujwidze, Helena hears "moaning and lamenting, in that language that none of us had ever learned in all those centuries...

...And then into this dull life comes Elias Szyra, passionate and worldly...

...While it has many of the traditional elements, including the jacket cover, this is not a romantic idyll...

...The author's voice occasionally interrupts the action-if this is not too strong a word for such a languorous novel-with the kind of existential doubts and musings readers have come to expect from Konwicki, albeit in works of more contemporary themes...

...Helena frets about the consequences of her acquiescence, but it is clear that, in her mind, she has no other choice...

...Their own estate, nearby, was lost to them after the failed uprising of 1863...

...There is even an allusion to the young child Lenin, and the telling of his birth bears eerie similarities to the biblical story of Christmas...

...And there are, added to the author's own personal appearances, incursions by other characters from previous and future times...

...THOMAS SWICK is travel editor of the Sun-Sentenal in Fort Lauderdale, Fla...

...Throughout his life as an artist, Konwicki has made a career of going against the tide...

...She looks out the window often in this novel, not just out of boredom, but in fearful hope of seeing Elias Szyra, the young Jew who desires her and promises to release her from this sentence of provincial tedium...

...And now, sensing the end of his own life approaching, he feels the need to get close to hers...

...Plater, who is often seen getting into or out of his carriage, displays all the conventional manners and witticisms of the day, and is plainly insufferable to Helena...

...She becomes obsessed with him, but her personal feelings cannot conquer the social conventions and prejudices of centuries, and she sends him unwillingly away...

...Clearly, and perhaps exaggeratedly, he feels himself fading from the contemporary scene...

...Yet despite these modern literary devices, the book represents a departure from Konwicki's previous work...

...But "Pan Tadeusz," composed in Paris by the homesick poet, presents an idyllic view of Lithuanian manor life in the early nineteenth century, and has none of the stark, oppressive boredom and unspoken sense of futility that Konwicki, with his twentieth-century vision, feels...

...But have I ever been free...

...I'm so awfully tired of my life, she thought...

...The empty stillness before a storm, the social calls of boring neighbors, the old clocks chiming the hour all seem to give serious competition to the Congo: "She took a Bible with a tattered spine from a small shelf...

...In the hot, dry summer in which the novel takes place, Helena becomes engaged to an uninteresting landowner by the name of Alexander Broel-Plater...

...MARY PAT KELLY is a filmmaker who writes often for Commonweal...

...Tadeusz Konwicki Bohin Manor the countryside and bearing the name of Schicklgruber...

...For the daughters of landowners in nineteenth-century Poland, and Lithuania, did not involve themselves romantically, or in many other ways, with Jewish men...