My Two Polish Grandfathers: And Other Essays on the Imaginative Life - Hardcover

Rybczynski, Witold

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743235983 ISBN 13: 9780743235983

Publisher: Scribner, 2009

Synopsis

AWARD-WINNING AND CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED WRITER WITOLD RYBCZYNSKI DELIVERS A REVELATORY COLLECTION OF LINKED AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS -- PART MEMOIR, PART FAMILY HISTORY -- ABOUT THE UPHEAVALS OF EUROPEAN LIVES DURING WORLD WAR II, HIS OWN INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, AND THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGES OF ART, MUSIC, AND ARCHITECTURE.

Witold Rybczynski's parents and grandparents were a thriving, cultured family in prewar Warsaw, then a sophisticated European city. With the onset of war, their world fell apart. His mother and father made separate escapes, reuniting against many odds on a ship bound for Scotland from Marseilles.

That people can lose everything, overcome stunning odds to survive, remake themselves in a foreign country, learn a new language and culture, and then do it again is extraordinary. My Two Polish Grandfathers is a testament to the boundaryless world of art, architecture, and music -- which can be transported from one country to another -- and clear affirmation of Rybczynski's own path toward becoming an architect and one of today's most original thinkers.

Beautifully written, thoughtful, and extraordinarily subtle, this riveting work offers a rare glimpse into the development of Rybczynski's educated outsider's eye and is a tribute to a European generation that has helped to define postwar American culture.

About this title

About the Author:

Witold Rybczynski has written about architecture and urbanism for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Home and the award-winning A Clearing in the Distance, as well as The Biography of a Building, The Mysteries of the Mall, and Now I Sit Me Down. The recipient of the National Building Museum’s 2007 Vincent Scully Prize, he lives with his wife in Philadelphia, where he is emeritus professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

My Two Polish Grandfathers

When I was a boy, conversations around the kitchen table were regularly punctuated by the phrase przed wojnaž -- before the war. My parents' lives in a faraway country were the subjects of family stories, which were told and retold like fairy tales. Once upon a time there was a place where everyone was happy all the time, living in splendid houses, going to balls, finding glass slippers. In the fairy tales, the war was like the evil witch: malevolent, destructive, ruinous. The stories had different purposes. For my parents, they kept alive the memory of who they were -- or had been. But the tales were also for the benefit of my brother and me. Of course, the subjects of my parents' stories were people who, in most cases, were still alive, but to me they seemed as distant as ancient ancestors. And just as potent.

My mother's fairy tale involved growing up in an enchanted castle. The family house was on Mokotowska Street, near the city's principal park, Lazienki Gardens, and behind Aleje Ujazdowskie, a broad avenue with parallel rows of lime trees -- Warsaw's Champs-Elysées. The neoclassic house was designed by Francesco Maria Lanci, one of those itinerant Italian architects common in nineteenth-century central Europe. Lanci had built the house in 1860 for Józef Ignacy Kraszewski, the foremost Polish man of letters of his time. My grandfather bought it in 1928 and spent two years renovating and enlarging; with three daughters, he needed more space. The building was laid out like a Renaissance villa, with high-ceilinged living quarters on the second floor and lower-ceilinged service rooms below. The family occupied only the upper floor, the lower level was rented for offices, and the cellar contained rooms for storing coal, potatoes, pickle barrels, and wine. The household staff included a nanny, two maids, a cook, and a watchman who tended the furnace. My mother, her older sister, Wisia, and their little brother, Michal, who was born the year they moved in, all had their own bedrooms, which seemed luxurious to me since my brother and I shared a room. Krysia, the youngest sister, slept in her mother's room; my grandfather had his own room as well as a library -- he was an avid reader. There was a small salon and a large drawing room for entertaining, as well as a long dining room with heavy oak furniture. Outside the dining room was a terrace with an ivy-covered stair leading to the garden. The garden, which was overlooked by four-story apartment blocks, was not large, and on hot summer days the family decamped to a country house in Piaseczno, a small town in the Warsaw suburbs. There, while the accommodations were rude, without indoor plumbing or running water, the girls and their friends could enjoy a modern amenity: a tennis court. Lazy summers in the country, a bustling household in town -- it all sounds wonderfully civilized.

The walls of the entrance hall at Mokotowska Street were hung with animal trophies -- stags' antlers and boars' tusks -- for my grandfather's other passion was hunting. The extensive wilderness areas of rural Poland offered a wealth of opportunities. There were boar in the puszcza, or primeval forest, in national parks on the Lithuanian border, deer in the Carpathian Mountains, waterfowl in the Pripet Marshes, and hunting clubs stocked with partridge and wood grouse in the vicinity of Warsaw. These outings were generally social occasions, groups of men setting out in horse-drawn carriages -- or a convoy of cars -- carrying hampers of food and drink. Hunts on private estates were sometimes followed by house parties, to which nonhunters -- and wives -- were invited. One of the hunting trophies on the wall at Mokotowska Street included a gold medal from the 1937 International Hunting Exhibition in Berlin. That event was presided over by another enthusiastic hunter, Hermann Göring.

My grandfather Mieczyslaw Jan Hofman was, in every sense, a self-made man. He was born in 1881 in Kalisz, a small city west of Warsaw on the Prosna River, which, until the end of the First World War, marked the boundary between the Russian and the Prussian parts of Poland, Kalisz being on the eastern (Russian) bank. He was the son of a customs official whose father had migrated from Bavaria to be manager of a local estate, and had set down roots and assimilated.* As a young man, my grandfather studied economics in St. Petersburg, the capital of the Russian Empire. The choice of the distant university was a measure of his ambition. Although he came from a solidly middle-class family -- one brother became an engineer, another a pharmacist -- he chose to make his own way, leaving home at an early age and supporting himself as a student by managing investments for wealthy clients. He clearly had a head for business, and on his return, he worked for -- and ended up running -- a cooperative savings bank based in Poznan“. He then became president of Bank Handlowy (Commerce Bank), the largest privately-owned bank in the country, headquartered in Warsaw. My grandfather belonged to what Poles call the "generation of the twenties," that is, the generation responsible for building the modern Polish state after the rebirth of the republic in 1918 (Bank Handlowy, for example, financed the construction of Gdynia, Poland's only Baltic port). He married Jadwiga Glowacka, the daughter of a Lublin judge, and had a happy family life including -- and how important this was at that time -- a male heir. He was fifty when he moved into the house on Mokotowska Street. In other words, a classic success story.

My grandfather appears somewhat forbidding in photographs, with a notable exception. A snapshot shows him sitting on a garden bench with another man. Jerzy Komorowski was president of the largest steel works and machine factory in Poland, Lilpop, Rau & Loewenstein (for whom my father worked). The two men were best friends, had lunch once a week at a Warsaw businessmen's club, and went hunting together. The extensive garden in the photo is behind Komorowski's summer house; the time is late spring of that fateful Polish year, 1939. The two friends are smoking -- an ashtray between them -- relaxed and smiling; perhaps the photographer has just said something funny. Or maybe they are amused at the odd spectacle they make. My grandfather is wearing a tweed suit, white shirt, and natty bow tie. He seems to have dropped in unannounced, for Komorowski is casually dressed, in a sort of T-shirt, white shorts, socks rolled down to his ankles, and -- a jarring note -- beat-up leather brogues. It's what one might wear on a Saturday morning for a spot of gardening. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, their contrasting dress, the two figures make a definite pair. An odd couple, one might say: the industrialist, relaxed, expansive, apparently uninhibited; the banker, more compact and controlled, not aloof, exactly, but with something held in reserve.

I never knew my grandfather, who died when I was a year old. He knew of me, however. In his will he left me, his only grandson, a share in one of his apartment buildings, the equivalent of the not inconsiderable sum of twenty-five thousand zlotys. He wrote the will in December 1943. By then, his stocks and bonds -- he patriotically invested only in Polish companies -- had been rendered worthless by the war. In addition to making various provisions for his family, the will also specified two scholarships at Warsaw's business school for the children of bank employees. "I acquired my estate by the work and savings of my entire life," my grandfather wrote, "for I inherited nothing from my parents and did not accept a dowry when I married." But the three-page handwritten document offers a glimpse of something else beneath the severity. After precisely spelling out the legal details of his bequests, he added a touching message to his family, written in a formal, old-fashioned Polish that doesn't quite translate into English.

I strongly ask my wife to continue to safeguard the children's welfare, to assist them morally as well as materially, and to bring up Michal- as a brave and patriotic citizen. As for the children, they should try, during all their lives, to be modest and true in order to stay cheerful in heart and mind, to work and save, not only for themselves but, as far as possible, for the entire community, and to love and help one another. Be happy, my dear ones, and may God bless you.

He scrawled a terse postscript untidily at the bottom of the page: "Due to completely altered circumstances I hereby annul this will." He added that on October 24, 1944, on his deathbed. The altered circumstances to which he alluded were the result of the Warsaw uprising. When the city fell, and the Germans ordered an evacuation, half a million Varsovians were interned in Durchgangslager 121, a transit camp at Pruszków, a Warsaw suburb. From there, they were sent either to work on fortifications outside the city, to Germany as forced labor, or to concentration camps. My grandfather bribed a guard to let his family out of the camp and, hidden in hay wagons, they made their way to a friend's country estate. From there they could hear the boom of detonations as the Germans blew up the city, block after block, building after building.

Before leaving his house on Mokotowska Street, my grandfather had concealed two suitcases containing gold coins, the family silver, a collection of pocket watches, and the deeds to his properties -- all that was left of his fortune -- in a bricked-up room in the cellar. Since access to the city was forbidden, he hired two men to retrieve the valuables. They did so, but when he opened the suitcases, they contained only bundles of old newspapers; someone -- most likely the hired men -- had removed the contents. Faced with this ultimate indignity, my grandfather collapsed with a stroke, and died a day later.

I never warmed to my mother's tale. It seemed to me sad -- a tale of loss rather than accomplishment. Moreover, the grand house on Mokotowska Street served only to underlin...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0743235983
• ISBN 13: 9780743235983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240