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American Polonia: A Polish Village in Brooklyn
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20549 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
11 / 1992 |
4,059 Words |
| Author
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Frank Fox
Frank Fox is a professor of east European history who
specializes in the history and art of Poland in the twentieth
century.
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Sonia, a dark--haired and animated writer for New York's Polish press, smiled as she recalled this exchange with her husband. "I thought I was back in Poland when we first arrived here. The marketplace, the churches, the restaurants, all the familiar places of our hometown were here, just awaiting us. There was a movie house, Chopin, with different Polish films every week. Even now, many years later, when we go away to Florida, we say to each other, "Oh, we must go back to Poland." But of course we mean that we're going back to Brooklyn, to Greenpoint," she said.
We were walking the streets of Greenpoint on a sweltering summer day. She and Andrzej, a well-known artist whose work has been featured on the covers of the New Yorker, came to America almost a dozen years ago. They always have sounded more nostalgic about their adopted home this "Male Miasteczko" (Little Town), as Andrzej calls Greenpoint, than about the old country. Here they have the best of both worlds, a small "Polish" town right in the middle of an American metropolis. It would be impossible to find a town in Poland with as many shops as can be seen on Manhattan Street in Greenpoint.
Sonia and I passed many stores with signs in Polish, their unique window displays often unrelated to what was being offered inside. A jubiler (Polish for jeweler) filled his entire window with an art naïf panorama of Zakopane, a well-known Polish mountain resort, the snow-capped Tatras drawing more attention on a humid day than the modest display of amber and silver. Several travel agencies within one short block exhibited dolls in folk costumes, colorful sandals, painted wooden eggs, portraits of the pope, jars of preserves, dried mushrooms, and assorted imports. Bakeries displayed babkas, enormous round breads, and khruisciki, light-as-air pastries sprinkled with powdered sugar. A corner restaurant's sign listed pierogi, bigos, klopsciki, golabki, and kaczki; the reasonably priced tongue twisters were advertised next to an outdoor menu featuring dishes of a Korean eating place.
This was a living example of the American melting pot, its ingredients defying mixing even as they are thrown together. But as one writer recently observed about Greenpoint, "In the narrow streets as dusk, children call to one another in Polish, while the Dairy 'n Stuff deli at the corner of Nassau and Eckford stocks Italian bread beside the babka."
Miller's Brooklyn Recalled
Greenpoint still resembles the
...
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