Stranger than Fiction

...Kaufman's favorite heroes, people like Adam Michnik or Bogdan Borusewicz, are for me as much friends in whose company I used to walk down Warsaw streets a mere nine or 10 years ago, arguing over the tactics of our Committee to Defend Workers and occasionally casting a backward glance to see if we were being followed, as they are legendary fixtures in Poland's current political lore...

...This, incidentally, saved hisskin: Had he defected to the Soviet Union, he would have most certainly fallen victim to Stalin's purges...

...he had been a member of the illegal prewar Polish Communist Party...

...Kaufman points this out while writing about the Polish people's pent-up frustrations resulting from their "sense of unavoidable impasse [that] permeates almost every human activity...

...Some of the peopleagain, this proud reviewer's friends— whom Kaufman met in Poland when they were still in hiding, and some he could not meet because they were imprisoned, have been vying for Sejm and Senate seats...

...I would change "men" to "men and women," not as an empty gesture of deference to Women's Lib, but becauseof the actual grace under pressure that many women, from actresses and underground editors to weavers and shipyard workers, have demonstrated in the most recent period of Poland's turbulent history...

...It must further be said to his credit that he does his best to dismantle all the easy stereotypes of the good-guysversus-bad-guys variety that a foreign journalist in Poland is often tempted to employ...

...In no respect are these literary echoes a result of Kaufman embellishing or retouching the original events...

...Under those circumstances, any action that was nonetheless undertaken was judged not so much from a pragmatic as from a moral standpoint...

...His mental baggage included some additional ironies of his family background...

...It was in a jail in 1929 that he met another Jewish-Polish Communist, Ozjasz Szechter...

...Born in Paris into a Jewish family that emigrated from Poland before the War and went to the United States in 1941 on emergency visas, he had every reason to consider his assignment 43 years later a sort of homecoming...

...He had developed a fascination, too, for that remote corner of Europe associated in his family with a great deal of horrible suffering (his parents' brothers and sisters and their children all perished in the Holocaust), giving him a peculiar sense of ethnic and cultural roots...

...Throughout these years he had retained the Polish he learned from his parents while growing up in New York...

...As a consequence, life itself has acquired a pronounced ethical dimension, and the exceptionally intense struggle of the forces of good and evil has produced real-life heroes and villains that beat any fictitious character...

...Uncomfortable as it may be to say so, in an oppressed society it is, as a rule, the society itself that heightens the oppression and adds to its woes...

...The facts related here are exactly that—the facts...

...This is not only true of the nation's ubiquitous political symbols and emblems or the overall significance of a subterranean political culture that has ultimately produced, in Kaufman's words, "a conspiratorial society of honorable men in which grace was held to be the highest of virtues...

...The so-called round-table negotiations have resulted in the relegalization of Solidarity, a quite remarkable loosening of censorship, and a relatively unhindered parliamentary election campaign...

...These came to the surface particularly on the occasion of his elderly father's first trip to Poland in the 50 years since he emigrated...

...As a Western reporter in Poland, he was rather atypical...

...It also applies to specific plot lines formed by individual lives...

...the sequenceof generational and political paradoxes certainly seems almost too neat to be true...

...This is a culture that was crippled for decades by an overwhelming sense of the absurdity and futility of all action...

...When Kaufman's father visited Poland he was unable either to reunite with Szechter or to meet Michnik: The father had recently died, and the son, as if to make the entire tale more symbolic, was in jail again—charged, of course, not with advocating Communism but just the opposite, an attempt to overthrow Poland's Communist system...

...Their prison discussions, indeed, may have pushed Szechter toward the rethinking of his position that later, notably at the final stage of his life in the late '70s, led him to an openly dissident stance...

...Decades of Communist rule have repeatedly spurred the Polish nation to acts of courageous resistance, ranging from street demonstrations to creating an entire underground culture with its own publishing houses and universities...

...By contrast, the hideous story of the police murder of Father Jerzy Popieluszko, and of the killers' subsequent trial, reads like a Socialist version of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood furnished with a cast of characters reminiscent of Smyerdyakov from Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov...

...The book's chapters dealing with enclaves of anti-Semitism in Polish society, the appalling hopelessness of everyday life (portrayed by way of meticulously describing a day in the life of a female textile worker in the city of Lodz), and the rapidly spreading use of drugs among the young make us aware that what impresses the observer as a "conspiratorial society of honorable men" is merely the brightest spot in the chiaroscuro of various shades of gray...

...in the process, it never shuns topics whose complexity is bound to blur the picture of the nation unanimously and enthusiastically pitched against its oppressor...

...His book covers a wide range of issues and penetrates many different social strata, from the apparatchiks in power to the clergy and intellectuals to farmers and industrial workers...

...Reviewed by Stanislaw Baranczak Alfred Jurzykowski Professor of Polish Language and Literature, Harvard...

...Yet one of the points Kaufman's book indirectly makes is precisely that Poland's reality over the past two decades or so has been far more imbued with meaning than any literature...

...As I write this review, those less resigned—the "honorable men" and women of today's Poland—seem to have gotten, at least for a moment, the upper hand...

...The story of the visit forms a highly charged subplot within the book, one that proves real life may well be more amazing than any fiction...

...Kaufman's father was already much more disillusioned with Communist ideology than his cellmate, who was still unshaken in his beliefs...

...On the contrary, personal and emotional as his account may be at times, his approach is primarily that of an impeccably professional journalist...

...What Kaufman brought to Poland in 1984, though, was not only his command of the language and his familiarity with Polish history (two obvious advantages for a foreign correspondent, especially if you compare him with a more typical American innocent abroad, a journalist largely sympathetic and open-minded yet linguistically inept and equipped, at best, with a very sketchy knowledge of the country he is covering...

...In my case it also means that in reviewing Michael T. Kaufman's account of his stay in Poland during the mid-'80s as the New York Times correspondent, I can't help taking things personally—checking for accuracy against my memories of living faces and voices, not against some abstract knowledge of facts and dates...

...The election, although not fully democratic, has offered the first chance of limited representation in half a century...

...Kaufman's book is a fascinating gallery of such individual human fates, each seeming to be governed by some novelistic principle...

...Kaufman's father was not simply a Polish Jew...

...Their sounding like literature is another fact—a fact of contemporary Poland's specific political culture...

...Thanks perhaps to his roots, but mostly thanks to his perceptiveness and sensitivity, Kaufman has been able to grasp and convey this specific feature of the Polish social landscape more clearly than the majority of Western correspondents who visited Poland during the '80s...

...Whatever the outcome of all this, at least one thing has been proven in Poland: that "mad dreams," if supported by enough " saving graces, " are not that mad after all...

...Isn't that a combination of some modernized Bildungsroman with the cloak-and-dagger novel...

...But then, "takingthings personally" is what Kaufman himself admits to in his introductory chapter...

...author, "A Fugitive from Utopia: The Poetry of Zbigniew Herbert" If the nonfiction books you happen to read in your early 40s turn out more and more often to have your own coeval friends as their heroes, that probably means your youth was a triple blessing: you spent it in an interesting country, at an important historic juncture, and consorted with the right people to boot...

...The irony of the prison encounter is that in 1946 Szechter became the father of one of the most famous figures in present-day Poland's liberation movement and a chief Kaufman protagonist, Adam Michnik (who, in fact, emerged as a full-fledged dissident long before his father, having begun his career as a human rights activist in high school...

...If that plot were part of a contemporary novel, we would wince at its farfetched symmetry...

...In yet another ironic twist, she had given up her career as a state prosecutor to become the prisoner's accomplice in political activities and, later on, the mother of his son...

...Consider the biography of Zbigniew Bujak, a factory worker turned selftaught political thinker...

...The person to whom Kaufman's father told his story (and who confirmed that Szechter had remembered their prison quarrels) was Michnik's fiancée, Barbara Szwedowska...

...At the age of 28 he became one of the top figures in Solidarity, second in popularity only to Lech Walesa, and during martial law, after a number of close-shave escapes, he carried on his leadership underground for several years, changing hideouts and disguises, never seen but still powerfully present...

...These frustrations have frequently manifested themselves not only in an active desire to stand up and be counted but also—particularly during the grim years of political stagnation and economic crisis following martial law—in thoughtless aggression, thoughtless apathy, or thoughtless selfdestruction...

...Reality itself is adding the most improbable epilogue to the journalist's already quite amazing account...

...Yet even though each of these volcanic islands of defiance seems to loom larger than the previous one, it is more often than not surrounded by a sea of despondency, gloom and cynicism that constantly threatens to engulf the efforts of the less resigned...

...As a result, he spent several years in prisons until he jumped bail and escaped across the southern border in 1935...