Poles Apart

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

One character in Brigid Pasulka's Cracow-set A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True (Houghton Mifflin, Aug. 1) tells a joke I remember from growing up in heavily Polish metro Detroit. Her setup is elaborate, but the punch line is simple — you can tell a Russian submarine from an American one because Russian sailors open the door when you knock. I remember the joke as a Polish joke, though. Of course, it's merely a vessel for ethnic stereotyping, and it works equally well whomever it's targeting.

It would be unfair and reductive to characterize Pasulka's novel in the same way — Essentially True is warm and charming, and it brings together a matched pair of stories about old and new Poland together with careful craft. Pasulka sets her heroine, Beata, in Cracow as Poland finishes its transition from the isolated communist past to membership in capitalist New Europe. Beata's coming-of-age journey is set against the story of her grandparents falling in love, surviving World War II and struggling behind the Iron Curtain.

Moving chapter-by-chapter between a modern-day bar girl understanding her past, and her forebears building their lives against a backdrop of old-world village quaintness, Essentially True treads familiar ground. Pasulka's pre-war Poland bears a striking similarity to I.B. Singer's shtetl stories, or to Jonathan Safran Foer's Ukraine, without the crushing self-referential preciousness. Likewise, this love story between a country boy-turned-partisan and Beata's ethereal grandmother, Anielica, carries a storybook sheen. Their romance is fanciful stuff, carried out over obstacles both self-imposed and brought about by war and separation. Like Louis DeBernières, whose best novels set the standard for romances conducted against the horrors of war, Pasulka understands the importance of fairy tale satisfaction. Even as she implies that her history is passed down as a story, polished with each retelling, her lovers become heroes, paragons of devotion.

Both of these elements of setting and romance project idealized characters in an idealized relationship on a very real Eastern Front, without tapping into the distracting outlandishness of magical realism. Beata's Poland is grimmer and grittier than her grandparents', but her half of the novel carries the weight of Pasulka's central point by illustrating the way that the past, both in story and reality, shapes a lived-in present.

Absent the animating warmth of narrative pleasure, the difficult work of yoking together past and present, personal and historical, gets hard. A Partisan's Daughter, DeBernières' latest book, showed how poorly chilliness suited him, substituting precision and technique for the outsized emotions he does so well. When the charm and good humor that inflates Pasulka's work, or DeBernières' or Foer's, is replaced with something drier like irony, the work of gathering multiple stories and versions of history into a single work becomes dicey.

Mati Unt's Brecht at Night (Dalkey Archive Press, July 14), newly translated, displays this difficulty. Unt is not interested in your pleasure. The late novelist and theater director's "documentary novel" centers on Bertolt Brecht's sojourn in Helsinki while awaiting a visa to the U.S., set against the history of the Baltic states and the fate of Unt's native Estonia.

Unt's novel is high-postmodern, not only incorporating scraps of historical documents and co-opting a variety of voices to make its point, but also pathologically unable to allow readers to immerse themselves in any single story. The first line of the novel, tellingly, gets interrupted three words in by an explanatory, editorializing aside. This is a choice, rejecting the formulas of storytelling and refusing to romanticize situations and characters. Unt's approach relies heavily on irony and juxtaposition, flitting between a fictionalized Brecht and the real man's poems, between historical documents and Unt's direct address, in a far more sophisticated fashion than alternating chapters.

But Brecht at Night's skillful ironies, both in placing cartoonish Brecht against Nazi expansion and in yoking the dramatist's flight to the history of Estonia, hold each element of the book at arm's length. By making no effort to forge connections between plots, Unt leaves a vaguely distasteful portrait of a hypocritical Brecht, a fascinating patriot's account of Estonian history, and an illogical suspicion that the one is responsible for the other.

Both Unt and Pasulka confront their histories. But where Unt lays out fragments and facts as indictments, Pasulka uses them to shade and color a picture of modern Cracow. And by enlisting the pleasure of the folktale — which, like a Polish joke, is transferable and diagrammable and reductive — Pasulka shows the way that history's disappointments provide the strength for new growth.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)