Being Polish American
"The earth I connect with": A conversation with Cecilia Woloch, a poet, writer, teacher, and performer
Cecilia Woloch in a conversation with Marta Cieślak and Anna Muller
To learn more about Cecilia and her work see her website here.
Marta Cieślak: One of our goals for this interview is to reflect on how Polishness can be expanded if we walk away from the narrow ethnic understanding of Polishness. Can you tell us who you are in the way that you would like to introduce yourself to the members of the Polish American Historical Association?
Cecilia Woloch: In terms of my identity,I'm a writer, mostly a poet. And I'm a traveler. Until this past March, I have traveled for at least half of every year since about 1993. This is the longest time I've stayed in one place for a long time. Another part of my identity is Roma, but I always tell people that this is anecdotal, because there was always a rumor or a joke in my family that on my father's side of the family, we were “part Gypsy.” I have never lived in a Roma community, but I wrote a book that was an exploration of this identity, a book that chronicled a series of journeys that took me all the way back to the village in the Carpathians, where my paternal grandmother was born, and also interwove a chronicle of Roma history. So, publishing this book, Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem,brought me into the Roma community in Europe, and now I'm very much a part of that community. And some know me as a Roma writer, so writing the book, in some way, gave me that identity. And I embrace the Roma identity precisely because it’s not married to geopolitical borders or to a set of religious beliefs. It's not pinned down to a category, ethnically. Because I feel that ethnicity, like nationality or race, is a fiction. These are fictions that we distort ourselves around. It's not pinned down to a category, ethnically, I feel that ethnicity, like nationality or race, is a fiction. These are fictions that we distort ourselves around.
My mother’s last name was Wisniewska, obviously Polish. And her family very strongly identified as Polish-American. When I started to travel in Poland, I saw that the Polish-American culture as I experienced it as a child doesn't bear much resemblance to the culture I encountered in Poland. I don't even know if it's a hybrid, Polish and American. It's more like a new thing, a third thing. In my mother's family there was a very strong sense of being Polish American, but my mother and her siblings spoke very little of the language because their parents didn't want them to know it. They wanted them to be assimilated, to be American – or Polish-American -- and they also wanted to have a secret language to speak to one another in, so that their children couldn’t eavesdrop or couldn’t understand what was being said.
My father’s side of the family, on the other hand, was this big, big mystery. My father’s relatives wouldn’t tell us exactly where they’d come from. Or they couldn't tell us because, as I discovered for myself, it was this place that was somehow nowhere, this place in the Carpathians that was in Poland but wasn't Polish, where the identities of the people didn’t conform to geographical borders or any other kind of boundaries. It was inhabited, for many generations, by Slavic people who identified sometimes as Rusyn or Rusnak, sometimes as Lemko, and later, in some cases, as Ukrainian — although these people had never lived in Ukraine — as well as Gypsy or Roma and Jewish people. Until World War II — and the genocide of Gypsies and Jews, followed by the ethnic cleansing of so-called Ukrainians by the post-war communist government — it was a place where identity was very fluid and very politicized, where identities shifted with political allegiances and religious affiliations. So I feel as if I've had a hard time pinning down that kind of identity for myself. And when I was growing up in Pittsburgh, people had very strong national identities that came from their grandparents. You were Italian American, you were Irish, you were Polish. And I was this unknown quantity to other people and to myself.
Cecilia's Paternal Granmother
Anna Muller: Are you able to identify why you never “clicked” with the Polish American or any specific identity that your family presented you with? Because it sounds like you grew up in a place with fixed identities and you didn't recognize yourself in any of them.
CW: I felt very at home in the world of my Polish-American maternal relatives, because it was this big family of people who were really creative, boisterous, rebellious, loving, warm, funny. I felt very at home in that. But that identity really wasn't connected to Poland. They didn't speak Polish, they didn't ever discuss Poland, and I don't know that they knew anything about Polish history, because their parents as immigrants were quite traumatized and silent about it. They would say, “No, we want you to be American. We don't want people to call you a dumb hunky.”
There was almost a kind of a roughness, a crudeness to that milieu that I didn't feel akin to — the loudness, the very Rabelaisian humor, the talk about bodily functions — that I didn't feel quite at home in. My father loved my mother’s family but he was this very dignified man, somehow, in spite of the roughness of his own upbringing. And as a kid, I loved my mother, but I really was so attached to my father. And it was my father's family and my father's life that were so mysterious to me. Also, as a child, I looked more like my father's family. I had one cousin, who's dead now, who I was very close to, because we both had this very crazy curly black hair and kind of slanted eyes. And people would ask me in school, “What are you, anyway?” And that wasn't asked very kindly. I had a kid once say to me, “You have Chinese eyes and Black hair” — although he used racist slurs for Chinese and Black— “So, what are you?” And the way I looked couldn't be explained by my Polish side. So the only thing I could connect it to was this mysterious, shadowy side of my family that nobody wanted to tell me anything about.
As much as I loved those Polish-American aunts and uncles and cousins, I knew that wasn't completely me. I think some of my brothers and sisters felt much more drawn to my mother's side of the family. Because the Polish- American side were much more fun. They were younger and more beautiful. But there was something there that I was never quite completely comfortable with. Not that I didn't belong. I did belong, but I was a little bit of an outsider, at the same time.
AM: Do you mind telling us a little bit more about your grandmother? What do you know about her?
CW: I know a lot and I know nothing. I'm looking at a picture of her right now… Growing up, I knew she had died before I was born. My mother's mother had also died before I was born — I'm named for my mother's mother — but my mother's mother was talked about, they told stories about her and said her name out loud. I knew that she had died young. I think she was 49 or 50. And there were pictures of her and my older sister had known her. But when my father's relatives got together, if my father's mother’s name came up, everybody’s voice fell to a whisper or they became totally silent. The first thing I remember my father telling me about her was when I was six years old and he was showing me how to sweep the kitchen floor. I was tiny and I had this tall broom and he put his hands over my hands and he was guiding me and he was saying, “This is how Mum would do it.” And I knew I wanted to do it the way she had done it. I think I wanted to bring her back for my father. But she was this big mystery.
I sat at my father's feet all the time listening to stories. I would try to put pieces together, you know how a kid will do, when you know there's something you're not supposed to ask questions about. So you just kind of listen for clues and you put your own little story together. I was doing that for a long time. Always thinking, as we do, that there will be time later to ask specific questions.
I knew early that my grandmother came from a village in “the old country.” It seemed to be a place that was not on a map because I kept asking, “Well, what country?” And my father would always say, “You are not Polish on that side. No, we're not Ukrainian, either, but your great- aunts and great-uncles speak Ukrainian. Your grandmother was called Cyganka”— and my dad called me that, too, and told me that it meant little Gypsy girl. And I thought, well, maybe she was a Gypsy, because Gypsies are very mysterious. My father told me that she had been sold as a young girl to an older man as a bride. And he told me that she had been the village barber, she cut people's hair. She was the midwife. And she washed the bodies of the dead in preparation for burial. Later, when I learned that she had left the old country by the time she was 13 or 14 years old, I realized that she had been still a child doing these things. And the priest I eventually met in the village said she would have been specially trained for that role. Others have told me that such a role for a young woman in a village was passed down in the family, and she was the first child, the first daughter of her parents. She also read the cards, so she told fortunes. And I think she also liked to gamble with the cards. Those were things I knew about her early, so you can see why I was so intrigued with her. And I couldn't understand what had happened to her. Because it seemed nobody really knew or would say. It seemed no one even knew where her grave was. Did she have a grave?
I knew she had come to the United States. I found out she came with her father, probably ahead of the rest of the family, probably when she was 13 or 14 years old. She married my father's father. And he was shot in the street by a cop before my father was born. Someone arranged a marriage for her with a widower who had five children, and they all lived together in the mining towns of Russelton and Curtisville. My father was born there, a little more than eight months after his father had been killed. He wasn’t expected to live because he only weighed about two pounds at birth. My grandmother had a lot of children who died tragically, horribly — three little boys who died as children. Then my uncle John died on the frontlines in World War II. Her other son, my uncle Chuck, went to occupied France and was part of the resistance. And my father came home from two tours of duty in the Pacific, which included time in China with the Flying Tigers, and ended up in Virginia State Penitentiary for four or five years. While he was there, his mother disappeared. When he got out of prison, she had moved to Detroit with a third or fourth husband, so he went there to try to find her. He couldn't find a trace of her, none of her personal effects, no grave. I believe he was told that she had had a heart attack.
MC: Given that intersection of coming from a Polish American family and the family that comes from Carpathia, which historically transcended ethnic, national, or religious identities, how do you define your place?
CW: The only thing I knew growing up was that, when I would ask my father where we came from, he would say “the Carpathians.” And this sounded so wonderfully mysterious to me that it became like Shangri-La, or the Land of Oz. I didn't even know where the Carpathians were, but I wanted to go there. And in some way when I started to travel in my haphazard, reckless way, I thought… You know, Rebecca Solnit has this wonderful book called A Field Guide to Getting Lost.And I may not have thought of this consciously, and I didn't even say this to people because I thought it was in some ways so absurd, but I thought if I just kept going, without knowing exactly where I was going, I would get to this place that I didn't know how to find, didn’t know where it was. But in my heart, from childhood, I was aiming for this place.
Since childhood, I was also dying to get behind the Iron Curtain. I wanted to see what was being hidden there, and what that might have to do with my family, with me. And I first went as soon as I could after the Iron Curtain fell. I went to Prague in 1993 and to Poland in 1994. I was looking for where the story of my family begins, especially the story of my father’s family. Because I knew I wanted to tell that story, especially the story of my father’s mother. I wasn’t even sure which country the Carpathians were in, and then I found out that the Carpathians stretched across several countries, so I didn’t know where to look. And when I got there, it was really by magic. It was completely by magic. I had been working as a poet in the schools in LA during the uprisings of ’92, after Rodney King was beaten by the police. Somebody from the LA Times had written an article about the work I was doing with kids. A man in London read this article when he was doing research in the British Museum, and he wrote to me in care of the school in L.A. When I went to London to see a friend, I met this man. I told him that I really wanted to get to the Carpathians, and to Poland, because I knew that at least part of the region called the Carpathians was in Poland. And he said, “You should meet my friend Sarah. She goes back and forth to Poland all the time.” He gave me an address for her in the south of England and we began a correspondence; when I went to Poland, I went to Warsaw and Krakow and I contacted friends of hers, who became my friends. It was only after my first, or maybe my second trip to Poland, that Sarah and I met in person, in London. And then she ended up meeting a Polish man — also by a kind of magical coincidence — and getting married to him. She was writing to me that she was living in the woods in this tiny Polish village and that she was lonely. And after she had a baby, I decided to go back to Poland and told her that I would come to visit her wherever she was. She sent me instructions about how to get to her village and I started looking on the map. I was going to need to get from Warsaw to Krakow. This was 1999. I was going to have get from Krakow to a place called Krosno. I was looking at the map and I realized that this place was in the Carpathians. It was the Carpathians.
My father had just died. It was the craziest trip. You know, I got on this train in Warsaw in the winter, in February of 1999. It was cold, it was dark. I had nothing to eat. I had a bottle of water. It was nine or ten hours on the train. Nobody spoke English. I wasn't sure where to get off. As I got off and clung to this one Polish couple that was left on the train and I was thinking, if there's no one to meet me, they'll take me home and give me something to eat and a place to sleep. Because that's the thing I’d discovered about traveling in Poland, there was always somebody that wouldn’t leave you hungry. But there was my friend Sarah, waiting on the tracks. She told me that I was the first person they’d invited who’d actually made it all the way there. And we drove into the hills to this little village. And her husband, whom I hadn't met before, was looking out the window and he had those Tatar eyes that my cousins had. I walked into the house, there's a wood stove burning, they had made a bed for me out of pine branches, because they were young and poor. And Lukasz gave me a shot of vodka.
Before I left the U.S., I had sent Sarah an old envelope that my father’s cousin had given me, saying that my great-uncle Frank used to write to “someone back in the old country.” And I had transcribed the return address on this envelope and sent it to Sarah. So I'm there that night, my first night in the Carpathians, and Sarah’s husband Lukasz says: “I think I know where this place is. I could take you there, if you want.” So, a few days later, we went. We drove to this village called Wisłok Wielki. We found the village priest — a Catholic priest, because the village church had been converted from an Orthodox or Greek Catholic church into a Catholic church, after the forced removals of Akcja Wisla in 1947. The priest’s elderly housekeeper had been one of the people who had been evacuated then and had more recently returned to the village. I was only beginning to understand this history. To me, this place seemed like no place, nothing. It was strangely empty. And I didn't understand that. It was just so nondescript. But the priest took us to see the oldest woman in the village. And the oldest woman in the village was sitting in another room, out of sight, and the priest and Lukasz were calling questions to her. And I could hear her saying: “Nie, nie, nie” [No, no, no]. And then I realized that they were saying Woloch, which was not my grandmother's maiden name. So I said, “No, her last name was Bakayza.” And I wrote it down, and Lukasz said, “Bakayza,” and the priest said Bakayza, and suddenly this elderly woman appeared in the doorway. And she's nodding her head and she says, “Yes, I remember them.”
So, it was either really pure luck, or fate. The Carpathians was a tough place to be in 1999 for a woman who'd been living in Los Angeles, so I was really challenged there. My friends lived in a place they called a glorified shed. Sometimes there wasn't running water inside, everything was cooked on a wood stove. But I went back the next spring and summer, and I kept going back. And as I was going back, I was learning about the history of that region, which is so complicated and dark. And that history explained so much about my family. And during those years, I briefly had a husband who watched a Kieslowski film with me and said, “You know, if that’s really what it's like, why would you want to go there?” And I said, “Well, if you haven't seen a Carpathian meadow in bloom, I cannot possibly explain it to you.” And I changed. I learned to build a fire in a wood stove, to chop wood, and I discovered a strength I didn't know I had. The village where Sarah and Lukasz lived is Pietrusza Wola. Like Krosno, it used to be very diverse. The people who identified as Lemko and Ukrainian are gone, the Jews are gone, the Gypsies are gone. But the earth there... the earth in that part of the world is really the earth I connect with. That's the earth that I feel is my earth. I love the wildness of the landscape. I love the meadows more than anything. I wrote a poem about the wish that, when I die, I want to be a meadow.
AM: In one of your poems, you mention that your mother’s Polish nickname was Sucha. Can you tell us a bit about the place of the Polish, or maybe Lemko, Ukrainian, or other Slavic languages, in your life?
CW: It’s funny, because we heard certain phrases growing up. I think my mother’s oldest sister spoke a bit of Polish, but it was really discouraged by their parents. Yet they were living in a very Polish-American community in Pittsburgh and the mass was in Polish in church. And my mother’s mother gave each of her children a Polish nickname. They were not nice nicknames. She did not want her children to be vain. I didn’t know her, Cecilia Wisniewski, but I was told she was always poking fun, that was how she survived the Great Depression trying to feed eleven children through it. My mom was Sucha, because my mom was thin and her mother used to say she was “dried up like sticks.” One of her sisters was Koślawa, or clumsy. So, I didn’t learn to speak Polish, but since childhood, the sound of Polish is very familiar to me. I really like the sound of it and, for someone who can only speak about 27 words of Polish, I have a decent accent for an American.
MC: In your work you reappropriated the word Tsigan(Cygan), or Gyspsy, which in Polish and English is often rejected now as a pejorative term. Can you reflect on why you decided to use this word in your poetry, both in English and Polish?
CW: You know, I have taken some heat for it and, for the new edition of Tsigan, I actually considered retitling it, because I had gotten so much heat for it. But instead I wrote an essay about why I chose to stay with that word. The biggest part of that choice was that this was my father’s pet name for me – Cyganka, little Gypsy. It was his way of connecting me to his mother, and it was all love, as when he called me “monkey,” or “mouse.” And people in the United States are very confused by the term Roma. They think it means Romanian, or from Rome; they don't really know what Roma means, in the U.S., and this is where my work is published.
And then, as I got involved in the European Roma community, I was exposed to the controversy around the language. Yes, Roma who are quite politically active, Roma who are educated, Roma who are more integrated into general society, are adamant that Rom, Roma, Romani is the only way to be identified. But the Roma man who runs the Cirque Tzigane in Paris, a wonderful poet named Alexandre Romanes, said to me, “I'm glad you use the word Tsigan (Cygan). That's who we are. Roma is an invention of the academics.” And to a certain extent I think that's true. Another Rom, a poet who lives in the U.K., advised me, “Be brave and use the word Gypsy.”
MC: Your workshops for poets are in English but you work with poets all over the world and they speak and write in many different languages. Can you talk about that, because it's all connected to that very rich sense of identity that you carry? It's the constant transcending of rigid borders. As an educator, you need to transcend the border of the languages of the individuals with whom you work.
CW: I speak decent French. I have studied Polish. Having a sense that there are languages that are structured in very different ways, that have very different textures, that's really important for a poet. Studying or knowing or reading in another language, other than your mother tongue, really infuses your relationship to language with greater humility and depth. I'm really interested in grammar and syntax and I'm really interested in how those underlying structures are different from language to language. It was important to my father that we learn to express ourselves well. Part of my education as a young woman in a very underfunded rural high school was to learn to speak well, so that, as my teachers would say, no one can look down on you for the way you speak. You may be poor, you may be from rural Kentucky, but you can use this language as elegantly as anyone. I did speech and debate in high school and I did theater in college. So I learned to enunciate, to speak very clearly, and to feel the words in my mouth, become attuned to their sounds.
I do teach students whose first language isn't English. But most of the students who take my workshops are English speakers, they're very good English speakers, if not native speakers. I also get people in my workshops who aren’t proficient English speakers but want to challenge themselves. Going back and forth between two languages is so rich. One language makes the other richer. I don't ask that people write in English and forget their mother tongue. When I was working with kids here in Los Angeles, in parts of the city where there are a lot of immigrants from Central America, I would encourage the kids to mix in Spanish and English words, as some Latinx poets do, and that was a very rich experience for them. I also teach American literature abroad — I love teaching literature. I was teaching American literature in China and I included a section on Pound. Ezra Pound has this famous poem that is not really a translation but a version of a well-known Chinese poem. I had the English translation and one of my students brought the Chinese poem. And we looked at them side by side and he read the Chinese and I read the English and we had a really wonderful discussion. In the creative writing class I taught in China, almost all of my students were young women, and there was one really great young man. At first, they had a hard time relating to the contemporary American poems I brought to class, so I asked them to bring Chinese poems to class as models and to either find a good English translation online or, if they couldn’t find a translation, translate the poems themselves. Some of them wrote in English so beautifully, not taking the language for granted but struggling with the language. That produces amazing results. That's something I never get tired of. I guess I didn't mention teaching when I talked about my identity because I'm not doing much teaching since the beginning of the pandemic. But that’s also something I am passionate about, and an important part of who I am.
AM and MC: Thank you so much for taking the time and sharing all these stories with us.