In the mid 1980s, I was the associate director of the American Studies Center at the University of Warsaw, a job furnished by Indiana University and the Polish government, the first of which sent me there in exchange for Warsaw sending to IU Bloomington an associate director of Polish Studies. They did this every year, the appointment being for one year, renewable for a second. This was a plum of a job for Poles since if they saved enough American dollars while in the States, they could fare quite well on return to their native country. When I got there the official exchange rate was something like 130 zł:1$ and the unofficial (at which everyone except State Department people traded) was around 650 zł: 1$. (Probably Jaruzelski traded at the latter rate also.) At that time a Małi Fiat (two cylinders) cost about $1200 and was immediately deliverable – if one paid in hard (any Western) currency. If one paid in Złotych then it cost about five times as much and delivery took about that many years: one went on a waiting list, about a five-years-long waiting list.
Thus they confirmed once again Gresham’s Law, where bad money will drive good money out of circulation and into hiding: I never saw a Pole open his wallet but that I saw Swiss francs or Deutsch Marks or, most commonly, American dollars tucked inside. These clearly were in reserve. As often as I saw the hard currency, never did I see anything bought with it, except by me. It was real money, emergency money. It was useful with the police, should trouble arise, for use with others whose services improved with tipping, and for buying hard-to-get stuff; indeed one government store sold goods otherwise unavailable but sold them only for hard currency. I recall that Courvoisier was around $7.
My Polish students, who were very bright indeed, assured me that I erred in calling Gresham’s Law that which was of right called Kopernik’s Law. I checked and saw that Copernicus did indeed write on the subject, and earlier than the Englishman, but rather too much at length, and anyway, he did it in Polish. In the sixteenth century, the third most powerful country in Europe after Spain and France, Poland soon lost its place, and since literature (and economic theory) follows the flag, the Polish priest’s work on that subject fell from the light. His work in astronomy was hard to ignore, however.
Anyway, I worked at one of the regional franchises of IU, and it being a slow year, I got the appointment. The Polish professor who was the director of the American Studies Program said I was to manage the American faculty, the visiting graduate and undergraduate students, and teach a couple of classes each term. I did ones in American literature, religion in America, and imaginative writing. The indigenous staff was very good, and I recall especially Zbigniew Lewicki, head of the American literature section, who agreed with me on disliking Whitman and who found my fiction funny. Late in the year, he did three months in jail with no charges filed though his fault was in having been found with three typewriters and $500 in cash, a tremendous amount to have lying about.
Worse, duplicating processes were of course controlled by the State, so typewriters were useful for disseminating unofficial documents. Thus, he was jailed. He could be visited only by family, who were dead, and by his spouse, from whom he was divorced. When he was released, he had to say on television that he was sorry and would not do it again. He was not required to say what it was he did, which was reasonable since formally he was never charged. After 1989, he became well placed in the Polish Foreign Service.
I was paid half again the salary of a Polish professor – instead of $26 per month, I got $39. Also I got an extra $6 per month through bureaucratic error: I was advanced that amount in złotych to tide me over when I first got there; it was deducted from my pay the first month and then restored and kept there. I said late in the year that I expected the computers to catch it and request its return but was laughingly told there were no computers. This was a major reason the system collapsed: computers could not be allowed since they can talk to each other, and without them, Poland would fall even further behind the modern world.
I also got a free apartment and utilities. The first apartment was wired but I’m not sure the second—of the grain elevator sort so favored (for others) by socialists everywhere—was; indeed, I think I was moved after it was decided I was harmless. The city was gray with little neon and the ugliest building was the Palace of Culture, given them by Stalin and designed in his style (a series of smaller and smaller rectangles piled up with concrete urns on corners as it ascended), a gift they could not refuse. (Hitler’s plans for the New Berlin were almost as horrible: Bad Theory produces Kitsch Art.) My oldest son got permission from Wittenberg University to take his junior year abroad, and accompanied me. He was pleased to have the chance to talk with other young Marxists, but he found that other than Harpo and Groucho Marxists, there were none of intelligence; indeed, those who enrolled at the university to study the Socialist catechism were ones who could get admitted no other way – they were lower in status even than pedagogy. English ranked very high.
His new acquaintances did not wish to hear of President Ray-gun or anything like it. It was for him what might be called a learning experience.
Jameson was not in the seminar the day a sociologist from another IU franchise lectured, he being over for a two-week trip of the sort the Polish Studies Center sometimes sponsored. Jack was invited to speak and of course did what every other PhD does when given the chance: he talked about his dissertation. He was that rarity, a very liberal secular-Jewish sociologist, whose dissertation happened to be on the reasons for the desegregation of Birmingham and other such places. (Some years ago I was accustomed to reading in a conservative journal the occasional writings of that true rarity, a conservative sociologist who not only was an Episcopalian but was—even rarer among such—a Trinitarian. Once he even mentioned believing in the reality of sin. Anything, he wrote, was allowed in the Episcopal Church.) I liked Jack and recommended him when a year or so later he applied for the job at Warsaw that I had held. He got it. But that day he was very down on American morality.
Anyway, the students probably expected his take since it was a firm rule that the two U of W departments the Party had to have control of were philosophy and sociology, the one to prove their line theoretically and the other to do so practically. Indeed, when another visiting (very liberal Unitarian) sociologist was speaking to a chance-met local Pole and told him what he did for a living, the American was taken by the sleeve to Holy Cross Church where a statue of Jesus staggering under his cross was pointed out to him. He was chagrined that so many Poles – 85% on a Sunday – went to church, but this was explained by a Polish sociologist as “the alternative.” The students present that day were mainly from the linguistics section and super capable: fluency in English was a chance at a ticket to the West. (They knew the best Polish Jokes: You heard what they call the Polish National Symphony after its triumphal tour of the West? A string quartet.)
Anyway, the speaker was so disgusted (with him). Students said that the United States did in no way desegregate on high moral grounds. Rather, it was done from economic necessity. Once Martin Luther King Jr. and others organized a boycott, it was integrate or lose an enormous amount of trade. (I think it likely that it was fear of the marketplace that led Faulkner to create his disagreeable family Snopes, folk for whom money mattered though little else did: they would embrace politically whatever was expedient. Thus Marx was bested by Snopes.) The speaker was wearily sad to report this unfortunate state of affairs, but said it was indeed so. When it was over, he asked for questions. The Poles sulked.
So to get things started, I asked a question that was a statement: “So I see that you are a marketplace man.”
The sociologist was horrified: “Where did you get such an idea?” How had he missed so badly? I might as easily have called him “religious.”
If he was discouraged, however, the Poles were delighted: they understood immediately what I had said since they most assuredly did not live in a marketplace economy but rather in a planned economy. The spokesman for Wojciech Jaruzelski, one Jerszy Urban, had said, “Go ahead and strike – we still will have housing. We still will have food. We still will have heat.” And so on.
Then one of the Poles, probably close to his MA (they do five years of study, and there is no BA), said, smiling, “Oh, I wish we were as free as American Blacks were in 1950!” And thus continued a pleasant afternoon for me.
As we all know – I did not in any wise expect it – in a few years they were free. Not all were happy with this though most were. After all, being on the dole for nearly half a century has an effect, even when the dole comes – as it always does – with severe strictures. I returned in 1993, a few years after the collapse of the USSR and was pleased to see old Soviet army clothing being sold in the Rynek at a markdown. (The next year I would see Russians in Beijing buying up whatever they could to take home and resell and make a little coin.) I also saw a very popular McDonald’s at an important intersection and every few blocks there were sex shops, small ones but nonetheless there. You take the good with the bad in a marketplace economy, but the choice is yours: you have a choice. But the police, formerly so numerous, were few. A Mercedes-Benz showroom had replaced a government (mostly tacky) clothing store. Modern buildings were going up. Poles promised to surround the Palace of Culture with new offices when they could do so. I was told that church attendance was down a bit. But the Poles were free. No longer was it the Intellectuals’ Paradise. And I was told that long ago Jerszy Urban had turned into a marketplace man.
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Greenfield Jones’s novel, Rêve Américain, is available at amazon.com as is his short story collection Don’t Lose This, It’s My Only Copy.
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