Oct 8, 2025
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The Genius of Gombrowicz and Poland: Becoming Adult in the Age of Trump and Putin
by Doniphan Blair
Witold Gombrowitz's photo from the passport he used to leave Poland in July 1939 for Argentina. photo: courtesy W. Gombrowitz PLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
"THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A GROWN
up," according to André Malraux, the French novelist and politician, in his “Anti-Memoir” of 1967. “Until you have to become an adult, just to get anything done,” would be the response of ambitious hippies at that time and rational pragmatists today. Maturity is, in fact, THE big question of human relations, politics, history, even Darwinian evolution. Yes, reproduction is adulthood’s biological marker, and sexual selection decides the next generation, but to pass down your genes successfully, you must guide your children to their own maturity, which requires patience, probity and functionality.
No one captures this conundrum better than Witold Gombrowicz (1904-‘69) in his groundbreaking second book, “Ferdydurke”, published to instant acclaim in Warsaw in 1937, but also Poland itself. After being swallowed up by Prussia, Russia and Austria for exactly 130 years, the Polish people reemerged as an adolescence nation in 1918 only to be conquered 21 years later by Germany and the Soviet Union, which collaborated on its insanely brutal destruction.
Regardless, the Polish people rose against the Nazis in August 1944, just as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto did 16 months earlier. Most of the entire city and Poland's underground army fought doggedly for two months with few weapons, while the Soviet Army sat just across the Vistula River, until the Polish Air Force flying out of Italy and other Allies parachuted in some war materiel. I learned this recently at the impressive, immersive Warsaw Uprising Museum, which evokes the many Polish men and women of all faiths and professions, as well as children, who stood up against fascism. They only surrendered when Warsaw was almost entirely flattened by the Germans, to try to spare civilians. The Nazis continued their slaughter, of course, in Warsaw as well as across Poland, including the bizarre death marches of Jews and political prisoners from the camps into Germany.
The ruins of Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto, around St Augustine Church in May 1943, became all of Warsaw after the 'Rising' of September 1944. photo: public domain The Poles continued to man up post-war. In 1980, led by Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa and his Solidarity Union and many dissidents, Poles triggered the process that toppled the Soviet Union. Free elections and admittance to NATO and the EU soon followed, in 1991, 1999 and 2004, respectively. By then, Poland was rising like a phoenix from its Soviet-era, rust-belt ashes, as well as Nazi annihilation, to first world splendor, a transition I witnessed wide-eyed while visiting in ‘96, ’97, ‘05, ’22, ’23, and October 2025.
Warsaw today is awash in design-y skyscrapers, broad boulevards and similar bike lanes, all sorts of cuisine (including a lot of vegan) and quite a few People of Color (often from Poland's Cold War allies, some running the many Vietnamese restaurants, which are very popular), statuesque women and everything digital, LGBT and recycling, cool tourists and German techno raves—not to mention the arms dealers. I met a couple of hip, young ones enjoying Warsaw’s clubs and museums as well as booming weapons' business, as the youthful nation invests a full 5% percent of its rapidly expanding GNP into defense.
Meteorological storm over Warsaw, its skyline no longer dominated by the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science (right). photo: D. Blair Obviously, the war in Ukraine has grown more dangerous, as it approaches its fourth anniversary, and the big year looming over many Poles, some western Europeans and a few Americans is 1939, the start of history’s greatest slaughter, which Poland bore the brunt of, second only to Ukraine.
Oddly enough, a month before World War Two started, Witold Gombrowicz boarded Poland’s first cruise liner on its maiden voyage, which was to Argentina, making “Ferdydurke” the literary hand-grenade he tossed off the back deck while fleeing the apocalypse for gentler Latino climes.
“Ferdydurke”’s drama and symbolism shocked me, when I read it in 1996. Not only was it masterful writing and laugh-out-loud funny, it revealed the inner workings of a nation I’d been trying to dicipher for over a decade, since starting to study the Holocaust in 1983. After a deceptively rambling intro—the “sleeper opening” common to Eastern European narratives, which contrasts starkly with the Hollywood trick of slamming you into the action headfirst—“Ferdydurke” explodes into life. The protagonist, Joey (Józio in Polish), is startled to find his old teacher, Pinko or Pinchon, pushing into his rented room, grabbing his manuscript off the table, and judging it immature. Although Joey is 30, the professor proceeds to drag him back to high school and full adolescent immersion.
Conrad, a Warsaw street book vendor, did not like 'Ferfydurke', preferring Gombrowicz's 'Dairies' instead. photo: D. Blair My summary may be slightly off. “Ferdydurke” is not famous enough to rate a synopsis on Wikipedia, and none of the book stores or vendors I've checked with thus far in Warsaw had a copy, in English or Polish, suggesting it's still wildly popular or the opposite. Conrad, a bookman with a 20-foot table on Chmielna Street, Warsaw’s main youth drag, didn’t have a copy, nor did he like “Ferdydurke”.
“Too much ego,” was Conrad's critique, to which he added, “I prefer his ‘Diaries’ [1969],” of which he did have four copies, although they weren't selling that well, despite The Paris Review's claim it was "widely considered his masterpiece."
“Old fashioned and weird,” was the opinion of the young woman working the top floor of a deluxe downtown bookstore, Empik, where I did finally find a complete Gombrowicz set, including “Ferdydurke”, but only in Polish, a brand-new, brightly-colored, minimalist edition. Due to Gombrowicz's rejection of having some of his books censored, the Polish version was long published by Jerzy Giedroyć’s Paris Literary Institute, which also serialized his "Dairies" in the renown, albeit with only 3,000 subscribers, Polish-emigre Kulture magazine. “I had to read 'Ferdydurke' in school,” the shy, soft-spoken and, thereby, more beautiful bookwoman said, “And when you are doing a school report, such a book becomes even harder to understand.”
The reaction of Luc Albinski, a part-time writer residing in a lovely high-rise apartment filled with art, when I asked him about “Ferdydurke”, was: "I love the book," and “Gombrowicz is telling us that adulthood is puberty wearing a suit.” At a bar in the catacombs under Krakow, Poland’s university and intellectual capital, some 30 years ago, I was ignored by a Polish beauty for not addressing her Polish until I said, in English, “What do you think of ‘Ferdydurke’?”
This article's author at the only memorial to Gombrowitz in Warsaw. photo: D. Blair In today's Warsaw, however, the dozen or so Poles I asked, aside from Albinski, were either not fans or unaware. The pierced-tattooed twosome strolling by Warsaw's only Gombrowicz memorial—a plaque at Chocimska 35, where he lived for a few years, which features a sculptured likeness from the famous photo of him in fedora—never heard of him.
Gombrowicz's honest acknowledgement of immaturity makes him mature, ironically, which evidently galls those stuck in perpetual adolescence, suggesting why it took so long for him to get his due. Years of struggle in Argentina earned him literary acclaim but little else until the release of a Spanish translation of “Ferdydurke” in 1947 and a Ford Foundation grant in 1963, which financed his return to Poland.
Shortly thereafter, however, he had to decamp for France. As well as refusing to publish his work, the Polish communist authorities initiated a vicious smear campaign. They were undoubtedly incensed by how Gombrowicz dodged the bullet of World War Two—even though he did report for duty at the Buenos Aires Embassy but was considered unfit—on top of his scathing social critique, not to mention the bisexuality.
Despite the censors' attempts to quash “Ferdydurke”, it became an international bestseller, was translated into 30 languages, and numbers 11,023 on Amazon’s fiction list today. His three subsequent novels, "Trans-Atlantyk" (1953), "Pornografia" (1960) and "Kosmos (1965), as well as "The Possessed", his supposed commercial potboiler, which was serialized in the late '60s under a pen name, were almost as well received. Meanwhile, his first theater piece, the tragicomedy "Ivona, Princess of Burgundia" (1938), about a prince determined to defy convention by marrying a plain woman, and other plays were staged and acclaimed in Germany, France and Sweden.
Gombrowitz not having a good day. photo: courtesy Gombrowitz Gombrowicz won the Prix International in 1967 and was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for a few years, indicating that his surreal, romantic, sexual and sometimes sick stories of youth, oppression and dreams captured the narrative of that time. It's even more poignant today, in fact, as Poland has gone whole hog for freedom, modernism, multiculturalism and rock and roll—with dyed hair, eccentric outfits and legal weed (CBD only, THC requires a prescription)—but is once again under extreme threat from fascism and war.
“Ferdydurke”’s cinematic climax comes as Joey exacts his revenge. Using forged notes (as I recall), Joey arranges a midnight meeting between Professor Pinko and one of his students, the pretty teenage daughter of the Moderns, an optimistic, handsome, essentially American family, with whom he's infatuated. She is called Zoo and the Moderns the Youngers in the actual movie, “30 Door Key” (1991, free on YouTube), by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who worked in Hollywood and is best known for “Moonlighting” (1982), so I will use that nomenclature.
Blowing up archetypes into Macy Day parade balloons, Gombrowicz conjures a cosmically comic scene. Joey deploys another forged note to also lure to the late-night rendezvous Zoo’s actual crush, the brutal bozo who’s been torturing Joey at school. When he and the Professor show up at Zoo’s window, an ecstatic Joey watches from the bushes as it veers into a complete pandemonium. In the confusion, Joey and the Crush connect somehow and flee to the countryside, living between the landed gentry—which Gombrowicz's family was--and the peasants, another set piece largely incomprehensible in the West.
We ignore Gombrowicz at our peril.
This is especially true as the West stages an enormous production of “Ferdydurke”, playing the part of Joey while Professor Putin schools us in realpolitik, fascism and active measures. On September 9th, Russia deployed 18 drones deep into Polish territory, undetected by Polish defenses. They're probably preparing for “a hybrid-war 'Pearl Harbor' on Europe, a large scale assault,” speculated Jonathan Fink, the host of the respected Silicon Curtain podcast, which focuses on Ukraine and Russia. “Mass drone incursions combined with informational campaigns.”
Polish journalist and politician Radosław Sikorski and wife Anne Appelbaum, American journalist and historian, voting in Poland's election of 2023. photo: courtesy Sikorski Once again, Poland is manning up. Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, husband to author Anne Appelbaum, who is one of America’s top analysts of Russia and autocracies, made an eminently adult statement at the UN’s emergency meeting of September 22nd, addressed directly to the Russians.
“By ordering mobilization in 1914, you precipitated the start of World War One, which bled Europe white and led to your Bolshevik Revolution. By signing the Hitler-Stalin pact, you helped start World War Two, the bloodiest in history. By sovietizing central Europe, you caused the Cold War. Don’t start another one. We are peaceful democracies, who have studiously avoided actively joining your attempt to reconquer Ukraine, but we will not be intimidated… You have been warned.”
Representing liberals who've read Sun Tsu's "The Art of War" or one of his wife's books—a good, short one is "Twilight of Democracy" (2020)—Sikorski is a member of the Civic Platform, a hybrid liberal-conservative party, which won back the prime ministership with Donald Tusk in 2023. Unfortunately, in June 2025, the presidency was retaken by the Law and Justice Party, illiberal conservatives, who controlled Poland from 2014 to '24 and fostered a climate of fear and scapegoating. Law and Justice did well with that platform, paralleling Trump in America, because many Poles feel ignored or aggrieved, making them prone to adolescent wishful thinking or conspiracy theories. Indeed, there's a long tradition of blaming problems on the Germans, Russians and sometimes Americans as well as, of course, the Jews. In addition to post-war pogroms (notably in Kielce, 90 miles south of Warsaw, on July 4th, 1946, which killed 42 Jews), there were antisemitic purges of the professions in 1956 and '68, which drove most of the few remaining Polish Jews to emigrate to Israel.
The author and his family at the second memorial to murdered Jews created by the remembrance and reconciliation movement of Mszana Dolna, Poland, 2022. photo: unknown According to Luc Albinski, who co-created the documentary "Nobody Told Me" about his grandmother, a Jewish doctor who accompanied her patients to the Treblinka death camp, and wrote a play about her, in an email: “In Poland, alongside a vast uninterested majority, we find both the best and the worst: extreme antisemites of every stripe—from workers to intellectuals—and passionate philosemites rooted in a vibrant remembrance and reconciliation movement."
I myself was touched deeply by Poland's R&R movement, starting when my family and I visited a mass grave in Mszana Dolna, south of Krakow, which holds the remains of my grandmother, aunt and uncle, on August 19th, 2022. Not only was the site completely renovated, as we walked down the newly cobblestoned path to the small but now beautified memorial, we were met by an honor guard of Polish Boy and Girl Scouts, who played an important role in the Warsaw Uprising, Mszana Dolna's mayor, Anna Pękała, and the leader of the town's R&R movement, Urzsula Antosz-Rekucka. By the time we hugged Urzsula, my brother and I were crying like babies.
I was similarly astounded by the R&R efforts in Lodz, my Polish family's hometown, which range from major memorials to trees and plaques honoring the deceased, or the large, vibrant Marek Edelman Dialogue Center, which produces lectures, films, art shows, books and festivals. A doctor whose wife and children left Poland after the '68 antisemitic purge, Edelman remained and worked relentlessly to heal and restore Lodz, which is enjoying a cultural and financial renaissance similar to Warsaw.
“Ferdydurke” doesn’t answer the riddle of adulthood—an enigma all individuals are obliged to solve personally—but Gombrowicz metaphorizes and personifies it to a "T," in the drama of “Ferdydurke”, his own life and that of Poland. His last piece, an operetta entitled "Operetka", skewers totalitarianism while expressing the quiet hope that some kids will surmount childishness and resurrect civil society.
Gombrowicz and Rita Labrosse, a French-Canadian literature student, who became his secretary and then wife, in southern France, circa 1964. photo: courtesy Gombrowicz Through an increased military, a galloping economy and a rapidly evolving culture, Poland is wending its way to the leadership of Europe, a position it hasn’t held since the Polish-Lithuanian Empire was at its peak in the 17th century. Whether they can inspire their new European friends, living in the lap of liberal luxury but plagued by partisans of the hard left and right and inundated with vastly different if not dis information, is hard to say. Some Dutch travelers, in Poland on a government-funded mental health vacation, told me that Ukraine is a CIA concoction not worth fighting for, while an old German friend of mine said her sons would not enlist, even if Russia invaded, but would help civilian efforts from behind the lines.
If enough of European kids agree with the aforementioned Dutch and German young men, a generation and a half of democracy in Eastern Europe may be drawing to a close. On the other hand, if Poland's artists, soldiers and politicians have studied their “Ferdydurke” as well as their nation's centuries-long suffering, they'll man and woman up and eventually lead the Dutch, Germans and other Europeans by example—the only adult trick that actually works on teenagers.
Posted on Oct 09, 2025 - 09:52 AM
by Doniphan Blair
Witold Gombrowitz's photo from the passport he used to leave Poland in July 1939 for Argentina. photo: courtesy W. Gombrowitz "THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS A GROWN
up," according to André Malraux, the French novelist and politician, in his “Anti-Memoir” of 1967. “Until you have to become an adult, just to get anything done,” would be the response of ambitious hippies at that time and rational pragmatists today. Maturity is, in fact, THE big question of human relations, politics, history, even Darwinian evolution. Yes, reproduction is adulthood’s biological marker, and sexual selection decides the next generation, but to pass down your genes successfully, you must guide your children to their own maturity, which requires patience, probity and functionality.
No one captures this conundrum better than Witold Gombrowicz (1904-‘69) in his groundbreaking second book, “Ferdydurke”, published to instant acclaim in Warsaw in 1937, but also Poland itself. After being swallowed up by Prussia, Russia and Austria for exactly 130 years, the Polish people reemerged as an adolescence nation in 1918 only to be conquered 21 years later by Germany and the Soviet Union, which collaborated on its insanely brutal destruction.
Regardless, the Polish people rose against the Nazis in August 1944, just as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto did 16 months earlier. Most of the entire city and Poland's underground army fought doggedly for two months with few weapons, while the Soviet Army sat just across the Vistula River, until the Polish Air Force flying out of Italy and other Allies parachuted in some war materiel. I learned this recently at the impressive, immersive Warsaw Uprising Museum, which evokes the many Polish men and women of all faiths and professions, as well as children, who stood up against fascism. They only surrendered when Warsaw was almost entirely flattened by the Germans, to try to spare civilians. The Nazis continued their slaughter, of course, in Warsaw as well as across Poland, including the bizarre death marches of Jews and political prisoners from the camps into Germany.
The ruins of Warsaw's Jewish Ghetto, around St Augustine Church in May 1943, became all of Warsaw after the 'Rising' of September 1944. photo: public domain Warsaw today is awash in design-y skyscrapers, broad boulevards and similar bike lanes, all sorts of cuisine (including a lot of vegan) and quite a few People of Color (often from Poland's Cold War allies, some running the many Vietnamese restaurants, which are very popular), statuesque women and everything digital, LGBT and recycling, cool tourists and German techno raves—not to mention the arms dealers. I met a couple of hip, young ones enjoying Warsaw’s clubs and museums as well as booming weapons' business, as the youthful nation invests a full 5% percent of its rapidly expanding GNP into defense.
Meteorological storm over Warsaw, its skyline no longer dominated by the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science (right). photo: D. Blair Oddly enough, a month before World War Two started, Witold Gombrowicz boarded Poland’s first cruise liner on its maiden voyage, which was to Argentina, making “Ferdydurke” the literary hand-grenade he tossed off the back deck while fleeing the apocalypse for gentler Latino climes.
“Ferdydurke”’s drama and symbolism shocked me, when I read it in 1996. Not only was it masterful writing and laugh-out-loud funny, it revealed the inner workings of a nation I’d been trying to dicipher for over a decade, since starting to study the Holocaust in 1983. After a deceptively rambling intro—the “sleeper opening” common to Eastern European narratives, which contrasts starkly with the Hollywood trick of slamming you into the action headfirst—“Ferdydurke” explodes into life. The protagonist, Joey (Józio in Polish), is startled to find his old teacher, Pinko or Pinchon, pushing into his rented room, grabbing his manuscript off the table, and judging it immature. Although Joey is 30, the professor proceeds to drag him back to high school and full adolescent immersion.
Conrad, a Warsaw street book vendor, did not like 'Ferfydurke', preferring Gombrowicz's 'Dairies' instead. photo: D. Blair “Too much ego,” was Conrad's critique, to which he added, “I prefer his ‘Diaries’ [1969],” of which he did have four copies, although they weren't selling that well, despite The Paris Review's claim it was "widely considered his masterpiece."
“Old fashioned and weird,” was the opinion of the young woman working the top floor of a deluxe downtown bookstore, Empik, where I did finally find a complete Gombrowicz set, including “Ferdydurke”, but only in Polish, a brand-new, brightly-colored, minimalist edition. Due to Gombrowicz's rejection of having some of his books censored, the Polish version was long published by Jerzy Giedroyć’s Paris Literary Institute, which also serialized his "Dairies" in the renown, albeit with only 3,000 subscribers, Polish-emigre Kulture magazine. “I had to read 'Ferdydurke' in school,” the shy, soft-spoken and, thereby, more beautiful bookwoman said, “And when you are doing a school report, such a book becomes even harder to understand.”
The reaction of Luc Albinski, a part-time writer residing in a lovely high-rise apartment filled with art, when I asked him about “Ferdydurke”, was: "I love the book," and “Gombrowicz is telling us that adulthood is puberty wearing a suit.” At a bar in the catacombs under Krakow, Poland’s university and intellectual capital, some 30 years ago, I was ignored by a Polish beauty for not addressing her Polish until I said, in English, “What do you think of ‘Ferdydurke’?”
This article's author at the only memorial to Gombrowitz in Warsaw. photo: D. Blair Gombrowicz's honest acknowledgement of immaturity makes him mature, ironically, which evidently galls those stuck in perpetual adolescence, suggesting why it took so long for him to get his due. Years of struggle in Argentina earned him literary acclaim but little else until the release of a Spanish translation of “Ferdydurke” in 1947 and a Ford Foundation grant in 1963, which financed his return to Poland.
Shortly thereafter, however, he had to decamp for France. As well as refusing to publish his work, the Polish communist authorities initiated a vicious smear campaign. They were undoubtedly incensed by how Gombrowicz dodged the bullet of World War Two—even though he did report for duty at the Buenos Aires Embassy but was considered unfit—on top of his scathing social critique, not to mention the bisexuality.
Despite the censors' attempts to quash “Ferdydurke”, it became an international bestseller, was translated into 30 languages, and numbers 11,023 on Amazon’s fiction list today. His three subsequent novels, "Trans-Atlantyk" (1953), "Pornografia" (1960) and "Kosmos (1965), as well as "The Possessed", his supposed commercial potboiler, which was serialized in the late '60s under a pen name, were almost as well received. Meanwhile, his first theater piece, the tragicomedy "Ivona, Princess of Burgundia" (1938), about a prince determined to defy convention by marrying a plain woman, and other plays were staged and acclaimed in Germany, France and Sweden.
Gombrowitz not having a good day. photo: courtesy Gombrowitz “Ferdydurke”’s cinematic climax comes as Joey exacts his revenge. Using forged notes (as I recall), Joey arranges a midnight meeting between Professor Pinko and one of his students, the pretty teenage daughter of the Moderns, an optimistic, handsome, essentially American family, with whom he's infatuated. She is called Zoo and the Moderns the Youngers in the actual movie, “30 Door Key” (1991, free on YouTube), by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who worked in Hollywood and is best known for “Moonlighting” (1982), so I will use that nomenclature.
Blowing up archetypes into Macy Day parade balloons, Gombrowicz conjures a cosmically comic scene. Joey deploys another forged note to also lure to the late-night rendezvous Zoo’s actual crush, the brutal bozo who’s been torturing Joey at school. When he and the Professor show up at Zoo’s window, an ecstatic Joey watches from the bushes as it veers into a complete pandemonium. In the confusion, Joey and the Crush connect somehow and flee to the countryside, living between the landed gentry—which Gombrowicz's family was--and the peasants, another set piece largely incomprehensible in the West.
We ignore Gombrowicz at our peril.
This is especially true as the West stages an enormous production of “Ferdydurke”, playing the part of Joey while Professor Putin schools us in realpolitik, fascism and active measures. On September 9th, Russia deployed 18 drones deep into Polish territory, undetected by Polish defenses. They're probably preparing for “a hybrid-war 'Pearl Harbor' on Europe, a large scale assault,” speculated Jonathan Fink, the host of the respected Silicon Curtain podcast, which focuses on Ukraine and Russia. “Mass drone incursions combined with informational campaigns.”
Polish journalist and politician Radosław Sikorski and wife Anne Appelbaum, American journalist and historian, voting in Poland's election of 2023. photo: courtesy Sikorski “By ordering mobilization in 1914, you precipitated the start of World War One, which bled Europe white and led to your Bolshevik Revolution. By signing the Hitler-Stalin pact, you helped start World War Two, the bloodiest in history. By sovietizing central Europe, you caused the Cold War. Don’t start another one. We are peaceful democracies, who have studiously avoided actively joining your attempt to reconquer Ukraine, but we will not be intimidated… You have been warned.”
Representing liberals who've read Sun Tsu's "The Art of War" or one of his wife's books—a good, short one is "Twilight of Democracy" (2020)—Sikorski is a member of the Civic Platform, a hybrid liberal-conservative party, which won back the prime ministership with Donald Tusk in 2023. Unfortunately, in June 2025, the presidency was retaken by the Law and Justice Party, illiberal conservatives, who controlled Poland from 2014 to '24 and fostered a climate of fear and scapegoating. Law and Justice did well with that platform, paralleling Trump in America, because many Poles feel ignored or aggrieved, making them prone to adolescent wishful thinking or conspiracy theories. Indeed, there's a long tradition of blaming problems on the Germans, Russians and sometimes Americans as well as, of course, the Jews. In addition to post-war pogroms (notably in Kielce, 90 miles south of Warsaw, on July 4th, 1946, which killed 42 Jews), there were antisemitic purges of the professions in 1956 and '68, which drove most of the few remaining Polish Jews to emigrate to Israel.
The author and his family at the second memorial to murdered Jews created by the remembrance and reconciliation movement of Mszana Dolna, Poland, 2022. photo: unknown I myself was touched deeply by Poland's R&R movement, starting when my family and I visited a mass grave in Mszana Dolna, south of Krakow, which holds the remains of my grandmother, aunt and uncle, on August 19th, 2022. Not only was the site completely renovated, as we walked down the newly cobblestoned path to the small but now beautified memorial, we were met by an honor guard of Polish Boy and Girl Scouts, who played an important role in the Warsaw Uprising, Mszana Dolna's mayor, Anna Pękała, and the leader of the town's R&R movement, Urzsula Antosz-Rekucka. By the time we hugged Urzsula, my brother and I were crying like babies.
I was similarly astounded by the R&R efforts in Lodz, my Polish family's hometown, which range from major memorials to trees and plaques honoring the deceased, or the large, vibrant Marek Edelman Dialogue Center, which produces lectures, films, art shows, books and festivals. A doctor whose wife and children left Poland after the '68 antisemitic purge, Edelman remained and worked relentlessly to heal and restore Lodz, which is enjoying a cultural and financial renaissance similar to Warsaw.
“Ferdydurke” doesn’t answer the riddle of adulthood—an enigma all individuals are obliged to solve personally—but Gombrowicz metaphorizes and personifies it to a "T," in the drama of “Ferdydurke”, his own life and that of Poland. His last piece, an operetta entitled "Operetka", skewers totalitarianism while expressing the quiet hope that some kids will surmount childishness and resurrect civil society.
Gombrowicz and Rita Labrosse, a French-Canadian literature student, who became his secretary and then wife, in southern France, circa 1964. photo: courtesy Gombrowicz If enough of European kids agree with the aforementioned Dutch and German young men, a generation and a half of democracy in Eastern Europe may be drawing to a close. On the other hand, if Poland's artists, soldiers and politicians have studied their “Ferdydurke” as well as their nation's centuries-long suffering, they'll man and woman up and eventually lead the Dutch, Germans and other Europeans by example—the only adult trick that actually works on teenagers.
Posted on Oct 09, 2025 - 09:52 AM
