Falling Star - Poland Through One Work of Art

"Spadajaca Gwiazda" "Falling Star" by Witold Masznicz
at the Nicolaus Copernicus Museum in Frombork. Source.

"twoj glos dla Solidarnosci krokiem ku wolnosci."

"Your vote for Solidarity is a step toward freedom."

Poster from Krakow, Poland, 1989.

Chrystus Frasobliwy or Worried Christ. Source.

Wood carving by Jozef Lurka. Source.

Below is an early version of an essay that appears in the April 15, 2012 edition of the Journal of American Folklore, volume 125, issue 496. I thank editor James P. Leary for supporting my work. Irish-American Prof. Leary is a champion of scholarship on Polonia. I also thank JAF co-editor Thomas A. DuBois, and JAF editorial assistants Hilary Virtanen and Anne Rue.

As per JAF guidelines, I do not post the finished version of this essay here. I am posting an earlier version. Those wishing to cite this material are advised to access the JAF, available through your library.

On Witold Masznicz's "Spadająca Gwiazda" / "Falling Star"

In the mid-1990's, I took a folk art class with Henry Glassie. Glassie asked his students to select one work of art from a given culture and explain how that artwork offers an entrée into that culture. Glassie gave us free rein; we could select an item of folk, elite or popular art.

I chose to select an artwork from Poland. As a child of immigrants, I had grown up with Eastern European folk art. I'd traveled to Eastern Europe several times, to study, as a tourist, and to live with family. I had lived in Poland for the eventful year of 1988-89, while studying Polish language and culture at Krakow's Jagiellonian University. I would travel to Poland again, to attend a scholarly conference, during my time as a graduate student at IU.

When considering which work of art to use as an entrée into Polish culture, I confronted an embarrassment of riches. I could have chosen a Góral's, or highlander's, embroidered felt pants; a wycinanka or brilliant paper cutting from Łowicz; one of the szopki or miniature castles and cathedrals hand-crafted from metallic papers and displayed at Christmastime in Kraków. I could have chosen Jan Matejko's painting of Jan Sobieski after his 1683 victory against the Turks at Vienna, an event that Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, post 9-11, identified as pivotal in Islam's relationship to the rest of the world. I could have chosen one of the films that won Andrzej Wajda an honorary Academy Award.

I could have attempted science, and chosen an item from Poland's geographic center, or from the Golden Age of folk art, by some estimates, the late nineteenth century, or one representing an art form common to Poland's varied populations, including peasants and nobility, Jews and Gypsies, and other regional or minority groups. I could have abandoned all hope of science, closed my eyes, spun the wheel, and pointed. There was the option to obey instinct, and to attempt to explain the powerful pull of the unarticulated.

During a yearlong visit in 1989, I was hiking through northern Poland. I stopped at Frombork, to pay respects to one of those Poles we Poles and Polish-Americans who engage in the unending struggle for dignity always cite: Copernicus. There I stepped into a small gallery. On the stone wall hung an artwork. I found myself staring at this artwork for a long time. Later, in the museum gift shop, I bought a postcard reproduction. The artwork was "Spadająca Gwiazda," "Falling Star," by Witold Masznicz. It was mixed media. An oil painting served as background; an unpainted, wooden, human figure occupied the foreground. From the few publications I have since found, I learned that Masznicz has displayed his works in various cities in Poland and the US, and that he has been influenced by medieval art. "Falling Star" was created in 1982, the year of Martial Law and the crushing of Solidarity. Another Polish artist, Witold Pruszkowski, also painted a "Spadająca Gwiazda" in 1884. Pruszkowski's oil painting has a dramatic, science-fiction look, very unlike Masznicz's. I don't know if Masznicz's artwork is a response to Pruszkowski's.

Since that hike in 1989, I've had twenty or thirty mailing addresses. I've long since given away as gifts all the paper cut-outs and carved wooden boxes I brought back with me from that trip to Poland. I have kept my flimsy little post-card reproduction of Masznicz's painting with me, though. Why? Searching in my mind for reasons for being so compelled by it, for keeping it for so long, I came to articulate why I had, intuitively, selected it as entrée into Polish art and culture.

The work is roughly rectangular, 23.5 by 20 by 9 centimeters, short sides top and bottom. The bottom is squared off, while the top rises to a curved arch, as in an altar triptych. The background is wood, painted midnight blue, with four white stars. A fiery yellow streak proceeds halfway down this sky. In the foreground lies an unpainted, human-like, wooden figure. This figure lies on a piece of wood which is lashed, by white cord, to the midnight blue background. The figure is lying in a fetal position, with its hands under its chin. Its joints are attached to each other, and also made mobile, by white cord. The grain of the wood is distinct; the grain runs vertically up and down the figure's legs, arms, and torso. The head is in the shape of an elongated sphere; here the wood's grain suggests, to the probing viewer, facial features. Perhaps one blotch is an eye, perhaps a streak is a nose? Nothing suggests a mouth. The figure lies directly under the fiery streak and looks to be its target.

This work is wordless, its principals gigantic and mythic. The human figure sports no clues as to sex, age, class, work, race, or even character. It assumes the ur human form: a fetal position. It has no mouth. The sky, too, is represented only in the broadest strokes that allow the viewer to know that this is a blue sky and not a blue table: the placement as background, four stars. A raised circular area in the paint's surface hints that the painter may have originally included some heavenly body, either moon or sun, but thought better of it. The chatter of facts that communicate individuality and individual experience has been expunged from this work, or this work represents a time when such chatter had not yet evolved. The viewer is confronted with the big, old nouns and verbs without definite articles: human / heaven / collision / destiny.

The viewer can be sure that collision is inevitable. It is plain from the trailing tail of the yellow blob that this is a falling star. It is aimed directly at the human form, right for the heart. This is not an artwork in which pleasure comes from being made to guess: "What's going to happen next?" The viewer is being informed of that, bluntly. Freed of plot uncertainty, the viewer turns to questions of value and meaning. "Why is this happening? Is it good or bad? Are the two visible agents: heaven and human, in compliance, or is one acting without the knowledge, or counter to the wishes, of the other?"

These questions are a matter of some urgency. When regarding this taciturn work, surveying it in a search for meaning, the viewer immediately recognizes the figure in front as like him or herself. It is human in the way that the viewer is human; it is not human in ways unlike the viewer. It is not of a different race or culture or age or profession. No distancing factors communicate that its fate belongs to a different set of experience than the viewer's fate. The viewer begins an urgent search for clues. One must find the clues before plunging heavenly star makes contact with targeted human heart.

Scanning the sky of this artwork, searching for meaning, is familiar to the viewer; scanning the sky for meaning is something humans have been doing for as long as we have been. The viewer sees what has been seen before: a beautiful shade of blue, the blue of night sky and the blue of deep ocean, a blue associated with meditative calm and profound mystery. No other features, no clouds, no horizon, no constellation, help out by providing further vocabulary or narrative. The viewer must make of this sky what he makes of any sky. Sky, of course, has been and can be the map for a sailor, the cosmic order for an astrologer or astronomer, the last frontier for a nation with an exhausted manifest destiny, the source of ultimate fear and destruction for the audiences of War of the Worlds and other films depicting attacks by space aliens. The viewer must make of this heaven what he makes of the heaven that is the metonym for fate, destiny, order, the heaven that is synecdoche for God. It is beautiful, informative, balanced, promising, terrifying, irrational, inexplicable, malicious, as the viewer holds in his own philosophy. Left only with mystery and his own forced conclusions based on insufficient data, the viewer turns to the human figure, hoping for more clues on which to develop or support a theory.

The figure is in a fetal pose. Is this the coil of new life ready to spring? A hologram for the helix? Is, then, the yellow streak sperm shooting from an ur father? Is this figure so blank, so apparently passive, so without feature, because it hasn't happened yet, and is waiting patiently and trustingly for heaven to come to earth in a generous, divine quickening? Or, horribly, is this the fetal position of sleep? Is this human not patient, but merely unaware? Has he surrendered to the promise of rest only to be annihilated for his indulgent and foolish relaxation of watchful tension? But then a creeping suspicion arises. Is this figure awake? Does he know what awaits him? Is his posture dictated not by the spatial economy of wombs or the reflexes of sleeping muscles, but, rather, by conscious decisions to lie down where one might stand, to crouch and be small where one might stretch and take up space, to curl silently where one might bounce violently, shake one's fist, yell and holler and shout? Is this just another one of those irritatingly bovine Poles, like those observed in bread lines, Kafkaesque bureaucratic offices, staring one in the face like human roadblocks when one is trying to get something done? Is this not the coil of hope or the innocence of sleep, but the product of long training, the manufactured posture of waking resignation?

Should we be as annoyed by this figure as we are by the plodding peasant in a slow cart taking up the whole, damn road? This one thing human in the beautiful, mute landscape represents humanity, us, and is no action hero, but rather is taking no action to save or to be saved. Or, do we feel a different anger? This figure is lying under a blissfully beautiful sky. A comet speeds across it, plain as day. For those of us who have stayed up late or driven far to see Haley, Kohoutek, Hale-Bopp, or some other ballyhooed celestial fireworks, this figure's apparent obliviousness is an affront. "Get some eyes!" we want to shout. "Open them and turn around and look! Behind you! An Event!"

I am fully aware of my own inner ungulate, of my own tendency to chew my cud, or, like the figure in "Falling Star," to revert to what looks like a duck-and-cover routine, a wake-me-when-it's-over strategy, when I might be fighting for rights, building a house of brick, or performing an aerobically therapeutic dance for joy. Should I blame my parents? They recounted, as living memory, the tale of the peasants who stood out (he worked too fast or too slow; she was too pretty or too smart; they sang a patriotic song within earshot of the wrong person) and, for their troubles, were tortured in the public square. Or is laying low as a survival strategy, not Slavic, but universal? I certainly encountered it among skittish American grad students, eager as serfs to identify and please the powers-that-be. A common folk metaphor among Polish Americans is "strong like bull" (from "silny jak tur.") The ability of peasants to be strong – or to be bovine – is beautifully dramatized in Andrzej Wajda's 1976 film "Man of Marble." The title is at least a double entendre. Despair at Poles' stoicism in the face of injustice, and awe at Poles' superhuman heroism in the face of catastrophe, are constants in Polish literature. William Butler Yeats is almost as Polish as he is Irish in his poem "Easter, 1916," when he speaks of the birth of a terrible beauty among Irishmen he'd previously dismissed as "drunken, vainglorious louts." My own aching awareness of stoicism's rewards, costs, and surprises invests me – with some urgency – in Witold Masznicz's artwork.

We study the figure's features for evidence to support one or the other of the above-proposed conclusions. The figure is lashed to the sky by cord. Similar, though finer, cord attaches limbs to torso. The same force that binds human figure to mythic sky holds human figure together. Can it be that the forces that keep us here on earth and elements in the mysterious plot are merely mechanical, and to be equated with muscles and tendons? Or, are muscles and tendons the equals of more mysterious, invisible forces? And are these forces benign or malicious?

The figure looks bound. Figures restricted by ropes, vises, and walls were a common motif in Polish art during the communist era. This motif appeared on movie posters, street art, gallery art, and folk art. An example can be seen in Hans-Joachim Schauss's 1987 book Contemporary Polish Folk Artists. Józef Lurka, a Polish wood carver, produced a sickeningly claustrophobic figure of a kneeling human, hands bound behind back, blindfold over eyes, imprisoned between two oppressive blocks of wood. In Lurka's view, the captive's suffering has meaning; a Christ-like figure watches over him. The obvious interpretation of the oft-repeated motif of human forms restricted by ropes, blindfolds, fences, vises and walls, was that the obstacles represented Russia's communist hegemony, or that of Poland's previous oppressors and occupiers, for example, the Nazis. Support for this can be found on a Solidarity poster from 1989, which featured a red chain-link fence with a hole broken in it and the caption: "Your vote for Solidarity is a step toward freedom." No symbols inform the viewer that communism is the sole referent in "Falling Star," or even one referent among many. For example, given that Martial Law was declared by the Military Council for National Salvation, whose acronym spelled the root of the word "crow," crows were sometimes used to symbolize communist oppression. This symbol had further resonance; during the Nazi occupation, Poles referred to the German eagle as a "crow." It would be easy enough to put a crow in the sky of "Falling Star," but there is none.

The figure in "Falling Star" looks bound, and being bound suggests oppression and absence of free will. Too, given that the figure is carved of wood, these cords suggest puppetry. Is this figure a puppet of some divine puppet master? On closer inspection and further reflection, however, it becomes evident that the figure is not tied up, but merely tied. The strings do not proceed directly to heaven, or to anything outside the human figure. Rather, these strings, lashing joints, are the very elements that allow rigid wood the potential of movement, one of the requirements of, and evidence for, life. Yes, this figure could get up and run away, if it were awake, if it chose to. It could turn around and see. In any case, puppets in Eastern European folk tradition have not always been viewed as passive subjects of the manipulation of overwhelming force. In fact, puppets were potentially subversive enough that when Nazis arrested Czech puppet master Josef Skupa, they arrested his comic puppets, Spejbl and Hurvinek, also.

Perhaps this figure's posture provides clues. Take this rectangle, short ends top and bottom, and turn it on its right side. The figure is no longer fetal, rather, he is seated, with his head rested on his hands. Anyone familiar with Polish or neighboring Lithuanian folk art can tell you: this is the posture of the Worried Christ. "Chrystus Frasobliwy," variously translated as "Worried Christ," "Sorrowful Christ" or "Man of Sorrows," is the most frequently encountered male figure in Polish folk art. It can be found in roadside shrines and folk art shops, in several media such as wood, stone, or metal. Worried Christ shows Jesus at some point in his Passion, perhaps after being whipped. He is typically wearing a crown of thorns and a loincloth. He is seated, his head resting in his hands. He is weighed down by the weight of his suffering and his destiny, and yet the Worried Christ, his center of gravity low, is not without strength and dignity. This is a Christ who has been beaten, but who is not beaten. He wears his scars, even his humiliation, as a gravity that binds him closer to the powers of earth. He has been stripped of any distraction, any of the "unbearable lightness of being," as Czech novelist Milan Kundera put it in the title of his best-known work. No stray wind will blow him off course. His pose is meditative; it may be his own suffering that obsesses him, but, given the look of transcendent thought on his face, it may be experience itself. The seeker does not feel foolish coming to this semi-naked, whipped outcast to plead for intervention, does not feel selfish presenting personal woes to someone who so obviously has suffered himself.

The human form in "Falling Star" is not a Worried Christ. He wears no crown of thorns or loincloth; he is lying rather than seated. This form is, though, part of a tradition in which stoic inaction in the face of cataclysm has been represented as honorable, even mysteriously powerful. The tradition of the Worried Christ must be considered when assessing "Falling Star."

And so I look at it again. I have reported my speculations; I am "conclusion-free." This artwork rewards me at least partly because it contains enough data to inspire in me a bit of the sense of mystery I know when I ponder the night sky, or experience itself, and, like the night sky, like life, it provides me with no more data than that, certainly not enough to understand what anything means.

I selected this artwork as an entrée into Polish folk art and its wider culture not because it contains elements of folk art, although it does, for example, the arched, painted wood typical of an altar triptych, or a figure that may be compared to a puppet or to a Worried Christ, but because it symbolizes for me Polish artists, and the wider population there, and in all of Eastern Europe. Life anywhere is precarious and unpredictable; the precariousness of life seems underlined in Eastern Europe. Overwhelming and mysterious energies charge forward without let up: war upon war, the mass displacement of immigration, Nazism, communism, environmental catastrophe. The viewer questions: "Is this annihilation or spiritual opportunity?" No definitive statement has been formulated as yet. However, we have the art as testimony to what people can do, even with fire aimed at their hearts.

Wladyslaw Kowalski: Another Quiet Hero

Wladyslaw Kowalski. Source: Ha'aretz

Vered Bar-Semech, director of the Yad Mordechai Museum, next to Kowalski's grave.
Photo: Eliyahu Hershkowitz. Source: Ha'aretz.

Polish Colonel Wladyslaw Kowalski was born in Kiev in 1896. He earned a degree in agronomic engineering. He fought for Poland's freedom during World War One. His parents were killed by the Russians. When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Kowalski headed the brigade that defended Warsaw. He was arrested by the SS. Because he worked for Philips electronics, he was released. During the war, Kowalski rescued forty-nine Jews.

From Ha'aretz:

"The first of them was Borel Bruno, a sick and hungry 17 year-old, who was wandering the streets of Warsaw outside the ghetto. In the summer of 1940 he encountered Kowalski and said: 'I am a Jew.' Kowalski took him home, looked after him and acquired a forged Polish passport for Bruno, as well as arranging a place for him to live and a job at the Philips plant. Because of this assistance, Bruno survived; after the war he moved to Belgium.

In August of 1941 Kowalski heard moans as he walked past a ruined building in Warsaw. From the building emerged a lawyer named Phillip Rubin, starving and frightened, who begged for help; his brother and sister were also inside the building. Kowalski took them all to his home…

In November 1943, he brought the Rosen family of four out of the ghetto in the city of Izbica, in the east of Poland, and brought them to safe haven with a friend in Warsaw. He also hid Jews in his own home and provided financial assistance to 12 to 15 others, for whom he organized hiding places in homes of acquaintances. Kowalski was interrogated by the Gestapo several times on suspicion of having helped Jews, but he never divulged information about those whom he helped. During the four months prior to the end of the war, Kowalski himself hid with 49 Jews in a bunker, with barely any food and water…

'I admit I saved only 49 Jews,' said Kowalski in 1961, when he addressed a conference of immigrants from Poland in Tel Aviv. 'I did not do anything special for the Jews and I do not consider myself a hero. I only did my duty as a human being toward people who were persecuted and tortured. I did not do this only because they are Jewish, but rather I helped every persecuted person without regard to race and origin.'

In 1963 he was awarded the title Righteous Among the Nations. One of the testimonies submitted to Yad Vashem supporting his candidacy stated: 'Mr. Kowalski saved many people through supreme personal sacrifice, of course without any monetary or other recompense. He worked and he devoted his salary to feeding or clothing the Jews he hid in his home. As the director of a firm in Warsaw, during the whole course of the war he did not allow himself to buy new clothes, he walked in torn shoes and he preferred to devote his income to saving people.'"

At age 61, Kowalski and his Jewish wife, whom he had saved during the war, immigrated to Israel. He worked at a grocery store. One of his final requests was that he be buried among Jews.

From Ha'aretz:

"The body of Polish Col. Wladyslaw Kowalski lay in the morgue of Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv for five days. Nowhere in the country could a cemetery be found that would agree to his final request to be buried 'alongside Jews.' The rabbinate was unwilling to compromise on its principles so that a Christian could be buried in a Jewish cemetery. The fact that he had been declared one of the 'Righteous Among the Nations,' who had saved some 50 Jews during the Holocaust, among them his future wife, was not sufficient to change that decision - nor was the fact that during World War II he had himself circumcised as a sign of identification with the Jewish people."

Finally, a kibbutz agreed to bury Kowalski.

From Ha'aretz:

"The anger felt by Artek Weineman, secretary of Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, over Kowalski's treatment after his death by the state and authorities was evident in the eulogy he gave:

'With mixed feelings we agreed to the request (to bury him at the kibbutz). On the one hand we saw this as our obligation toward this individual to agree to this request. On the other hand, we asked the hurtful and insulting question: Why has this person, who did so much for the Jews, not been laid to rest in a central locale where the survivors can visit him and honor the memory of this man? They have been too small to appreciate and understand the sublime motivations of this man, who risked his life in order to save the lives of tens of Jews from the preying claws of the Nazi animals. However, we are angry at those whose obligation it was to pay full respects to this person after his death and who saw it as an appropriate time to humiliate him in the eyes of the civilized world and his family.

'It is an honor to us that Kowalski's body rests in the cemetery of our kibbutz. His wonderful character and his great deeds will serve us and our children as a symbol of the good and the pure in the human race and will reinforce in us the belief and the hope that brotherhood of nations will ultimately overcome racial hatred and brutal nationalism.'"

From: "Mystery surrounds Righteous Gentile who saved dozens of Jews. Since Kibbutz Yad Mordechai agreed to bury Wladyslaw Kowalski - a Righteous Gentile who saved 49 Polish Jews in the war - in its cemetery in 1971, virtually no one has visited his grave and mysteries surrounding his life abound."
Ha'aretz April 20, 2012
By Ofer Aderet. Link to story on Ha'aretz.

"Bieganski": "Important," "Admirable," "Pioneering," "Incontrovertible to Any Fair Minded Person" Goska "Forces Open the Door"

"Bieganski: The Brute Polak Stereotype, Its Role in Polish-Jewish Relations and American Popular Culture," has been reviewed by editor, publisher, and bookseller Daniel T. Weaver in "Upstream Two: A Mohawk Valley Journal." Active and concerned Polonians and those interested in Polish-American culture will purchase, read, disseminate and support Upstream Two, as it focuses on Polish-American life and literature.

Weaver's review of "Bieganski" is one of the most accurate that the book has received so far.

All too often, those who speak about the Brute stereotype are Polish chauvinists or anti-Polish bigots. The Polish chauvinists insist that all Poles are heroes on horseback. The anti-Polish bigots insist that Poles are inherently flawed, or, more crudely, that Poles are all pigs. Neither group is correct. The Polish chauvinists have no use for my work, and neither do the anti-Polish bigots.

This skewed shouting match is worse than farce; it is a tragedy. The Bieganski stereotype is pervasive in elementary school classrooms, on university campuses, in the press and in films, in museums and in formal, state-sponsored "tolerance" efforts to come to terms with atrocity. It is a stereotype that is used to rewrite history, a stereotype that is used to lie to concerned human beings about what we need to do to meet our ethical responsibilities as members of the human race. Indeed, contrary to both Polish chauvinists and anti-Polish bigots, the Bieganski stereotype has deep and universal ethical implications.

Daniel T. Weaver is neither a Polish chauvinist nor an anti-Polish bigot. He is able to see and report with greater acuity than members of either group. He remarks that after the arrival of peasant immigrants to the US, the image of the Pole in America became "a brute, a man existing only slightly above the level of an animal…Goska shows that negative Polish stereotypes, unlike negative stereotypes of other national, racial, and ethnic groups, continue to be acceptable…Goska does an admirable job showing negative Polish stereotypes."

"Goska's book raises two troubling questions. Why, when the Germans planned and carried out the Holocaust, do so many people blame Poland and have a higher opinion of Germany than of Poland? Why, when both Poles and Jews were both victims of Hitler's racist theories, do some from both sides so despise each other?" The Bieganski stereotype, Weaver insightfully realizes, "Can alleviate Nazi guilt."

A reviewer in American Jewish History had the same epiphany as Weaver. Bieganski, this reviewer reported, "gives the illusion of absolving those who failed in their own test of humanity" during the Holocaust.

In his review, mulling over the questions Bieganski raises, Weaver mentions a woman I'd never heard of: Stella Kubler. Kubler was a Jewish woman who betrayed possibly thousands of Jews to the Nazis in Berlin during World War II. Weaver also mentioned the book, "The Cap: The Price of a Life," about Holocaust survivor Roman Frister, who had been repeatedly raped by a Jewish capo, and who stole a cap from a fellow prisoner, in order to facilitate his own survival, while dooming the victim of the theft.

"In the end," Weaver says, "Goska makes an honest attempt to employ [her] theories to explain the baffling reputation of Poland as the perpetrator of the Holocaust and the continued acceptance of negative Polish stereotypes in American culture and elsewhere…[Bieganski] forces the reader to think about issues he or she has not likely been forced to look at…Other writers must force open widely the door Goska has opened."

As much as I am gratified by Weaver's review, he missed a couple of very important points in the book, and his review contains two sentences that are terribly inaccurate. But I'm not going to quibble; I'm not even going to challenge him to a duel.

When I was writing "Bieganski," the hostility I encountered communicated to me that I was treading on dangerous terrain. Indeed, ten years out from my PhD and having published, as expected, in peer-reviewed journals, and garnered positive evaluations from students and peers, I am forced to consider leaving teaching forever. Being a "pioneer," as Weaver called me, writing a "groundbreaking" book, as Shofar Journal of Jewish Studies called "Bieganski," has had a ruinous impact on my life as a wage-earner.

But I learned something else, too. I realized that, eventually, someone would read "Bieganski," and would understand. Daniel T. Weaver doesn't understand the book perfectly, but his review shows that he understood a good percentage of what I was saying, and that is a gratifying feeling.

That's the good news. The not so good news is that Polonia has not yet taken action on the Bieganski stereotype. While I've spoken at Brandeis, at Georgetown, in museums, synagogues and in UU churches, I have yet to speak to a Polish group. The Polish embassy and the Kosciuszko Foundation have not yet addressed the book, Polish language publishers have not yet published it, and Polish-Americans are not purchasing it in significant numbers.

Meanwhile, one or two people do buy the book. I received a very heartening email from a reader of Bieganski who is neither Polish nor Jewish, but, in fact, proudly German-American. This reader understood the book, too. He understood its universal implications. His email:

"Say 'n - - - - r' and you're dead. Say 'Polack' and people stand there, smiling, waiting for the punchline.

Selective outrage against what should be equally immoral.

You know Bieganski isn't a fight for Poles & Jews, it's about evolving people's heads to where they see right and wrong, try to empathize with human beings struggling, past, present and future and learn from past mistakes."

I rejoiced when I received this email from this one reader. He got it. He understood the book. Thank you, one reader, thank you.

***

Upstream Two also contains an essay by me, "My Vow: I Will Never Be an Immigrant," and several poems. It also contains a review of Linda C. Wisniewski's "Off Kilter: A Woman's Journey to Peace with Scoliosis, Her Mother, and Her Polish Heritage," identifying it as a memoir the reviewer wished he could have written himself, and many other reviews of, or original contributions to, Polish-American culture. Again, concerned Polonians will buy Upstream Two, read it, and support it, as will anyone interested in Polish-American culture.

Making Monsters: A Guest Blog by UK Crime Writer Danuta Reah

Grendel. Source

Bieganski the Blog is honored to host the guest blog, below, by the prize-winning UK crime writer, Danuta Reah.

Reah lives in Sheffield, England. She is familiar with the dark side, a familiarity that, as you see below, helps her to plumb the darker aspects of the Bieganski the Brute stereotype.

Reah reports, "Every child needs a skill in the playground … my skill was telling ghost stories. I got thrown out of the needlework class when I was nine because the needlework teacher couldn't cope with the ghoulish tales I used to entertain the class with … My first novel was based on a rather creepy encounter I had on an empty station platform one evening - it's a story I often tell when I do author events, but beware: it needs bright lights and a crowd."

Reah's father, Jan Kot, was an officer in the Polish cavalry. His poem appears here. Reah's murder mystery "Forest of Souls" addresses the tangled histories and moral ambiguities of Eastern Europe.

Making Monsters by Danuta Reah

In 2010, in Northumbria, a gunman, Raoul Moat, went on a killing spree. He killed one man and seriously injured two other people: his ex-girlfriend, and a police officer selected at random and shot in the face at point blank range because Moat "didn't like" the police. Moat later turned his gun on himself.

The police officer, David Rathband, recovered from his very serious injuries, but the attack left him permanently blinded. He was determined to return to work as a traffic policeman – a job he did well and a job he loved. His employers were keen to have him back. He was determined to live a normal life. He was finding it hard to adjust to life without sight.

He said he felt no bitterness or anger towards Moat, who had injured him so badly, and he founded a charity, the Blue Lamp, to support emergency staff injured in the line of duty. He was, our newspapers told us, a hero.

In August of last year, police were called to his house to investigate a "domestic incident." Shortly after that, his wife left him. On the 29th of February 2012, David Rathband was found dead at his home. He had taken his own life.

This is a tragic story of a man trying hard to cope with a terrible event in his life. Was he also trying to cope with the burden of being a publicly proclaimed "hero"? Let's look at this concept of "hero." I am not talking about someone behaving heroically in particular circumstances: the person who runs into a burning building to rescue people who are trapped; the journalist who deliberately places him or herself in danger to get a story out to the world. I am talking about the "Hero," the concept found running through myth and folklore, the Jungian archetype epitomized by beings such as Arthur, Galahad, Achilles, Beowulf.

The universal hero is something recognized across cultures, but this hero is not real. The hero is a social construct, a metaphoric expression of human need. Heroes do not exist. What does exist is people behaving bravely. Was David Rathband a hero in this sense? He behaved bravely when he was shot, playing dead so that Moat would leave. He made brave attempts to cope with the aftermath of the attack, so, yes, he was a brave man but he was not a hero. The status of hero was imposed upon him, and must have added to the stress of his existence. By turning people into heroes we are denying them their humanity. No one can live up to the image of the mythic hero.

But it seems we need out heroes. And as we need our heroes, so we need our monsters.

UK newspapers (and, I am sure, USA newspapers) love monsters. They must, because they constantly create them. The monster, like the hero, is a social construct, a mythic figure, a metaphor, an archetype.

The monster is a familiar figure from our earliest literature. In the poem Beowulf, the monster, Grendel, presents all the characteristics of the mythic monster. Grendel comes from the mist-shrouded moors. He attacks the king's warriors as they sleep, tears one of them open, rips his joints – his "bone-locks" – apart and drinks the blood from his veins.

Grendel is an outsider, he is not human, he is unnatural, an aberration of nature, he is hostile to people, he inspires fear and he carries out unspeakable acts. These are the characteristics of the mythic monster.

How does this relate to the everyday world? We are familiar with modern examples of human evil that our culture has identified as monsters: Hitler, Mengele, the Moors Murderers from the 60s England, Brady and Hindley, the famous serial killers from the US, Bundy, Dahmer, Gein.

The issue here is not what these people have done. They have committed heinous crimes. Is it useful, helpful or right, however, to depict them as monsters?

Less well-known examples can be instructive. In 1997, a British woman, Louise Woodward, was convicted of shaking Matthew Eappen, a baby in her care, to death. During her trial, most newspapers in the UK depicted Woodward as an unjustly persecuted hero. Two of the newspapers ran campaigns for her release.

In the USA, Woodward, as an au pair nanny, was an outsider. Newspaper reports in the US described her as sullen and hostile. The au pair nanny is an object of fear – a figure almost like the wicked step-mother of folk tales, or the witch in the woods who wishes your child harm. Wooward had carried out an unspeakable act – she killed a baby. In 2007, she topped a list of the ten most notorious criminals in Massachusetts. Woodward was, and remains, a monster.

In the UK, Deborah Eappen became the unknown outsider. Newspaper reports showed her as cold and uncaring (she had let a young stranger look after her children), she showed no grief about her dead child, it was claimed. She carried out an "unspeakable act": she, as a doctor, examined the eyes of her injured child with an ophthalmoscope rather than performing more traditionally motherly acts of grief and concern. 'Debroh (sic) Eappen is in my eyes more guilty than anyone,' claimed a post on a London news web site. Deborah Eappen was a monster.

It seems that, murderer or victim, the status of monster – or hero – is arbitrarily ascribed. The parents of Madeleine McCann, a three-year-old child who went missing in 2007 in the Algarve, held the status of hero in the British press as they desperately sought for their lost daughter. Later, when the local police accused them of being complicit in their daughter's disappearance, the press reports changed. Their continued sojourn in Praia de Luz turned them into outsiders, the unemotional demeanor of Kate McCann became hostility, the parents' leaving of their children in the apartment while they went out was aberrant, the murder of their daughter was an unspeakable act. They were monsters. Madeleine remains lost. Her parents are no longer under suspicion of complicity in her disappearance. They have sunk into (relative) obscurity, neither hero nor monster any longer.

Does it matter that we turn people involved in news events into heroes or monsters (or sometimes both)? Most people depicted as heroes have behaved admirably on at least one occasion, most people depicted as monsters have done terrible things. As long as the press stops hounding the innocent, is there any cause for concern?

I think there is. Heroes and monsters are not reality. They are metaphors and archetypes. If we turn positive acts and evil acts into aspects of the archetype, we are denying their humanity. How do "heroes" behave in everyday life? They behave like human beings, and, doing so, possibly feel they have betrayed their own heroic image. People with cancer must always "fight" they must always be "positive." People like David Rathband must feel no anger towards the person who attacked and damaged them. What's wrong with being afraid? What's wrong with feeling negative? What's wrong with being blazingly, incandescently angry with the person who took your sight? Being a hero is a dreadful burden.

But what about the Ian Bradys, the Myra Hindleys, the Ted Bundys, the Ed Geins, the abusive soldiers at Abu Ghraib? Why shouldn't we see them as monsters? Surely, by their acts, they have relinquished their status as human beings. And this is where the problem lies. They are human, and it is their status as humans that enabled them to do what they did. They were human when they committed their unspeakable acts, as were and are the Nazi war criminals, the genocidal Hutus in Rwanda and the people who led them on, as were and are the armies of Milosevic when they carried out their genocides, as were and are Milosevic, Mladik and Karadzic themselves. These are humans, doing what humans do.

The psychologist Philip Zimbardo talks about the Lucifer effect in relation to human evil. He claims that people, put in contexts of evil, will often commit acts they would not have done, had the context not occurred. This is not to excuse the evil; it is to recognize an important aspect of humanity. We are all capable of evil. Recognizing that capacity in ourselves is the best protection we have against it. If we don't recognize it, there will continue to be Auschwitz, Abu Ghraib, My Lai. There will continue to be murders, massacres and genocides.

Look at this picture: This is a human being, and sometimes, this is what human beings do.

US Soldier Lynndie England with an Iraqi Prisoner. Source.

Ethnicity, Ideology, Academic Hiring, and Bieganski

Sometimes blog readers respond to blog posts like "A Bohunk in the Ivory Tower" and "The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision" to say, "I'm shocked, shocked, to read your post implying that academic employers consider ethnicity and ideology in their hiring decisions! How dare you allege such a thing! Everyone knows that the Ivory Tower is interested only in objective truth, not ideology, interested only in merit, not ethnicity!"

These posts reveal a profound lack of awareness in those who post them. They also reveal a failure in Polonian leadership, organization, and vision. Where there is failure, there is opportunity to correct it. Suggestions can be found in the blog post entitled "There's Hope: What You Can Do about the Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision."

Until we start strategizing about and having an impact on academic hiring, academic funding, and academic syllabi, we have not yet begun the serious work of addressing the Bieganski the Brute stereotype.

I just came across a bracingly blunt and utterly unvarnished video clip of Dr. Thomas Sowell, a scholar with whom every serious Polonian will be familiar, a scholar quoted in "Bieganski." In this brief and pointed video clip, Dr. Sowell speaks with unparalleled frankness and courage about ethnicity, ideology, and academic hiring. You can view the video clip here.

Stop Blaming the Jews (Again): Bieganski in a Surprising Location

An essential tool in Polonia's battle with Bieganski the Brute  Stereotype

I recently enjoyed the pleasure and the privilege of reading the pre-publication manuscript of a new book addressing Polish-Jewish relations.

I was allowed to read this pre-publication manuscript thanks to the publisher's generous favor to me, no more no less.

I was not invited to serve as editor, advisor or fact checker.

The author of the book in question is a very big name, the kind of name that occupies page one of the New York Times. The topic of the book is a very big topic, the kind of topic that commands prime-time specials and university courses and international diplomacy at the highest level.

The book includes an endorsement by another big name in Christian-Jewish relations.

I would love to tell you the name of the book, author, and publisher, but I never will – for reasons that will become obvious.

I sat down with this book in a state of eager excitement and cozy pleasure. I could not wait to read it.

It wasn't long before I found what struck me as an isolated typo. Odd, I thought; this book is meant to be ready for publication – I was reading page proofs as they would appear in the finished text. I reported the isolated typo to the publisher. He thanked me and expressed relief that I had stumbled across this typo in time for him to correct it before the book went to press.

And then I went on to finish the book.

Isolated typo shmypo.

That wasn't no isolated typo.

Ooooo no it wasn't.

I lost count of how many errors I found.

There were misspellings. Misspellings of common, everyday vocabulary words. Misspellings of place names. Misspellings of the names of political leaders, misspellings of the names of archetypal mythic and fictional characters, misspellings of the names of geographic locations where historic events transpired.

There were errors of fact on cultural material so great honking huge that my jaw hit the floor.

Errors in the dates of world historical events.

Errors in the grammar of foreign language phrases.

Heck, they even managed to get the food wrong.

These objective errors were not the end, of course.

Of course this book addressing Polish-Jewish relations relied unquestioningly on the Bieganski the Brute stereotype. This book will serve to perpetuate Bieganski, that false, revisionist, misunderstanding of Christian-Jewish relations, immigration history, World War II and the Holocaust.

This next part won't surprise you.

The factual errors in this text all concerned Poland, Poles, and Polish culture.

A publisher who couldn't recognize key errors in fact about Polish history – who couldn't spell the names of Polish kings correctly, or even recognizably, or accurately date the Warsaw uprising – who didn't even know what Poles eat – will be publishing a book that perpetuates the Bieganski the brute stereotype.

At moments like this, all too many in Polonia point the finger.

They blame the Jews.

There are Jews out there, they insist, who say bad things about Poland in books, movies, newspapers, museums, TV shows, on university campuses. According to this theory, if it were not for these bad Jews, Poland's history would be well and accurately known.

I'd like to extend a little wake up call to those Polonians – the press publishing this upcoming, deeply flawed book on Polish-Jewish relations is Catholic.

That's right, all you dedicated conspiracy theorists who insist that some diabolic outside force controls Polonia and is solely responsible for the Bieganski image. A significant, influential, and historic CATHOLIC publisher was ready to send to press a book addressing Polish-Jewish relations that didn't even spell the names of Poland's political leaders in a recognizable fashion.

I was able to correct factual errors in the book, but I cannot sway it away from its central promulgation of the Bieganski stereotype.

I live in academia and among writers, editors, activists and politicians. I live in New Jersey, a wildly diverse state. When I encounter scholars discussing who gets hired and why, when I huddle with activists to plan political actions, when I chat with editors, publishers and writers and discuss the content of upcoming publications, when I confer with school administrators about what books get put on syllabi and on library shelves, I hear the same concerns addressed with utmost seriousness, and handled with priority and urgency:

"How will the

African Americans

Jews

Women

Gays

Hispanics

Asians

Muslims

Italian Americans

React to this?

Maybe we better factor in their sensitivities and change our plans accordingly.

Maybe we better call in an expert from that community.

Maybe we better hire a consultant.'

Poles? Polish Americans? I have never, not once, heard anyone but me express concern about how Poles or Polish Americans will react to anything.

Why? Because Polish Americans are not players. If they don't like what this Catholic publisher publishes about them, so what? What consequence will there be for the publisher? Has any Pole or Polish American had an impact on this publisher's work? Never, almost certainly.

Remember: this publisher is CATHOLIC. Poland has been called "Rome's most faithful daughter." Poland gave the church one of its most significant recent leaders: John Paul II.

And yet we Polonians exercise so little power, we have so little juice, that a publisher that represents the church Poles have been so loyal to for so long displays a stunning, almost certainly unconscious disregard for Poles and Poland.

A Catholic publisher did not deem it necessary to bring in a Polish fact checker to vet a book about Polish-Jewish relations. A Catholic publisher will contribute to the Bieganski the Brute stereotype.

It took me eight years to find a publisher for "Bieganski." Again and again publishers, including the publisher at a Catholic university, demanded that "Bieganski" be vetted by Jews. I pointed out that Jewish authors had supported "Bieganski." I was actually told – on the campus of a Catholic university – that "Bieganski"'s Jewish supporters were not Jewish enough, that their names didn't sound Jewish enough and that they didn't appear Jewish enough. Mind, in this one instance, it was not a Jew saying this to me, but a non-Jew speaking for a Catholic university.

Do you think for one second that any North American publisher has ever been kept awake by similar worries about how a book will affect Polish or Polish-American readers? Not a chance.

Don't blame others, Polonia. Look at yourselves. Look at how you've failed to become players who can have an impact on publishers, and look at how you can change so that you can become players. Start here: read "The Crisis in Polonian Leadership, Organization, and Vision."

Heroic Rabbi Beaten, Imprisoned in Backward, Anti-Semitic Poland and Ukraine

Photo by Brendan Hoffman. Source: New York Times.

Menachem Youlus is a peaceful, learned, heroic rabbi and Torah scribe. Rabbi Youlus "exudes honesty and integrity," as one of his supporters and major donors, a lawyer, told the Washington Post. Along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, Rabbi Youlus is a recipient of the Olender Peacemaker Award.

Rabbi Youlus rescues Torah scrolls from Eastern European countries like Poland and Ukraine – what PBS, America's public television station, called "dangerous places." In these backward, anti-Semitic regions, "Torahs are hidden in walls, buried in the ground, piled in basements of monasteries." Former Nazis and still hidden Jews populate Eastern Europe. Jewish sacred items are put to profane use by Eastern Europe's many anti-Semites.

"In Ukraine, [Rabbi Youlus] bought [a Torah scroll] from a former Nazi sergeant who said he confiscated it from a man entering Auschwitz. Youlus discovered another being sold in pieces to artists who were using the sacred parchment as canvas. Some he smuggled out of then-Communist countries, two panels at a time, in the lining of luggage." Rabbi Youlus has been beaten and imprisoned and "threatened with jail in Siberia."

His "expeditions," as he calls his trips to Eastern Europe, in distant, exotic lands, among the primitive Bohunks, are fraught with peril. Rabbi Youlus has been called "The Jewish Indiana Jones." "'He's an intrepid Jewish 007,' said Rabbi Moshe D. Shualy, ritual director for Chizuk Amuno, a Baltimore synagogue that has two of Youlus's rescued Torahs. 'He puts himself in such impossible situations to find, retrieve and resurrect these scrolls.'" Rabbi Youlus has gone into $170,000 worth of debt to finance his work.

In Ukraine, as reported in the Washington Post, Rabbi Youlus was swindled by a typically crafty and venal Bohunk peasant who used Jewish gravestones to build – what else – a pigsty. In Oswiecim, Poland, Youlus discovered that the town priest was secretly Jewish and had secret information about hidden Torah scrolls, as described below by the Philadelphia Jewish Voice:

Rabbi Youlus "took out an ad in the local [Oswiecim] newspaper and asked if anyone had panels of a Torah from before the war. The next day he received a call from a priest who said he had four panels. The panels were an exact match in pagination, style and content. Obviously they were originally from the Torah he had found buried in the cemetery. Rabbi Youlus learned that the Priest was born a Jew – named Zeev – and was sent to Auschwitz.

Before the Torah had been buried in the Oswiecim cemetery these four panels had been removed and smuggled through Auscwitz (sic) by four different people. As each person who had a panel was about to die they passed along the panels. Eventually the four panels made it into the hands of Zeev who guarded them as a Priest for over 60 years. Rabbi Youlus lovingly restored the Torah and made it kosher once again." This very Torah scroll would be used by the March of the Living on its annual, controversial marches through Poland. "And every other year it will be taken by 10,000 students as they march through Auschwitz on March of the Living."

Rabbi Menachem Youlus' work is so important that it has been featured on numerous Jewish-themed websites, in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and on PBS, America's prestigious public broadcasting television station. Rabbi Youlus has been honored in synagogue ceremonies. Video of one such ceremony is visible on the PBS "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" website. It was televised nationally in the United States.

From the Washington Post, "with great fanfare, the Torah from Auschwitz was dedicated in New York on Holocaust Remembrance Day 2008. Months later, on the Jewish New Year, the congregation again took the Torah down from its imposing two-tiered ark. In his sermon, Rabbi Rubinstein repeated the story of the Torah's wondrous rescue from the killing fields of Oswiecim [Please note the use here of the name of the Polish town – Oswiecim – rather than the name of the German, Nazi concentration camp – Auschwitz.] Reflecting back on that homily, he says: 'Remember, this was two days after the market dropped 700 points, and I was trying to talk about retrenching, not financial retrenching, [but] what are the things that are the anchors of our lives.'"

As the Washington Post put it, "The stories Youlus has told over the years resonate so powerfully because they meld this centerpiece of the Jewish religion with the cataclysm of the Holocaust, providing a reassuring sense of continuity and hope. As survivors, Youlus's Torahs are brought out for Holocaust Remembrance Day, they're used to teach lessons in religious schools, and for many people, such as Robert Kushner, they have become part of a deeply personal family narrative. Youlus says in a video on the Save-a-Torah Web site: 'Every single Torah that I rescued has a story.'"

The Rabbi's "fundraising video describes Youlus's rescue operation in dramatic fashion. While a violin plays a mournful tune, supporters give testimonials. The screen flashes archival photos of concentration camp barracks and piles of desecrated Torah scrolls. The message is clear: Make a donation so Youlus can parachute in, rescue these fragile survivors and breathe new life into the ancient text known as the Tree of Life."

Note the phrase: "Youlus can parachute in." into what kind of geography does one "parachute in"? One "parachutes in" to chaotic danger zones in which more conventional transportation is not possible. Into what does Rabbi Youlus parachute? Into a scene of concentration camps and desecrated Jewish ritual objects, also known as Eastern Europe. In this Bieganski worldview, that is all that Eastern Europe is.

Shouldn't Eastern European countries be troubled by the removal of cultural items like Torah scrolls? No, says Save-a-Torah's president, investment banker Rick Zitelman of Rockville, Maryland.

"These Torahs do not belong to the people / organizations / museums / churches that hold them. They belonged to synagogues or Jewish communities or families that were destroyed or killed during the Holocaust … These stolen Torahs are no different than art that was stolen from Jews by the Nazis and others, and is now being returned to its rightful owners."

"Many state museums and archives in Eastern Europe – including some in former monasteries – do hold hundreds of scrolls. And half a dozen major Jewish organizations, backed by the U.S. State Department, have been pressing governments in the region to return them to Jewish hands in an orderly fashion.

Wesley Fisher, director of research for the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, is working on the issue. He acknowledges that the slow pace of negotiations 'leads many people to think, 'Well, they should just be taken.' 'But he says he believes the Jewish people should not 'repeat theft,' and with the revival of Jewish life in the region, it's 'not a matter for individuals to decide in cowboy-like fashion' who should have these scrolls. Such decisions should be made in consultation with local communities, he says. Fisher adds: 'I'm not aware that Save-a-Torah is actually trying to deal with Torahs that are held in government hands in the countries of Eastern Europe.'"

Rabbi Youlus' supporters include billionaire David Rubenstein, 60, co-founder and managing director of the Carlyle Group and "Leila Gal Berner – a historian who has taught at leading universities – [who] stands by Youlus even after being informed of [conflicting] facts and of Youlus's denial. In an e-mail, she skirts the question of what the scribe told her about the Torah's origins. "I believe that Rabbi Youlus is an honest man who is doing holy work," she says. "I believe that he must navigate complicated territory in order to find and rescue the Torah scrolls he finds." "For Gal Berner, rescuing a scroll like hers means 'that community didn't die when Hitler tried to kill it.'"

***

Now for the truth. Rabbi Menachem Youlus is a liar and a con artist who defrauded donors for his own personal gain. He may have stolen as much as one million dollars.

Rabbi Youlus never went to Eastern Europe. The only overseas trip he had ever taken was a two-week visit to Israel.

None of the Torahs Rabbi Youlus sold were, in fact, from Eastern Europe at all.

When confronted with the truth of what Youlus was doing, many continued to support him.

Rabbi Shoshana Hantman said, "'I hope you've read 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' At the end, a truth is concealed for the better good of the community … If there is any deception going on ... also think about what he's done that's good." She wrestles with what she has heard. "Destroying this man, if he is guilty of what you suspect, may very well be in service of the truth but in disservice of a greater truth," Hantman says. What, for Hantman, is the greater truth? "The Jewish reverence for the past, for heritage and for those who suffered and died because of the Nazis."

"Perhaps, as sociologist Samuel Heilman says: 'There's a sensitivity because of Holocaust denial. If you say some stories aren't true, you may have to say that all stories are not true. So best not to touch on a sensitive topic.' Heilman – who has written numerous books about Jewish communities and is a professor at City University of New York – suggests that some American Jews feel guilty: 'They didn't manage to rescue the people, so they rescue the Torahs.' Clark University professor Deborah Dwork, co-author of a history of Auschwitz, has her own theory: 'The loss was so devastating that we crave tales of survival.'"

More defenses of Rabbi Youlus can be found at vosizneias site 47758 and The Jewish Channel's article "Leading Open Orthodox Rabbi Defends Alleged Fraudster."

***

The saga of Rabbi Youlus invokes many dark themes: gullibility, betrayal, pathological liars and those who enable them. Compounding all this is Youlus' shameless exploitation of the Holocaust. In turn, neo-Nazi websites exploit the Rabbi Youlus story for their own sick, nefarious ends: smearing all Jews and Holocaust denial.

***

This blog post will not address any of these themes. Rather, this blog post's main idea is already obvious to anyone who has read "Bieganski": The Bieganski, Brute Polak stereotype is such a given, such a constant, in American and Western culture that it played an essential role facilitating Rabbi Youlus' lucrative scam.

The pinnacle, the crème-de-la-crème, of American university scholars, and attorneys, and financiers, and journalists, and television personalities, and religious leaders, are so imbued with, so steeped through, so marinated in the Bieganski stereotype, Bieganski is so firmly nestled in their limbic systems and the marrow of their bones, Bieganski is so much the canonical text, the bread and butter, of the Ivory Tower and television and film and scholarly publications and the mainstream press, that when a pathological con artist like Youlus, through whom they should have seen as if he were a pane of glass, comes along to sell them a bridge, they buy it, because it fits into their stereotypical view of Eastern Europe as a land populated by still-living Nazis and crafty, venal peasants who build their pigsties out of Jewish gravestones and Catholic priests who hide their true, Jewish identity for sixty years under counterfeit cassocks and concentration camps and border guards who threaten heroic rabbis with exile to Siberia.

Those who believe in and promote the racist and revisionist Bieganski stereotype call the shots on all fronts in American and Western culture. Those who challenge Bieganski are not hired and are demonized and silenced.

And Polonia, Poles and other Bohunks do not do one thing about this abysmal state of affairs, and they aren't going to begin to do anything about this until they address the crisis in Polonian leadership, organization, and vision, described here.

Hey, folks, If you're not going to do anything about the Bieganski stereotype, I'm going to use it.