WEN: 2E90FC
Exhibitor Name: Evie Groch
Division: Poetry (Adults)
Class: 01 Poetry
Ambivalence That was Poland, a name my mother didn’t like to say aloud, as if that would legitimatize it. What it meant to her was borscht and potatoes, kasha and cabbage and onions laced with a bitter hatred of everyone not Catholic or native. I got it. Yet when I would catch her singing a song in Polish and asked her to teach it to me, she recoiled in disgust as if caught red-faced in a bold lie. “Never!” she responded. “I won’t!” Yet into her Yiddish slipped so many Polish words, I could not discern them from our native tongue and adopted them as my own. Yet she repeatedly described the village she called home with restrained fondness and detailed objectivity.
And I never figured out if I was allowed to call myself Polish as my false papers claimed I was, or if I should be grateful I really wasn’t born there.
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