Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood 9781978814004

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Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

Global Perspectives on Aging Series editor, Sarah Lamb This series publishes books that ­will deepen and expand our understanding of age, aging, ageism, and late life in the United States and beyond. The series focuses on anthropology while being open to ethnographically vivid and theoretically rich scholarship in related fields, including sociology, religion, cultural studies, social medicine, medical humanities, gender and sexuality studies, h ­ uman development, critical and cultural gerontology, and age studies. Books w ­ ill be aimed at students, scholars, and occasionally the general public. Jason Danely, Aging and Loss: Mourning and Maturity in Con­temporary Japan Parin Dossa and Cati Coe, eds., Transnational Aging and Reconfigurations of Kin Work Sarah Lamb, ed., Successful Aging as a Con­temporary Obsession: Global Perspectives Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Ending Ageism, or How Not to Shoot Old P ­ eople Ellyn Lem, Gray M ­ atters: Finding Meaning in the Stories of L ­ ater Life Michele Ruth Gamburd, Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka Yohko Tsuji, Through Japa­nese Eyes: Thirty Years of Studying Aging in Amer­i­ca Jessica C. Robbins, Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland: Memory, Kinship, and Personhood

Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland Memory, Kinship, and Personhood

JESSICA C. ROBBINS

Rutgers University Press New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Robbins, Jessica C., author. Title: Aging nationally in con­temporary Poland: memory, kinship, and personhood / Jessica C. Robbins. Description: New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, [2020] | Series: Global perspectives on aging | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020010824 | ISBN 9781978813960 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978813977 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978813984 (epub) | ISBN 9781978813991 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978814004 (pdf ) Subjects: LCSH: Aging—­Social aspects—­Poland. | Older ­people—­Poland—­Social conditions. | Health promotion—­Poland. Classification: LCC HQ1064.P6 R63 2020 | DDC 305.2609438—­dc23 LC rec­ord available at https://­lccn​.­loc​.­gov​/­2020010824 A British Cataloging-­in-­Publication rec­ord for this book is available from the British Library. All photos by the author Copyright © 2021 by Jessica C. Robbins All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—­Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www​.­rutgersuniversitypress​.o­ rg Manufactured in the United States of Amer­i­ca

 In memory of my grandparents, Rovelle Coffman Choate, Pauline Davis Choate, Alvin Dolliver Robbins, and Jean West Robbins

Contents

Preface ix Introduction 1 1

Histories of Active Aging: Aktywność across Eras

25

2

Aspiring to Activity: Transforming Aging through Education

45

3

Beyond Activity: Sustaining Relations in Institutional Care

65

4

Remembering the Polish Nation: Connections across Third and Fourth Ages

91

5

Rethinking Memory: Everyday Rhythms of Dementia

122

6

Gardens of Memory: Reimagining Home and Nation

139

Conclusion

155

Acknowl­edgments 161 Glossary 169 Notes 171 References 193 Index 205

vii

Preface  To confuse someone is to Buffalo To seek ­favor thru flattery is to fawn To betray is to rat To strug­gle clumsily is to flounder To treat as an object of importance  is lionize

I found ­these words scribbled in pencil on a small piece of paper on top of a dresser in my grandparents’ apartment in the “in­de­pen­dent living” wing of a retirement community in northern ­Virginia in May 2005. My parents and I w ­ ere ­there, along with my u­ ncle and aunt, to help my grandparents move into the nursing home wing. They had already downsized significantly in the move from their town­house to this apartment a de­cade ­earlier, but ­there w ­ ere still too many ­things—­furniture, rugs, linens, cookware, clothes, plants, collections of shells, baskets, coins, miniature zoo animals, safety pins, rubber bands—­the ­things seemed never to end. As I picked up a pile of expired coupons and materials for arts-­and-­crafts proj­ects that ­were never to be, this piece of paper fluttered to the ground. Once I had deciphered the handwriting and read the words on the small page, I was taken aback. Th ­ ese words ­were written in the hand of my ­father’s ­mother, who in 2005 had had Alzheimer’s disease for around ten years, and they ­were more lucid than much of her speech at that time. At first, I interpreted t­ hese words according ix

x  •  Preface

to their form. The act of defining words seemed a strug­gle to create a tangible real­ity, something to grasp and thereby remember. The list of animals as verbs gave the list an odd coherence and pos­si­ble playfulness, although the circumstances of the day ­were such that I could only interpret the words as full of loss. I was also struck by the effortful nature of the words themselves (“to seek ­favor,” “to strug­gle clumsily,” “to treat as an object of importance”). Next, the sociality of ­these words stood out. They are all definitions that have to do with relating to another person; at stake are feelings of confusion, approval, betrayal, and re­spect. I had long understood my grand­mother’s illness as a failure to relate meaningfully to ­others, and ­these words seemed to constitute her own recognition of this failure—or rather, in her words, this floundering, this clumsy strug­gle. In a sense, this book is an exploration of this gap in sociality, of what lies between “failure” and “floundering.” I include this story about my grand­mother in order to show more fully the varying kinds of experience that have s­ haped this book. B ­ ecause all arguments are made from a par­tic­u­lar position, I see the task of describing one’s par­tic­u­lar position and stance as a part of honest scholarship. In other words, since knowledge is always produced ­under certain conditions, the inclusion of such personal history is part of describing the conditions in which this book has been produced. Of course, this honesty is always contextual, depending on the time and place; I would include dif­fer­ent information about that piece of paper had I written this the day I found it. Emotions, attachments, and perspectives all shift. But I include it nevertheless, as part of working t­ oward an ideal that must remain imperfect. Additionally, it just seems decent to include such personal information given the nature of ethnographic research. As Lawrence Cohen has written, “it seem[s] fair play to invoke one’s grand­mother if one is in the business of writing about every­ one ­else’s” (1998, 296–297). Thus I include this preface with the goals of honesty and fairness, and attendant dreams of completeness and totality. However, it was partially a desire to escape the personal that led me to study aging in Poland. I had first thought of studying aging and memory in the United States, but I thought that I would somehow be too reminded of my grandparents’ illnesses and I worried it would be too personally difficult. Thus I sought out another place in the world where aging and memory seemed like salient con­temporary topics, where ethnographic and anthropological insights could prove useful. The dramatic large-­scale changes experienced by the oldest generations drew me to eastern Eu­rope, where I saw a proliferation of social activity around memory at dif­fer­ent scales. Poland

Preface • xi

seemed emblematic of the changes of eastern Eu­rope, and the University of Michigan’s excellent Polish studies program made the proj­ect seem practical. Thinking of my grandparents turned out to be unavoidable, although conducting fieldwork in a learned language did initially provide some degree of emotional distance. But the personal ultimately turned inescapable in another way, as fieldwork was framed by health prob­lems of my own. ­Those years of pain, confusion, procedures, surgeries, distress, and care s­ haped my experiences of both fieldwork and writing, although it is difficult to articulate precisely how. I know that t­ hese unwished-­for insights into patienthood and biomedical worlds shape my ethnographic and anthropological stance, if only in the sense that I am forever aware of how we are all “struggl[ing] clumsily.”

Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

Introduction

Late on a Tuesday after­noon in November, a group of older w ­ omen and I walked up the steps of a building at the University of Technology in Poznań, a city of around 540,000 p­ eople in western Poland.1 College-­age students ­were smoking, chatting, and laughing outside in the dwindling after­noon light. Inside the building, a large group of older p­ eople filled the hallway outside a ground-­floor classroom that was still full of young students. As the lecture ended, the younger students began leaving the classroom and the older ­people began to enter, every­one jostling to move forward in the direction they wanted. The hectic movement settled down as p­ eople took their seats in the lecture hall, but the noise remained as p­ eople chatted with t­ hose around them. The room felt smaller than it was, as almost all seats ­were full; perhaps one hundred ­people ­were gathered for a lecture as part of a class at the Uniwersytet Trzeciego Wieku, or University of the Third Age (UTA), an institution for lifelong learning specifically for older p­ eople.2 ­A fter a staff member from the UTA asked the crowd to quiet down, she introduced me, described my study on aging in Poland, and invited p­ eople to sign up for interview times a­ fter the lecture. The day’s lecture was titled “The Rebuilding of the Bishop Jordan Bridge,” given by an emeritus professor of engineering at the university. For an hour, the professor described the history of this pedestrian bridge over the Cybina River, a tributary of the Warta River, which is the main river in Poznań and the third-­largest in the country. (The Warta itself is a branch of the Oder 1

2  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

River [Odra], which runs through Wrocław, the other city where I conducted fieldwork.) The Bishop Jordan Bridge connects the oldest district of Poznań, Ostrów Tumski, where the cathedral lies, with the eastern district of the city. The cathedral is one of the oldest churches in Poland, dating to the time of Mieszko I, the ruler of Poland in the tenth ­century. Some sort of bridge had been in this location since the ­middle ages; since the nineteenth c­ entury, the bridge has been built, destroyed, and rebuilt several times, in conjunction with the wars that occurred during t­ hese years. As the professor described the successive destructions and reconstructions of t­hese bridges, showing pictures of old maps, design plans, and more recent construction images, ­people in the audience listened attentively, if not quietly. At such events, older Polish p­ eople often keep a sort of r­ unning commentary with their friends or whomever happens to be sitting next to them. This proved true at this lecture, as the w ­ oman next to me leaned over to share information she found pertinent, saying out loud the name of a bishop whose name the professor did not remember, commenting on the beauty of maps of Poznań from the eigh­teenth ­century and the relative ugliness of the con­temporary neoclassical cathedral compared to its fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­century Gothic style and, upon learning that I had also lived in Wrocław, the dirtiness of that city compared to Poznań. This lecture was typical of UTAs: many retirees crowded into a lecture hall to listen to a distinguished professor give a lecture on a topic of general interest, or at least presumed general interest. The topics could be relatively academic, with seemingly l­ ittle connection to issues of aging per se, or they could be explic­itly about aging, such as one lecture on adaptive psychological strategies for prob­lems in late life. Regardless of the topics of ­these lectures, they w ­ ere always well-­attended, always full of older ­people engaging with p­ eople around them, clamoring to be heard. Most events I attended ­were held in some university space—­the University of Technology in Poznań, the Institute of Pedagogy in Wrocław, the ­grand University Hall of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań—to which every­one I knew arrived by tram or bus. No one was in a wheelchair, although some did use canes. P ­ eople would attend with friends or alone and they often interacted with p­ eople t­here; a­ fter lectures in Wrocław, some p­ eople would go downstairs to the student cafeteria and have cups of coffee in l­ittle Styrofoam cups and a few cookies, talking with their friends about the lecture or other topics. Other activities at the UTA, such as En­glish or computer classes, ­were similarly busy and social. ­People saw attending t­ hese lectures as part of learning

Introduction • 3

how to age well, as an attempt to accept old age but also to develop oneself. ­Women in par­tic­u­lar told me that they enjoyed time to do something for themselves (dla siebie) ­after lifetimes of working and caring for o­ thers. ­These older Poles who attend UTAs are participating in what has come to be known as active aging, a term that refers to increasingly popu­lar global discourses and programs that encourage older adults to learn new skills, remain in the workforce, become socially engaged, and practice health-­ promoting be­hav­iors in order to lessen the economic and social burden that increasing numbers and proportions of older adults pose to the broader polity. Like other countries in Eu­rope, Poland’s population is growing older, due to a combination of increasing life expectancies and decreasing birthrates.3 Such demographic change poses challenges for policymakers who often understand population aging as a f­ actor that puts a strain on social ser­vice, health-­care, and pension systems. As defined by the World Health Organ­ization: “Active ageing is the pro­cess of optimizing opportunities for health, participation, and security in order to enhance quality of life as ­people age” (2002, 12). This was developed as part of the United Nations Second World Assembly on Ageing in 2002 in Madrid, as part of addressing global population aging.4 Active aging is related to other concepts such as “successful,” “healthy,” and “productive” aging (Butler and Gleason 1985; Rowe and Kahn 1997) that together respond to theoretical and cultural concepts of aging as a time of decline (Cumming and Henry 1961) or as a fundamentally negative pro­cess (cf. Gullette 1997, 2004, 2017). ­These concepts are part of dominant con­ temporary understandings of aging and the life course in which retirement from industrial or postindustrial l­ abor heralds a new phase of life, sometimes called the “third age” (Laslett 1996) or “the young-­old” (Neugarten 1974). Scholars and policymakers imagine the third age as a time in the life course when one has left the formal l­abor market, remains healthy, and can thus contribute to society through activities such as volunteering. This phase of life is historically par­tic­u ­lar to the demographic and political-­economic shifts of the second half of the twentieth ­century (in North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope). UTAs and other active-­aging programs encourage older adults to challenge dismal ste­reo­types through activity. Active aging can include programs like exercise classes, lecture series, foreign-­language classes, hobby groups, volunteering, and opportunities for socialization. Such efforts are often quite popu­lar among many older ­people in diverse contexts around the world where they are implemented.

4  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

Yet the opposite of active aging—an old age characterized by decline, illness, de­pen­dency, isolation—­always looms, accompanied by the often-­ unspoken knowledge of the certainty of death. Indeed, scholars conceive of the third age as followed by the “fourth age” of “dependence and decrepitude” (Laslett 1996, 192).5 However, this ethnographic study focusing on moral personhood shows that substantive, impor­tant similarities exist across seemingly divergent experiences of health and illness, in­de­pen­dence and dependence, and connection and isolation. Moral personhood refers to an analytic category that encompasses what it means to be a social person, in which some ­people are made to feel valued and included, while ­others are devalued and excluded. In con­temporary Poland, as in many parts of the world, active aging and the third age are seen as ideal forms of moral personhood in late life, whereas experiences of illness and the fourth age can diminish, dismantle, or threaten moral personhood. Active-­aging programs have become a new way for some older Poles to practice aktywność (activity, activeness), a locally meaningful form of moral personhood, by aligning themselves with narratives of pro­gress. In Polish, programs promoting active aging use the word “aktywność” or “aktywny” (active), but ­these words are also used in other contexts, as this book w ­ ill show. Thus, to preserve local meanings and histories of the word aktywność, I ­will use the Polish word throughout this book and use “active aging” only for t­ hose programs that are explic­itly affiliated with active-­aging concepts of the past few de­cades. This distinction between active aging and aktywność helps to maintain a separation between categories of analy­sis and categories of practice, a key contribution of anthropological perspectives that offer possibilities for new forms of understanding.6 Active-­aging programs take on meanings associated with national history and Poland’s place in the con­temporary world order. This has to do with the multiple, dramatic, and large-­scale sociocultural and political-­economic changes that have occurred during the lifetimes of the oldest generations in Poland. ­People who participated in active-­aging programs ranged in age from their late fifties (born in the early 1950s) to their late nineties (born in the early 1910s). The oldest individuals included in this book ­were born before World War I, when Poland was still u­ nder partition and ruled by the Prus­sian, Austro-­Hungarian, and Rus­sian Empires. They lived through World War I, the creation of the first in­de­pen­dent Polish state since 1795, the catastrophic destruction of World War II, the imposition of state socialism by the Soviet Union, the collapse of that system in 1989 and the

Introduction • 5

transformation to a demo­cratic cap­i­tal­ist nation-­state, and the joining of the Eu­ro­pean Union in 2004. ­These transformations had profound effects on ­people’s daily lives and ways of imagining themselves (Berdahl et  al. 2000; Mandel and Humphrey 2002; Verdery 1996). Th ­ ese shifts w ­ ere not  just political-­economic in nature but also sociocultural, heralding changes in understanding the relation between the person and society and in “what the world is and should be”—in short, the moral imagination (Beidelman 1993[1986], 2; see also Livingston 2005). Th ­ ese multiple large-­ scale changes that have occurred over the course of a lifetime form the context within which active-­aging programs try to improve experiences of late life in Poland and, as this book w ­ ill show, inextricably shape the experiences and ideals of aging in con­temporary Poland. The role of older p­ eople in the moral imagination of the Polish nation becomes evident in con­temporary media and public discourse. Age often becomes a meaningful category of difference during times of social change (Cole and Durham 2007; Edmunds and Turner 2002). For example, in Polish public discourse, older w ­ omen become figures of the nation (Cohen 1998; Graff 2009; Mosse 1988). One example from national politics exemplifies the extent to which age and generation can index po­liti­cal worldviews. In response to elections in 2005 in which the conservative nationalist party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (PiS, or Law and Justice) won both presidential and parliamentary elections, ad campaigns in 2007 used threatening images of older w ­ omen to motivate younger generations to vote for the center-­right party Platforma Obywatelska (PO; Civic Platform).7 The link between older ­women and the conservative nationalism of PiS was represented by the figure of the moherowe berety (mohair berets). The term refers to the wool caps that many older Polish w ­ omen wear and has come to stand for groups of older rural ­women who support PiS and listen to the conservative nationalist Catholic radio station Radio Maryja, the flagship member of a media conglomerate run by the controversial, conservative priest ­Father Tadeusz Rydzyk.8 A widely circulated image from the months before the 2007 parliamentary election depicts a large group of older ­women wearing t­ hese hats as they attend what is presumably a mass, with the added caption “VOTE, or e­ lse ­they’ll do it for you!”9 Intended as a get-­out-­the-­ vote campaign targeting younger voters, this image demonized el­derly ­women en masse ­because of their po­liti­cal and religious views. Another ad urged, “Steal your grand­mother’s ID” (thereby making it impossible for her to vote).10 ­These images pre­sent older ­women as a threat to the con­temporary

6  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

Polish nation b­ ecause of their support of the conservative, nationalist worldviews promoted by PiS and Radio Maryja. Although PiS lost parliamentary elections in 2007 to PO, since 2015, PiS has regained and consolidated its power in decisive electoral victories and made numerous policy changes that advance its exclusionary vision of the Polish nation.11 ­These generational politics that construct older Poles as threatening to Poland’s ­future are one way that older Poles’ moral personhood is diminished. B ­ ecause PiS does draw support from disproportionately large numbers of older Poles, particularly older w ­ omen in rural eastern regions, older ­people come to be associated with a vision of the Polish nation that is ethnically Polish, Catholic, supports patriarchal visions of gender roles and the ­family, and denounces the politics of the socialist past. PiS uses historical politics to justify this exclusionary vision of the Polish nation, which is the opposite view of Poles who support Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) membership and promote rights for sexual, ethnic, and religious minorities. Th ­ ese historical politics draw on mythical understandings of the Polish nation that extend hundreds of years into the past. The moral imagination of aging in Poland, then, includes not only the transformations that have occurred within the lifetimes of the oldest generations but also t­ hose at a deeper historical scale. To understand the interplay between moral personhood and active aging, it is necessary to understand ­these historical concepts of the Polish nation.

Aging and the Mythical Polish Nation The following ethnographic example demonstrates the role of national history in older Poles’ understandings of themselves and the world in which they live. The context, however, seems to exemplify the so-­called fourth age—­the opposite of active aging in a university classroom. On a gray day in November 2008, on the third floor of a rehabilitation center run by Catholic nuns in Wrocław, pani Joanna and another w ­ oman w ­ ere sitting in their wheelchairs by the large win­dow that looked out onto the gardens.12 How was she feeling, I asked of pani Joanna. “Better and better,” she said.13 This was good to hear ­because the first time we met she had dissolved into tears talking about the stroke that had brought her to the rehabilitation center. That day she demonstrated how her right arm was getting better, how she could raise it higher and wiggle her fin­gers more than previously. Throughout the conversation, she rubbed her right arm (the side affected by stroke) with

Introduction • 7

the left side. Unlike the rest of the patients at the center, who ­were dressed for the chilly fall weather in sweaters, pani Joanna was wearing an oversized bright yellow T-­shirt with a cartoon bumblebee on it. A speech ­bubble leading from the bee’s mouth read (in En­glish), “Wanna be my bumblebee?” Pani Joanna then asked how I was d­ oing. Well, I responded. Research was ­going well thanks to the kindness of ­people at the center. It was a plea­ sure to hear ­people’s stories. Pani Joanna commented that yes, ­there ­were a lot of older p­ eople at the center who remember well, and that it is impor­ tant to talk about the past, to remember. At this point the other w ­ oman at the win­dow joined the conversation, so I introduced myself as an American doctoral student in Poland to do research on aging and memory in Wrocław and Poznań. The other w ­ oman agreed that this is an impor­tant topic. Together, the two w ­ omen talked for half an hour on differing topics: the lack of patriotism in younger generations, the emigration of younger ­people, and the good qualities of Poles. Pani Joanna talked about a late friend who had lived in the United States, but who missed Poland terribly the entire time she was t­ here. “That’s what our nation is like—­people miss it.”14 She described how Poles ­were often fighting in other ­people’s wars, but that no one came to help the Poles. Even though Poles have fought around the world for in­de­pen­dence, no one helps them. Poland is a “nation chosen by God.”15 The other w ­ oman agreed, saying that Poland was chosen by God to suffer. “Young p­ eople now are sick, it’s terrible. Th ­ ere ­aren’t many ­people left” who know what true patriotism is, she said. “I feel bad for my c­ hildren and grandchildren.”16 They are leaving Poland, but for what? Poland has every­thing but money. At least they are starting to return. The two w ­ omen then remarked that at heart, Poles are good p­ eople, with good traits: “Poles are hardworking and hospitable. ­These are ­really good national qualities.”17 With this agreement, the w ­ omen fell s­ ilent. Then the second w ­ oman asked me if I would wheel her back to her room down the hallway, which I did. From the laminated piece of paper attached to the wall above her bed, I learned that her name was Genowefa, that she was eighty years old, and that she was diabetic. Returning to the hallway, I was intent on writing up this conversation in my notebook. As I sat in a chair on the other side of the hallway from the win­dow and smiled at pani Joanna across the hallway, I remarked that I was writing notes about what she and pani Genowefa had just discussed. She wheeled herself over to me and kept talking, as if instructing me, with a tone of seriousness and earnestness about what she was saying. A ­ fter

8  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

about fifteen minutes, the obiad (traditional midday meal) cart was wheeled into her room; I pointed this out, but she kept talking, undistracted by the cart, other ­people walking through the hallway, or the staff member pushing the cart telling her that her food had arrived. ­A fter another ten minutes, pani Joanna ended the conversation, saying that she would go eat ­after all. Her obiad was surely cold by then. Pani Joanna told me about her ­family’s background: her ­mother was from Lwów (the current Ukrainian city of L’viv) and her ­father’s ­family was from Przemyśl (a city in what is now southeastern Poland) and then moved to Lwów. She spoke of how beautiful Lwów was and how excellent the air was.18 She spoke of vio­lence by Ukrainians t­ oward Poles, saying that her f­ ather had to be careful on the streets; if he was heard speaking Polish, he would be attacked. They moved to Wrocław in 1958, a­ fter the “boom” in postwar development. It was ­because Poles are “very hardworking,” she repeated, that Wrocław and Warsaw came to be as beautiful as they are ­today. “My god—­ Wrocław, Warsaw—­nothing but ruins.”19 She spoke of the generosity of Poles throughout history, of Poles who have always fought on behalf of ­others, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan—­but that no one comes to Poland’s aid. She mentioned her son who lived in Ireland, and that Poles ­were sent to Siberia where they starved and had to forage in the forest for food: mushrooms, fruits, berries. Pani Joanna emphasized that she knows how ­things ­really ­were ­because she is old enough to remember, in contrast to her grandchildren, who say, “Grandma, tell us a story!”20 They do not know about her experiences, which, for pani Joanna, is a “tragedy.” Pani Joanna encouraged me to read books about postwar Poland, about Poland’s aid to other nations, and about deportations to Siberia. They have lists of ­people’s names, she said, which ­will demonstrate that she speaks the truth. The history that she learned in school was not true, she said, in contrast to now, when it has been “documented.”21 This conversation took me by surprise—­although I had heard such repetitions of the standard Polish national narrative before, it was never in such a context. During my fieldwork at this rehabilitation center run by the ­sisters of St. Elizabeth in the center of Wrocław, other older Poles had told stories that intertwined personal and national histories—­and indeed they would for the duration of the twenty-­two months I spent conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Poland—­but u­ ntil that point, ­these stories had only appeared during somewhat more formal interview-­like settings when I had specifically asked p­ eople to tell me about their lives. This day, I had not explic­itly asked any questions, turned on a voice recorder, or invoked any of the

Introduction • 9

conventions that established the framework of “official research.” The fact of my presence and stated interest in memory and old age brought forth ­these stories from pani Joanna and pani Genowefa. Even ­after the conversation could have ended, a­ fter I brought pani Genowefa back to her room and was sitting quietly in the hallway, pani Joanna was the one who kept the story g­ oing for so long that her meal became cold. Especially notable w ­ ere the many connections across time and space that pani Joanna made: post–­World War II Wrocław, which ­until 1945 had been the German city of Breslau; pre-­and postwar Lwów, a city that was part of the Polish state ­after World War I but became Soviet L’viv ­after World War II; the Polish capital of Warsaw, which was even more devastated than Wrocław during World War II; Siberia, a place to which Poles had been deported in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by the Rus­sian tsar and then by the Soviets; Ireland; Iraq; Af­ghan­i­stan; and Poland itself, as long-­suffering, sacred, and fundamentally good. During this conversation, t­ hese faraway places and times w ­ ere all made as pre­sent as the garden outside the win­dow. It was also remarkable that pani Joanna framed herself as someone who remembers t­ hese times and places. When we met in 2008, she was sixty-­two years old; she was born in 1946, meaning that she had not lived through World War II. She was one of the younger p­ eople at the rehab center, and younger than one might expect for someone who framed herself as remembering the old days, as a keeper of memory. In fact, her story was quite similar to the stories of w ­ omen in their late nineties with whom I had spoken. In ­these stories about the past, thirty years difference in age seemed almost irrelevant. The final, and seemingly most transparent, aspect of pani Joanna’s story was the degree to which it recapitulated the romantic, messianic national myth of Poland as the Christ of nations. This story, in simplified form, is that Poland has suffered oppression by foreign powers for centuries and has valiantly resisted this oppression. For centuries Poles have fought for their own—­and for ­others’—­freedom. ­These strug­g les would be in vain, since Poland has often lost such strug­gles, except that to be Polish is to be Catholic, and Poles have thus been defending Catholicism as well as Poland in ­these fights. Poland is a nation chosen by God to suffer, and in that suffering it finds redemption: Poland, the Christ of nations. This messianic myth can take gendered dimensions in the figure of Matka-­Polka, or Mother-­Pole, who both protects the nation through nurturing its members and bears its suffering. The Matka-­Polka’s suffering is the suffering of the Polish nation.22

10  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

Like many national myths, this story contains ele­ments of truth. The territory of con­temporary Poland has indeed been ruled by many powers over the centuries; most impor­tant in regard to this mythic formulation, the Polish-­Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned into three by the Rus­ sian, Prus­sian, and Austro-­Hungarian Empires in the late eigh­teenth ­century. The last partition was in 1795; an in­de­pen­dent Polish state did not exist u­ ntil a­ fter World War I in 1918. Poles did indeed fight foreign rule. During the partition period, ­there ­were many uprisings (powstania) against the foreign rulers, and some Polish insurrectionists did indeed fight in revolutionary movements abroad. Revolutionary movements also characterized Polish po­liti­cal life in the first half of the twentieth ­century in both World Wars I and II. The control of postwar Poland by the Soviet Union marked another loss of Polish in­de­pen­dence, but re­sis­tance occurred in the form of ­labor strikes, most notably in the 1970s and 1980s, as Poles fought against Soviet control. Poland’s link with Catholicism dates to the ac­cep­ tance of Latin Chris­tian­ity by Mieszko I in 966, and Poland and Catholicism have been closely linked by po­liti­cal connections for centuries.23 Like all nationalist myths, however, this is a highly selective reading of history (Hobsbawm 1983; Renan 1996[1892]). This understanding of Polish nationalism is a historical construct that draws primarily on nineteenth-­ century Polish Romantic nationalist ideals, and its creation has more to do with late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Polish politics than with how ­people actually understood themselves during the nineteenth ­century (Porter 2000). Erased from this history are centuries of linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse populations living on the territory of con­ temporary Poland (Porter-­Szücs 2014). Moreover, in con­temporary Polish politics, this narrative is espoused by PiS and other far-­right po­liti­cal parties and religious leaders as part of isolationist, conservative, exclusionary ideologies. Since the tragic plane crash in April 2010 that killed President Lech Kaczyński and ninety-­five o­ thers near Smoleńsk, Rus­sia, and especially since PiS’s electoral victory in 2015, this national myth has come to dominate Polish po­liti­cal life. The crash occurred as the president and many top governmental officials ­were traveling to Smoleńsk to mark the seventieth anniversary of the massacre of Polish officers and intelligent­sia by the Soviet Union in the Katyń forest. Almost immediately labeled a “second Katyń,” the event became concretized as part of the national my­thol­ogy of suffering when the president and his wife ­were buried in the crypts of Wawel

Introduction • 11

Cathedral in Kraków, alongside Polish kings, rather than in the military cemetery in Warsaw where Polish leaders have been buried for almost a ­century. Even though Polish and Rus­sian governmental investigations ruled the crash an accident, the president’s surviving twin b­ rother, Jarosław Kaczyński, who leads PiS to this day, has reopened investigations, including exhuming bodies of the victims, and promoted conspiracy theories about the cause of the crash. This story of the Smoleńsk crash—as the latest example in Polish national martyrology—­has become incorporated into some older Poles’ narratives of their own lives. For instance, over a span of eight hours, pani Małgorzata, a ­woman in her eighties who lived alone, shared tales of her own suffering and that of the Polish nation. In addition to suffering, she saw the presence of miracles in both her own life and that of the nation, remarking on her capacity for healing p­ eople through the laying on of hands and Poland’s history of g­ reat leaders, such as Józef Piłsudski, the interwar Polish leader, and Lech Kaczyński. Pani Małgorzata felt that both she and the Polish nation had been chosen by God for their capacity to endure suffering and for their power to witness, perform, or embody miracles.24 Some might dismiss pani Małgorzata or pani Joanna as vessels for nationalist messages absorbed from the media or as old ­women stuck in the past. Indeed, younger Poles I knew ­were often quick to do so, commenting that “­these ­people need to die off for our country to move forward.” (This type of comment by younger ­people was especially common in response to anti-­ Semitic, or conservative religious remarks by older ­people.) Yet, as the following chapters ­will show, ­these narrative connections between the person and the nation recurred across diverse groups of older Poles and in varying contexts. Moreover, t­ hese links that pani Joanna made to par­tic­u­lar places and times ­were impor­tant for her understanding of herself as a person, her social relations, and her place in the world. This type of connection between the person and certain places and times—­what I ­will call the spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood—is key to understanding aging in con­ temporary Poland.

Moral Personhood and Its Spatiotemporal Contours Through a focus on the spatiotemporal contours of personhood, this book contributes to ongoing debates about how dif­fer­ent socie­ties understand the

12  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

concept of the person and the extent to which personhood is s­ haped by social relations. Throughout the book, I use the concept of moral personhood, which is rooted in anthropological theories of the person, kinship, and the moral imagination, to guide the analy­sis of experiences and understandings of aging in Poland. As pani Joanna demonstrates, personhood is created through social relations, such as exchange or care, that occur within meaningful cultural frameworks and po­liti­cal economies (Mauss 1985[1938], 1990[1925]). This pro­cessual view of personhood takes relationality as fundamental, meaning that an investigation of personhood must examine social relations (Carsten 1995). Social relations, furthermore, are inherently moral, in that they involve “judgments about what the world is and should be” (Beidelman 1993[1986], 2). Social relations, then, consist not only of what is occurring in any par­tic­u ­lar interactional moment but also of evaluative, reflective pro­cesses. ­Because social relations, cultural frameworks, and po­liti­cal economies can vary across time and place, it follows that personhood can also vary with time and place. Indeed, the comparative ethnographic rec­ord demonstrates exactly this. One key type of variation noted in anthropological discussions of personhood is the supposed difference between individual and relational persons. Euro-­A merican ideals of the person consist of an in­de­pen­dent, autonomous, bounded individual who enters fully formed into social interactions. This contrasts with relational ideals of the person found in South Asian and Melanesian contexts, in which interdependent social relations that are patterned by forms of difference (e.g., gender, class, caste, and age) shape personhood to produce relational persons, such as dividuals or partible persons (e.g., Daniel 1984; Dumont 1980; Marriott 1976; and Strathern 1988). The key difference between ­these individual and relational models of personhood has to do with the role of sociality. In ideals of Euro-­American individual personhood, the person is fixed and social relations are secondary, and in ideals of relational personhood, the person only comes into existence through social relations. In the anthropology of eastern Eu­rope, the contrast between individual and relational persons has been explored in terms of capitalism and socialism, in which individual persons seem to align with cap­i­tal­ist systems and worldviews, and relational persons seem to align with socialist systems and worldviews.25 However, ethnographic research in this region has shown that ideals and practices of personhood are more complex. For example,

Introduction • 13

ethnographic research in Hungary shows that ideals of individual personhood existed during socialism due to presocialist cap­i­tal­ist ­labor practices (Lampland 1995), whereas research in postsocialist Poland demonstrates how Poles use relational personhood to resist the individualization of neoliberal ­labor management (Dunn 2004). The complexity of t­hese experiences and ideals of personhood suggest that it is necessary to move beyond a binary between individual and relational personhood. Such a binary also appears to be false when viewed through the lens of recent anthropological studies of kinship and care, which show how t­ hese types of social relations shape personhood. Ethnographic research in Malaysia shows that personhood and kinship are created through everyday practices of relatedness like commensality, such that “kinship itself is a pro­cess of becoming” (Carsten 1995, 223). In this context, both practices and ideals of personhood and kinship are relational. Th ­ ese insights on empirically investigating the pro­cessual, relational nature of personhood have comparative implications, meaning that they can be used in other contexts, including ­those in which p­ eople do not hold such relational ideals of personhood (Carsten 2000b). In other words, ­people can hold ideals of individual or relational personhood, but t­ hese do not necessarily correspond to the practices that create, sustain, or dismantle personhood, which are fundamentally relational—­and can be studied empirically (Buch 2018; Kowalski 2016). Practices of relatedness, which also include care and memory (Carsten 2007a), are inextricable from larger po­liti­cal structures and histories (Franklin and McKinnon 2001; McKinnon and Cannell 2013; Thelen and Alber 2018). In con­temporary eastern Eu­rope and Rus­sia, practices and ideals of sociality are historically and gen­er­a­tion­ally inflected (Caldwell 2016; Grama 2019; Haukanes and Trnka 2013; Magee 2019; Palmberger 2016; Pine 1995; Pozniak 2014). Experiences of late life in eastern Eu­rope, which are shot through with practices of care and memory, are thus a privileged site for seeing the spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood. ­These theoretical insights about moral personhood have empirical implications for understanding aging. Although ideals of in­de­pen­dence in late life can come to shape ­people’s imaginations of how to age well, the above discussion demonstrates that the practices that create personhood are relational. Therefore, in order to “see” moral personhood in late life, the anthropologist can investigate the daily practices through which relatedness is created, maintained, or unraveled. ­These relations that shape transformations

14  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

in persons occur through meaningful forms of difference such as gender or race (Buch 2018; Lamb 2000; Thelen and Coe 2017). It is this perspective that reveals similarities in contexts as dif­fer­ent as the UTA, where older ­people gathered amid the energetic bustle of college life, and the stillness of some moments at the rehab center, where pani Joanna and pani Genowefa sat in wheelchairs by the win­dow overlooking the garden. Yet in both contexts, older ­people w ­ ere connecting with ­others through the telling of stories, ­whether t­ hese w ­ ere stories about past and pre­ sent suffering, that day’s tour of the local brewery, or ­future travel plans; the learning of skills, w ­ hether t­ hese skills involved operating a wheelchair, walking, learning En­glish, or using a computer; and the sharing of food and drink, ­whether in the form of Styrofoam cups of coffee in a university cafeteria or after­noon snacks carried in by nurse’s aides. Through remembering, imagining, learning, and commensality, older ­people across ­these sites ­were forming new social relations of friendship and care. ­These meaningful social relations with nonkin have the power to shape the ways in which older ­people understand themselves and are understood by ­others through refashioning the connections between persons, places, and times. In other words, the par­tic­u­lar practices that shape moral personhood for older Poles have spatiotemporal contours. Personhood is created across lifetimes via pro­cesses that are both intimate and vast, encompassing small-­ scale social interactions, historical po­liti­cal economy, and the moral imagination (Beidelman 1993[1986]). By focusing ethnographic attention on the pro­cesses through which persons are created, maintained, and transformed, rather than on the presence of an idealized third or fourth age, it becomes pos­si­ble to avoid reproducing local ideals of moral personhood in late life and instead to create an empirically grounded understanding of moral personhood. The spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood became evident in the life-­history stories that older Poles shared with me. Bound up in pani Joanna’s narrative connections between dif­fer­ent times and places are concerns for the relationship between persons and places, and the kinds of lives that have been, are, and might be pos­si­ble in each place. Pani Joanna was proud that her son had the opportunity to live and work in Ireland, but she was also worried that he was living so far away from her and their other kin. For pani Joanna and o­ thers in her generation who came of age during socialism or before, the chance to travel and work in western Eu­rope was a sign that

Introduction • 15

Poland is f­ ree and no longer u­ nder Soviet rule. However, the prospect of her son building a life in Ireland was also fraught for pani Joanna ­because she felt that living abroad threatened his ability to maintain kin relations in Poland and weakened his ties to Poland itself. The narrative juxtaposition of her son’s life abroad with the past suffering of Poles in Siberia and the destruction of Polish cities during World War II suggests that for pani Joanna, t­ hese moments in time are linked. Her lament that her grandchildren do not understand the times in which she lived echoed her lament over younger ­people leaving Poland for work abroad. The places that had significance for pani Joanna do not carry equal weight for her ­children and grandchildren, who lived with physical distance from Poland and emotional distance from stories about Poland’s history. Pani Joanna understood her own life and the lives of her ­children as following a path that is tied to the life of the nation. The possibility that her ­children and grandchildren could live their lives without such a close connection disrupts pani Joanna’s understanding of how life should proceed. The potential severing of the bond between the life course of her c­ hildren and grandchildren and that of Poland undercuts her understanding of the bonds between persons, places, and temporalities, and thus chips away at moral personhood—­the sense that her perspective ­matters in social contexts. Pani Joanna’s affirmation of the importance of having Polish history written down correctly, in books, can be interpreted as an attempt to pass on knowledge—to me, certainly, but perhaps also to her c­ hildren and grandchildren, should they want to listen. In sum, for pani Joanna, this rupture between life courses, places, and times threatens the very meaning of what it is to be a Pole and an older person. In active-­aging contexts like the UTAs, older Poles sustain moral personhood not only through the new social relations that they form and the new skills that they acquire but also through the very context of the UTA itself, which aligns with con­temporary ideas of a globalized, cap­i­tal­ist, and demo­ cratic Poland. Older Poles who participate in active aging, then, not only have opportunities to engage in meaningful experiences but also are likely to have t­ hese experiences positively valued by ­others ­because of the meanings associated with the UTA. In ­these third-­age contexts and the fourth-­ age ones examined in ­later chapters, it is the Polish nation that figures especially prominently in shaping the spatiotemporal contours of older Poles’ moral personhood.

16  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

Studying Aging in Wrocław and Poznań ­ ecause I wanted to understand con­temporary experiences of aging in hisB torical perspective, I chose to conduct fieldwork in two cities with differing relationships to the historical Polish nation. At first glance, Wrocław and Poznań seem quite similar—­they are Poland’s fourth-­and fifth-­largest cities, with populations of over 600,000 and 500,000, respectively, located in western Poland, around 100 miles apart, which is about three hours’ driving distance or u­ nder three hours on the train. Each is home to several large universities. They are two of the wealthier cities in Poland, in keeping with the long-­standing East–­West, rural–­urban divide that characterizes Poland’s socioeconomic geography. Despite t­ hese seeming similarities, the two cities have dif­fer­ent histories in their relation to the mythical Polish nation. Poles of many ages see t­ hese histories as shaping the pre­sent character of each city. Although I ultimately found it difficult to draw clear patterns distinguishing aging in each city, the differing histories and characteristics of each city help provide context to understanding the spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood in each place. Dif­fer­ent historical moments ­matter in regard to Wrocław’s and Poznań’s role in national my­thol­ogy. As the seat of the original Polish Piast royalty in the tenth c­ entury, Poznań has a geographic claim to the origins of Polishness. Throughout the centuries, the region has had a majority Polish ethnic population. Many ­people in Poznań can trace their ­family history in the region back for hundreds of years. When Poznań was part of the Prus­ sian partition, ­there w ­ ere uprisings against the Prus­sians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the uprising in 1918–1919 is notable as one of the few successful uprisings in Polish history. Poznań is also known for a massive strike at a locomotive factory in June  1956, one of the first major protests against the state socialist government, in which dozens of p­ eople w ­ ere killed.26 This strike figures prominently in Poznań residents’ understandings of their city as an impor­tant site of re­sis­tance against imposed Soviet rule. Although Wrocław was also part of the Piast lands, for most of the past eight hundred years the population has been largely ethnically German. ­A fter 1945, when the borders of Poland shifted to the west at the end of World War II, the German Breslau became the Polish Wrocław as part of the land that Poland gained from Germany, referred to by the state socialist government as the “ziemie odzyskane,” or “recovered territories.” A ­ fter

Introduction • 17

the war, ethnic Poles who had been living in the territory known as the kresy (borderlands) that is now Lithuania, Belarus, and western Ukraine, ­were moved to Wrocław; many Poles from Warsaw and other regions moved to Wrocław as well (Kenney 1997; Thum 2011). The city was largely destroyed in the final months of World War II, and its older residents have stories about moving to a city that lay in ruins. Thus the oldest generations in Wrocław all have stories about moving to the city from elsewhere. ­These historical differences shape Poles’ understandings of each city and its residents, evident in con­temporary city marketing campaigns. Wrocław residents tend to view Poznań as rule-­abiding, closed, and efficient, thus mapping onto ste­reo­t ypes of Germans. Poznań residents, for their part, imagine Wrocław residents as out­going ­people who are often late, based on ste­reo­types of eastern ways of being. Indeed, the legacy of the kresy and of the city of Lwów in par­tic­u­lar (now L’viv, Ukraine) is actively cultivated by the city itself and residents of Wrocław. The city now markets itself as “Wroclove” (the final syllable pronounced as in the En­glish word “love”), emphasizing the multiethnic history and pre­sent of the city and of the kresy. In contrast, Poznań markets itself as the “Miasto Know-­How,” or “the Know-­How City,” drawing on its legacy of business and trade fairs. Th ­ ese ste­reo­types ­were generally not obvious to me as an ethnographer (although the public transportation in Poznań was indeed more efficient and reliable). However, ­people of all ages in both cities spoke to me of t­ hese differences. In both cities I sought out a diverse range of field sites ­because I wanted to examine the taken-­for-­granted categories used to study aging (cf. Cohen 1994). ­These fall into roughly three types: first, organ­izations that saw themselves as promoting active aging (described in chapter 2); second, institutions with medically defined purposes (described in chapters 3 and 5); and third, organ­izations or places where ­there ­were older Poles, but they ­were not defined in terms of the third-­age/fourth-­age binary (described in chapter 6). I also intentionally chose organ­izations with differing relationships to the state. The sites focusing on active aging w ­ ere Universities of the Third Age, a nongovernmental organ­ization (NGO) focused on active aging, and municipal centers for se­niors and aging-­related ­matters. The medical sites included a rehabilitation center run by Catholic nuns, a state-­run home for ­those with chronic physical disabilities (Social Welfare Home), and a day center for p­ eople with Alzheimer’s disease.27 The third type of sites included neighborhood se­nior clubs, parish clubs, retiree organ­izations, and allotment gardens. In order to elicit culturally meaningful categories, I did not have a

18  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

predetermined category of a chronological age that counted as starość (old age); rather, if ­people felt that category applied to them, I would include them.28 During the longest consecutive period of fieldwork (eigh­teen months from 2008 to 2010), I focused this study on the first two types of sites: educational and medical sites. As places that most clearly represent the so-­called third and fourth ages, t­ hese are institutions where cultural ideals of aging are made most explicit. Th ­ ese sites are also exceptional, as most older Poles do not participate in UTAs or live in institutional care or attend a day program. Yet it is exactly ­because aktywność and institutional care in old age are seen as polar opposites, both in Poland and in the gerontological imagination, that ethnographic study of moral personhood in t­ hese institutions offers valuable insights for understanding aging in a range of contexts. Indeed, as chapter 4 ­will show, ­there are many similarities in moral personhood despite the supposed differences between the third and fourth ages. However, when I returned for shorter research trips in the summers of 2012, 2013, and 2014, I sought out more typical contexts of aging for a comparative perspective. Through already existing contacts, I met older Poles who participated in allotment gardening, parish clubs at their church, and retiree clubs through their professional organ­izations, as well as older p­ eople who lived alone. As presented in chapter 6, aging in ­these contexts that w ­ ere not explic­itly “about” aging looked remarkably similar to the other contexts at the level of moral personhood. In total, over one hundred ­people participated in this study; most w ­ ere older Poles themselves (ranging in age from the early sixties to the late nineties), but some ­were staff or volunteers of all ages who ­were in some way involved with institutions or proj­ects related to aging. I conducted all research in Polish. The populations across ­these medical and educational institutions varied not only by health status but also by socioeconomic status. At the rehabilitation center and Social Welfare Home, most p­eople w ­ ere less well-­educated, having worked as farmers, manual laborers, or ­doing odd jobs. This was particularly true at the Social Welfare Home, where some ­people had previously been un­housed or had lived in institutional care their entire lives. ­People at the rehabilitation center came from a wider class background, including former teachers, engineers, and priests. At the Universities of the Third Age, ­people ­were more highly educated; ­there, the population included retired teachers, accountants, and office workers, as well as factory workers. At the NGO program, the Alzheimer’s center, and

Introduction • 19

the vari­ous clubs and organ­izations, ­people came from more diverse class backgrounds. Almost all the older p­ eople I came to know w ­ ere w ­ omen; across field sites, over 90  ­percent of research participants w ­ ere ­women. Poles explained this empirical difference by expressing gendered ideologies of personhood across the life course. In response to questions about the predominance of older ­women at the rehabilitation center and the Universities of the Third Age in par­tic­u­lar, ­people gave varying explanations. Some ­people explained t­hese proportions in demographic terms (i.e., w ­ omen live longer than men), but ­others commented that men do not need rehab b­ ecause they just die—of heart attacks, of strokes. And if they do need rehab, they often do not survive ­because rehab is difficult work, and older men are weak. Moreover, men who do live through rehab are more often taken care of at home by w ­ omen; when ­women need rehab, however, ­there is no one to take care of them. At the Universities of the Third Age, ­people commented that it is only natu­ral for men not to attend ­because w ­ omen have been more “aktywne,” or “active,” throughout their entire lives. From helping out with ­house­hold chores to ­running ­house­holds of their own, all while working, ­women are always engaged in the social world, as both men and ­women explained. In retirement, then, it seems only natu­ral that ­women would seek out UTAs as a place for continued engagement with the social world. Men, however, are more attached to the world of nature and objects rather than ­people; this is why men have hobbies such as fishing, gardening, and tinkering. ­These perceptions ­were repeated in multiple conversations with both men and ­women. Such gendered explanations of sociality led me to the allotment gardens and other organ­izations analyzed in chapter 6, which w ­ ere places of more mixed-­gender interactions. I gained access to the medical and educational institutions through personal and professional connections with staff. During fieldwork at medical institutions, I spent the most time with the patients and residents—­older Poles themselves—­although I also spent time with medical and administrative staff and observed group physical therapy and occupational therapy (terapia zajęciowa) sessions. At the beginning of my time at the rehab center and the Social Welfare Home, the staff introduced me to a few patients and residents as a way of welcoming me into the institution; through ­these residents I then met o­ thers, most often in hallways, although sometimes through occupational therapy. Th ­ ese conversations tended to be quite informal, as formalized interview questions would have been inappropriate in this setting. I also conducted more formal interviews with financial and

20  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

therapeutic staff at the rehab center and the Alzheimer’s center. ­A fter describing my proj­ect according to the oral consent pro­cess approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB), I would ask if I could rec­ord our conversation, assuring ­people of anonymity. Some p­ eople tended to forget that the recorder was t­ here or mistook it ­later for a cell phone, so I tried to remind them during the conversation that it was being recorded. Some ­people preferred not to be recorded, so I tried to take especially accurate notes in t­ hese cases. Generally, I tried to let the other person guide the direction of conversation (Briggs 1986), especially when it was the first interaction. At the UTAs, interactions with older Poles tended to be more structured than at the medical institutions. ­People at the UTAs ­were used to participating in student research proj­ects and often expected a more formal interview genre. As at the rehab center, I had a core set of questions about life history, daily life, experiences of aging, and opinions on politics in Poland, but I tried to be quiet in t­ hese conversations, except when the research participants expected formality. Recruitment at the UTAs happened in a formal lecture as well as via a notice posted on their bulletin boards. I attended several classes regularly and, at the request of UTAs in both cities, taught a weekly conversational En­glish class. ­These classes proved to be an excellent way to meet new ­people who had not seen the previous recruitment materials, and I was glad to be able to engage in practices of reciprocity with ­people from whom I was learning so much. Rather than formal interviews, fieldwork at the Alzheimer’s center consisted of observation and participation in daily activities. B ­ ecause of IRB regulations regarding informed consent, interviews with p­ eople who had Alzheimer’s proved too logistically and ethically complex. Thus, the data from the Alzheimer’s center does not contain the kinds of life-­history stories as from older Poles in other contexts. My research ­there also followed the institution’s own set of ethics standards for conducting research. Every­ one t­ here knew that I was conducting research, and I regularly mentioned it to center attendees. As with the other institutions, staff members ­were pre­ sent in ­people’s space ­every day, such that my presence was not an intrusion. If it seemed that it might be, I left the room. This book’s analytic pro­cess reflects the nonlinear nature of ethnographic research itself. ­A fter taking comprehensive notes by hand throughout the day, I would write t­ hese up as more coherent documents in the eve­nings. At times it was difficult to force the events, information, and emotions of the day into a linear narrative, leaving me with some expanded bullet-­point

Introduction • 21

notes. Many useful insights came through writing emails and field reports to friends and colleagues. In addition to t­ hese written documents, the body of data I have collected includes photo­graphs (e.g., institutional and domestic interiors, institutional and public events, and photo displays), documents (e.g., archive of journals and publications from the UTA in Wrocław, memoirs, institutional publicity materials, and newspaper clippings), and objects (e.g., gifts and examples of arts-­and-­crafts proj­ects, including the doily on this book’s cover). This analytic pro­cess was also fundamentally collaborative. A total of four transcription assistants (all first-­language Polish speakers) provided detailed timed guides for audio recordings, with more detailed descriptions of key themes. In meetings with each assistant before and occasionally during this pro­cess, I tried to ensure that we had the same (or at least similar) understanding of the proj­ect. I did this by sharing stories from fieldwork, as well as key topics that had emerged through field notes and recordings. Based on ­these guides and my notes, I then went back and listened to key sections and transcribed the desired sections myself. I have checked par­tic­ u­lar moments and translations with native Polish speakers. Unfortunately, parts of some conversations remain unintelligible due to background noise or the quality of voice of the speaker; this unintelligibility was confirmed by native-­speaker assistants. In the text of the book, I have indicated when portions of recordings w ­ ere unintelligible. Throughout the book, I include the Polish translations only when ­these reflect verbatim speech according to recordings or field notes. When I use only the En­g lish phrasing, it is ­because t­ hese are phrases that I ­either jotted down in En­glish or that somehow did not make it into my field notes. One risk in writing about older p­ eople lies in reproducing familiar tropes of old age (Cohen 1994). When t­ hese ste­reo­types do appear throughout this book—­when older ­people appear as wise or respected, or suffering and pitiable—­these have emerged through ethnographic observation. This ethnographic fieldwork was an emotional and intense experience, especially in the medical institutions, where research participants often experienced suffering and pain. The educational institutions w ­ ere not always an escape from this emotional intensity, however, as p­ eople would sometimes weep as they told stories about difficult war­time memories and present-­day distant kin. Like other ethnographic research with older p­ eople in eastern Eu­rope (e.g., Skultans 1998), practices of remembering and relatedness are shot through with loss and rupture. Yet ­these practices also contain moments

22  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

of joy and hope (cf. Livingston 2012). ­These emotions help to convey the stakes of moral personhood for older Poles.

Plan of the Book Chapter 1 explores the development of active-­aging institutions and experts in the context of Polish history. It draws on historical evidence (institutional archives from educational institutions for older adults, secondary sources on the history of old-­age care in Poland) in order to explore the meanings of active aging and aktywność across multiple political-­economic formations: postsocialism, socialism, the interwar period, and the partition era (focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The chapter shows how con­temporary discourses of active aging are overlaid upon an older Polish rhe­toric of aktywność. Although par­tic­u­lar concerns are related to the politics of each era, points of continuity also extend across t­ hese large-­scale historical ruptures. Especially impor­tant in this continuity is the role of the Polish nation and key cultural practices. The chapter thus suggests the need to look for continuity as well as change in understanding the region and in understanding approaches to aging. Chapter 2 draws on ethnographic data from educational organ­izations for older adults that explic­itly promote active aging in order to show the local Polish form and content of this globally circulating discourse. Key sites include two Universities of the Third Age, increasingly popu­lar continuing-­ education institutions for older adults, that teach classes and or­ga­nize groups covering a wide range of subjects (e.g., En­glish language, computer skills, psy­chol­ogy, handicrafts, and Nordic walking). Through ethnographic analy­sis of the bodily, social, and m ­ ental practices through which ­these institutions aim to transform stigmatized and isolated older Poles into engaged, embedded, and productive se­niors, the chapter shows how t­ hese practices take on meaning that is associated with Poland’s place in the con­temporary world order as a postsocialist modern Eu­ro­pean nation, yet they also resonate with Poland’s socialist and presocialist past. Personhood for older Poles who participate in ­these organ­izations thus takes on spatiotemporal contours that are international in scale and continuous across historical eras. Chapter 3 draws on ethnographic data from two dif­fer­ent long-­term care institutions to show how ­people living outside ideals of both active aging and aktywność can nevertheless create moral personhood. In both a

Introduction • 23

rehabilitation center run by Catholic nuns and a state-­run long-­term care center for p­ eople with chronic physical disabilities, older Poles engage in intimate, meaningful social relations with nonkin that have the power to shape the ways in which older ­people understand themselves and are understood by ­others. In par­tic­u­lar, practices of care emerge as key modes through which p­ eople sustain moral personhood. The demands of caring for aging, failing, or recovering bodies structured the days at both centers, making the center itself the most meaningful spatial scale. People at the centers created enduring relations with staff and fellow residents, making it pos­si­ble to imagine a ­future. In ­these contexts of illness and debility, the spatiotemporal aspects of moral personhood are thus smaller in scale than the international frame of active aging. In some cases, t­ hese small-­scale cyclical relations recall domestic life, thus resonating with cultural ideals of receiving care at home. Chapter 4 brings together empirical material from both educational and long-­term care institutions in order to explore how older Poles narrate their own lives in terms of Polish national history. Th ­ ese narrative links incorporate key historical and geographic references that emerge in the interpersonal contexts in which they are produced. In all t­ hese narratives, it is Poland as a place that figures most prominently—­the relationship of Poland to other nation-­states, the content of Polishness itself, and the continuity of Polishness across generations. The periods before World War II exist in a stable moral teleology culminating in the interwar Polish state, whereas the socialist and postsocialist periods have ambivalent meanings. Practices of relatedness and remembrance create moral personhood and the possibility of generational continuity for ­these older Poles. Across ­these contexts that are associated with relations opposite to ideals of both active aging and aktywność, older Poles create connections to dif­fer­ent temporalities that expand the spatiotemporal dimensions of moral personhood, thus demonstrating points of connection across assumed difference. Chapter 5 explores a limit case of understanding moral personhood in late life: a center for p­ eople with Alzheimer’s disease. In this context, in which memory loss would seem to threaten moral personhood, Polish national history continues to provide a meaningful spatiotemporal framework for moral personhood in late life. Evidence from the Alzheimer’s center suggests that extra-­domestic sociality is particularly impor­tant for maintaining and transforming relatedness and personhood, even as some types of memory fade.

24  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

Chapter 6 extends the analytic lens to social settings that are not marked as sites of ­either active aging or illness and debility. Social settings that are more typical of the experiences of many older Poles include allotment gardens, parish clubs, and neighborhood se­nior clubs. In ­these more normative contexts, Polish national history remains impor­tant for moral personhood in late life. Additionally, the local concept of aktywność is impor­tant as an aspirational ideal that shapes the participation of older Poles in t­ hese more typical activities. Central to this concept is the idea of participating in a sociality located outside the home, which constitutes a notable contrast to the ideal of being cared for at home in the case of illness or debility. Concepts of home and nation thus serve as anchors for the moral personhood of older Poles. Insights from t­ hese contexts suggest that activity in late life is a fundamentally relational pro­cess that gives vitality to life itself. The chapter confirms the book’s thesis that practices of relatedness and remembrance are essential for moral personhood. The concluding chapter explores the implications of this book’s argument for aging studies, area-­studies scholarship, and anthropological theory by holding on to the distinctiveness of aktywność as a par­tic­u­lar social-­historical phenomenon. Supporting aktywność as well as active aging may make moral personhood pos­si­ble for a more inclusive group of older Poles by shifting attention to everyday social practices rather than potentially exclusivist models of education and health. Given the regional history of the concept, which exceeds Cold War binary frameworks, aktywność can help to reframe the study of central and eastern Eu­rope by highlighting dif­fer­ent spatial and topical dimensions of the region. Fi­nally, the book’s central focus on moral personhood works to build this concept into a robust analytic category that can overcome long-­standing tensions between phenomenological and historical political-­economic perspectives by refusing a separation of intimate experience and broader social change. Ultimately, this book helps to explain how older Poles’ experiences and imaginations of aging are s­ haped by everyday practices of relatedness, and the interweaving of personal and national pasts.

1

Histories of Active Aging Aktywność across Eras

Universities of the Third Age (UTAs) are perhaps the most vis­i­ble form of active aging in con­temporary Poland. With hundreds of institutions across the country that go by this name, in large cities and small towns, Universities of the Third Age are known by Poles of all ages and receive recognition from power­ful po­liti­cal leaders; in recent years, national meetings and convocations of UTAs have hosted the prime minister, president, and First Lady. According to the history of the UTA in Wrocław, one of the original goals of t­ hose who established the first UTAs in Poland in the 1970s was to “create a new model of old age: pleasant, active, useful, and wise” (Bilewicz 2001, 6).1 This desire for a new form of late life emerged in the 1970s, at the same time that older ­people ­were increasing in number and proportion, thus making aging a topic of sociocultural and political-­economic concern. The debility and greater dependence on o­ thers that can often increase in late life (though, it should be noted, are not ­limited to this phase of the life course) can pose challenges on multiple levels: individual, familial, institutional, regional, and national. In this context, the new model promoting an old age that is “pleasant, active, useful, and wise” could seem obvious or as an implicit good. However, ­these qualities require closer historical and ethnographic 25

26  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

inquiry in order to fully understand their meanings. In par­tic­u­lar, the term “active” (aktywny) deserves scrutiny due to its prominence in the con­ temporary global imaginary of aging. At the UTA in Wrocław, being aktywny and promoting aktywność are impor­tant in the pre­sent day. Two excerpts from an essay by a longtime słuchaczka (participant; literally, auditor) on the centrality of aktywność make this point well: “Aktywność is a characteristic of ­every person, a synonym for life, the slowing of pro­cesses of aging. Aktywność of a person has a certain direction that is determined by the goal (biological or social) that is subordinated to its course. It can appear in dif­fer­ent forms and dif­fer­ent intensities” (Warmuz 2006, 19).2 “The meaning of aktywność in the life of an older person can be summed up in the word IN­DE­PEN­DENCE. In­de­ pen­dence in the activities of everyday life, in­de­pen­dence in conquering life’s difficulties. And if one looks at the ele­ments of this word, we see that IN­DE­PEN­DENCE is: Strength, Ambition, Love, Openness, Activity, Passion, Initiative, Energy, Per­sis­tence, Hope, Courage, Knowledge, Patience” (Warmuz 2006, 22; capitalization in original).3 The first excerpt opens the essay, and the second excerpt closes it. (The final sentence of the second excerpt is an acrostic; the author takes each letter in the Polish word for in­de­pen­dence, samodzielność, and associates it with a quality that begins with that letter.)4 In between, the author ruminates on the benefits of aktywność at the level of the person and the social environment, especially that it enables one “to cross bound­aries” (przekroczyć granice). She also describes the multiple course offerings and types of social groups at the UTA in which słuchacze (participants plural) engage, highlighting the volunteering done by słuchacze in the broader community, and she points out examples of słuchacze by whom she is inspired, such as t­ hose who have physical health challenges (e.g., walking with a cane or crutches, attending classes soon a­ fter having a pacemaker implanted) (Warmuz 2006). This emphasis on in­de­pen­dence resonates with con­temporary neoliberal ideals of moral personhood, evident in active and successful aging discourse (Greenberg and Muehlebach 2007; Muehlebach 2012; Rose 2007; Shamir 2008). However, the bulk of the essay describes the multiple types of sociality in which p­ eople in the so-­called third age engage. This coexistence of ideals of in­de­pen­dence alongside practices of sociality suggest that categorizing ideals of personhood as neoliberal may not capture the complexities of personhood that exist in practice (Trnka and Trundle 2017). This also suggests that the term “aktywność” is complex and needs further

Histories of Active Aging • 27

explication. Additionally, the desire to promote aktywność reaches back to at least the 1970s, when the UTAs w ­ ere founded, suggesting that a historical lens could help to reveal the multiple meanings and forms of sociality pre­sent in con­temporary desires for aktywność. Indeed, as this chapter shows, the concept of aktywność as a moral imperative in late life predates the con­temporary global active-­aging movement. ­Because this book’s argument engages both theories of aging and Polish history, this chapter explores the development of active-­aging institutions and experts, with a special focus on the histories of the Universities of the Third Age, in the context of Polish history. By taking a historical perspective, drawing on institutional archives from UTAs and secondary sources on aging and the history of old-­age care in Poland, this chapter explores the meanings of active aging and aktywność across multiple political-­economic formations: postsocialism, socialism, the interwar period, and the partition era (focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). The chapter shows how con­temporary discourses of active aging are overlaid on ­earlier Polish efforts to promote aktywność. Although par­tic­u­lar concerns are related to the politics of each era, points of continuity also exist across ­these large-­scale historical ruptures. Especially impor­tant in this continuity are key cultural practices and the role of the Polish nation, suggesting the spatiotemporal contours of aktywność. Pre­sent throughout are key concerns of in­de­pen­dence and dependence as well as obligations and responsibilities for care. This chapter thus suggests the need to look for continuity as well as change in understanding both the region and approaches to aging.

Demographic and Political-­Economic Contexts of the Rise of Gerontology Although the number of UTAs in Poland has dramatically increased in the past fifteen years since Poland’s membership in the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU), the origins of t­ hese institutions are connected to the growth of the discipline of gerontology in Poland, which coincided with demographic changes in the country in the de­cades following World War II. From 1950 to 1970, the proportion of p­ eople over the age of sixty-­five grew from 5.2 ­percent to 8.5 ­percent, and the share of ­people over the age of seventy-­five grew from 1.6 ­percent to 2.5 ­percent, as noted in the first comprehensive so­cio­log­i­cal study of aging in Poland (Piotrowski 1973, 7). Like social scientific research on aging in other

28  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

parts of the industrialized world, early gerontological research in Poland was concerned with the consequences of increasing numbers of older ­people for state welfare policies.5 The goal of Piotrowski’s book was to achieve a “diagnosis” of the state of older p­ eople in Poland to learn the extent to which they are dependent and the extent to which they are in­de­pen­dent, in order to make policy recommendations (Piotrowski 1973, 8). Within this perspective, the categories of in­de­pen­dent and dependent become central (Piotrowski 1973). Inherent in the analytic structure of the research, then, is a juxtaposition between in­de­pen­dent and dependent persons. The development of the UTAs in the 1970s occurred at roughly the same time that the fields of gerontology and geriatrics ­were becoming institutionalized in Poland. The Polish Medical Society officially recognized geriatrics in 1967. Prac­ti­tion­ers lament the current small size of the field; per capita, Poland has up to twenty times fewer geriatrists than other Eu­ro­pean countries like Slovakia, Austria, Sweden, and E ­ ngland (Derejczyk et al. 2008, 153). Gerontology became institutionalized in 1972 with the establishment of the Polish Gerontological Society.6 Having strong connections to the fields of psy­chol­ogy, sociology, and demography, gerontologists in Poland emphasize the distinctive nature of old age in its capacity for growth and development through self-­reflection and education, yet they also emphasize continuity between old age and ­earlier phases of life. In recent de­cades, Poland’s population has continued to grow proportionately older, like populations in other EU countries. The average life expectancy is predicted to rise to 77.1 years for men and 82.9 years for w ­ omen in 2035 (from 71.0 for men and 79.7 for w ­ omen in 2007) (GUS 2009, 144).7 In 2007, 13.5 ­percent of the Polish population was sixty-­five years old or older; this is predicted to rise to 24.5  ­percent of the population in 2035 and 32.7 ­percent in 2050 (GUS 2009, 219; 2014, 134).8 Moreover, the proportion of the population over the age of eighty was predicted to rise from 3 ­percent in 2007 to 10.4 ­percent in 2050 (GUS 2009, 219; 2014, 136). At the same time, the fertility rate is low, so the population is predicted to shrink over time (GUS 2009, 189).9 In 2003 Poland’s total fertility rate was at its lowest since World War II (1.22); since then, it has risen to 1.4 in 2009 and then fallen back to 1.25 in 2014 (GUS 2014, 35–36). ­These two features—­increasing life expectancy and low fertility rates—­are the hallmarks of an aging society, and partially explain the rise of philosophies around active aging. Following this demographic shift that spurred the growth of gerontology, Poland underwent major political-­economic transformations, as it

Histories of Active Aging • 29

became a cap­i­tal­ist democracy in 1989, a member of NATO in 1999, and the Eu­ro­pean Union in 2004. ­These transformations brought about structural changes in Polish society that affected both discourse and practice surrounding aging populations. ­After 1989, perhaps the most salient shift in po­liti­cal economy for older adults was the erosion of guaranteed state provisions, such as visits to the doctor, medicines, education, and childcare. For p­ eople who grew up with this system—­that is, the current oldest generations in Poland—­ the increased costs associated with t­ hese ser­vices w ­ ere a moral affront. The shift in responsibility from the state to the person provides the backdrop for this chapter’s focus on retirees’ increased engagement with active-­ aging programs as a way, in part, to maintain their sense of moral personhood. The numbers of retirees are especially large due to ­earlier state initiatives. During state socialism, in order to maintain full employment of the population, which was central to state socialist ideology, the state encouraged early retirement through mechanisms such as not penalizing pension benefits if ­people continued to work in retirement and offering early retirement options to ­those in dangerous occupations (e.g., miners). Additionally, both during and a­ fter socialism, early retirement was pos­si­ble regardless of profession based on years of work. In 1997 men could retire at age sixty a­ fter thirty-­five years of work (instead of at age sixty-­five ­a fter twenty years of work) and w ­ omen could retire at age fifty-­five ­after thirty years of work (instead of at age sixty ­after twenty years of work) (Calasanti and Zajicek 1997, 454–456). This is not to suggest that pensioners became rich during socialism—­indeed, so­cio­log­i­cal research shows the opposite—­but rather that encouraging early retirement was in the interest of the state. And indeed, many ­people took advantage of this (Calasanti and Zajicek 1997). Many research participants in their mid-­seventies, then, had been retired for twenty years. Retirement age and pension policies continue to be impor­tant in the public sphere, especially as a contested issue in national elections.10 The first few years a­ fter 1989 brought rapid po­liti­cal and economic changes that had particularly negative effects on the oldest generations. Due to a combination of rising prices and shifting pension indexing, p­ eople living on pensions had, in real costs, higher expenses and less income (Calasanti and Zajicek 1997; Synak 1992, 91). In 1990 welfare became the responsibility of local rather than the central government (Rybka 1998, 255; Synak 1992). In 1995, 18 ­percent of the population required outside assistance to meet basic needs (Rybka 1998, 257). The scale of ­these effects made ­these issues central for policymakers.

30  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

For policymakers concerned about the effect of the aging population on social welfare systems, the “old-­age de­pen­dency ratio” is a key mea­sure. It figures older persons as a group that endangers the financial solvency of the collective ­because they are recipients of state welfare (e.g., pensions, health care) rather than contributors. Within this category, de­pen­dency becomes an explicit threat to the system (cf. Lamb et al. 2017, 7). However, this dependence is socially constructed through a complex relationship of state policy, shifting po­liti­cal economic conditions, and gendered histories of ­labor (Calasanti and Zajicek 1997). Moreover, this focus on the dependence of older p­ eople ignores the participation of older p­ eople in the informal market, which is left out of such official calculations (Calasanti and Zajicek 1997).11 ­These statistical mea­sures of the role of older ­people in society must therefore be closely scrutinized. Some demographers have tried to make this statistic more precise by dividing it into the “old-­age healthy de­pen­dency ratio” and the “old-­age unhealthy de­pen­dency ratio” in order to have a better mea­sure of the cost to the system (Muszyńska and Rau 2012). The “healthy” and “unhealthy” are defined by their activity limitations, and thus their potential ability to contribute to the formal economy. In Poland, the “old-­age de­pen­dency ratio” was predicted to increase from 25.3 in 2018 to 52.7 in 2050; that is, in 2010 ­there ­were 100 working persons for ­every 25.3 persons over age 65, and this was predicted to increase to 100 working persons for ­every 52.7 persons over age 65 in 2030 (EUROPOP 2018).12 This is among the higher ratios in the EU and signals increased stress on the social welfare system (e.g., pensions, disability payments). According to the “old-­age healthy de­pen­dency ratio” and “old-­age unhealthy de­pen­dency ratio,” Poland fares even worse (Muszyńska and Rau 2012, 156–157). However, this revised mea­sure could still be problematic, since it could serve to reinforce sociocultural divides between healthy and unhealthy older ­people, furthering the marginalization of ­those who are less healthy. At the macro level of demography and social policy, the category of “de­pen­dency” structures understandings of old age, implicitly constructing the older person—­and groups of older p­ eople—as a threat to society.13 At the discursive level, t­hese categories diminish moral personhood for older ­people. It is impor­tant to note that current policy initiatives promoting active aging are linked to ­earlier concerns about the economic productivity of older persons. Even though ­there has been a shift in state policy and ideologies about the role of the state in taking care of older p­ eople, the concern for

Histories of Active Aging • 31

de­pen­dency itself cuts across eras. In other words, de­pen­dency has been a constant, but what to do about de­pen­dency has shifted. During and ­after socialism, the concept of the older person as inherently dependent has remained central. This taken-­for-­granted nature of the older person as dependent is a continuous ele­ment of moral personhood across socialist and postsocialist eras.

Older P ­ eople in Poland across Eras: Ethnographic and Policy Perspectives When considering the history of aging in Poland, key themes of interdependence, l­ abor, care, and kinship recur, but with dif­f er­ent ideals and practices across political-­economic eras. The concept of aktywność is evident, however, across eras. Evidence from the historical ethnographic rec­ord shows that the presumption of dependence in late life is relatively new, dating to the shift to urbanization from agricultural life. Intergenerational relations of ­labor and care largely ­shaped moral personhood for older Poles in presocialist times. As urbanization transformed ­these relations, new institutions and professions emerged to care for older persons, who w ­ ere increasingly characterized as dependent. ­A fter providing a sketch of the conditions of older Poles in presocialist times, at the end of this section I discuss how the growth of caring professions of social work and pedagogy w ­ ere linked to ­these political-­economic shifts. From a historical ethnographic perspective, the demographic or policy category of “dependent” becomes more complex. For instance, in multigenerational rural families in a village in Lesser Poland in the 1930s, older ­people continued to contribute to the h ­ ouse­hold economy. In a rural agricultural context, persons with illness or disability could engage plenty of activities, such as peeling potatoes, taking care of grandchildren, or sewing (cf. Nagengast 2019[1991]). ­People would work in any capacity that they could; a common perception was that “inactivity is a harbinger of death” (Zawistowicz-­Adamska 1948, 167, in Zalewska 2009, 21).14 In the 1970s in the Dobrzyń region (ziemia dobrzyńska) in north-­central Poland, residents over age seventy-­five held one of two attitudes ­toward death: “to live actively right up u­ ntil death itself, wishing for it at the moment a symptom of infirmity appeared,” or “to live more or less passively to death, not wishing for it at the moment a sign or even total infirmity appeared” (Olędski 1991, 175,

32  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

in Zalewska 2009, 21).15 The first of t­ hese was more common, perhaps related to the perception that infirmity could hasten the transmission of land to the next generation. This idea that activity was essential to life was reflected in con­temporary conversations I had with Polish colleagues, who described their grandparents who lived in villages as not understanding the con­ temporary practice of taking vacations, declaring: “If y­ ou’re not working, ­you’re dead!” This perspective on everyday life among rural ­house­holds pre­ sents a more expansive understanding of aktywność and ­labor than that evident in demographic statistics about de­pen­dency. As the structural conditions of l­abor changed during the urbanization of the mid-­twentieth ­century, and state socialist ideology dominated, the social position of older p­ eople changed as well. The new socialist world prioritized newness and youth over tradition and old age. Patterns of social relations changed as well; both ­children and ­women spent more time away from the home, sometimes strengthening collegial ties at the expense of ­family ties (Zalewska 2009, 23–24). This tension between kin and nonkin ties is also evident ­today, as some aging activists encourage older Poles both to keep more money for themselves, rather than giving it all to ­children or grandchildren (see Caldwell 2007 for similar examples from Rus­sia), and to loosen their ties with kin in order to form new social relations based on affinity or shared interests, as described in the next chapter exploring sociality at the Universities of the Third Age. However, this should not be seen as a complete shift away from f­ amily relations, as intergenerational relations of care have continued to be a key mode of sustaining kin ties. In rural and urban contexts, grandparents—­ and especially grand­mothers—­have provided childcare so that both m ­ others and ­father can work, leading to what has been called by scholars “the institution of the grandparents” (Buchowski and Stanisz 2010, 346; emphasis in original). The central role of older Poles as providers of care to grandchildren has been relatively constant through political-­economic changes; the counterpart of this intergenerational dynamic occurs when older ­people receive care from f­ amily. The ethnographic rec­ord suggests, then, that moral personhood in old age is bound up in long-­standing ideals of intergenerational care within families. Indeed, before the development of care institutions in the sixteenth ­century, older ­people who required care remained at home within a multigenerational h ­ ouse­hold. With the exception of mutual-­aid socie­ties run through guilds, charity was managed through the church, which would

Histories of Active Aging • 33

collect donations from landowners and distribute them to the poor. Care institutions began to grow in the sixteenth ­century u­ nder the leadership of the counterreformation priest Piotr Skarga, who opened secular charitable institutions. ­These came ­under state regulation during the reign of Poland’s last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, in the late eigh­teenth c­ entury, but this state supervision ended during the partition era (Rybka 1998, 245–247). During the partition era, policies varied by empire; the Prus­sian Empire had more state-­run welfare institutions, administered by cities and provinces, while the scope of ser­vices in the Austro-­Hungarian Empire was ­limited and secondary to nonpublic sources, and in the Rus­sian Empire, some assistance organ­izations w ­ ere transformed into Russification programs (Rybka 1998, 247).16 Although nonstate charity was still pre­sent, ­these organ­izations w ­ ere often in antagonistic relationships with the ruling powers (Bobrowska-­ Nowak 1988, in Małek and Szczepaniak-­Wiecha 2005, 25–26). Along with shifts in po­liti­cal economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fields of social work (praca społeczna), social care (opieka społeczna), and social pedagogy (pedagogika społeczna) developed. Tracing the interwoven nature of health care, pedagogy and education, and social welfare helps to illuminate current efforts to promote active aging and aktywność by revealing the spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood evident in ­these fields. In the early twentieth c­ entury, with Poland’s regained in­de­pen­dence and the growth of fields of social work, the idea of “community care” developed in contrast to previous ideas of “individual care,” which located the cause of prob­lems in the individual (Rybka 1998, 248; see Krzeczkowski 1936, 1938). ­These collective values w ­ ere codified in the 1923 Act on Social Care, which promised to provide assistance to t­ hose who could not provide for themselves ­either permanently or temporarily (Małek and Szczepaniak-­ Wiecha 2005, 27), but it was ultimately unsuccessful b­ ecause of its funding structures; local governments ­were supposed to provide the ser­vices, but could not raise taxes or other revenue to pay for them (Rybka 1998, 250–251). In 1989 the Polish gerontologist and sociologist Brunon Synak wrote that the 1923 act was technically still in effect, although the bureaucratic structure was too “haphazard” (1989, 110) to allow for any real comprehensive system. Professions specializing in the fields of social care began in the interwar this time as well; in Warsaw, the Polish ­Free University (Wolna Wszechnica Polska) provided education in social work and pedagogy thanks to the

34  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

influential pedagogue Helena Radlińska, and the Institute of Social Economy (Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego) conducted research on marginalized groups (Małek and Szczepaniak-­Wiecha 2005, 28–29; Rybka 1998, 251). Polish scholars w ­ ere in contact with other Eu­ro­pean scholars and traveled to conferences in France, Germany, and Switzerland (Małek and Szczepaniak-­Wiecha 2005, 29, 33). Th ­ ese international activist-­intellectual networks hark back to the partition era in Poland, when nobles, intellectuals, artists, and cultural elites would travel and live abroad. In social work and pedagogy, it was largely ­women who helped to build ­these fields, as part of a movement of patriotic ­women activists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Małek and Szczepaniak-­Wiecha 2005; Schulte 2005). Although the par­tic­u­lar focus of social care efforts tended to be on childcare and “social diseases” like tuberculosis and venereal disease (Schulte 2005, 286–288), rather than care for the aged in par­tic­u­lar, it is t­ hese same fields that now engage with care of older adults. Understanding policies from the socialist era can shed light on expectations of care in late life among the oldest generations in con­temporary Poland. In postwar Poland, the state did not have any systematic social care system ­until ­a fter the Stalinist period, since it was believed that po­liti­cal changes would solve all other social prob­lems (Synak 1989, 111). Additionally, state socialism was not supposed to have any disadvantaged or marginalized groups, so the field of social work itself was a challenge to the state; “rehabilitation,” however, was a less direct challenge, so the term was used to include medical rehabilitation, such as ­after an accident, as well as work with populations that could pose a challenge to state authority (Lorenz 2006, 53). The fields of health care and social work ­were united through the integration of both health care and social welfare into the Ministry of Health (rather than the Ministry of ­Labor) in 1960, and through the creation in 1973 of “health care teams” composed of doctors, public health nurses, and social workers (Rybka 1998, 253). Institutional care (of the type that chapters 3 and 4 investigate) was rare during state socialism; Brunon Synak (1989, 111) reports that just 1.4 ­percent of all older p­ eople lived in care institutions in 1989, and it was viewed as a last resort, only for the sickest ­people (1989, 119). In the years ­after 1989, institutional care has retained its status as care of the last resort for older ­people. This has to do both with the state of institutional care as well as cultural norms of late life. A 2009 survey showed that two-­thirds of Poles would prefer to live in their own home in old age, with

Histories of Active Aging • 35

help from kin if necessary (CBOS 2010, 2).17 The decentralization and privatization that w ­ ere features of postsocialist society more generally had a particularly devastating effect on health care, such that health outcomes have been adversely affected, especially for ­those older Poles without economic or familial resources. Health reforms of 1999 transformed the health-­care system from central state funding to a social insurance system that was funded at a relatively lower percentage in order to encourage the private sector. State spending on health care dropped to levels lower than during state socialism. Surveys have found that only one-­quarter of pensioners can afford the medicines they need, a prob­lem unthinkable during socialism (Watson 2010; see also Ostrowska 2001, 2010; Watson 2006a). The sociologist Peggy Watson characterizes the postsocialist reform as one “where health care has been desocialized. This has been achieved by redefining responsibility for health in terms of the individual—­thereby detaching responsibility from power, by framing reform in terms of abstract fiscal discourse, and eliding questions of social justice, need and equality” (2006b, 1084). This shift from collective to individual responsibility is a shift in both philosophy and practice. For older p­ eople who had lived their adult lives during socialism, t­hese transformations in health care w ­ ere dramatic reconfigurations of the relationship between the state and the individual. Whereas the state used to take responsibility for the health of its citizens, the postsocialist state conceptualized health care as the responsibility of the individual. Older Poles have continued to expect the state to provide care, as ­will be discussed in chapter 2, even as the state has relinquished some of its responsibility for the same. Such ideals of care, then, are inextricably linked to political-­economic formations, and shape the imaginative horizons of moral personhood. In order to understand how t­ hese transformations play out in educational contexts, the next section explores the histories of Universities of the Third Age.

Origins of Universities of the Third Age in Poland As institutions that are emblematic of efforts to promote active aging, the Universities of the Third Age would seem to fit neatly within the postsocialist context of individual responsibility for health and aging well. However, a closer look at the histories of ­these institutions reveals a more complex story in which at least as much continuity was pre­sent across the pre-­and

36  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

post-1989 eras. Tracing key aspects of the origins and development of the UTAs in Poland demonstrates the points of continuity in active aging and aktywność across distinct political-­economic eras. The first University of the Third Age in Poland was founded in 1975 in Warsaw by Halina Szwarc, a professor and rector of the Acad­emy of Physical Education in Warsaw. In addition to being a medical doctor, Szwarc had been a member of the Armia Krajowa, or Home Army, the Polish re­sis­tance organ­ization during World War II (Szwarc 2008).18 She founded the UTA in Warsaw only two years ­a fter the creation of the first University of the Third Age in Toulouse, France, by Pierre Vellas, a professor on the faculty of Law and Economics at the University of Toulouse (Maćkowicz and Wnęk-­Gozdek 2019, 95). The original goals of the first University of the Third Age ­were to “contribute to raise the level of physical, ­mental, social health and the quality of life of older ­people,” to “realize a permanent educational program for older p­ eople in close relation with the other age groups (the active, the young),” to “realize gerontological research programmes,” and to “realize initial and permanent education programmes in gerontology” (Vellas 1997). Originally associated with the University of Toulouse, the earliest Universities of the Third Age ­were all affiliated with local universities, giving them an academic character in which the university faculty, rather than the retirees, ­were in charge of the programming. Although the classes included physical fitness as well as lectures, the programs emphasized academic content (Formosa 2014, 44). This university-­focused approach was modified by Universities of the Third Age in the United Kingdom, which grew during the 1980s and took a “self-­help” approach to educational programming for retirees in which the retirees themselves w ­ ere part of the planning and educational efforts (Formosa 2014, 45–46). A mix of ­these models has developed in Poland, where some organ­izations are stand-­alone groups and ­others are officially associated with local universities.19 Three years a­ fter Vellas founded the first University of the Third Age in Toulouse, Universities of the Third Age w ­ ere established in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Quebec, and Poland (Formosa 2014, 44). When considered from the perspective of Cold War–­era Eu­rope, this connection between France and Poland may seem strange. However, a past director of the University of the Third Age in Wrocław, Aleksander Kobylarek, pointed out the long history of Polish intellectuals traveling to other Eu­ro­pean countries—­especially France.20 According to an article in the Polish popu­lar press on the occasion of a biographical movie made about her, Szwarc met

Histories of Active Aging • 37

Vellas at a social work conference in Milan in 1975. During a conversation in the hallway, he suggested that she begin a University of the Third Age in Poland (Górecka-­Czuryłło 2010). In the fall of 1975, the University of the Third Age in Warsaw began its first academic year. Wrocław’s University of the Third Age was founded in 1976, and Poznań’s in 1979. Szwarc also served as the president of the Association Internationale des Universités du Troisième Âge (AIUTA), or the International Association of Universities of the Third Age. Almost annual conferences of AIUTA took place in Belgium, France, Canada, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland, as well as Poland, during the 1980s. In other words, Universities of the Third Age in Poland have always been characterized by international connections. Indeed, foreign languages (namely, En­g lish, French, and German) have always been part of the curricula of ­these institutions. Currently, the Universities of the Third Age in both Wrocław and Poznań serve as leaders and models for other such institutions, in the city, in the region, and internationally. For example, the University of the Third Age in Wrocław helped or­ga­nize a University of the Third Age in L’viv, Ukraine, and the University of the Third Age in Poznań cooperates with a University of the Third Age in Dortmund, Germany. ­These connections resonate with a deeper history and legacy of connections (i.e., Wrocław as the heir to the lost Polish city of Lwów, Poznań’s historical connections to Germany), although the UTAs in Wrocław and Poznań also have other international links. UTAs have seen a “boom” in growth, doubling to over 200 in the ­whole country from 2007 to 2010 (Zych 2011). The number has steadily risen since then. As of 2017, t­ here w ­ ere 614 UTAs in all of Poland, 44-­four of which are in the voivodeship of Greater Poland, where Poznań lies, and 53 within the voivodeship of Lower Silesia, where Wrocław lies.21 In the Universities of the Third Age in Poznań and Wrocław, ­there is a ­great deal of historical continuity through par­tic­u­lar members of the organ­ izations. In Poznań, the original director is still involved in the leadership of the UTA, and, at the time of fieldwork, a French instructor had been teaching classes t­ here for thirty-­four years. In Wrocław, the longtime director is still involved as an adviser and in other organ­izations in the city. In both places, ­there are słuchacze who have been attending for over ten years. Szwarc herself worked on behalf of the Universities of the Third Age ­until the end of her life (2002). This fact of personal continuity also belies any easy understanding of t­ hese organ­izations in terms of socialism and postsocialism. Rather, t­ hese nongovernmental organ­izations show that ­there is

38  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

institutional continuity across ­these po­liti­cal lines.22 Such continuity allows for a historical perspective on the concept of aktywność, which was being promoted long before active aging became codified as part of a global gerontological context.

Histories of the Universities of the Third Age in Wrocław and Poznań The Universities of the Third Age in Wrocław and Poznań that ­were the field sites for my ethnographic research are two of the oldest UTAs in Poland. A brief glance at their institutional histories ­will provide insight both on contexts of ­these key field sites and on histories of aktywność in Poland, especially connections to medicine and pedagogy. In Wrocław, approximately 750 ­people attend the University of the Third Age, which is affiliated with the College of Pedagogy at the University of Wrocław, and has a permanent space in the basement of that building. It was open to all retirees over age sixty, which at the time of fieldwork in 2008, was an annual cost of 70 PLN (about 25 USD, or about the cost of a second-­ class one-­way train ticket from Wrocław to Warsaw). The institution sees itself as providing a model for aging well not only for local contexts but indeed for the world. A historical chronicle of the University of the Third Age in Wrocław explains that “research shows the importance of the University’s role for both the local and broader aging society—­the city, country, and even the world” (Bilewicz 2001, 5).23 Or­gan­ i­za­tion­ally, the UTA shifted from affiliation with trade u­ nions, to the city council and health department, and last, the university; this information about the institution over time reveals a shift in focus from ­labor to medicine to education. In its first few years, it was part of the Provincial Council of Trade Unions, and from 1979 to 1997, it was or­ga­nized as part of the Department of Health and Social Welfare and the City Council. Since 1997 it has been or­gan­i­za­tion­a lly part of the University of Wrocław (Bilewicz 2001). ­These orga­nizational shifts could suggest a change in the concept of the older person as primarily a worker, a patient, and a student. However, a closer look at the practices of the UTA across ­these eras reveals continuity in the presence of medical and educational expertise, and the importance of social relations to institutional life at t­ hese UTAs.

Histories of Active Aging • 39

The medical aspect of the University of the Third Age has been pre­sent since the beginning of the institution. In other words, monitoring the physical health of older Poles at the UTA has been a long-­standing practice. In Wrocław, the association of the University of the Third Age with gerontology and medicine is evident in the long-­standing practice of appointing medical doctors in the position of scientific adviser. ­These doctors came from diverse specializations, including geriatrics and surgery.24 ­Because the university was located in the Medical Acad­emy, słuchacze had close contact with nurses and students, who had office hours where słuchacze could get advice on higieny życia (everyday hygiene) and have their blood pressure checked (Bilewicz 2001, 19). Th ­ ere ­were also opportunities for f­ ree checkups, including cholesterol screening and ultrasounds (Bilewicz 2001, 20). Rehabilitation exercises for persons with spinal and joint issues ­were made pos­si­ble through affiliation with the University of Physical Education (Bilewicz 2001, 20–21). This interest in health has continued: many research participants mentioned an interest in health as a reason for their participation in the University of the Third Age. Courses ­were offered in nutrition, psy­chol­ ogy, and the biology of aging, as well as exercise classes. The role of education and, in par­tic­u­lar, the field of andragogika, or andragogy (adult education), has ­shaped the practices and ideals of the UTA in Wrocław. Since 1997, the University of the Third Age in Wrocław has been ­housed within the Institute of Pedagogy. Students of andragogy, a field of specialization within pedagogy, often lead classes or activities at the UTA. According to a professor of andragogy in Wrocław, the term “andragogy” itself has a regional usage that is l­ imited to former countries of the socialist bloc and Germany. The term is used to distinguish the field from “pedagogika dorosłych,” or “pedagogy of adults,” which was used during socialist times. The impor­tant distinction h ­ ere is a shift from the concept of teaching, which is focused on dissemination of information, including socialist propaganda, to the concept of learning, which is focused on the student’s development (cf. Malewski 2010). The term “andragogika,” or “andragogy,” comes from the work of Malcolm Knowles, an American psychologist and educator who pop­u­lar­ized the term in the 1970s. In postsocialist eastern Eu­rope, its use was a form of re­sis­tance to the socialist discipline of adult education and training. This is also a regional dimension of the institution; that is, scholars in Wrocław emphasized how par­tic­u­lar their vision of andragogika is and its connection to Universities of the Third Age.

40  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

The purpose of the institution is not only for learning but also for forming social ties. The role of certain kinds of social interaction demonstrated in this book is vital to sustaining a sense of moral personhood, and p­ eople’s motivations for attending UTAs have historically been largely social. The chronicle of the UTA in Wrocław emphasizes the importance of social relations for słuchacze, in par­tic­u­lar, the forming of new friendships. Care stands out as an enduring feature of ­these relations, as the first słuchacze who completed the yearlong program of study received the honorary title of “środowiskowy opiekun społeczny,” or “local social caretaker” (Bilewicz 2001, 8). ­People’s motivations for joining the group ­were often as much social as they ­were academic (see also Maćkowicz and Wnęk-­Gozdek 2019).25 This became evident in the chronicle of the University of the Third Age in Wrocław: Among the reasons given for signing up for the STW w ­ ere health and intellectual needs, but also emotional. They expected that in this institution they would find relief from prob­lems, that it could lessen their uncertainty and fear about loneliness and death, anxiety, sadness, joylessness, and being lost. Participation in classes helped students in forming new friendships and lessened feelings of loneliness/isolation. Additionally, participation improved and developed their psychophysical health through rehabilitation, sports, and rational recreation. (Bilewicz 2001, 11)26 The meetings that occurred ­here above all served to strengthen individual values and sympathies with interpersonal contacts and a feeling of joy in life. They ­were also a useful form of group therapy. Participants in t­ hese groups started to help each other solve personal prob­lems, related to, for instance, prob­lems with apartments, d­ oing the shopping, and jointly planned holiday trips or sanatorium visits. (Bilewicz 2001, 9–10)27

According to official language of the institution, “The University is a social organ­ization, directing engagement in the sphere of culture, education, and preservation of health of ­people in the older age, in­de­pen­dent of their formal level of education” (Woźnicka, A. Regulamin UTW 1979–1997, p. 1, in Bilewicz 2001, 15).28 The council of the UTW also served a social function; during weekly office hours, słuchacze could “voice requests for help, for example, with cleaning, reading aloud, shared walks, or l­ ittle repairs” (Bilewicz 2001, 20).29

Histories of Active Aging • 41

In the official rec­ords of the institution, the core mission and activities seem relatively unchanged over the years: “Just as before, the UTW still promotes activity in prophylactic gerontology and in the sphere of education, culture, and health of retirees. The goal of this work is ‘. . . ​taking care of and increasing intellectual and physical capability of older p­ eople, the social activation of such persons, and helping older persons t­ oward this realization through the University’ ” (Regulamin UTW 1997, cited in Bilewicz 2001, 30).30 Perhaps ­because of the influence of gerontology and geriatrics and their connection to the universalizing perspective of biomedicine, t­ here is very ­little mention of the Polish nation. Aging is presented as a universal phenomenon, not one specific to Poland. However, more informal historical documents such as kroniki (scrapbooks) and kuriery (journals), which ­were created by słuchacze, contain more detail about activities that have specifically Polish connotations. For instance, choirs and cabarets perform patriotic songs and the UTA has long hosted events for impor­tant holidays throughout the year (e.g., Christmas Eve, St. Andrew’s Day, C ­ hildren’s Day, and W ­ omen’s Day). Th ­ ese events shape the spatiotemporal contours of life at the UTA. Practices that have a long history in Poland such as lace making and embroidery are also practiced in groups at the UTA that meet regularly. As customarily w ­ omen’s activities, ­these reflect the gendered norms of sociality. The history of the University of the Third Age in Poznań reveals a similar degree of continuity of aspirations and practices. The founder, Lidia Wrocińska-­Sławska, was trained as a social worker, and at the time of fieldwork in 2012, was still serving as the vice president of the institution, though she had also joined its ranks as a słuchaczka ­after she retired. She describes the goals of the institution as unchanged from the beginning. A flyer from 2009 states their goals as “the continual education of se­niors, the stimulation of their personal growth, the development of se­niors’ intellectual and physical fitness, and the dissemination of gerontological prophylaxis.”31 Like other UTAs in Poland, the UTA in Poznań has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. During the academic year 2011–2012, the University of the Third Age in Poznań had approximately 1,300 słuchacze, a huge increase from the 50 students during the inaugural year 1979–1980. It was originally or­ga­nized as part of the Towarzystwo Wolnej Wszechnicy Polskiej (TWWP, or Society of the F ­ ree Polish University), which was established in 1918, upon Poland’s in­de­pen­dence at the end of World War I. The organ­ization sees itself as the continuation of educational organ­izations

42  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

(Uniwersytet Latający, or Traveling University, and Towarzystwo Kursów Naukowych, or Society of Scientific Courses) that promoted Polish-­language and historical education during the official suppression of Polish culture during the partitions, especially in the Rus­sian and Prus­sian Empires.32 Like the discipline of pedagogy more broadly, the history of the UTA in Poznań is linked to the history of Polish national movements. Like the UTA in Wrocław, Poznań’s UTA has strong historical ties to medical institutions. ­Because Wrocińska-­Sławska worked in the służba socjalna (social ser­vice), which was formerly administered as part of the health department, it was easy for the UTA to find partners in the health field, such as the geriatrist Stanisława Jankowska. Thus, the first lectures took place on the fourth floor of a building that h ­ oused a medical clinic next to the Mercure H ­ otel in the center of Poznań, not far from the main train station and exhibition halls for the targi, or international trade fairs, for which Poznań has long been known.33 The słuchacze did not have to pay to participate. The beginning curriculum consisted of weekly lectures, foreign-­language classes (En­glish, French, and German), exercise classes, and radiestezja (dowsing). Wrocińska-­Sławska advertised the University of the Third Age during radio and TV programs, and ­after four years, the number of słuchacze had become too large for the room so the institution had to seek new spaces. Wrocińska-­ Sławska recalled that she would keep the topic of lectures a surprise ­until the lecture itself, for she suspected that if she announced a schedule ahead of time, ­people might not attend if the topic did not sound immediately engaging. Throughout the years, Wrocińska-­Sławska has sought out official connections with other higher-­education institutions in Poznań. Each year, the inauguration of the academic year is celebrated in the main auditorium of Adam Mickiewicz University, the leading university in Poznań, and currently the classes take place in dozens of locations throughout the city, at both public and private institutions. As they enter their fifth de­cade, the UTAs in Wrocław and Poznań draw on their histories of promoting aktywność in old age as they participate in active-­aging movements in the pre­sent. Th ­ ese histories reveal an enduring set of concerns with how to live well in old age, how to transform negative experiences and mindsets into positive ones, and how to cultivate aktywność at both individual and social levels. The forms of moral personhood t­ hese institutions cultivate in the pre­sent show traces of t­hese national and political-­economic transformations that s­ haped them.

Histories of Active Aging • 43

Aktywność across Eras: Activity, In­de­pen­dence, and the Nation “The meaning of aktywność in the life of an older person can be summed up in the word IN­DE­PEN­DENCE” (Warmuz 2006, 22). Taken from the essay by a słuchaczka at the UTA in Wrocław that opened this chapter, t­ hese words seem deceptively s­ imple. In­de­pen­dence is the opposite of the dependence that looms large for policymakers and scholars concerned with increasing numbers of older ­people who need social ser­vices. In­de­pen­dence also partially fits with ideals of old age as documented in ethnographic studies of Polish villages in the first half of the twentieth c­ entury, in which signs of debility are best followed by a quick death. Aktywność as a mode of promoting in­de­pen­dence seems a logical part of this construction of old age as a time characterized by dependence and in­de­pen­dence. Yet the development of the UTAs and the intellectual fields that take aging and aktywność as their domains, as well as the essay that opens this chapter, suggest that more complexity is pre­sent in ideals of aktywność than is revealed by a focus on in­de­pen­dence and dependence. This complexity stems from the variation in experiences of old age and the implicit or explicit recognition of the role of social relations in aktywność. At the macro level, strug­gles over political-­economic calculations of “old-­age de­pen­dency ratios” reveal difficulties of accounting for the multiple forms of interdependence that exist in late life, only some of which are vis­i­ble through quantitative economic mea­sures. At the disciplinary level, the overlap between fields such as gerontology, geriatrics, pedagogy, and social work reveals the holistic nature of experiences of aging, in which it is difficult to separate medical from developmental from social issues. At the individual level, historical concerns for maintaining aktywność had to do with continuing to hold up obligations to kin and other social groups. Taken together, ­these sets of histories and experiences suggest that aktywność is a practice that is shot through with interdependent social relations, including forms of responsibility and obligations. ­These sets of histories also suggest that promoting aktywność as a form of moral personhood in late life has spatiotemporal contours. The Polish nation or state often figures prominently, but not always via the romantic national myth of suffering as depicted in the introduction to this book. For instance, the increasing numbers of dependent older ­people can threaten the

44  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

solvency of the welfare state. The fields of social work as well as pedagogy and andragogika ­were connected to both medicine and Polish nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ­These linkages raise questions concerning the role of the Polish nation and state in the spatiotemporal ideals and practices of moral personhood in late life and of the enduring meaning of the category of the nation for older Poles. Chapter 2 takes up ­these issues of aktywność, in­de­pen­dence, and social relations by analyzing ethnographic data on the UTAs in Wrocław and Poznań as well as on another organ­ization that explic­itly promotes active aging.

2

Aspiring to Activity Transforming Aging through Education

“Poland is no country for old p­ eople.” This phrase headlined a two-­week-­ long series in the leading Polish daily newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Newspaper), in 2008.1 The title of the series was a play on the title of the film No Country for Old Men, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, which had been released in Poland not long before. In the multiple types of news stories the series presented, aging emerged as an experience characterized by discrimination, isolation, poor health, inadequate financial resources, and even abandonment by ­family. ­These articles made clear how the experience of aging was tied to a diminished sense of moral personhood. In letters to the editor solicited by the paper, older Poles wrote in with their own stories of old age, many pointing out how physically and socially active they w ­ ere. Overall, this series presented aging as an experience that was overwhelmingly negative—­unless one could stay active by being physically fit and socially engaged. The use of the word “still” ( jeszcze) in the text of survey questions—as in “are you still earning money?” “what do you still want to do?”—­indicated that continuity of

45

46  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

activity is what mattered.2 In other words, older ­people in Poland could age well by remaining the same as one’s younger self (cf. Lamb 2014). However, one article belied this hope that a good old age could be achieved through active aging. In an interview, a social psy­chol­ogy professor in Warsaw described his personal experiences of discrimination in the public sphere, and negative ste­reo­types of older p­ eople pre­sent in Polish culture more generally. He even used the German word “Untermenschen” (subhuman) to describe how older ­people are seen in the broader culture. This word, with its historical association with Nazi race science, was a damning characterization of the place of older ­people in the con­temporary Polish imagination. This professor saw hope in intergenerational activities in which older p­ eople joined younger p­ eople as peers, perhaps in degree programs at universities. He decried places that catered to the mistrust of older ­people ­toward society at large, such as Universities of the Third Age and the church, where he claimed that “acts of personalization” w ­ ere discouraged and older p­ eople w ­ ere treated as an anonymous mass. Participants of the UTA in Wrocław met this description of Universities of the Third Age with outrage. So distressed by this dismissive characterization of their beloved institution at the national level, participants and orga­nizational leaders called a meeting to express their indignation. In addition to participants, some students in andragogika (adult education) attended as well. During the two-­hour discussion, participants and students alike agreed that this professor did not truly understand what happened at UTAs or he could never have described them in that way. In fact, rather than echoing fears of aging, participants described the ste­reo­types that they w ­ ere challenging, particularly that learning is not part of late life. Moreover, they did not experience age segregation at the UTAs, noting the andragogika students in the room. They agreed with the professor that intergenerational connections w ­ ere positive, and appreciated being able to teach younger ­people skills and values that they had learned over the course of their lives. For instance, one participant encouraged younger ­people to cultivate “aktywność maksymalna” (maximum activeness) as they w ­ ere aging. The students similarly stated their appreciation for the older adults attending the UTA, who provide positive models for aging. Across generations, ­there was consensus that older ­people served as moral exemplars of aging through their participation in the UTAs. Taken together, this newspaper series and the discussion about it at the UTA in Wrocław crystallize a binary vision of old age that can be ­either

Aspiring to Activity • 47

negative or positive, depending on how successfully older ­people can challenge negative ste­reo­t ypes of late life. This book ultimately demonstrates that this binary concept does not correspond to the realities of everyday practices of aging. In other words, the third and fourth ages do not match up with experiences of aging. However, in this chapter, I focus on ­these spaces of active aging in order to understand t­ hese practices and ideals of moral personhood on their own terms. By drawing on ethnographic data from educational organ­izations for older adults that explic­itly promote active aging, this chapter explores local Polish iterations of this globally circulating discourse. In addition to Universities of the Third Age, I also analyze a nongovernmental organ­ization (NGO) called @ktywny Se­nior (@ctive Se­nior) that aims to promote active aging. This chapter offers ethnographic analy­sis of the bodily, social, cognitive, and emotional practices through which ­these institutions aim to transform stigmatized and isolated older Poles into engaged, connected, and productive se­niors. Th ­ ese practices take on meaning that is associated with Poland’s place in the con­ temporary world order as a postsocialist modern Eu­ro­pean nation, but they also resonate with Poland’s socialist and presocialist past. In other words, active aging encompasses a par­tic­u­lar understanding of what moral personhood in ­later life might look like, which has specific spatiotemporal implications. Yet practices of aktywność work across multiple spatiotemporal levels and exist alongside multiple versions of moral personhood. Moral personhood for older Poles who participate in ­these organ­izations thus takes on spatiotemporal contours that are both regional and international in scale and continuous across historical eras.

Everyday Rhythms of Local Institutions: Spatiotemporal Features of Active Aging The Universities of the Third Age in Wrocław and Poznań have both existed since the 1970s, and ­were quite similar in terms of course offerings and roles as institutional leaders in promoting active aging and aktywność. However, key differences existed that highlight regional distinctions between the two cities. This suggests that Universities of the Third Age not only reflected ideals of moral personhood linked to a desired form of the Polish nation but also consisted of practices that coincided with local, regional understandings of personhood.

48  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

FIG. 2.1  ​Sitting area at the University of the Third Age, Wrocław

Orga­nizational meetings with the staff of the University of the Third Age reflected ­these differences in institutional structure and in regional ste­reo­ types of be­hav­ior. In Wrocław, my appointments ­were rarely scheduled for an exact time; for instance, I was told to stop by ­after 10 a.m., or around 3:30 p.m. The director or a participant would prepare a cup of coffee and put out a tray of wrapped candies. One administrative staff member worked part-­time, so słuchacze volunteered for the rest of the administrative duties (e.g., accounting). The administrative staff member had her own office, as did the director, although słuchacze ­were often working and talking in his office. The entranceway to the University of the Third Age’s space in the basement of the University of Wrocław had three small t­ ables alongside the informational bulletin boards, where słuchacze often met (and where I occasionally conducted interviews). The volunteers referred to each other in the informal register of address (ty), notable among retirees, who tended to stay within the formal register (pan / pani). The atmosphere was often busy, but felt relaxed and informal. When beginning fieldwork in Wrocław, I was given the semester’s course offerings and invited to show up at any of them that I liked.

Aspiring to Activity • 49

FIG. 2.2  ​Corner of the classroom at University of the Third Age, Wrocław. The text on the

poster reads “UTW: Our l­ ittle homeland.”

The University of the Third Age’s offices in Poznań are located on the second floor of a centrally located city-­owned building across the street from the Adam Mickiewicz University library and a block away from plac Wolności (Freedom Square), a former site of Prus­sian military displays and now a gathering place for demonstrations as well as a site for open-­air events. ­These offices ­were primarily administrative and had no designated social space. Whenever I had an appointment ­either to discuss my research, or­ga­ nize conversational En­glish classes, or interview a staff member, the appointments ­were always scheduled for an exact time (e.g., 1:30 p.m.). I would be led to a ­table appointed with white-­and cream-­colored lace doilies, a plate of cookies and cakes, and offered a cup of coffee or tea. The administrative space had three rooms that functioned to receive guests or hold meetings. The two accountants had their own office, and ­there was a separate cashier’s booth with a plateglass win­dow, such as at a museum. Every­one referred to each other in the formal register, and it had the feeling of an office workplace. ­Because they ­were located in the same building as the School of Pedagogy at the University of Wrocław, the halls of the UTA in Wrocław ­were

50  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

FIG. 2.3  ​Lobby of the University of the Third Age, Poznań

filled with college students and słuchacze alike, creating a bustling academic atmosphere that starkly differed from the more businesslike offices in Poznań. However, many classes through the UTA in Poznań w ­ ere held at other universities in the city, so the same hectic academic atmosphere was pre­sent ­there.

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In contrast to Wrocław, where słuchacze paid one annual fee that allowed them to participate in almost all classes, in Poznań, słuchacze paid for each individual course that they attended (see chapter 1 for more details). This meant that in Poznań, ­people w ­ ere more likely to select just one course at a time, whereas in Wrocław, some słuchacze spent part of e­ very day in an or­ga­ nized activity through the UTA. Correspondingly, it was more common for słuchacze in Wrocław to emphasize the importance of their friendships ­because they had the chance to develop over more interactions. ­These differences in spatial organ­ization and social be­hav­ior align with Polish ste­reo­types of ­these two cities: namely, that Wrocławianie are laid-­ back, relaxed, and informal, whereas Poznaniacy are more or­ga­nized, businesslike, conservative, and distant. Poles attributed ­these differences to the legacy of the partitions and the history of population movement (or not). That is, the Prus­sian influence in Poznań is thought to bring about a proclivity for organ­ization, business, and rationality that Poles also associate with Germans, whereas the postwar relocation of ­people from western Galicia to Wrocław is thought to give its residents an “eastern” laid-­back openness and warmth that Poles associate with Ukrainians. When I described the differences in the Universities of the Third Age to słuchacze at each place, they nodded their heads in affirmation. ­These regional differences suggest that the spatiotemporal ele­ments of moral personhood are not only national but also local. ­These ste­reo­types have their roots in the partition era and show how practices of aktywność contain ele­ments of sociality that are older than the transition from socialism to postsocialism.

“Se­niors Are ­People Too!”: Gendered and Classed Aspirations of Moral Personhood Conversations with orga­nizational leaders revealed the degree to which moral personhood was at stake in the cultivation of aktywność—­and that aktywność was linked to Poland’s place in the world order. For instance, a former director of the University of the Third Age in Wrocław, Walentyna Wnuk, described her efforts to change the attitudes and be­hav­iors of older adults through the offerings of the UTA. In addition to the course she taught at the UTA, “The Autumn of Life in Gerontological Perspective,” which was required for all słuchacze, she led trips to Brussels and Strasbourg for se­niors to meet with their representative to the Eu­ro­pean Parliament.

52  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

This representative also made occasional visits to the UTA. Th ­ ese visits w ­ ere part of transforming older Poles into “Eurose­niorzy,” or “Eurose­niors,” in the words of Wnuk. She wanted to encourage older adults to become “open,” in contrast to the “closed” nature that characterized life during state socialism. It was central to this idea of openness to create a sense of belonging to the Eu­ro­pean Union (EU), which at the time of this conversation in 2008, was still quite new, as Poland joined the EU in 2004. This orientation t­ oward Eu­rope and the West contrasts with a socialist-­era orientation ­toward Rus­ sia (then the Soviet Union) and the East.3 Some of the most popu­lar classes at the UTA, and among t­ hose most discussed in my conversations with słuchacze, involved activities linked to this open, westward orientation of con­temporary Poland. Classes in computer skills and foreign languages—­especially English—­were often oversubscribed. Słuchacze who attended the conversational En­glish classes that I taught in both Wrocław and Poznań told me that they w ­ ere learning En­glish to communicate with their ­children’s spouses and grandchildren in the United Kingdom. (Many younger Poles emigrated to the United Kingdom for better employment opportunities ­after Poland joined the EU.) However, although ­these par­tic­u­lar instances of language learning ­were connected to recent sociopo­liti­cal changes—­Poland’s membership in the EU—­they also resonated with older forms of sociality and education. As chapter 1 showed, UTAs ­were teaching foreign languages in the 1970s and 1980s, long before EU membership. Moreover, ­these practices recall ­those of Polish elites’ learning of foreign languages, such as French and German, during the partition era. In other words, the practice of Poles learning foreign languages in order to access a form of cultural prestige has a deeper history. Th ­ ese histories give a classed ele­ment to the aspirations of older Poles learning En­glish at the UTAs.4 Across all the dif­fer­ent classes and activities that they participated in at the UTA, słuchacze emphasized how impor­tant their new friendships w ­ ere. As described in the introduction, most słuchacze ­were ­women. ­These ­women saw such new friendships as distinct from ­those that they had made ­earlier in their lives, when the practicalities of daily life directed them more t­ oward relations with coworkers or neighbors (Robbins-­Ruszkowski 2017b). At the UTA, by contrast, they could build relations with p­ eople they simply liked. This fact of choosing one’s own friends was something they associated with Poland’s westward orientation (and indeed, it is well-­documented in the scholarly lit­er­a­ture on socialism and postsocialism).5 For many, before

Aspiring to Activity • 53

retiring and attending the UTA, life was busy with work and ­family obligations. In c­ areers in education, accounting, and health care, and with gendered kin expectations of care for spouses, c­ hildren, and grandchildren, the ­women at the UTA w ­ ere glad to focus on themselves. Many ­women told me that the UTA gave them a chance to “robić coś dla siebie,” or do something for oneself. Exemplary of this attitude was the experience of a former teacher, pani Jolanta, who sought out the UTA in Wrocław a­ fter ten years of retirement.6 Widowed, and with c­ hildren who had moved abroad to E ­ ngland, she felt lonely and heard about the UTA from a friend. She enthusiastically participated in multiple activities, such as lectures on health and nutrition, and she was learning to swim. She described t­ hese activities as filling in what she had missed out on ­earlier in her life. Most impor­tant to her, however, ­were the friendships she made with other w ­ omen at the UTA, whom she described as her “second f­ amily.” ­These friendships ­were impor­tant b­ ecause pani Jolanta was other­wise quite lonely, but also ­because they contrasted with social relations from ­earlier in her life and ­because they fit within idealized forms of gendered sociality, in which social relations are w ­ omen’s responsibility. The importance of friendships at the UTAs was echoed by other słuchacze, who described ­these relations as distinct from other kinds of relations. For instance, pani Dominika, a sixty-­three-­year-­old ­woman who had worked in banking, commented that she “lacked contact with ­people,” yet in the same breath remarked that she participated in exercise classes and other activities offered at her housing complex. She saw relations at the UTAs as dif­fer­ ent, for they w ­ ere defined by choice and affinity, rather than by circumstance. For instance, pani Dominika commented that “one cannot ­really choose” one’s neighbors or coworkers. During the socialist era, relations with coworkers often extended into multiple spheres of life, as state enterprises often ­housed workers in the same apartment buildings and or­ga­nized vacations for workers. Many w ­ omen at the UTA mentioned that even if one did not like par­tic­u­lar ­people, one should still maintain good relations with them ­because one might need something from them in the ­future. In other words, they experienced t­hese social relations as instrumentalized, in contrast to relations at the UTA, which originated in mutual affinity for certain activities (e.g., learning En­glish, physical exercise). At the UTA, if she saw someone in the hallway whom she did not particularly like, pani Dominika felt comfortable simply greeting that person and moving on. This liberation

54  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

FIG. 2.4  ​ Słuchacze from the University of the Third Age, Poznań, visit the Poznań Aeroklub

from unpleasant social relations and a corresponding opportunity to form pleasant, enjoyable relations was a key feature of sociality and moral personhood at the UTA.7 This contrast with previous times in the life course, which coincided with the socialist past, was also evident at the @ktywny Se­nior NGO in Wrocław. This organ­ization was part of the social landscape of active-­aging-­focused efforts in Wrocław. Located west of the city center and set back from the road in an enclosed area with an adjacent parking lot, the building also ­housed a skateboard park and a gymnastics training fa­cil­i­ty. Walking through a parking lot, the adjacent wall of which was covered with elaborate cartoonish graffiti, Sektor 3 was at the far end of the building, ­behind which was an old dilapidated tram sitting on tracks that w ­ ere no longer used. Formally named Sektor 3: Wrocławskie Centrum Wspierania Organizacji Pozarządowych (Sector 3: Wrocław Center for the Support of Nongovernmental Organ­izations), it provides training (e.g., publicity, fund-­raising) and institutional resources for nonprofit organ­izations of vari­ous types (e.g., a Polish–­Lithuanian cultural exchange, a group on mentoring). Although they receive funding from the city of Wrocław, they facilitate programs that

Aspiring to Activity • 55

are in­de­pen­dent from the government. Wnuk, the former director of the UTA in Wrocław, had introduced me to staff at Sektor 3; she had meetings ­there related to her work as the adviser to the mayor on se­niors’ affairs. A colleague of hers on the advisory board for se­niors for the voivodeship had created and run @ctive Se­nior. Marek Ferenc, the former man­ag­er of a health clinic, was inspired to start this program a­ fter visiting a friend in a retirement community in British Columbia, Canada, where he noticed how dif­fer­ent life was t­ here than for many retirees in his own neighborhood in Poland, where he saw social isolation.8 He was inspired by this example and by Sun City, Arizona, a retirement community for older adults with many recreational and social opportunities that was one of the first of its type in the United States, and he wanted to bring a similar model to Poland. The @ctive Se­nior program in 2008 was his first attempt to change the ways that older ­people experience and understand aging.9 It has since expanded and become a foundation that runs multiple programs for se­niors, including one that promotes volunteerism among se­niors and another that works t­ oward a cooperative housing program. For the first iteration of @ctive Se­nior, Ferenc chose a neighborhood called Popowice that featured a 1970s-­era blokowisko, or housing development. In this area, 22 ­percent of inhabitants ­were above sixty, as compared to a citywide average of 13 ­percent.10 The offer of f­ ree medical screenings in conjunction with a local medical clinic helped attract se­niors to this program. ­Those who attended classes on healthy aging, communication, and computer skills received the ­free screenings. Ferenc hoped to change the attitudes of older p­ eople he saw as “closed,” echoing Dr. Wnuk’s perspective. He aimed to help them embrace aktywność by teaching concepts and practices related to “a responsible lifestyle” and “social integration.” He framed older Poles’ habit of viewing doctors as responsible for their health care and relying on pills to fix their prob­lems as irresponsible. To help this group become responsible as well as to flourish in their new postsocialist, transnational, and technology-­focused world, the @ctive Se­nior program offered lectures on preventive health be­hav­iors such as proper diet and fitness, as well as computer classes and communication workshops. This view seems to fit well within neoliberal ideals of self-­care in which individuals take responsibility for their own health.11 The changes in social relations that occur through this program ­were intended to have economic as well as social effects; an implicit goal of the program was to return retirees to the cap­i­tal­ist workforce. Indeed, one of

56  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

the sponsors of the Local Activation Centers, neighborhood-­based centers that grew out of the work of the pi­lot program @ctive Se­nior, was H ­ uman Capital, a unit of the Eu­ro­pean Social Fund.12 Among its goals ­were “improving the level of professional activity and ability of finding employment by persons who are unemployed and professionally passive, reducing areas of social exclusion, enhancing the adaptability of employees and enterprises to changes that take place in the economy, and popularisation of education in the society at all educational levels with concurrent improvement of the quality of educational ser­vices and a stronger correlation between them and the needs of the knowledge economy.”13 In par­tic­u­lar, the @ctive Se­nior program was intended for ­people who ­were forced into early retirement ­a fter 1989, most of whom ­were ­women. Ferenc commented that such p­ eople became marginalized b­ ecause they ­were not part of the “computerization” of society that happened in the 1990s and 2000s. To educate participants on how to engage in this new society, he or­ga­nized a trip to a stockbroker’s office and to a bank, where staff gave a pre­sen­ta­tion on how banks work, ATMs, and automatic deposit machines. Such ideals of transformation w ­ ere not only espoused by the program’s leader but also taken up by the participants themselves, who, in one activity, created slogans for active aging. Some representative examples w ­ ere: “Forward, Se­niors!” “Now the world belongs to us!” “Se­niors rule!” “Se­niors are p­ eople too!”14 In conversations, participants in the @ctive Se­nior program described the need to claim their humanity in the face of what they felt was their dehumanized status. For instance, pani Jadwiga, a seventy-­year-­ old w ­ oman who worked as a security guard described feeling “unnecessary” to younger Poles; in other words, she did not feel needed. This was echoed by pani Grażyna, a sixty-­two-­year-­old w ­ oman who worked as a caregiver for an older man in Germany for part of the year. Even though her wages contributed to her ­family’s income, she felt that Polish society did not value her expertise or ­labor. In the face of such discrimination, then, ­these slogans are a way for participants to claim humanity. ­These ­were essential to the organ­ization’s understanding of itself, as a dozen of t­ hese slogans formed a r­ unning header for the organ­ization’s website for some years. Although their content resonates with the forward-­looking goals of the @ctive Se­nior program, the form of ­these slogans harks back to the socialist era. Some Polish friends in their twenties and thirties giggled when I mentioned t­ hese slogans to them, commenting that they sounded like something from socialist times. Indeed, t­ hese slogans echo the forward-­oriented,

Aspiring to Activity • 57

optimistic qualities of socialist-­era slogans, such as the famous “Workers of the world, unite!”15 This similarity in form suggests that continuity and change can coexist. For t­ hose who participated in both the original @ctive Se­nior and its ­later iterations, it was transformative. During a conversation with nine ­women who participated in @ctive Se­nior programming in 2014, one ­woman, pani Magdalena, stated that “life had changed a lot” and now “­there was no time” ­because her days ­were so filled with activities from ­these programs as well as her volunteer work for a ­children’s hospice. Another ­woman, pani Kasia, described with pride that her f­ amily now asked her about her volunteer work, in contrast to before she participated in @ctive Se­nior programming and volunteer training, when “they would rarely ask me any questions.” Taken together, the programming and the recognition of her kin helped her feel vis­i­ble in the con­temporary “cult of youth,” as she declared: “We too are alive!” ­Others described the joy they took in participating in a “se­niors’ ball,” which gave every­one a chance to dress up in their finest clothes, leave the h ­ ouse, and dance and listen to m ­ usic. Multiple ­women agreed that the “assertiveness training” they participated in helped them feel more comfortable to express their opinions both at home and with peers. They said what they had learned through t­ hese programs helped them to be “open,” in contrast to their peers who spent time only at neighborhood se­nior clubs, where attitudes ­were more “closed.” Such activities, which gave new rhythms to their days, are reshaping moral personhood by providing opportunities for t­ hese w ­ omen to be seen by ­others, including their kin, as contributing to and participating in a social world that extends outside the home.16 Ferenc understood the habits of older Poles as fundamentally linked to a national quality. He shared the following parable that he had learned from some andragogy students: What is the difference between a French se­nior, a German se­nior, and a Polish se­nior? And now listen, b­ ecause this is impor­tant. I’ll speak slowly. The French se­nior wakes up in the morning, eats a continental breakfast, and takes a cata­log and looks where and at which school he can go and learn something. The German retiree, se­nior, wakes up in the morning, drinks a bawarka—­that is, you know, you know, tea with milk, a bawarka—­eats a pastry, takes the cata­log, and looks for a trip or for a place to go on a trip. And the Polish retiree wakes up in the morning, pees in a jar—­you know what the

58  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

word siusiu (pee) means?—­and goes to the clinic. You understand? That’s what we ­were talking about, you know, about the clinic, the line. . . . ​­Because he believes that the clinic builds health. Th ­ ere is nothing more incorrect. ­There is nothing more incorrect. That is what we want to change. So that he ­doesn’t go in the morning to the clinic with the jar of pee, with urine. Instead that he would take a cata­log, the internet. That he’d seek out something. That he’d sign up for something. That he would go somewhere. Well, you know . . . (laughter).17

In this story, the practices and attitudes of older persons reflect a sort of national temperament. Presumably ­because France is the home of the first University of the Third Age, French se­niors are presented as focusing on education, while German se­niors appear as a common Polish ste­reo­type of Germans as frequent tourists.18 In contrast, Polish se­niors appear h ­ ere as focused inward on bodily ailments, and on the medical clinic as a site of authoritative knowledge. Two ­women who participated in @ctive Se­nior shared this attitude, describing their peers who spent their days “in line for the clinic,” echoing Ferenc’s descriptions of older Poles as expecting doctors to take responsibility for their health. By transforming Polish se­niors into persons who practice aktywność, then, Ferenc and @ctive Se­nior ­were aspiring to ideals of moral personhood located in France and Germany. Moral personhood that is overly focused on the individual body as a subject of the clinic becomes evaluated as negative, whereas moral personhood that extends outward to education and travel becomes evaluated as positive. According to orga­nizational leaders, practices of aktywność have national ele­ments. Th ­ ese are often related to Poland’s membership in the EU and transition from socialism to capitalism. This national political-­economic shift has strong moral overtones, casting the socialist past as fundamentally backward and the cap­i­tal­ist pre­sent as desirable. This contrast between past and pre­sent becomes evident in the discrediting of generations who built the socialist state, as described in the opening of this chapter. Aging is thus accompanied by a diminished sense of moral personhood. It is exactly this diminishment that institutional leaders and older Poles themselves wish to overcome by engaging in practices that are connected with a proper vision of the pre­sent and ­future—­that is, focused on the new. Yet in what follows, I ­will show how even activities that are clearly understood as being part of this new world order contain older histories.

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Practices of Aktywność as Practices of Remembrance: Individual and Shared Pasts In addition to classes like En­glish and computer skills that ­were explic­itly associated with westward aspirations, other activities at the UTA also focused on learning new skills. Within ­these activities, ele­ments of the past ­were vis­i­ble, thus revealing multiple temporalities that s­ haped older Poles’ moral personhood. One type of new activity in which słuchacze engaged at the UTA was a “memory-­training” class.19 Although t­ here is no evidence that such cognitive classes can prevent or delay the onset of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, “brain-­training” classes have become a popu­lar form of activity for many older adults in both Eu­rope and the United States, perhaps as a way to cope with the cultural fear of dementia.20 The class, which met once weekly over the course of a semester, was a mixed-­gender group of six słuchacze, taught by a ­woman in her early twenties who was studying for her master’s degree in andragogika. The class began with a series of word games in which słuchacze had to list as many words with certain prefixes (e.g., anty-­[anti-], przed-­ [before; in front of]) as they could within a set amount of time. ­Toward the end of the class, they engaged in a visualization exercise, in which the teacher encouraged them to imagine, in rich sensory detail, the experience of holding, seeing, tasting, and smelling an apple. The słuchacze enthusiastically participated in all t­hese activities; the atmosphere was one of friendly competition, as ­people clamored to list as many words as they could as quickly as pos­si­ble, and of good feeling, as they all agreed on the beauty and deliciousness of the ­imagined apple. ­These exercises bracketed a very par­tic­u ­lar kind of remembering that occurred in the ­middle of the class, which became decidedly less pleasant for the participants. The teacher asked the słuchacze to close their eyes and visualize their elementary schools in as much detail as they could: the look of the building from the outside, the physical space of the entrance and layouts of the room, the teacher’s dress. Just a few minutes into the exercise, however, the activity broke down as one w ­ oman, and then another, interrupted the teacher to describe the painful war­time memories that ­these activities brought up. A ­ fter one ­woman exclaimed that she saw a “horrific image,” another w ­ oman joined in to say that she too had a “horrific image.” The second ­woman went on to describe a story about being exiled to Siberia

60  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

as a child, and upon to return to Poland ­after the war at age twelve, being placed in a classroom with ­children much younger than her, enduring teasing and shame. The first w ­ oman who had mentioned a horrific image then described the gestapo entering her school and rounding up partisans hiding in the woods, and killing them in front of the students and teachers. The rest of the class listened and occasionally asked questions, such as where the first ­woman was from. When she gave the answer Kielce, ­others nodded knowingly, as this was a region known for its strong partisan nature during the war. Meanwhile, the teacher tried to lead the group back to the focus of the exercise—­the power and strength of memory. She pointed out the vivid nature of t­ hese memories and encouraged the group to regain a sense of calm through a set of breathing exercises. As she ended the class with the visualization exercise about the apple, the teacher pointed out that the słuchacze could control their feelings with the power of their thoughts. By focusing on the taste of the apple, she suggested, “a smile depends only on us.” Although the explicit goal of this class was to foster cognitive skills, the most dynamic part of the class occurred when słuchacze engaged in discussion of the collective past. Despite variation in experiences, the słuchacze connected with each other on the shared experience of war­time suffering. In other words, the collective past formed the basis for sociality in the pre­ sent, even in this context that was defined by future-­oriented aspirations—­ namely, preserving or enhancing cognitive skills. The past’s significance for moral personhood also became evident through other classes that occurred at the UTA. Although słuchacze learned new skills at the UTA through activities such as En­glish, computer, and aerobics classes, they also engaged in activities in which they had participated ­earlier in their lives. Th ­ ese enduring practices, such as handicrafts and choir, ­were not as often commented on by institutional leaders or by słuchacze themselves, but nevertheless formed an impor­tant part of the social life of the UTA. Through participation in ­these groups, ­women engaged in a form of gendered activity that signified a continuity with a past, rather than a transformation into a new sort of person. This suggests that “Eurose­niors” are not the only kind of personhood being nurtured through practices at the UTA. In addition to this new form of moral personhood, enduring forms of sociality remain in which the national collective past plays an impor­tant role. The national past was implicitly evident in events like choirs and cabaret per­for­mances. For instance, one of the several cabaret groups at the UTA

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performed a musical sketch about the life of Pope John Paul II. The audience received it well, clapping with g­ reat enthusiasm. At another concert, the UTA choir in Wrocław performed songs about Lwów, to which Wrocławians—­especially older Wrocławians—­have a special connection.21 Pani Marianna, a w ­ oman sitting next to me, teared up at several of the songs, explaining that she remembered her ­mother, who had moved to Wrocław from Lwów, singing them to her as a child. Her tears at this memory then turned into a lament for her m ­ other, who was currently living with dementia that was progressing quite rapidly. Pani Marianna went on to say that her m ­ other’s stories and knowledge about Lwów ­were ­going to dis­appear with her memory, and implored me to conduct a life-­history interview with her ­mother, for the sake of her ­family history.22 Such performances—­and reactions to them—­demonstrate that the shared past forms the basis for sociality in the pre­sent. The cabaret and the choir drew connections to meaningful ele­ments of the past that ­were shared at both the national and regional levels, thus fostering ties among słuchacze. Th ­ ese collective pasts also fostered familial remembering, as pani Marianna’s case demonstrates. In this context that seems to be cultivating a form of neoliberal personhood that promotes the learning of new skills and looking to the f­ uture, older Poles are engaging with the shared past and thereby creating a vision of aging that highlights values of commonality, sociality, and collectivity.

The Limits of Active Aging In a recurring workshop at the UTA in Wrocław called “Meeting in Spacetime: Dialogue between Generations,” a group of around ten słuchacze and six doctoral students in andragogy participated in activities designed to create a shared social world based on sharing ele­ments of their biographies. ­These activities varied from meeting to meeting and included telling life stories on certain topics such as childhood or Christmas Eve (including the story that appears in chapter 4), walking through the botanical garden, and taking a weekend trip to Prague.23 They often engaged in activities designed to create warm feeling and mutual understanding, such as one at the botanical garden in which the słuchacze made posters about youth, and the students made posters about old age. Every­one worked earnestly on their section of the poster, sketching flowers or writing a few words such as “full of energy” (about the young), or “wisdom” (about the słuchacze). Although ­these

FIG. 2.5  ​“Meeting in spacetime: dialogue between generations” group, botanical garden,

Wrocław

Aspiring to Activity • 63

exercises may have seemed shallow or contrived, both the students and the słuchacze described feelings of warmth and delight that they could form relations with persons of dif­fer­ent generations whom they other­wise never would have met. Through intentionally creating t­ hese intergenerational relations, the doctoral students and słuchacze ­were reshaping the spatiotemporal qualities of moral personhood. Like other classes at the UTAs and other organ­izations like @ctive Se­nior, this intergenerational group aimed to reduce negative perceptions and experiences of old age through a range of activities. ­These activities focused on improving physical and m ­ ental health, learning new skills, increasing social connection, and providing a sense of confidence. Often ­these transformations ­were linked to Poland’s status as a demo­cratic, cap­i­ tal­ist nation-­state that was a member of the EU, and they contrasted with Poland’s socialist past, showing that active aging is far from a universal set of practices and ideals. Yet not all activities at the UTA constituted a break with the past or a radical transformation of habits and dispositions. Słuchacze who participated in groups like choirs or handicraft groups w ­ ere engaging in forms of activity that preceded 1989 and had in fact endured for generations. Although the ideals of postsocialist transformation shape the moral imagination of active-­aging proj­ects in Poland, the practices of aktywność occurring at UTAs and @ctive Se­nior show how presocialist and socialist histories also shape the moral personhood of older Poles. However, participation in ­these culturally valued institutions was not available to all older Poles—­nor was it necessarily desired by all. First, the spaces of the UTA w ­ ere rather inaccessible to t­ hose with mobility limitations. Indeed, I never saw anyone in a wheelchair, and only the occasional person with a cane. Similarly, p­ eople living with illness requiring significant care could hardly participate. Second, something called a university is likely to appeal to certain groups more than ­others. I knew of few słuchacze who had worked in factories; most had retired from c­ areers in education, health care, engineering, or administration of some sort. That is, the UTA is l­ imited by both class and class aspirations. Third, this setting’s form of sociality itself tended to appeal more to w ­ omen than to men, given the gendered ideals of sociality across the life course, in which ­women are understood as fundamentally more connected to the social world. Th ­ ese institutions thus tended to exclude persons with illness or debility, lower education or class status, and men. Noting t­ hese limitations is not meant as a critique of the institutions themselves, which are highly meaningful to so many older Poles.

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Rather, I mention t­ hese limits in order to ask who may be excluded from such culturally valued forms of aging. Th ­ ese organ­izations are meant to transform negative ste­reo­types and experiences of aging, yet in a sense they may further entrench forms of exclusion for older Poles who cannot embody such transformations. The cases presented in this chapter raise questions of what kinds of moral personhood may be pos­si­ble in spaces of the “fourth age,” which would seem to be the opposite of both active aging and aktywność. Chapter  3 thus explores moral personhood and social relations in contexts of debility and institutional care, which are among the more stigmatized forms of late life in con­temporary Poland. When older Poles cannot engage in ­these culturally valued forms of active aging and aktywność, what forms of sociality emerge, which spatiotemporal contours become impor­tant, and how do ­these shape moral personhood?

3

Beyond Activity Sustaining Relations in Institutional Care

On an unseasonably chilly July after­noon, five older w ­ omen and I chatted over cappuccinos and dessert for two hours in the restaurant of the John Paul II H ­ otel, a four-­star ­hotel in the historic religious district of the city. ­These w ­ omen w ­ ere słuchacze in the En­glish class that I taught at the University of the Third Age in Wrocław, and we ­were catching up ­after not having seen each other for two years.1 The conversation was generally light, as the ­women discussed the latest news at the UTA, talked about memory-­training classes in which they learned to memorize long sequences of numbers and words, and tried to show off their En­glish skills to me—­and to outdo their friends. The tone grew more serious as one ­woman shared news about a mutual friend’s illness, but it was generally a lighthearted after­noon. The cappuccinos and cheesecake ­were delicious, although every­one pronounced the fruit and ice cream dish a bit odd—­why was it full of grapefruit rather than the local berries that w ­ ere in season? The w ­ omen insisted on treating me to coffee and dessert, and I felt glad to be welcomed back so warmly. In many ways, this after­noon meeting in the restaurant felt like another world compared to that morning’s conversation at the Social Welfare Home 65

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(Dom pomocy społecznej), where I was also reconnecting with p­ eople whom I had first met three years e­ arlier. Pani Bożena stated that costs for medicine had risen a lot since then, leaving her with only 90 PLN (30 USD) for pocket money each month instead of the 140 PLN (47 USD) she used to have. Without assistance from her large f­ amily, she would not have enough to eat, she said, pointing to the jars of pickles that her son had brought her. A recent accident in which her bed railing had fallen on her leg brought pain to her knee when she lay in one position. The brace that would keep her leg in the proper position was not covered by insurance, she said, so she had to endure the pain. This economic contrast to the restaurant at the John Paul II h ­ otel was stark; t­ here our cappuccinos w ­ ere 8 PLN (3 USD), our slices of cheesecake 12 PLN (4 USD) each, and unsavory grapefruit and ice cream w ­ ere 15 PLN (5 USD). Yet t­ hese w ­ ere not two worlds—in fact, a bus connected the Social Welfare Home to the city center, where it was just a few minutes’ walk to the John Paul II h ­ otel. Although pani Bożena spoke of injustice and pain, she also smiled and laughed with her ­daughter when she called, showed me pictures of her grandchildren and great-­grandchildren, took out her latest knitting proj­ect, and asked about my sibling in Arizona. (Pani Bożena loved the ­Grand Canyon.) In some ways, this was not so dif­fer­ent from the conversation at the ­hotel restaurant, where the ­women also spoke of kin, friends, and travel. Despite stark contrasts in class, education, and health between pani Bożena, who relied on gifts of pickles from her son, and the ­women from the University of the Third Age, who purchased expensive cappuccinos in luxury ­hotels, the practices through which ­these w ­ omen sustained moral personhood do not differ radically. In emphasizing ­these similarities, I in no way intend to romanticize the poverty of pani Bożena or pre­sent a rose-­colored view of her as nobly suffering (which, in the Polish context, would fit within nationalist Catholic discourses of old age). Rather, in this chapter, I explain the surprising connections between ­these ­women’s sustenance of moral personhood through an analy­sis of the spatiotemporal dimensions of social relations and care. The places in which social relations occur, as well as the duration of time spent at ­these places, can shape moral personhood. So too can the ­imagined places and times that emerge through older Poles’ experiences in t­ hese institutions. This analy­sis works against Polish cultural distinctions between aktywność, the culturally valued way to grow old, and the negative views of aging in institutional care, and the “third age” and “fourth age” of international gerontological scholarship.

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Drawing on ethnographic data from two long-­term care institutions (a Catholic-­run rehabilitation center and a state-­run Social Welfare Home), this chapter documents and analyzes experiences of aging in places to which the rhe­toric of aktywność and active aging seems not to extend. Indeed, the logic of active aging implicitly discriminates against ­those who live in institutional care for not properly cultivating healthy, able bodies. Moreover, ­these institutions are stigmatized and marginalized ­because of common beliefs that care should happen at home, by kin. To some extent, t­ hese negative expectations for institutional care w ­ ere borne out during fieldwork; days at both places w ­ ere often difficult, full of tears, pain, and exhaustion. Patients and residents missed their families, longed for home, and endured pain. Staff worked long hours, strug­gled with difficult patients, and cared for failing bodies. The loud hurried footsteps of a nurse walking to the next patient’s room contrasted with the slow laborious movement of a patient with a walker or a resident in a nonmotorized wheelchair. The halls smelled of power­ful cleaners, at times barely masking the smell of soiled diapers. Yet despite t­ hese difficulties, daily life at t­ hese institutions had a quiet vitality to it. Pain subsided, a roommate told a joke, a staff member brought hot ­water for tea, a nun performed a ser­vice at chapel. ­People formed new social relations even as o­ thers ­were unraveling. Practices such as joking and making tea created the social relations that s­ haped ­these older adults’ moral personhood. The spatiotemporal aspects of ­these institutions and the relations that occurred within them fostered ­these social relations. The schedules of meals and medi­cation, for instance, created regular opportunities for staff and residents to interact and become familiar with one another. The physical buildings and rooms themselves constituted worlds unto themselves, even as multiple forms of connection to the outside existed as well. ­These spatiotemporal features s­haped the vitality of institutional life for patients and residents. ­These everyday interactions and rituals, which occurred between older adults themselves, visitors, and staff, constituted the moral personhood of older adults living in residential institutions. At an analytic level, this spatiotemporal perspective brings into view how ­people maintain and strengthen relatedness and personhood despite the sociocultural and political-­economic barriers to ­doing so. This framework complements research that uses structural perspectives to show how po­liti­ cal, economic, and historical forces marginalize and exclude certain groups of ­people and are inseparable from regimes of health and illness (e.g., Biehl 2005; Farmer 2003; Kleinman et al. 1997; Scheper-­Hughes and Wacquant

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2002). Yet all who live on the margins are not suffering all the time. In this chapter, I focus on moments of laughter and care as moments that have transformative potential (Livingston 2012), and ­people who are able to create moral personhood. Focusing on the everyday practices of relatedness (Carsten 2000b) through which ­people create and maintain relations with kin and nonkin alike shows how moral personhood becomes pos­si­ble for ­those living outside their moral ideals. Research on the anthropology of care shows that relations of care that sustain bodies also sustain persons (Buch 2015a, 2018; Heinemann 2016; Livingston 2012; Seaman 2018; Thelen 2015; Yarris 2017), such that intimate bodily routines and the rhythms of daily life take on moral qualities. Yet questions remain about how the spatiotemporal aspects of ­these relations shape the quality and meaning of ­these relations, and the moral personhood that they help to create. This chapter thus explores key components of moral personhood according to the following questions: Which spatiotemporal scales emerge through relations of care, and how do they shape moral personhood? How does the placeness of each institution shape the social relations that occur within them? What are the temporal aspects of t­ hese social relations—­how often do they occur, how long do they endure, and what kinds of ­futures are pos­si­ ble for t­hese relations? How do the temporalities of sudden or progressive debilities shape moral personhood? How do practices and ideals of care intersect with or diverge from practices and ideals of active aging and aktywność described in chapters 1 and 2? In this context in which p­ eople are living outside their ideals of aging, what does creating, sustaining, or transforming moral personhood look like in practice? To answer ­these questions, I describe each institution in turn, focusing first on the rehabilitation center and then on the Social Welfare Home, which, despite their shared goals of rehabilitation and medical care, differ in key ways. At the rehabilitation center, most ­people had moved ­there ­because of sudden medical events (e.g., recovering from strokes or surgeries), whereas at the Social Welfare Home for the chronically physically ill, most p­ eople had lost function through long-­term or chronic illness. Th ­ ese differing temporalities of illness are crucial in determining pos­si­ble f­ utures of older persons in institutional care and the possibilities for personhood in late life. The swift and radical change brought on by an event like a stroke transforms someone differently than does the slower debility of an illness like arthritis or multiple sclerosis (cf. Becker and Kaufman 1995; Kaufman 1988).

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In what follows, I focus especially on the spatiotemporal and social aspects of the institutions themselves, and the social relations between patients or residents, staff, kin, and visitors. Next I pre­sent case studies for each institution to show how the spatiotemporal aspects of daily life in institutional care shape social relations and personhood. Taken together, ­these cases provide an ethnographic account of aging in institutional care that moves beyond binary frames of in­de­pen­dence and dependence, health and illness.

Rituals of Rehabilitation: Spatiotemporal Aspects of a Catholic Rehabilitation Center Run by Catholic nuns in the order of St. Elizabeth, this eighty-­bed rehabilitation center is populated by ­people who have had major medical events that have left them dependent on the care of o­ thers.2 Although p­ eople are supposed to be in this institution for a temporary period of only a few months, in real­ity, many ­people remain for a year or longer as their physical conditions fail to improve or as they wait for openings in institutions intended for long-­term care. A few beds are set aside for ­people to remain ­there permanently. Almost all patients are over the age of sixty, and consistently, about 70 ­percent are ­women.3 Almost every­one uses a wheelchair, though some can walk for short distances assisted by a cane or walker. At the time of fieldwork, patients had to contribute 70 ­percent of their pension to stay in the institution, and if this came to less than 800 PLN (about 260 USD in 2008–2009) per month, they had supplement it up to that amount. The center is reimbursed by the Narodowy Fundusz Zdrowia (NFZ, or National Health Fund), the public national health-­care fund, which pays for accommodation in a room, usually with one to three roommates; medical care by the institution’s doctors, nurses, opiekunki (literally “carers,” roughly equivalent to nurse’s aides), and rehabilitation therapists; participation in terapia zajęciowa (occupational therapy, most often art and ­music therapy) and daily chapel ser­vices as desired; three meals and two snacks daily; and, if needed, two adult diapers daily. ­Because the quota of two adult diapers daily is not enough for most patients, and they and their families must pay for extras, nurses and nurse’s aides have come up with the solution of placing a small child’s diaper inside the adult diaper as a liner. ­Children’s diapers are cheaper and adequate for urine, so nurse’s aides change

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t­ hese liners instead. Additional medical ser­vices, such as massage and ultrasound treatments, are an extra out-­of-­pocket cost, as are medicines (though the NFZ refunds the costs of certain medi­cations).4 Families often bring in fruit, cookies, juices, and tea, as well as supplemental personal care products, such as deodorant, shampoos, and lotions. Some ­people keep books, magazines, or booklets of Sudoku games or crossword puzzles in small rolling metal cabinets with a foldout leaf, on which meals are served. ­These cabinets also display clocks, radio, seasonal trinkets or flowers, devotional items, and f­ amily pictures. Patients store their clothes in several shelves, a hanging rack, and drawers in a shared wardrobe in the room, often across from the bathroom. The rooms have high ceilings and large win­dows with gauzy curtains that look out t­ oward the convent building or, on the other side, onto the gardens and an empty lot where a new ­hotel was being built at the time. Rooms ­toward one end of the hallway have a view of the Odra River. The windowsills in all the shared spaces and offices are full of beautifully maintained plants, cared for by the siostra oddziałowa (ward s­ ister). The building that currently h ­ ouses the rehabilitation center was built in 1901 and was originally used as housing for the novitiates of the order. Almost entirely destroyed in 1945 during the siege of the city, the nuns began to use the building as a hospital in 1946. During state socialism, the building was taken from the nuns and used as a city hospital; a­ fter 1989, it was returned to the s­ isters of St. Elizabeth as part of the agreement between the Catholic Church and the new Polish state.5 The building’s distinctive brick exterior, large, heavy wooden doors, and high ceilings immediately date the building to the prewar period. Patients’ rooms are on the top three floors of the four-­story building, which consists of one long corridor. At one end of the top floor is the chapel, renovated in 2009, where t­ here is a daily after­noon ser­vice with communion (performed by a ­sister) and a mass ­every Sunday. Approximately one-­third of the patients attend daily chapel. About thirty minutes before chapel begins, patients start to leave their rooms and line up in the hallways to wait for the elevator. Moving four wheelchairs in and out of the one patient elevator, which itself moves quite slowly, takes time. At the other end of the top floor is the świetlica, or common room, where ­people gather for holiday meals and for visits with f­ amily. Occasionally, occupational therapy groups meet t­ here, though they more often use a smaller room next door, where a TV is tuned to Telewizja Trwam (I Persist Tele­vi­sion). This TV channel is part of the same media conglomerate as Radio Maryja and

Beyond Activity • 71

FIG. 3.1  ​Plants in the win­dow, rehabilitation center, Wrocław

the newspaper Nasz Dziennik (Our Daily), run by the Redemptorist priest Tadeusz Rydzyk, adding another religious dimension to the physical space of the institution.6 The win­dows of t­ hese rooms look out onto the Odra River and the Cathedral of St. John. Seasonal decorations that patients make in occupational therapy, which reference the religious calendar, often hang on the walls of the corridor and bulletin boards on all floors.

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FIG. 3.2  ​Easter decorations, rehabilitation center, Wrocław

Nurses and nurse’s aides gather in the dyżurka (nurses’ station, or shift room) on each of the top three floors, consisting of two rooms and a bathroom. On the ground floor, the left side of the corridor ­houses some therapy rooms (massage, ultrasound), doctors’ examination rooms for specialists’ visits and private practice, and the office of the ward ­sister, shared by the ­sister in charge of admissions and discharges, the two staff doctors, and a sleepy black-­and-­white cat. A small dog, Funia, often trotted in and out of the office, following the siostra dyrektor (literally, sister-­director) around the building. This is the room that I was invited to share, where I stored my coat and purse, and to which I was given a key. Sitting on the small sofa at the back of that office provided chances for casual conversation with staff, opportunities to meet occasional visitors, and moments of respite from and reflection upon conversations with patients. Indeed, having a place in this office was crucial to the sense of belonging that I came to have at the rehabilitation center. The receptionists, medical, and administrative staff came to associate me with the doctors and ward ­sister through my presence in that office, since that was where I often first met them. (Occasionally I would meet medical staff as they visited patients’

Beyond Activity • 73

FIG. 3.3  ​Flower-­themed decoration, made by a patient in occupational therapy, rehabilitation center, Wrocław

rooms, and in t­ hose cases they first assumed I was a relative of the patient.) Over time, I became integrated into their practices of reciprocal joking and gift giving. The ­sisters would often relax by looking at images on Power­Point slideshows depicting beautiful scenery, sometimes with sentimental text (both religious and secular) superimposed over the images; nostalgic socialist-­era pictures, fashion, and consumer goods; and extended (sometimes off-­color) jokes. Soon, I started receiving ­these as email forwards from the ward s­ ister. At Christmas and Easter, the s­ isters gave me gifts of choco­lates, handmade beeswax candles in seasonal shapes (e.g., a tree, a bunny), devotional and greeting cards, and books (e.g., poems by Czesław Miłosz, the Nobel-­prize winning poet, and Jan Twardowski, a priest and poet). Now, several years ­later, the books still smell faintly of sweet incense. One year at Christmas I received the same bag of gifts that the administration gave out to all the ­sisters, including scented toilet paper, maxi pads, and deodorant. On my birthday, they made an ołtarzyk, or l­ittle altar, for me, as they did for each other on their birthdays. Consisting of the same sorts of gifts, along with cut flowers, the display was set up on a t­ able in the corner of the room next to one of the large amaryllis plants. I gave similar gifts

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(e.g., choco­lates, flowers, stationery) in return, although I am not sure how much expectation of reciprocity t­ here was, since I was not bound by the local structures of work, church, or kinship. Th ­ ese kind, generous gifts w ­ ere the pro­cesses by which I was incorporated into the social life of the institution and they represented evidence of the efforts the staff made more broadly to create a warm, positive atmosphere amid sickness, sorrow, and the ever-­ present aura of death. Soon, my outward appearance—­specifically, my footwear—­also began to mark me as someone who belonged at the rehabilitation center. I was initially asked to purchase disposable shoe coverings for 1 PLN (or about .30 USD) like all visitors to the center. This is a common practice at hospitals and some museums. A ­ fter a few months of fieldwork, I was encouraged by the staff to leave a pair of shoes in the office as they do. For the duration of my time ­there, I left a pair of shoes in the rehab center office, which I donned ­after arriving. This distinction between footwear for inside and outside is quite practical in the winter, when boots drip with slush, salt, and dirt. Th ­ ese practices also serve to mark a boundary between the inside and outside of the institution. The delineation of t­ hese bound­aries, and traveling across them, are ways that relationships are created, maintained, and defined.7 The right side of the ground-­floor hallway has rooms for physical therapy and separate elevators for staff and patients. At the end of the corridor are the offices of the financial administrators and the siostra dyrektor. The entrance to the building, from a brick-­paved courtyard that wraps around to a small garden with cultivated flower beds and paths, leads ­toward a reception desk. To the right of the reception desk are the radiology technician’s office and the office where admission interviews are held. A ramp leads from ­behind the reception desk up to the elevated ground floor. On the left side is the stairwell, used only by the staff and visitors, with windowsills full of plants. Both staff and patients circulated among the ground floor and top three floors, but only staff w ­ ere pre­sent in the basement, where the kitchen, laundry, and cleaning facilities w ­ ere located. The basement was primarily composed of the kitchen and custodial workers, but the staff members whose offices ­were on the ground floor went down to the basement e­ very day to eat obiad (the main meal, served at midday) in the kitchen. ­Because I shared the office on the ground floor, my presence was expected at obiad with the staff. Indeed, if I was upstairs visiting with a patient, one of the doctors or the ward s­ ister would call the nurses’ station on each floor to locate me. If I

Beyond Activity • 75

did not appear in the kitchen within approximately ten minutes, I would be summoned again. Although I sometimes felt frustrated by the interruption of conversations with patients, I was also deeply grateful to the staff for including me in their mealtimes; along with giving me a place in their office, sharing obiad with the staff marked me as someone who belonged at the institution. Obiad cost 4 PLN (approximately 1.33 USD), for which I paid once a week or ­every other week, but no one was keeping track of ­whether I paid or not. Although it occurs during mid-­day or early after­noon, many Poles distinguish between the traditional obiad and the more con­temporary Western lunch (Polish: lunch). The fact that every­one at the rehabilitation center referred to obiad as such signaled both the form of the meal itself (two dishes, consisting first of a soup and then a main course of meat, potatoes, and vegetables) and the “traditional” orientation of many at the rehabilitation center. My friends in their twenties and thirties would use both obiad and lunch, sometimes without distinguishing between t­ hese two types of meals, but older ­people would almost always use obiad. In this way, food practices served as a marker of generational difference. At the rehabilitation center, the obiad always consisted of two dishes: first a soup (e.g., pea, pickle, or beet), followed by a main course, usually consisting of a meat dish (e.g., pork cutlet, pork stew with beans or vegetables, fried chicken), mashed or boiled potatoes, and a side of vegetables (­either cooked vegetables, most often beets or carrots, or surówki, meaning literally “­little raw t­ hings,” or vari­ous raw vegetable salads). A pitcher of fruit compote and juice was always on the ­table. Exceptions to ­these standard meals ­were notable, as on Fridays, when no meat would be served; instead, the main dish would be fish; kotlet jajeczny, a breaded cutlet made of chopped boiled eggs, onions, and herbs; potato pancakes, with kefir; or pasta with a sweet creamy strawberry sauce. Potato pancakes ­were especially beloved by the staff, and the quickness with which they must be served (they cool rapidly and have to be prepared in batches) lent the timing of obiad a certain urgency on t­ hose days. The staff and the patients all ate the same food, and w ­ ere generally satisfied with the high quality of the food itself. Located in the historic religious district in the center of Wrocław, the inside of the institution sharply contrasted with the world outside it, where tourists lazily wandered and nuns walked from convent to church to soup kitchen. The rehabilitation center bustled with its daily clinical and religious rhythms, marked by meals, changes of clothes and diapers, medi­cations,

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chapel ser­vices, and rehabilitation appointments. As mentioned above, many residents of this institution ­were deeply sad to be away from their kin; it was not uncommon for patients to break down crying. This was especially true for t­ hose who w ­ ere ­there temporarily, as I w ­ ill show ­later. Yet despite the pervasive sadness and hospital-­t ype setting, a sense of lightness and good cheer prevailed among the patients and staff. The staff who shared the office of the ward ­sister would make tea and coffee, and pour juice and ­water for each other throughout the day. The nurses and nurse’s aides would do the same in their stations. During my days at the center, I circulated among the ground-­floor office, patients’ rooms, and occupational therapy room. I would occasionally visit group physical therapy sessions and daily chapel or spend time chatting with the receptionist, but my locus of gravity in the institution was with patients and with staff in the ground-­ floor office. Some days I would spend more time in the ground-­floor office, whereas other days I would spend more time with the patients. I spent days shadowing the ward s­ ister and a nurse’s aide in order to try to see institutional life from their perspectives, and I conducted shorter interviews with other staff (psychiatrist, financial administrative staff).

Diapers and Feeding: The Repetitive Intimacy of Caring Relations To gain a new perspective on the rehabilitation center, ­after I had been ­there for almost six months, I asked the ward ­sister if I could shadow one of the nurses or nurse’s aides for a day. From my regular location with e­ ither the patients or the head medical staff, the nurses and nurse’s aides ­were rather inaccessible. From a patient’s room, I would see them bringing medicines, responding to patient calls, or moving quickly through the hallways; when sitting in the ground-­floor office, I would occasionally observe a nurse or nurse’s aide come in to discuss a patient. Their duties w ­ ere elsewhere. A ­ fter discussing with the two staff doctors who would be best for me to observe, the ward ­sister indicated that I could follow one of the more experienced nurse’s aides, pani Kasia, for a day. I had seen pani Kasia during my time ­there, but as with the other nurse’s aides and nurses, we had not developed more than a polite superficial relationship. The ward ­sister officially introduced me to pani Kasia, who was surprised that I wanted to observe her, and we settled on a date in late April.8

Beyond Activity • 77

On the agreed-­upon date, I arrived at the rehabilitation center a c­ ouple of hours ­earlier than usual so I could be t­ here when pani Kasia’s twelve-­hour shift started at 7:00 a.m. I was struck by the brightness of the early morning sunlight as I walked around a shopping center built in 2001, through a park, and across the Odra River on my way to the center. A ­ fter placing my purse in the ground-­floor office, I went upstairs to the second floor to meet pani Kasia, and we immediately went to a patient’s room to help a w ­ oman use the toilet. Pani Kasia lifted the w ­ oman off her wheelchair, onto the high toilet seat, and closed the door. Pani Kasia walked across the room to where the w ­ oman had been sleeping, made the bed, folding the blanket just so on the side of the bed, and placed some dirty clothes into a bag. When pani Kasia had finished straightening the bed, she asked the patient, pani Ewelina, if she had finished. When pani Ewelina remarked that she had, pani Kasia went in to flush the toilet and clean her, saying at the end, “You have a clean bottom,” and pani Ewelina thanked her.9 Taking a sponge from pani Ewelina’s own plastic basket of personal care products and wetting it, pani Kasia gave Ewelina a sponge bath and then wrapped her in a towel, saying “so you w ­ on’t freeze [formal address]” and calling her “kochanie” (darling).10 As pani Kasia helped pani Ewelina into her diapers, pani Ewelina remarked, “Just like a small child.”11 Pani Kasia selected a pair of thick tights for pani Ewelina to wear and helped her into them. Pani Kasia then went to awaken pani Ewelina’s two roommates, inquiring about the cleanliness of a diaper and then changing it, before giving that w ­ oman, pani Teresa, a sponge bath in her bed. A ­ fter drying off pani Teresa, pani Kasia applied a thick, oily-­ looking white cream to pani Teresa’s bottom. Noticing a new deodorant on her bedside cart, pani Kasia sprayed it, saying, “It smells beautiful.”12 The flowery odor was thick and sweet, almost cloyingly artificial. Pani Kasia chose a sweater and pants from pani Teresa’s wardrobe and helped her into her clothes. Pani Kasia then returned to the third roommate, pani Miecia, who was still dozing, and succeeded in waking her up. A ­ fter pani Kasia took pani Miecia to the bathroom, she straightened up her bed, just as she had pani Ewelina’s and pani Teresa’s. A cleaning lady ­stopped by with her supplies to clean the bathroom, inquiring, “Who is sitting ­here?” Pani Miecia responded, “Just a l­ ittle longer.”13 The cleaning lady left with her t­ hings. Pani Kasia brushed pani Teresa’s hair, saying, “So t­ here ­won’t be a tuft of hair sticking out.”14 Pani Kasia then called in to the bathroom to pani Miecia, saying, “Have you pooped [informal address] or not? Have you managed

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[formal address] or not?”15 Pani Ewelina remarked that she did not like wearing her tights, but pani Kasia told her she could not find another pair of pants. Not hearing a response, pani Kasia went into the bathroom to check on pani Miecia, saying, “Clean bottom. W ­ ere you d­ oing something? [informal address].”16 Halting her cleaning, pani Kasia helped pani Miecia into her diaper in the bathroom, and then moved into the bedroom, asking pani Miecia which sweater she would rather wear, “crewneck or turtleneck?”17 Pani Kasia demonstrated how best to put on pani Miecia’s sweater, first inserting the arm that is in pain, since it is easier to wiggle the healthy arm into the second sleeve. In the next room down the hallway, pani Kasia began to dress pani Alicja, a patient whom I knew well. As pani Kasia was helping pani Alicja out of her pajamas and into her characteristic bright red sweater, pani Alicja laughed as she said, “Boobs like tripe,” and then sighed, saying “old age is no joy,” a Polish idiomatic phrase.18 The first part of this morning routine took over an hour. Pani Kasia was in near-­constant motion, moving ­women into and out of wheelchairs, onto and off toilets, in and out of clothes. The patients w ­ ere in motion too, as much as they ­were able, though this motion was punctuated by stillness when pani Kasia was with ­others. This was the first time I had met ­these three ­women, although I never learned their diagnoses. It seemed as if pani Miecia had had a stroke, since one side of her body moved less well than the other, and pani Ewelina had prob­lems with her legs. All the w ­ omen w ­ ere in wheelchairs, though pani Teresa could stand on her own.19 In t­ hese moments, it was not necessary to articulate what was wrong, for as the sole nurse’s aide on the floor, pani Kasia knew t­ hese ­women and their bodies. ­A fter waking and dressing another room of patients, pani Kasia went to feed two bedridden ­women who could not feed themselves. The first ­woman, pani Ola, would only open her mouth when Pani Kasia said, “Open [your] mouth” or “­We’re opening [our] mouth”; pani Ola would repeat ­after Pani Kasia and open her mouth.20 Pani Kasia would then say, “Say ‘aaaaa,’ ” pani Ola would say “aaaaa,” necessarily keeping her mouth open, and Pani Kasia would place a spoonful of yogurt in her mouth. Pani Kasia explained that you have to find a dif­fer­ent way to feed each person. Pani Kasia and pani Ola repeated this sequence with e­ very bite, so that when we left the room, the words “open your mouth” w ­ ere echoing in my head like a refrain. In the next room across the hallway, Pani Kasia fed the second patient who could not feed herself, an almost impossibly thin w ­ oman made of skin and bones, who was s­ ilent throughout. This w ­ oman’s roommate, also bedridden but

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able to feed herself, was weeping and repeating “nu nu nu nu nu nu” over and over. Pani Kasia attributed her tears to the inability to express herself due to a stroke that left her unable to speak. With all patients ready for the day, pani Kasia and I sat down in the dyżurka with the floor nurse, pani Maria, for a breakfast of bread, ham, cheese, and instant coffee. When we had finished, pani Kasia and I w ­ ere enlisted by the ward s­ ister to clean the wheelchairs of the patients on the third floor. The handyman for the center brought the chairs down to the basement level, the ward ­sister hosed down the chairs, pani Kasia and I dried them, and the handyman brought them back up. Pani Kasia then went back up to the floor, while I finished the drying. I went back up to the second floor, but was soon called down for lunch with the ward ­sister, who expressed surprise that I was still shadowing pani Kasia; she had expected the work to be too difficult for me, and for me to return to the safe haven of the office. “Horrible, ­isn’t it?” she said, referring to the work of changing diapers and feeding.21 The morning’s routine of changing diapers, moving patients from bed to wheelchair to toilet to wheelchair, and feeding t­ hose who needed to be fed, was repeated in the after­noon, in reverse, beginning around 4:00 p.m. and ending around 6:30 p.m. This was a long, tiring day full of repetitive, difficult physical tasks: moving parts of bodies that w ­ ere in pain, turning patients to prevent bedsores, changing diapers that sometimes even became soiled during the changing pro­cess. Th ­ ere ­were intense and often unpleasant odors. Pani Kasia was not paid well for her work; several staff I knew at the center would work extra hours to make ends meet. Despite t­ hese long hours and low pay, pani Kasia expressed a satisfaction in her job that came from helping ­others. She took pride in being able to connect with patients that o­ thers might dismiss. In fact, it was exactly the repetitive nature of her work that allowed her to connect to patients, to know the best way to put on someone’s sweater or to encourage someone to eat. In ­these repeated cyclical pro­cesses of maintaining and renewing bodies—of fastidiously making up a bed when it would be undone in only a few hours, of changing diapers even as they ­were being soiled, of styling hair that would soon be matted on a pillow—­pani Kasia and her patients w ­ ere also forming relationships of care with one another. ­There ­were indeed moments of frustration, sadness, shame, and pain, but ­there w ­ ere also moments of connection, empathy, tenderness, and humor. Many interactions ­were about suffering, but some ­were equally about hope. I point this out not to minimize the very real suffering that t­ hese patients

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endured or to defend the difficult working conditions of medical personnel in Poland, but rather to highlight the moments of intimacy in which patients and staff engage. Such intimacy can be difficult or disgusting, but it can also be personal and constitutive. Th ­ ese older p­ eople ­were not being taken care of by their families, but they ­were not abandoned ­either. Patients became part of the small-­scale sociality and daily rhythms of the institution. Indeed, this rehabilitation center was a site for the production of intimate, small-­scale relations, made pos­si­ble through a cyclical temporality.

Relations at a Social Welfare Home: Spatiotemporal Aspects of Isolation Unlike the rehabilitation center, the Social Welfare Home in Wrocław is intended for long-­term care. The p­ eople who live t­ here are not pacjenci (patients) but mieszkańcy (residents), as the managing nurse quickly corrected me. This designation is meant to distinguish the institution from places like the rehabilitation center and hospitals, where p­ eople are undoubtedly patients. Rather, at the Social Welfare Home, ­people are supposed to live. However, this place is clearly not an ideal or normative home. Given both the permanent and less-­medicalized nature of this institution when compared with the rehabilitation center, I expected this institution to feel more like a home and for p­ eople to have closer social ties and have a sense of community. Rather, the residents ­were more isolated than in the rehabilitation center. With flat-­screen tele­vi­sions in each room and almost every­ one with l­ imited mobility, p­ eople tended to stay in their rooms. Although they had the choice between taking meals in their rooms or communal dining rooms on their floor, most every­one chose to eat alone in their rooms. The institution is located on the outskirts of the city, amid construction-­ supply companies, a com­pany selling gravestones, and newer housing developments. Residents and staff described the location as calm, quiet, and surrounded by green. A large yard bordered the building on three sides, with patches and tufts of grass mostly covering the dirt. One bus line ends about a half mile from the institution, and another bus line stops about a half mile away in the other direction. The building is large, housing over two hundred residents on three floors of individual or shared rooms, which are arranged in three hallways that form the shape of the letter H. Most ­people have individual rooms with shared entranceways and bathrooms, or one

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roommate and a shared bathroom. Th ­ ere are some rooms, however, in which three or four p­ eople live; formerly, up to six p­ eople shared a room. Built in 1981, by 2008 the building was showing its age. Made of gray slab concrete painted in patches of dull blue, it very much looked the part of a structure built and maintained during socialism. During my fieldwork, the building was undergoing interior renovation for the first time since it had been built. Half the renovation was completed, but the other half was empty for months—­those residents had been moved to a hospital in Wrocław—as they completed the renovations. The front entranceway, located in the unrenovated section, had a brown vinyl sofa, a ­table, and a pay phone. A fish tank held a dozen small, brightly colored fish that darted around. Several men would often be sitting in the lobby when I arrived; they rarely talked to each other, but occasionally flipped through a magazine, did a crossword puzzle, or dozed. From time to time, someone would go outside to smoke a cigarette. The long hallway off the lobby would normally be full of residents, but instead was empty, giving the building a ghostly feel. The other long hallway of residents’ rooms had already been renovated. The paint was fresh, in con­temporary warm shades of peach and ocher. Purple handrails about waist-­high ran along all the hallways. Bulletin boards hung on the wall, on which w ­ ere posted weekly menus, vari­ous staff hours, seasonal crafts made by residents, and nature images cut from magazines and calendars. In the basement was a small general store, a hair salon, and a recreational room for terapia zajęciowa. Greenery and plants filled the win­dows. The chapel was u­ nder renovation in 2009 and not in operation, but on my return in 2012 I saw the newly renovated space. Centrally located on the ground floor just off the lobby, the chapel seats around twenty p­ eople, with empty space next to the rows of chairs for p­ eople in wheelchairs. A portrait of Jesus, painted by a resident who had advanced multiple sclerosis and held the paintbrush with his teeth, hung near the entrance. As at the rehabilitation center, patients had to contribute 70 ­percent of their pension to stay in the institution, and if this 70 ­percent was less than 800 PLN (about 260 USD in 2008–2009) per month, they had to supplement it to that amount. I interviewed ten ­people at this home, three men and seven ­women, ranging in age from mid-­fifties to late seventies. Many ­people had lived in the institution for de­cades, since its very beginning. Some staff had also worked t­ here for de­cades, and one nurse told me that the ­children of some staff referred to residents by kinship terms. Other staff

82  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

FIG. 3.4  ​Painting of Jesus made by a resident of the Social Welfare Home, Wrocław

boasted that residents went on field trips, citing annual trips to the zoo, botanical gardens, and rynek (market square; the focal point of downtown Wrocław, like many other Polish cities and towns). In general, it was difficult to conduct interviews with administrative staff, as they w ­ ere often extremely busy with bureaucratic m ­ atters (e.g., preparations for state health ser­vice inspections). I interviewed the staff psychologist and pedagogue and had informal conversations with nurses and the kaowiec (kaowiec is shorthand for instruktor kulturalno-­oświatowy, or cultural-­educational instructor, a common position during state socialism).

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Four types of Social Welfare Home are run by the government in Wrocław: for the chronically physically ill, for the mentally ill, for older p­ eople (dla osób w podeszłym wieku, or for ­people of advanced age), and for daytime stays. Despite ­these clear administrative distinctions between categories, in practice many p­ eople fell into more than one category (e.g., one person can be both physically and mentally ill). Indeed, at this Social Welfare Home, staff confirmed that certainly some ­people ­there had m ­ ental illness as well as physical disabilities. Decisions about admitting p­ eople to the institutions are made at the level of city government (Miejskie Centrum Usług Socjalnych, MCUS, or Municipal Social Ser­vices Center), rather than at the institutions themselves. However, one staff member said that older ­people cannot be admitted to the institution for the el­derly if they already have health prob­lems. This distinction between healthy and sick old ­people becomes muddled, however, as t­ hose who fall ill a­ fter they are admitted are not moved to a dif­fer­ent institution. In other words, the neat categories defined by the state are much messier in practice.22 Two meaningful categories of difference emerged based on the residents’ histories of illness: t­ hose who had been ill since childhood (e.g., polio, ce­re­bral palsy) and lived most of their lives in institutions, and ­those who developed health prob­lems ­later in life (e.g., multiple sclerosis, stroke, complications from diabetes). Generally, residents ­were quite poor; some ­were homeless before coming to the Social Welfare Home. A local charity, Towarzystwo Pomocy im. św. Alberta (St. ­Brother Albert’s Aid Society), often referred many of the formerly homeless to the Social Welfare Home. Among this group and other residents, both residents and staff complained to me that many p­ eople had prob­lems with alcohol abuse. One staff member estimated that as many as one-­third of the residents ­were alcoholics. Although alcohol was not officially permitted, residents could leave the premises at any time, which made it pos­si­ble for them to purchase alcohol on their own. Some also shared that staff would purchase alcohol for residents. Alcohol seemed to be an open secret; residents who drank would throw empty b­ ottles out the win­dows of their rooms, leaving a pile of discarded b­ ottles and cans for all to see in the common m ­ iddle courtyard. As at the rehabilitation center, I was welcomed by the staff and given a space to store my purse and write notes; however, unlike the shared office in the rehabilitation center, I had this room all to myself. It was a spare room that was sometimes used as a guest room if residents had ­family visiting overnight, although to my knowledge it was never used for this purpose during

84  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

the five months I was ­there. Located in the short connecting hallway across from a rarely used sitting room, this space felt more isolating than connecting. Residents and staff occasionally passed through the hallway and looked in, sometimes with curiosity, but kept moving on their way. In short, this space proved to be more of a hindrance than a help in meeting residents. This is not the fault of the staff, who ­were unfailingly generous and kind. Rather, I see the institution itself as somehow promoting isolation and preventing integration into life t­ here. The methodological difficulties that I faced at this institution ­were not due to the actions of any individuals, but rather to the combined effects of spatiotemporal institutional ­factors. Despite methodological difficulties, residents’ and staff members’ complaints about alcoholism, and observations of physical isolation and loneliness, many ­people with whom I spoke seemed content with their lives at this institution, perhaps b­ ecause they had such difficulties in their lives before arriving ­here. One ­woman commented that she was happy to have three full meals a day, each dif­fer­ent from the previous one and almost e­ very meal containing meat, since she could never afford such a diet on her own. Another ­woman who had ce­re­bral palsy talked about the shame she brought on her ­family when she was a teenager, citing her stepfather’s regular practice of hiding her ­behind a closed door when guests came to visit. One man told me that he had difficulties finding a place to live, moving from workers’ ­hotels to shelters, and was glad to have a stable residence. He liked all the food at the institution, he said, and had gained weight since arriving. For p­ eople with such precarious and difficult pasts, life at this institution provided stability and relief. However, this satisfaction was not uniform: one w ­ oman complained about the quantity of food, saying that if her ­family did not supplement it she would go hungry. Another w ­ oman in a wheelchair told me that the renovations improved life at the institution for t­ hose who could walk, but not for ­those in wheelchairs, as the bars on the walls ­were at the wrong height. One ­woman said she needed a new brace to stop a pain in her knee, but that this cost was not reimbursed. And like many p­ eople in the rehabilitation center, two w ­ omen roommates who had each had strokes and w ­ ere then bedridden ­were deeply upset about being in this institution, away from ­family. If she had only had c­ hildren, one ­woman said, ­things would be dif­fer­ ent and someone would care for her. But she had only a niece, and she could not rely on her for such care in the same way. An aunt is not a m ­ other, she said (cf. Cohen 1998, 119). She clutched my arm or hand as we spoke, embodying

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the loneliness and desire for h ­ uman contact about which she spoke. Isolation was a pervasive prob­lem. Indeed, given my expectation that residents of this institution would have close social ties b­ ecause of the institution’s permanent nature, it was surprising to learn that most ­people did not have close friends ­here and to hear them describe the other residents very negatively. Residents described being unable to trust other residents, and depicted some as generally “niedobry” (bad). Although permanence and imagining f­ utures can be helpful in creating moral personhood, it is not the sole f­ actor. Rather, the ability to imagine one’s life extending into the f­ uture in a place that is meaningful, where one can create or maintain social relations, allows p­ eople to achieve moral personhood. It is this combination of temporality, spatiality, and social relations through which moral personhood can endure. In the next section, I discuss the case of a ­couple who met and married at the Social Welfare Home. Their relationship and love for each other had transformed their lives, creating possibilities for personhood that did not exist when they first moved to the institution. Particularly impor­tant to creating such possibilities for personhood is the ability to both give and receive care. Through helping each other, through actions that are directed ­toward another, each person becomes part of a generative sociality.

The Reciprocity of Care: Creating Relatedness at a Social Welfare Home On summer days when the weather was warm, a handful of ­people would congregate outdoors, sitting just outside the front entrance on the landing, or sometimes farther down the ramp off to the side. They would chat or sit quietly, enjoying the sun. It was h ­ ere that I often saw pani Władysława and pan Bogusław, who would sometimes play with a local cat that wandered by. Pan Bogusław was in his late sixties and pani Władzia (nickname for “Władysława”) in her early seventies. A former truck driver, Bogusław came to the Social Welfare Home a­ fter a severe stroke rendered his left side mostly para­lyzed. His wife left him, and needing full-­time care, he applied for and quickly received a place in the Social Welfare Home, thanks to personal connections. Now able to walk with the assistance of a walker and to speak intelligibly, pan Bogusław prided himself on being able to assist pani Władysława when she needed his help, though at times she would help him. Pani Władysława, a widowed former accountant, had diabetes that affected

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her vision. Her eyesight varied from day to day, and at times she was fully reliant on pan Bogusław for help around their room. I had first met the c­ ouple at m ­ usic therapy sessions e­ arlier in the summer. Six ­people and the staff member leading the group sang along with ­music playing on a portable stereo; then the staff member played the same tune on his guitar and the group would provide the melody and lyr­ics. The ­music included folk songs (e.g., “Hej sokoły, My Cyganie”) from the World War I era (e.g., “Wojenko, wojenko”) and World War II era (e.g., “Serce w plecaku”) that I came to know well from singing with vari­ous groups of older ­people during my fieldwork (Adrjański 1973). During the second session that I attended, a­ fter ­people grew tired of singing and the group started to disperse, pani Władzia began asking questions that I had grown to expect: ­whether it is r­ eally true that Americans are always so happy in comparison with Poles; comments about Polish gościnność (hospitality); ­whether I had Polish heritage and if not, what attracted me to Poland; what American cities are like. About a week ­later, I saw pani Władzia on the landing outside. ­A fter a brief chat about the weather, she invited me to have coffee in her room. A ­ fter getting her husband’s attention by saying “Bogusiu” (the vocative form of “Boguś,” an affectionate diminutive for Bogusław), pan Bogusław led the way to their room on the third floor.23 Although they ­were engaged, not married, pan Bogusław and pani Władzia already shared a room. (The wedding was planned for ­after the renovations ­were finished so that the institution could publicize both the renovations and the wedding.) They ­were the only ­couple who lived together at the Social Welfare Home. Over the preceding three years, they got to know each other ­because pan Bogusław would help pani Władzia move around as she was recovering from operations on her eyes. Their room was more decorated than most o­ thers at the institution and had a few shelves holding artificial flowers, photos of themselves, photos of Pope John Paul II, and other trinkets. The ­table on which they ate had vinyl placemats, salt and pepper shakers, and a ­bottle of seasoning sauce for soups. They ­were also the only ­couple allowed to have a cat. They followed local, national, and international politics on TV, unlike some other residents, who said that politics was irrelevant to their lives. As if to demonstrate her point about the hospitality of Poles, that day pani Władzia asked for an extra meal for me from the staff when their obiad was delivered. (This was the only occasion that I would eat obiad at the institution; the rest of the time I ate snacks that I brought with me in my purse.)

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Despite this hospitality and their friendliness with me and the staff, pani Władzia and pan Bogusław did not act this way with their fellow residents, describing them as untrustworthy and only looking out for themselves. “If he could, one would drown the other in a spoonful of ­water,” pani Władzia said.24 They had a few close friends (przyjaciele) at the Social Welfare Home, but learned through experience not to trust p­ eople ­there. A ­ fter repeatedly being too generous (e.g., by lending p­ eople parę groszy [a few cents], buying cigarettes for someone), pani Władzia felt that her kindness was being taken advantage of and that ­people w ­ ere mocking her ­behind her back. Other residents w ­ ere jealous of them, they agreed, since they w ­ ere the only ones living together. In fact, they attributed this untrustworthiness to Poles in general, claiming that foreigners are justified in having poor perceptions of Poles. Pani Władzia attributed this to the socialist era, during which “zawsze musieli kombinować” ([­people] always had to [figure something out]).25 Referring to shortages of building materials during socialist times, pani Władzia explained that p­ eople would take materials from their workplace to use at home. This logic still applied; she gave the example that if I accidentally left my cell phone somewhere at the institution, it would surely dis­appear. Preferring their own com­pany to that of other residents, pani Władysława and pan Bogusław spent their days together, taking care of their cat and conversing with the staff when the staff had time. The pair boasted of their comfortable conditions at the Social Welfare Home, where they could eat three full meals daily and w ­ ere thrilled to have found each other and have someone with whom to share their days and nights. They described their lives at the institution before they met each other as bleak, lonely, and sometimes even filled with suicidal thoughts. But since they had been together, it had transformed their lives, they said. As was common throughout our conversations, pani Władzia tended to speak for both of them about this topic, and pan Bogusław interjected agreements, clarifications, or occasional brief stories of his own. On the occasions when he did speak of their relationship, his voice would become so choked with emotion that he could barely speak. By way of explaining what kept their relationship together, pani Władzia said, “I love him more than life itself . . . ​mm, more than life itself. R ­ eally. That is, I have a kind of hierarchy: God, Boguś, and the cat.”26 They often declared their love for one another, and pani Władzia described the plea­sure they each took in helping each other. “We need each other. One of us helps the other, according to our capabilities. We live together in love,

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in harmony, like two gray doves.”27 For instance, as they walked and wheeled through the hallways together, she would push his wheelchair while he would give her directions. Or, when making coffee, pani Władzia would carefully mea­sure out a spoonful of instant coffee into a gray glass mug, filling the electric teakettle with ­water from the bathroom sink, and putting it on the base to boil; once the k­ ettle was ready, pan Bogusław removed it from the stand, put it in the basket of his walker, pushed it over to the t­ able, and poured the boiling w ­ ater into the mugs, since pani Władzia might spill it. Rather than the pride in in­de­pen­dent action and ability prized at the Universities of the Third Age, pani Władysława and pan Bogusław created and maintained moral personhood through their abilities and desires to help each other. Though each suffered greatly before their move to long-­term care, the two w ­ ere content to live in an institution with material comforts better than they could afford themselves and to have found a trustworthy partner in a society they regarded as full of untrustworthy p­ eople. The hospitality that pani Władzia and pan Bogusław showed was remarkable, especially at the Social Welfare Home, but not wholly unusual in Poland; as a foreigner and a guest, I was often the recipient of generosity. What was far more noticeable was their kindness t­ oward each other. In falling in love, they overcame physical and affective barriers to friendship at the state-­run institution, creating intimate bonds of trust that extended only to their small, mostly closed circle. The significance of ­these relations takes shape when we analyze analyzing their spatiotemporal features. The ­couple’s domestic activities (e.g., jointly preparing snacks, caring for the cat) made the shared room feel like home. Their relations focused on the pre­sent rather than the past.28 Th ­ ese present-­focused kin relations constituted the grounds on which they could build a safe, known, and predictable f­ uture together.

Sustaining Moral Personhood: The Significance of Spatiotemporal Scales In this chapter, I have told the stories of several p­ eople who seem to be excluded from cultural norms of active aging, the increasingly popu­lar rhe­ toric and discourse surrounding old age that is linked to the Eu­ro­pean Union, and aktywność, a Polish philosophy of life itself in old age. This marginalized status would seem to threaten the moral personhood of residents

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of institutional care. And indeed, with its emphasis on health, in­de­pen­dence, and physical activity, neither of ­these contexts fits within models of active aging. Furthermore, each of t­ hese contexts is outside ideals of aktywność, with its focus on a sociality beyond the domestic sphere. Yet, rather than the total marginalization that such discourse implies, the p­ eople described ­here live in worlds that meet their needs in the pre­sent and are in accord with their values. Moral personhood ­here, rather than exemplifying active age-­defying se­niors, exists in a form that is more evidently pragmatic and relational. Predictability is valued more than exploration. Through repeated, cyclical practices of care, p­ eople maintain moral personhood. Moreover, acts of caregiving can even strengthen moral personhood. The nurse’s aides si­mul­ta­neously change diapers, crack jokes, and personalize their care to the needs of each patient. Pan Bogusław and pani Władzia take care of each other through daily embodied, emotional practices. Supported by ­these intimate, small-­scale acts of caregiving, personhood can then expand to encompass more distant moral imaginaries.29 In a place where they can mutually help each other, pan Bogusław and pani Władzia can imagine a safe, trustworthy, shared ­future against the isolation of an untrustworthy society. ­These spatiotemporal worlds are marked by an intersection of small-­scale, cyclical relations with expansive, knowable ­futures and places. This differs from the spatiotemporal world of active aging, which is marked by exploration and the unknown on both small and large scales. It is true that ­these persons are exceptional, and that many ­people at each institution strug­g led much more than t­hese individuals. Indeed, pan Bogusław and pani Władzia ­were among the most favored patients and residents by staff, volunteers, and other patients and residents, for their good humor and conversational skill. Prob­ably for the same reason, they ­were also the ­people with whom I spent the most time as an ethnographer. Yet, despite their exceptional status, the experiences of t­ hese individuals constitute an impor­tant challenge to the ideals of active aging. Rather than revealing a world full of individuals taking responsibility for their own health and well-­ being, t­ hese case studies show that dif­fer­ent forms of moral personhood are pos­si­ble, in which receiving care can be both valued and constitutive of relatedness. Significantly, all the p­ eople I have described are deeply Catholic, and in Poland, Catholic imagery and rhe­toric depicts suffering and receiving care in old age as exemplifying the value of ­human life in all stages.30 However, it is indeed true that many equally devout Catholics lived less

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contentedly in ­these institutions. The logic of in­de­pen­dence in active aging can fall apart in the face of disability, and the satisfaction in receiving good care can fall apart in the face of isolation from kin and bodily suffering. In this chapter, I have demonstrated that intimate relations of care in institutional life shape moral personhood and that ­these relations have spatiotemporal features that are smaller in scale than the international frame of active aging. Long-­term residence offered opportunities to create enduring relations with staff and fellow residents, making it pos­si­ble to imagine a ­future. Dif­fer­ent physical conditions affected residents across ­these institutions; some became quickly disabled through a stroke or surgery, and ­others had been living with debility since childhood or experiencing a progression of debility across the life course. ­These dif­f er­ent ways of coming to live with debility ­shaped how ­people understood their experiences in institutional care. The demands of caring for aging, failing, or recovering bodies structured the days at both centers, making the center itself the most meaningful spatial scale. Th ­ ese contexts of care make it clear that the ideal of in­de­pen­dence in late life is false in practice, which makes it pos­si­ble for other ideals such as interde­pen­dency to be embraced—or if not embraced, endured and made lighter by humor.31 Neither active aging nor aktywność was pos­si­ble for t­ hese older Poles, but aspects of domestic life emerged in the routines of everyday life, thus recalling ele­ments of aktywność and helping to sustain moral personhood. This chapter has demonstrated how the temporal and spatial aspects of institutional care can shape relatedness for older Poles. For anthropologists, this analy­sis suggests a reconsideration of the study of personhood in explic­ itly temporal and spatial terms. ­Because horizons and memories, in addition to rhythms and routines, prove useful for thinking about who can be included or excluded from full personhood in old age, I extend this investigation of temporalities of care in chapter 4 by taking a closer look at how spatiotemporal links to the Polish nation emerged in the narrative practices of older adults in multiple contexts.

4

Remembering the Polish Nation Connections across Third and Fourth Ages As demonstrated in the introduction, older Poles understand their own life experiences as intimately connected to national history and frequently weave together personal stories and national narratives. A particularly striking example of reading the personal through the national was offered by pan Zbigniew, an older man who was a patient at the rehabilitation center in Wrocław.1 A retired engineer and recent widower, pan Zbigniew was recovering a­ fter an operation left him unable to take care of himself. Without any kin at home since his wife had died, the rehabilitation center was the best choice. Although he was glad to talk, he was quite shy and insisted that he did not have anything in­ter­est­ing to say. To overcome this reticence, I asked if he could begin by telling me a bit about his biography—­for instance, where he was born. He answered that he was born near Kraków before the war. Almost an hour l­ater, he ended his story with some of the most personal details of our conversation: his wife had passed away three months ­earlier, and he was grieving. “It was a terrible blow,” he whispered.2 Soon

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a­ fter this revelation, he asked if he could rest; he was visibly tired and laid his head back on the pillow. Yet, except for framing his story with his birth and his wife’s death, he spoke mostly about the history of Poland in the twentieth c­ entury, including the difficulty of the war­time years and the oppression he and his f­ amily felt during socialist times.3 He did mention some kin—­siblings who had passed away, a nephew who had made bad financial decisions, his son and grand­son who had recently visited him at the center—­but the emotional gravity of his story lay in his telling of national history and especially his wife’s death. What he called his “życiorys” (life story; literally “life-­outline”) was punctuated by geopo­liti­cal transfers of power, not marriages, births, and graduations. I l­ater realized that I had not learned the professions of his c­ hildren, why or when he had moved from Kraków to Wrocław, or other seemingly basic personal details (e.g., information about his health, past employment, or education). B ­ ecause he was so fatigued by our conversation, I could not learn more that day, and he was discharged soon a­ fter our conversation.4 More could be added ­here—­for instance, perhaps older Poles felt a need to teach a young American interviewer about Polish history. It is also pos­ si­ble that pan Zbigniew’s grief was too painful for him to bear, thus leading him to avoid the details of his life in f­ avor of more impersonal topics, but this does not seem likely, given both his openness and his intertwining of po­liti­cal history and personal lives. Or perhaps this was his way of keeping me at a distance in the pro­cess of building rapport, since we ­were just getting to know each other. However, given the consistency with which I heard such stories from ­others whom I came to know very well over a period of many months, I see pan Zbigniew’s story as part of a larger pattern of meaningful and intimate connections that older Poles make between their personal lives and Polish national history. Close analy­sis of such ethnographic data elucidates the nature of the links between personal lives and national narratives. Chapter 3 demonstrated how moral personhood could be sustained in institutional care through small-­scale, cyclical relations that make imaginable expansive, knowable ­futures. This chapter explores how narrative links between individual and national levels that incorporate key historical and geographic references can create relatedness, moral personhood, and generational continuity. Through t­ hese embodied stories, older Poles attempt to place themselves within a spatiotemporally coherent and meaningful set of social relations, including relatives, roommates, caregivers, and fellow

Remembering the Polish Nation • 93

citizens. ­These personal and national tales are more than recapitulations of the narrative of Poland as the Christ of nations, since for ­those who tell ­these stories, suffering is not redemptive (see the introduction for a discussion of this mythical narrative). Rather, through t­ hese stories of suffering p­ eople are forging meaningful connections with ­others. In other words, it is ­these connections, rather than through suffering for the sake of redemption, that help ­people to create moral personhood. This chapter shows how t­ hese links are key to creating or sustaining moral personhood in this population. Understanding how older Poles can maintain personhood is impor­tant to combating popu­lar negative ste­reo­types of elders as well as presenting possibilities for older Poles themselves to cope with such a loss of personhood. As older Poles narrated their lives, they made explicit or implicit links to dif­fer­ent temporalities that expanded the temporal and spatial dimensions of their personhood, which had lessened through retirement, discrimination, illness, or a loss of kin ties.5 Analyzing how ­people talk about their own lives in relation to national history demonstrates that older Poles can restore moral personhood through spatiotemporal scaling practices. ­These personal-­national narratives are a fundamental practice through which memory, relatedness, and moral personhood are cocreated. Remembering is a pro­cess that is fundamentally interpersonal and social, and can thus be seen as constitutive of kinship itself (Lambek 1996, 2007; Pine 2007). By exploring the spatiotemporal contours of ­these practices of remembering, and the types of pasts, pre­sents, and f­ utures they suggest, the analy­sis in this chapter builds on insights from the anthropology of kinship and memory (Carsten 2007b) to show the stakes of what is remembered (and what is elided) for both older Poles themselves and the social relations of which they are a part. As t­ hese remembrances shape older Poles’ understandings of themselves and their kin, they also create national identity (Jakubowska 2012; Pine 2007). This spatiotemporal approach holds promise for more complex understandings of moral personhood in late life by showing how large-­ scale sociopo­liti­cal transformations come to ­matter. This approach also sheds light on understandings of con­temporary Poland and eastern Eu­rope, where multiple large-­scale transformations have differently s­haped generational experiences and imaginations (Haukanes and Pine 2005; Magee 2019; Pozniak 2014; Rausing 2004; Yurchak 2006). Exploring how the nation comes to ­matter to the oldest generations can show the complex experiential and imaginative potential of practices of remembrances. In turn, this can

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reveal nuanced understandings of national pasts, pre­sents, and ­futures that go beyond common understandings of national mythologies. In this chapter, I focus on stories told to me by two p­ eople from the rehabilitation center and two ­people whom I met through the University of the Third Age in Wrocław. In the first example, I analyze an exchange with pani Wanda, an older ­woman at the rehabilitation center who aimed to teach me about Polish history. In so d­ oing, she was trying to teach me not mere facts, but a morally inflected history that valued the interwar Polish nation-­state and employed the trope of the suffering nation. In the second example, I analyze two excerpts from a conversation with pani Alicja, another w ­ oman at the rehabilitation center (introduced in chapter 3 as she was assisted in getting dressed in the morning), in which her laments about the current suffering of the Polish nation ­were a means of indexing personal trou­bles and creating relatedness. She compared her own bodily and economic suffering to better times during socialism when she was a farmer; her stories focused on food and natu­ral resources. In the third case, I analyze two parts of a conversation with pani Cecylia, an older ­woman whom I met through the University of the Third Age, who spun long, complex stories of individual and national suffering that w ­ ere at once mystifying and predictable in the connections she made across times and places. She compared the current influx of foreign capital and the emigration of young Poles abroad to the oppression of the partitions, World War II, and state socialism. Her Galician roots and noble ancestry grounded her moral personhood in Poland, such that even living a successful life abroad could never be complete. In the fourth and final example, I analyze a story about Wigilia (Christmas Eve) in Siberia written by pan Florian as part of a class at the University of Third Age. In narrating his experience of deportation, privation, and comfort, pan Florian described companionship with fellow Poles through embodied moments of eating, crying, and praying. Connections between person and place emerge as the moral centers of all t­ hese stories. In par­tic­ u­lar, it is the place of the Polish nation during a par­tic­u ­lar period—­the romanticized pre–­World War II eras—­that mattered most for creating relatedness and personhood. The temporal scales that older Poles referenced in ­these stories varied. The time of partitions from the late eigh­teenth to the early twentieth ­century was seen as a time of moral patriotic strug­gle in the face of oppression, while interwar Poland was seen as unequivocally good. World War II was seen as

Remembering the Polish Nation • 95

another time of g­ reat strug­gle but g­ reat patriotism, while state socialism was seen as a deeply conflicted time: negatively viewed from the perspective of interwar in­de­pen­dence and postsocialist freedoms, but positively viewed from the perspective of postsocialist difficulties. Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) membership was also fraught, presenting both increased opportunities and dangers for older Poles and their kin. In other words, it was post–­World War II Poland that was morally fraught. For ­these older Poles, times before World War II exist in a stable moral teleology culminating in the interwar Polish state. The labels of socialism and postsocialism may not be the most appropriate for representing t­ hese older Poles’ moral personhood. Each case study reveals a connection to a par­tic­u­lar time and place; when taken together, they reveal common themes. In all ­these narratives, it is Poland as a place that figures most prominently—­the relationship of Poland to other nation-­states, the content of Polishness itself, and the continuity of Polishness across generations. ­These older Poles index Poland and Polishness through talk of national and religious holidays, military leaders, songs, poems, natu­ral resources, and produce. It is crucial to note that none of ­these ­people ­were born in Wrocław; all but pani Wanda had experienced war­time or postwar deportation, dislocation, or resettlement. Their lives are part of Eu­ro­pean histories of po­liti­cally, ethnically, and religiously motivated movements of populations, the vio­lence of which has had devastating effects on persons, memories, and worlds. The legacies of ­these events are evident in the stories ­these ­people now tell, which shape their moral personhood in the pre­sent.

“My Dear Leader!”: Narrating Morality in Polish History Sometimes p­ eople made ­these connections between personal and national lives as a way of teaching me, a younger American ­woman, about Polish history.6 One ­woman at the rehab center particularly exemplified the didactic style of some older Poles. On meeting me in the corridor while I was sitting with pani Alicja, pani Wanda heard my accent and started correcting my Polish. She suggested that I come talk with her, telling me that she spoke very clearly and had excellent pronunciation (perhaps distinguishing herself from ­others, like pani Alicja, who had had strokes and ­were difficult to understand). She recited Polish tongue twisters and asked me to repeat ­after her. Pani Wanda then gave a brief lecture on the gender of nouns in the

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Polish language, invited me to stop by again to talk sometime, and entered the elevator to go downstairs for her physical therapy session. ­Later that week, I s­ topped by pani Wanda’s room, where she and her roommate, pani Małgorzata, w ­ ere sitting quietly on their beds waiting for obiad, and welcomed me in. Pani Wanda was much more talkative than pani Małgorzata, although pani Małgorzata was happy to chime in occasionally. For almost an hour, pani Wanda shared her life history, describing the recent accident in which she had broken her leg, which had led to her need for care at the rehabilitation center, and her de­cades of work w konfekcji (in a garment factory). First, she worked in a factory sewing suits and outerwear, and then in another one sewing athletic clothing. ­After thirty years, she retired at age fifty-­five in 1979. She went back to work as a secretary in a construction design office for few years, but then left to take care of her grandchildren. She had been widowed for thirty-­three years, following her husband’s death from a heart attack. She told a story about her husband’s arrest and weeklong detention by the milicja (military police) for his role in organ­izing opposition activities, saying that this would make a good story for p­ eople in Amer­ i­ca. Pani Wanda and pani Małgorzata then discussed how much better it is now that communism has ended and they no longer had to wait in long lines to receive rationed goods and fulfill ever-­increasing quotas at work. ­After a pause, and without my asking, pani Wanda began to tell me about Poland’s regaining of in­de­pen­dence a­ fter World War I. This conversation occurred on 12 November, the day a­ fter In­de­pen­dence Day, so ­there was a temporal logic to raising this topic. Slowly and deliberately, pani Wanda then told me about the partitions of Poland, which began in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. PANI WANDA (PW ):  ​And now in­de­pen­dence. In­de­pen­dence. This was

Piłsudski, ­wasn’t it?7 JES SICA (J):  ​Yes. PW:  ​He, in the year 1918, it was 1918 that Poland re . . . ​regained in­de­pen­

dence. B ­ ecause Poland was ­under partitions for 123 years. 123 years. J:  ​Yes. PW:  ​Of captivity.8 Are you recording every­thing? J:  ​Yes, yes. PW:  ​Poland was divided into three partitions, into three parts. The east was part of Rus­sia. Rus­sia occupied the east of Poland. The Germans occupied the west. And ­here . . . ​the mountains . . . ​Zakopane, was Austria. Kraków,

Remembering the Polish Nation • 97

Zakopane was Austria. 123 years. And ­later t­ here ­were always uprisings. They fought, the Poles, and ­there w ­ ere uprisings. Uprisings. The January uprising, the November uprising, like right now—­they regained, the November one, and then in­de­pen­dence. J:  ​Yeah, yes. PW  ​So many years of captivity. Dreadful. B ­ ecause Poland, as a country, is located—­it’s not a big area—­but it’s located . . . ​Rus­sia is a huge country, and Germany is too. J:  ​Yeah. PW:  ​And they always want to eliminate the l­ ittle one, this country. J:  ​Yeah, yeah. PW:  ​Oh my goodness! Already? [to a staff member bringing in drinks and silverware for obiad] S TAF F MEMBER (SM):  ​Like I say, time’s up. PW:  ​Yes, but ­we’re talking seriously. SM:  ​What do you mean, serious? PW:  ​Ah, it’s serious. Serious. SM:  ​Ah, what­ever, yeah right, it’s serious. PW:  ​No, but it’s in­ter­est­ing, in­ter­est­ing. And Piłsudski, he was the leader. He held on. And it was Piłsudski, when he died, the year was 1935, on the twelfth of May. Piłsudski died. J:  ​You remember well. PW:  ​Yes. And I was already ­going to school, and, uh, we went to the holy mass, with gray banner flags, and I recited a poem: It c­ an’t be true, that y­ ou’re already gone. It c­ an’t be true, that y­ ou’re already in the grave. Although ­today, the entire Polish land is crying. The entire Polish land is in mourning. For us, you w ­ ere a statue of steel. For us, you w ­ ere of an excellent order. You who lifted up and saved Poland. And lifted [us] up to the summit and the glory. Oh my, what an in­ter­est­ing conversation you w ­ ill have [for your research]. J:  ​Oh yes, it’s good. Thank you for this conversation. PW:  ​I even know this song about Piłsudski, a patriotic song. Ri . . . ​[starts to sing] I know it. Should I sing a l­ ittle?

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J:  ​Please, go ahead, please. PW:  ​­Really? J:  ​Please. PW:  ​[singing]

He’s riding, riding, on Kasztanka, on Kasztanka,9 Gray rifleman’s attire! Hey, hey, commandant! My dear leader! Hey, hey, commandant! My dear leader! Where is your saber, made of steel, made of steel, Even in ­going to b­ attle? Even in ­going to b­ attle? Hey, hey, commandant! My dear leader! Hey, hey, commandant! My dear leader! Where’s your uniform of a general, of a general, Sewn with golden thread? Sewn with golden thread? Hey, hey, commandant! Beloved leader! Hey, hey, commandant! Beloved leader!10 That’s about Piłsudski. It’s about Piłsudski, ­because he rode on Kasztanka. About Piłsudski. This holiday is good, it’s good it exists, it’s impor­tant, this in­de­pen­dence.11

We discussed the parade and fireworks that took place the previous day in Wrocław, and pani Małgorzata sighed that now they would have to wait another year to celebrate In­de­pen­dence Day. As she recited this poem about Piłsudski, pani Wanda’s voice took on characteristics of a dramatic reading—­slowing down and speeding up, modulating the pitch more deliberately. The song that pani Wanda sang had an upbeat, lilting, catchy melody. At first, she sang with some hesitation, searching a bit for the melody, but her voice grew more confident and joyful with each verse. She lingered over the line “sewn with golden thread,” perhaps resonating with the de­cades she herself worked at sewing factories.12 The lyr­ ics of both the poem that pani Wanda recited and the song that she sang are addressed to Piłsudski himself using the vocative case, giving the poem

Remembering the Polish Nation • 99

and song an intimate, heartfelt character.13 As she spoke of the partitions, ­there was emotion in her voice, evident in dramatic pauses and searching for words. And indeed, her comment to the staff member who brought utensils for obiad indicated that she found t­hese topics to be impor­tant and meaningful. The slow, enunciated syllables and repeated words suggested not only that she saw me as an interlocutor who might not fully understand her but also that ­these ­were the points she wanted to convey. Indeed, when compared to the preceding stories about more recent history, pani Wanda’s narration suggests that Poland’s in­de­pen­dence in 1918 was a more significant moment. The only moments explic­itly marked as impor­tant, or topics explic­itly marked as serious, ­were the conversations about the partitions and in­de­pen­dence. In other words, it is significant that this is the story pani Wanda told me slowly and didactically. It is significant that this historical period is what called up emotional songs and poetry. The question then becomes, what differentiates this period from ­others? The story that she told is the fundamental narrative of Polish nationalism, reaching back to the partitions of the eigh­teenth c­ entury. It is this niewola, or enslavement, by foreign powers that forms the backbone of the Polish national myth of the suffering nation. As pani Wanda recited this stock narrative, she was not only teaching me a par­tic­u­lar chronology of Polish history but also showing me where and when Polish morality lies. Pani Wanda and pani Małgorzata spoke of everyday suffering during communism and they w ­ ere glad that it had passed, but the moral center of the narrative lay in this ­music and poetry, in this interwar time. They did not have much to say about the pre­sent. ­A fter the song about the “dear leader,” Pani Wanda changed the topic to American history, praising the hard work of Americans who built the country from nothing into riches. She then sang the following verse: This is Amer­i­ca! The famous USA! What a rich country, heaven on earth! Oh, if one wants to have four wives, One must have millions! This is Amer­i­ca! The famous USA! What a rich country, heaven on earth!14

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A bouncy, quick, cabaret-­style melody, this song prompted pani Małgorzata to sing along, and they both smiled while singing. Twice more during our conversation, the ­women began to sing this song, joking about how hard it must be to satisfy four wives.15 As I took my leave of pani Wanda and pani Małgorzata to join the administrative staff for obiad in the kitchen, pani Małgorzata thanked me for my com­pany, saying how enjoyable it was to talk and remember. Other­wise, she said, one just sits silently. The potential for a difficult silence loomed in many patients’ rooms at this center. Indeed, the fact of conversation itself meant that pain had subsided enough for it to happen at all. As ­these ­women sang and joked, they ­were not only seeking respite from pain and trying to make their days in institutional care more pleasant, they w ­ ere also creating social relations located in the historical Polish nation. The spatiotemporal contours of t­ hese relations meant that their personhood expanded beyond the walls of the rehabilitation center, where bodily concerns dominated and staff could judge their interactions as “not impor­tant,” to the bounds of the Polish nation ­under a respected leader. Locating themselves within that meaningful past offered opportunities for moral personhood in the pre­sent.

“We Losers D ­ on’t Have Anything”: Narrating Loss, Creating Relatedness The moral personhood of pani Wanda and pani Małgorzata has distinct spatiotemporal contours, focusing on the early twentieth ­century and reaching back to the days of partition in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, and located within the bound­aries of interwar Poland.16 Th ­ ese w ­ ere fairly common spatiotemporal markers among older Poles, especially t­ hose in their seventies and eighties, but they w ­ ere not the only times and places that mattered to ­people. For instance, pani Alicja, a patient at the rehabilitation center, whom we introduced in chapter 3, more commonly understood her pre­sent life in relation to the state socialist past, thus grounding her moral personhood in a shallower timescale, although pre–­World War II Poland was also her geo­graph­i­cal scale of reference. When we met in 2008, pani Alicja was seventy-­two but looked older than pani Wanda and pani Małgorzata, who ­were in their eighties.17 Born in a village in the southeast of Poland before World War II, pani Alicja moved to a village outside Wrocław ­after the end of the war in 1945.18 She had the

Remembering the Polish Nation • 101

deep wrinkles and thick limbs of someone who had worked outside for de­cades. Pani Alicja had worked as a farmer up ­until the moment she had a stroke, five months before we met, which left her reliant on a wheelchair and rendered her legs and entire left side para­lyzed. She attributed the severity of her medical prob­lems to the three hours that passed between the moment of her stroke and the arrival of the ambulance to take her to the hospital, and she believed that her rehabilitation would be less complicated if she had received medical attention sooner. Asking me, “Are ­there such diseases in Amer­i­ca?” pani Alicja was surprised to learn that Americans do suffer strokes, and said that in Poland “they d­ on’t treat high blood pressure, they ­don’t treat this and that.”19 I asked her w ­ hether she was in pain, and she responded affirmatively, telling me about her heavy, para­lyzed left side. As we spoke, she stroked and pulled on her gnarled and clenched left fist, trying unsuccessfully to overcome the severe contractures. She showed me how difficult it was to move, asking me to hold her left arm and hand to feel the weight of her para­lyzed limb. If it fell over the bed at night, she said, she was unable to lift it back onto the bed. Pani Alicja stayed at the rehab center for over a year while waiting for a place in a long-­term care institution; during this time, she did not know when she would be leaving or where exactly she would be g­ oing. At one point, she was planning to move to a Social Welfare Home, where she said she would save 100 PLN (just over 30 USD) per month, but this move was delayed more than once. This 100 PLN was a significant sum for pani Alicja, who received 500 PLN (around 170 USD) per month in renta (disability pension). Although I sometimes saw pani Alicja’s grand­daughter and son ­there, and pani Alicja mentioned the help they provided in the form of financial assistance and material goods (e.g., by bringing her fruit, coffee, and personal care products), she often complained to her roommates, staff, and me about being abandoned by her ­family. Almost ­every time I said goodbye, she began to weep while wishing good health for my ­family and me, and asked me when we would next see each other. It was never soon enough. At her request, several times I helped pani Alicja use the center’s pay phone to call her grand­daughter to ask when her next visit would be, and to ask her to bring specific items. Although some patients had cell phones, pani Alicja did not, so she relied on the pay phone in the stairwell on the ground floor. To get to the pay phone, I wheeled pani Alicja from her second-­ floor room to the patient elevator across the hallway, where we waited for the slow, clunky trip down to the ground floor. At the pay phone, she would

102  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

fish around in her change purse for her calling card and the scrap of paper with her grand­daughter’s number. I dialed, held, and hung up the phone for her. Twice, pani Alicja cried with gratitude that I had helped her make this phone call, since the staff did not have time to help her and she could not wheel herself even the short distance across the hallway to the elevator.20 Beginning the first day we met, pani Alicja called me “kochana” (darling), as other older w ­ omen did (especially if they had trou­ble remembering my name, an uncommon one in Poland).21 When I would enter her room, she would exclaim “kochana Jessiko!” and begin telling me stories of her day, often lamenting her poor physical state.22 On that first day, I asked pani Alicja if she would tell me about her ­family. She answered by saying that her husband had a large f­ amily and that he was one of nine c­ hildren. He passed away in 1995, and a year ­after that, her ­daughter died at age forty-­ nine.23 Then pani Alicja began to cry. “I am such an orphan,” she said. “In Poland, they say that ­you’re an orphan if you ­don’t have a ­mother or ­father, but also if you d­ on’t have kids. Hand me a tissue.”24 ­A fter a few moments of silence and deep breaths, pani Alicja then spoke of her grand­daughter who had moved to E ­ ngland for work. PANI AL IC JA (PA):  ​But my grand­son finished school—he is a surveyor. My

grand­daughter also studied surveying, geodesic engineering, and left for ­England. They have their own firm. [. . .] Her husband also went to school for geodesics, and finished. Construction was r­ eally growing ­there, it’s ­going along, t­ hey’re putting the wianki on the construction.25 [. . .] ­They’re earning good money. My grand­daughter was h ­ ere, and she’s glad that she is earning good money. But she says, “Grandma, I’m not coming back b­ ecause I ­don’t see myself h ­ ere. What am I ­going to earn ­here—­pennies [something about contrasting one month of wages in ­England with three months of wages in Wrocław].” JES SICA (J):  ​Aha. PA:  ​She went ­there and is staying put t­ here b ­ ecause it’s better for them ­there. More money. J:  ​Mm, yeah, I understand. PA:  ​And h ­ ere t­ here’s no money. [. . .] Poland is dif­fer­ent, it ­doesn’t pay, you know. And now since they got rid of communism, from that a lot of thieves have sprung up. During communism ­there w ­ eren’t so many thieves. The politics ­were dif­fer­ent, the Rus­sians took every­thing, but

Remembering the Polish Nation • 103

t­ here w ­ ere contributions of petroleum, gas.26 And now, Rus­sia is taking gas from us, and we losers ­don’t have anything.27 No petroleum, no gasoline, no gas—­there’s nothing in Poland. They have every­thing. They have gas, they have petroleum, they have every­thing, gasoline—­now they have every­thing that one needs. J:  ​Mm. PA:  ​Once, a car cost a lot of money in Poland. Now, it’s the upkeep that’s expensive. The car ­doesn’t cost that much, t­ here are cheap cars now. But it’s r­ eally difficult to maintain the car. Gasoline, buying insurance, paying for every­thing, it’s difficult, you have to have a lot, be rich. You ­really have to earn a lot. J:  ​Yes, right. PA:  ​If you ­haven’t gone to school, finished school, you earn very l­ ittle. Prob­ably [the same] in Amer­i­ca? J:  ​Yes, the same . . . ​but every­one has credit.28

The conversation then turned to the high interest rates on loans for cars and apartments, and the long duration of mortgages. In this brief exchange, pani Alicja linked the fate of her grandchildren with that of con­temporary Poland. Even though goods and produce created in Poland ­were taken by the Soviet Union, pani Alicja still saw this past relationship as better than the current one, in which she understood Rus­sia to have no obligation to contribute any energy to Poland. For pani Alicja, a question about her ­family prompted tears and a lament of abandonment, which then moved to stories about Poland’s economy and natu­ral resources and comparisons to the socialist past. The personal and national appeared morally inextricable. Twice more during that conversation, pani Alicja made comparisons to the socialist past, first saying in response to my question about working on the farm that it paid better to be a farmer at that time, before Germans bought the sugar factories. Now no one wants to buy the beets from her farm, she said. L ­ ater, pani Alicja engaged with her roommate’s d­ aughter in a discussion of Polish versus foreign produce, and the relative quality and health of each. The roommate’s d­ aughter, who appeared to be in her late fifties, had overheard pani Alicja telling me about the better quality of life during socialism. H ­ ere, she tried to share with pani Alicja her differing understanding of state socialism.

104  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

ROOMMAT E’S ­D AUGH T ER (RD):  ​Pani Alicja, it was the case then that they

managed ­things so that ­there was vinegar and mustard on the shelves. And t­ here w ­ asn’t anything ­else to eat. You ­don’t know ­because you lived in the countryside. How many cows and pigs w ­ ere you keeping, and t­ here was nothing on the shelves to eat. PANI AL IC JA (PA):  ​Every­thing went to Rus­sia. RD:  ​Yes, exactly. PA:  ​­Because they needed every­thing. RD:  ​Ok, fine, they needed it, but what did we have? You had food b ­ ecause you lived in the countryside. But we d­ idn’t have food. PA:  ​And now t­ here’s too much of every­thing, they d ­ on’t pay for anything. It used to be ­free. [. . .] RD:  ​You know, I’m not saying that every­thing then was bad. Hello [to a staff member who entered the room]. But you ­can’t say that t­ hings, that t­ hings ­were good and that every­thing was wonderful, ­because, um, you w ­ eren’t ­going hungry. But listen, we received . . . PA:  ​[something about bringing goods to Wrocław] RD:  ​We d ­ idn’t even see ham for entire years. At our workplace, at Christmas we received a kilo of ham per worker, and at Easter t­ here was a kilo of ham per worker. Besides that, we never even saw it. And as white-­collar workers, we had two and a half kilos of meat on our [ration] cards. Uh, that included every­thing—­with bones, with every­thing. Two and a half or two-­seventy. For the ­whole month. And you know, well, flour was rationed, sugar, every­thing—­butter. PA:  ​Every­thing went to Rus­sia. RD:  ​Yeah. So you know, you ­can’t say that . . . PA:  ​[something about the hard work of postwar reconstruction, picking up on an ­earlier theme in our conversation] RD:  ​­Th ings w ­ ere built b­ ecause ­people had to work somewhere. They had to. PA:  ​[something about farmers working too] RD:  ​Yes, and ­a fter the war, if a farmer d ­ idn’t pay he went to jail, pani Alicja. My mom worked in the statistics office, and she had to write [noise from the corridor]. The peasants ­didn’t know anything, and they took them to jail b­ ecause they d­ idn’t hand over a cow, or meat, or, or, or . . . PA:  ​[. . . ​hectares.] [They took] the meat, so many potatoes, one and a half tons of wheat for ­free. We had to produce every­thing for ­free. [. . .] They

Remembering the Polish Nation • 105

took every­thing. But ­here for us, in our country, it ­wasn’t necessary. Every­thing [went] to Rus­sia. RD:  ​It was also necessary for us, ­because we also had to eat. So you see . . . PA:  ​And now t­ here’s too much of every­thing. [. . .] Instead of [­going] to Wrocław, no one asks, the potatoes are so dirty, the carrots are so dirty. Every­thing Dutch . . . RD:  ​Oh, p ­ eople are wising up, pani Alicja. Only ­idiots choose t­ hose. P ­ eople are wising up. PA:  ​­They’re learning. RD:  ​­They’re learning, ­they’re learning. They know about sprays and such . . . ​I look at every­thing now to see if it’s Polish. If it’s not Polish, I d­ on’t get it. For example, [. . .] on the PLUS code it’s written where the product is from: Spain, Poland, Holland. Of course I ­won’t buy a banana from Poland ­because ­there a­ ren’t any bananas from Poland. PA:  ​­There a­ ren’t any. RD:  ​So I’ll buy the [foreign] bananas. But potatoes—­I w ­ on’t buy anything but the ones from Poland. You know, sometimes t­ here are dumb p­ eople, but you know, the majority want Polish potatoes, Polish carrots, Polish dairy products, ­because t­ hey’re better. PA:  ​­There ­aren’t as many chemicals. RD:  ​Yeah, they ­don’t have so many preservatives, so . . . PA:  ​The Dutch [produce] ­really has a lot of chemicals. They bought land from us, t­ hey’re sowing it, giving it fertilizer. [. . .] Carrots, mushrooms, vegetables [. . .] I ­won’t eat it ­because it stinks of fertilizer/manure. RD:  ​It’s all for the good that the peasants now ­aren’t using so much fertilizer . . . ​better food. PA:  ​The sprays [. . .] I d ­ on’t buy [that kind]. RD:  ​[Something about a contrast between food grown in your garden and food prepared for sale]. . . . ​It’s healthier to do every­thing without fertilizers. PA:  ​[. . .]The gardener [. . .] And not artificial fertilizer, only natu­ral fertilizer. RD:  ​So you see, pani Alicja, history is more complicated that it can seem to us. ­There ­were good moments and bad, but more of the bad ones than good.29

With this, the roommate’s d­ aughter changed the topic and began to ask me more about my stay in Wrocław. The disagreement over understandings of the socialist past had been temporarily smoothed over by a shared

106  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

appreciation of the quality of Polish produce, although over the year that I knew her, pani Alicja returned to the topic of the difficult condition of Polish farmers t­ oday. Indeed, such laments about the poor quality of life in con­ temporary Poland w ­ ere common for pani Alicja, who fondly remembered the socialist past and the better provisions for small farmers. In this moment, however, the conflicting memories of the past stemming from differing experiences during socialism ­were resolved by affirming the quality of Polish produce. Pani Alicja would often share food with me and ask me to distribute it to her roommates. Once she gave me an apple that her grand­daughter had brought her, entreating me to eat it b­ ecause “Polish apples are the best.” Her roommate’s ­daughter was ­there that day too, and she, pani Alicja’s roommate, and pani Alicja all affirmed the excellent taste of Polish apples. Divisions between rural and urban life, between p­ eople of dif­fer­ent socioeconomic status, and between p­ eople of dif­fer­ent ages, w ­ ere overcome by an assertion of shared national pride in which Polishness is positively associated with ideas of the natu­ral (cf. Caldwell 2011). In their conversation, the naturalness of Polish produce is juxtaposed with negative views of foreign capital, although the roommate’s d­ aughter noted the complexity of the situation in her acknowl­edgment of the need for foreign produce if one wants to eat bananas in Poland. ­These conversations and stories demonstrate connections between individual and national scales. Pani Alicja made quick transitions between her own bodily suffering and that of the Polish nation, in one breath commenting on the difficulty of that day’s physical therapy session, and in the next, on the sad state of ­today’s Poland, where the grocery stores are full of “dirty” foreign produce and farmers have no one to whom to sell their crops.30 Deeply upset by both her bodily changes and her move to institutional care, and lacking certainty about her f­ uture, pani Alicja’s world was in flux. During this time of uncertainty, she sought to place herself in a known world, seeking connections with ­others by telling stories about the past. For pani Alicja, a moral life was in the past, in a time in which she and her ­family could make a living on the land, and in which ­people w ­ ere honest. ­These broader spatiotemporal horizons, however, could not substitute for the loss of living in her own home, among ­family, in the village. Her case pre­sents an example of a failure of moral personhood, when connecting to the scale of the Polish nation meant yet another way of experiencing loss. Although pani Alicja did not sustain moral personhood, it is notable that her attempts to do so involved the same spatiotemporal scaling practices as other older Poles.

Remembering the Polish Nation • 107

“How Is It Pos­si­ble without Chopin? How?” Polish Cultural Icons in the Moral Imagination As pani Alicja lamented the state of con­temporary Poland, she sought connections with o­ thers. Indeed, complaint is a common cultural form in Poland (e.g., Wojciszke 2004–5).31 Yet, although pani Alicja was deeply critical of her pre­sent situation, t­ here was also a sense of pride in her voice as she talked about her grandchildren’s success abroad. Like many Poles, she was glad for the educational opportunities her grandchildren had in ­today’s Poland. Th ­ ese complex feelings about socialism and postsocialism w ­ ere shared by ­people at both the medical and educational institutions, although discussions about the benefits of EU membership w ­ ere more common at the Universities of the Third Age. As shown in chapter 2, the active aging and aktywność of University of the Third Age słuchacze encompasses not only the physical and cognitive self-­improvement but also the broader geographic scales of the EU and extended ­future worlds. The EU is not always an unambiguous good for this group, however, as I learned during my time with pani Cecylia, a widowed w ­ oman of sixty-­seven when we met in 2008. In e­ very conversation we had, pani Cecylia consistently connected her own life to national and geopo­liti­cal events.32 The stories she told spanned in time from the Piast dynasty of the tenth c­ entury, to the partitions of the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries, to the travails of con­temporary Poland, and ­were punctuated by connections to traumatic events that loom large in Polish national memory: deportations to Siberia, the concentration camp of Auschwitz, and the massacre at Katyń. Members of pani Cecylia’s f­ amily had died in all ­these places and elsewhere. In describing ­these kin, she would emphasize their education and profession as evidence of their morality, and the loss of f­ amily fortunes and exile as the material proof of historical and con­temporary injustice. Despite remarking that material ­things are not impor­tant since they can be lost at any time, and that health and ­family are what ­matter most, during my time with her it felt as if pani Cecylia was seeking to demonstrate materially the world that she lost. Out­going, talkative, and opinionated, pani Cecylia shared many details of her life with me; our meetings often lasted over four hours and at times felt like lectures. We first met on a bright October day at the University of the Third Age in Wrocław. A friend who had occasionally lectured ­there introduced us; a­ fter I explained my research interests, pani Cecylia invited me for coffee. We left the University of the Third Age and walked back

108  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

t­ oward the center of town, through the train station, to plac Kościuszki, where she led me into the M ­ usic and Lit­er­a­ture Club, a dark, musty place on the ground floor of one of the buildings lining the square. Pani Cecylia introduced me to the director, a formally dressed older man who gave the impression that we ­were disturbing him. She explained that I was an American doctoral student who wanted to learn about Poland and that she thought I could help the club with English-­language translations and perhaps even teach ­there. Confused, since I had thought we ­were ­going straight to a café, I began describing my research to the man as he showed us the club’s rooms and explained the musical per­for­mances and literary readings that took place ­there. The main concert room was a small hall with high ceilings, with dozens of wooden instruments and sepia-­toned portraits hanging on the wall. ­There ­were about forty high-­backed wooden chairs and a ­grand piano. The contrast between this dark, ancient-­feeling space and the bright fall day outside was palpable. Pani Cecylia led us to a self-­service café across the square, where we ordered pastries, but before the cashier could ring up our order, pani Cecylia de­cided she would rather go to a dif­fer­ent café with more comfortable seats instead of hard plastic chairs. We walked back across the square to a dif­fer­ent café with t­ able ser­vice, where the waitress sat us at a t­ able next to the win­dow. We ordered cappuccinos and began to talk. Pani Cecylia spoke for two hours with such energy that I could not get a word in edgewise even to read my oral consent form, let alone take notes or rec­ord the conversation; the only pauses w ­ ere for rhetorical effect or during difficult moments when she mentioned her ­family’s war­time losses: relatives killed in Katyń and the gas chambers, another who was deported to Siberia, and the loss of land (majątek ziemski) and property (majątek).33 Her f­ amily came from an area south of Lwów and her husband’s f­ amily was from Kraków; p­ eople in both families ­were highly educated and some owned land.34 Without a notebook, I could not keep track of all the kin she mentioned, though her pride in their accomplishments was evident as she listed their professions (doctors, l­awyers, architects). Her stories focused on her ­family and on the state of t­ oday’s Poland, which she complained had become an international laughingstock ­because the country’s leaders since socialist times have had only elementary school education. Yet with pride she said, “Poland has always been in Eu­rope; it’s exactly in the center.”35 ­These themes of familial suffering and national decline became familiar during our long conversations over the next year and a half.

Remembering the Polish Nation • 109

FIG. 4.1  ​Pictures of unknown kin, shown by pani Cecylia

Each subsequent conversation lasted from two to seven hours, ending only when I drew them to a close; pani Cecylia would have preferred to keep talking. She repeatedly showed me photo­g raphs of deceased kin, both known and unknown, serving as material evidence of the loss of property, land, and kin—as well as prestige, dignity, and re­spect—on scales both personal and national. Recurring themes in t­ hese conversations ­were the loss of her ­family’s property during the war and her savings ­after 1989, and the terrible state of ­today’s Poland, as evident in the rise of foreign-­owned companies, the closing of schools and hospitals, and the state of the national health-­care ser­vice, in contrast to Poland’s noble past. She moved back and forth between t­ hese and daily strug­gles: she was taking driving classes to get her driver’s license, but like many ­people, had failed the exam multiple times; arthritis in her knees was painful; and she quarreled with her d­ aughter and son-­in-­law who lived with her. Pani Cecylia lived in Krzyki, a neighborhood in the southern part of Wrocław, on the ground floor of a one-­hundred-­year-­old three-­story ­house. (I often passed by her ­house on the bus on the way to and from the Social Welfare Home.) She shared the apartment with her ­daughter, son-­in-­law,

110  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

and two grand­sons; each generation had its own bedroom, which also functioned as a living room. The only rooms they shared w ­ ere the kitchen, bathroom, and long hallway, which had high shelves overfilled with books and boxes. The wooden doorjambs of pani Cecylia’s room and the bathroom ­were stripped of paint, as if during renovations. The floors creaked, the kitchen appliances and cookware looked well used, and the bathroom fixtures seemed fragile. Although the apartment felt crowded, pani Cecylia compared it with when she and her husband moved in ­after the war and had to share it with another ­couple to whom they w ­ ere not related. In the hallway, the apartment was crowded and dark, but in pani Cecylia’s room, with large win­dows that let the light stream in, ­there was a sense of peace. The objects in her room marked the space as one decorated by an older person: the lace curtains; the heavy woven wall hanging of the black Madonna of Częstochowa; the painted portraits of well-­dressed individuals with serious expressions; the socialist-­era display cabinet overflowing with old china, newspapers, and knickknacks, with juice ­bottles and pictures of grandchildren on top; the large boxy TV with antennas; and the folded-up tapczan (convertible sofa). The style of ­these objects conveyed their age, suggesting that the inhabitant of the room was similarly aged. As we sat in her room one hot July day, the phone rang and interrupted our conversation. Pani Cecylia went to the kitchen to answer it, and ­a fter she returned, said that it was her ­sister, inviting her on a trip to Duszniki Zdrój, a nearby spa town. But pani Cecylia could not accompany her b­ ecause she had an appointment the next day with the stone masons to repair her mother-­in-­law’s grave. Pani Cecylia then explained that her mother-­in-­law saved money her w ­ hole life for her gravestone, but did not earn much working as a teacher and then a social worker. Pani Cecylia herself worked as a physical therapist and specialized in ­children with developmental disabilities. During socialist times, she was indignant about having a boss who was less educated than her, explaining “­because that’s just what the times ­were like.”36 Deeply Catholic, pani Cecylia attended mass at the parish church down the road nearly daily, and she was also active in Solidarność (Solidarity) in 1980 and 1981. Her strident anticommunist sentiments ­were matched by her sharp critique of post-1989 Poland. During this conversation, rather than continuing to talk about her mother-­in-­law’s grave, pani Cecylia discussed her mother-­in-­law’s savings, and how much she and her husband had saved—­and then lost in the wymiany (exchanges, meaning currency exchanges). Pani Cecylia then spoke of the foreign companies that are now

Remembering the Polish Nation • 111

buying up Polish land and property, so therefore one should never become too attached to material t­ hings. Instead, one should travel and find a passion in life, she said. Pani Cecylia then began speaking about patriotism. Her voice conveyed both passion and sadness as she discussed the practices and meanings of what it is to be Polish: PANI CEC Y L IA (PC):  ​­There are some bad ­people, ­those who are jealous of one

another. They want every­thing dishonestly, walking all over every­body, to get to their goal for themselves. Once the power, even the, the impor­tant power, was ser­vice for the nation, ser­vice for society. One’s own country, one’s own . . . ​­things ­were valued differently. Th ­ ere was patriotism, and the c­ hildren w ­ ere raised in this spirit. [sigh] Now. . . . ​“This? Poland? Now ­there’s Eu­rope!” OK, what about Eu­rope? I’m telling you—­what Eu­rope? Eu­rope, Eu­rope . . . ​­we’ve been in Eu­rope, we are located such that ­we’ve been in Eu­rope for a thousand years. Eu­rope never gave anything to us. But, if I have my own country, my own language, my own religion, my own currency, right? It’s ­really impor­tant to have one’s own. It’s something totally dif­fer­ent—­one’s own Sejm, one’s own parliament, one’s own judiciary, one’s own education, [. . .] one’s own what­ever, every­thing—­ one’s own culture. Well, for example, ­a fter the war, t­ here was this case that Mickiewicz’s Dziady [Forefathers’ Eve] was banned.37 JES SICA (J):  ​Mm. PC:  ​Well. How can one forbid Mickiewicz’s Dziady? J:  ​Mm. PC:  ​The entire—­the students, professors, every­one—­the entire nation rebelled. And Chopin—­Chopin’s ­music was banned at the ­music acad­emy. So, no one at all ever heard that the Poles had Chopin [no one ever knew that Chopin was Polish]. So our professors, our conservators of the fine arts, they thought of [having] a Chopin competition. A Chopin competition, so that this ­music would remain for the next generations. ­Because—­how is it pos­si­ble, without Chopin? How? And even h ­ ere in our Park Południowy, t­ here was [name], one of t­ hese impor­tant p­ eople, who managed to erect a monument of Chopin ­here in Park Południowy. And it was cast in bronze, and [now] t­ here is a beautiful monument. ­These Chopin competitions are held in Duszniki and Krynica, and are very nice, ­aren’t they?38 J:  ​Indeed.39

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­ ere, pani Cecylia contrasted the current dishonesty of some in politics H with a time in which Polishness was valued. She linked this current dishonesty to war­time bans on Chopin and Mickiewicz (cf. Tucker 2011, 91–101) and rebellious postwar per­for­mances of Dziady. In this excerpt, morality lies in times of in­de­pen­dent Polish po­liti­cal formations and in times during which p­ eople strive for in­de­pen­dence. For pani Cecylia, patriotism consists of living in—or valuing—­a world full of governmental structures, linguistic and religious practices, and art forms that are Polish. Since ­these statements came ­after her dismissive comments about Eu­rope, “what about Eu­rope?” they suggest that pani Cecylia is against Poland’s membership in the EU. However, further remarks l­ ater in this conversation clarified her position. A ­ fter she again lamented the closing of state-­supported institutions ­after 1989 and the purchasing of Polish factories by foreign companies, I tried to ask her to connect t­ hese changes to Poland’s EU membership. JES SICA (J):  ​Does this mean ­you’re not glad that Poland is in the EU? PANI CEC Y L IA (PC):  ​Darling, I was very glad about this. And I would be very

happy, for example, that, that my grandchildren w ­ ill be able to choose their own college, that they ­will be able to choose for themselves where they want to live. But I would like them to feel that ­here is their country, their homeland, their roots, you know? That they would feel that they are Polish, and that they would strive to make t­ hings work well in Poland. J:  ​Mm. PC:  ​That t­ here would never be this second or third category of ­people who are more poorly paid in a foreign country, or more poorly treated, or . . . ​ Well, supposedly racism ­doesn’t exist, but apparently it does exist. A ­ fter all when ­there is a crisis like this, it’s only then that t­ hese t­ hings become vis­i­ble. ­Because in another country, they first think about their fellow countrymen, and not about the foreigners who came t­ here to earn a living or make some extra money, right? J:  ​Right. PC:  ​And the first t­ hing is to fire the foreigners. So why should they not have their country, their homeland, their heroes. ­A fter all that Poland has suffered, a­ fter so many wars and attacks and however many p­ eople murdered. How many of t­ hese are still unknown? Thousands of ­people perished and fought ­because . . . ​the partitions, the wars of resettlement, ­there w ­ ere vari­ous events. But the w ­ hole time ­there was this love that was instilled for the homeland, the national hymns, w ­ eren’t ­there? They sang

Remembering the Polish Nation • 113

“Rota”: “We w ­ on’t let” . . . ​“We w ­ on’t let our faith be buried, / We are the Polish nation, the Polish p­ eople,” and so on.40 Or . . . ​well, ­there are a lot of ­these patriotic songs, from books, ­etcetera. However, not all Poles are the same. Some are very honest and very conscientious, and it’s hard for them right now. ­Because t­ here are ­these con men, t­ hese wheelers and dealers—­a few of them get together and take over. They establish bonuses for themselves, t­ hese colossal rewards. Well, even in the government ­there ­were bonuses of 400,000, now 3 million, before ­these w ­ ere bonuses for three or four ­people from the government, from the parliament. Even before a crisis like the one now, this is a disgrace. How can ­others have 600 zloty, or some o­ thers have only 400 zloty from their pension, or ­others d­ on’t have work, or . . . ​I w ­ ouldn’t know how to take such money without thinking of t­ hese p­ eople, of what’s happening with t­ hese p­ eople, who have been deprived of every­thing. Tell me, Jessica, would you be able to put 500,000 zloty in your pocket, for example, or maybe 400,000, knowing that this lays p­ eople off, closes a workplace, and fires thousands of ­people? Thousands of hectares of land, ­because first, it was the same ­thing with ­these farmers.41

Pani Cecylia went on to describe the injustices that have been perpetrated against small farmers by the influx of foreign capital. For pani Cecylia, the topics of Poland’s Eu­ro­pe­anness and EU membership ­were bound up with historical and con­temporary Polish suffering. The EU might provide increased opportunities for her grandchildren, but ­these opportunities themselves ­were fraught since once abroad, her grandchildren would have to live ­under a non-­Polish government. She directly linked this danger to the oppression, suffering, and death of partitioned Poland and World War II, and then to current economic disparities, moving seamlessly between time periods. However, the moral center of her stories is always Poland.42 This moral geography is also ­shaped by the experiences of pani Cecylia’s ­daughter and other kin. Her ­daughter lived and worked in Germany as a rehabilitation therapist, but had since returned home to Wrocław b­ ecause she missed her f­ amily. Unable to find work as a therapist, her d­ aughter now worked in accounting for a large supermarket chain. She disliked her job and complained that she could not earn enough to have a life that would be middle-­class in Germany. Pani Cecylia was thrilled that her ­daughter had returned, not understanding how one could live so far away from one’s

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­family. Abroad, she said, one can meet acquaintances (znajomi) and colleagues (koledzy), but not true friends (przyjaciele) or f­ amily (rodzina). She asked: If something ­were to go wrong, on whom could one count? Being away from f­ amily and away from Poland created deep instability and uncertainty for pani Cecylia. Implicit in pani Cecylia’s comments is the idea that building close relationships takes time, an impossibility in light of her ­daughter’s short stay in Germany. Yet more than time is required, as another story shows. Her cousin moved to Canada with her husband and small c­ hildren, leaving Poland on the eve of martial law in 1981. She told pani Cecylia that she still longed for Poland, crying into her pillow at night as she dreamed of her true home. For pani Cecylia, this was further evidence that Poles should not move abroad ­because ­there they lack true friendships and kin relations. Yet her cousin had ­family in Canada: though her husband had passed away, her ­children and grandchildren lived ­there. This is why she w ­ ill not move back, despite tears on her pillowcase for almost thirty years. Pani Cecylia’s cousin’s sadness, her ­daughter’s return to Poland, and pani Cecylia’s own feelings all privilege physical closeness to kin relations and ancestral connections, both of which suggest a strong desire for continuity with the past. Pani Cecylia saw it as a historical fact that Poland belongs to Eu­rope, and therefore the EU. The EU represented an external moral validation of Poland’s geography, but it si­mul­ta­neously heralded yet another threat to Polish patriotism for f­ uture generations b­ ecause of increased possibilities for working abroad. That is, the very act of living outside the Polish state threatens one’s Polishness. For pani Cecylia, it was through both the physical location of kin in Poland and per­for­mances of partition-­era artistic works, within the bounds of Poland itself, that Polishness can continue. When I described ­these conversations with pani Cecylia to my Polish friends in their twenties and thirties, the stories w ­ ere often met with a rolling of the eyes, a deep sigh, and likely a choice word or two. For ­these friends, this type of narrative that recapitulates the story of Polish suffering through the figures of Mickiewicz and Chopin feels like a stale, l­ imited, and backward understanding of what it is to be Polish. The exclusionary nature of pani Cecylia’s patriotism was at odds with more inclusive understandings of Polishness and a desire for multiculturalism by many of my friends.43 (Indeed, this exclusionary vision was at odds with more inclusive nationalist ideals of Mickiewicz and other Polish exiles of the nineteenth c­ entury [Porter 2000].) Yet for pani Cecylia, this narrative pre­sents her con­temporary

Remembering the Polish Nation • 115

strug­gles as having the same moral stakes of ­great Polish strug­gles of the past. Her current suffering, and that of her kin, was inextricable from her f­ amily’s aristocratic Galician past. For pani Cecylia, at stake in the continued per­ for­mance of Dziady and Chopin’s music w ­ ere the continuation of this noble legacy and the survival of her kin. For pani Cecylia, whose sense of what it is to be a good person is so tightly bound up with this Polish patriotic ideal, ­these per­for­mances extended her personhood into the ­future.

“We Share Opłatki and Tears”: Remembering Christmas in Siberia This concern for continuity was evident in other stories that intertwined the personal and the national.44 The stories of pan Florian, a retired doctor who attended the University of the Third Age in Wrocław, w ­ ere similar to pani Cecylia’s in their overwhelming detail and length.45 He spoke for hours on end, weaving together personal and national histories. He and his wife, pani Ania, who worked at the Agricultural University in Wrocław and ­later in environmental protection, attended the conversational En­glish class that I led and invited me over for obiad several times. I soon learned that ­these meals ­were ­really daylong events, as pan Florian regaled me with stories of his life. As with pan Zbigniew and pani Cecylia, I barely had to ask any questions, and pan Florian would talk for hours. Pani Ania would serve food and listen in, but when she was not ­there, pan Florian would serve the food himself. One day, a­ fter I had been t­ here for over seven hours, during which he had fried up pierogi, served two plates of dessert, and poured countless mugs of tea, he asked if I was getting tired, and if I would perhaps like to return another day. I admitted that I was in fact tired, that my hand was cramping, and that my recorder would soon run out of battery power. Throughout this conversation, whenever he would come to a pause in his story, he would say, “What ­else would you like to know?” I would ask a follow-up question, and he would speak for another two hours. Born in 1927 near Wilno (Vilnius), pan Florian’s stories often centered on his six and a half years in Siberia as a teenager.46 Together with his m ­ other and ­sister, at 5:00 a.m. on 13 April 1940, he was forced out of his home and they ­were sent on a train to Siberia. His ­father, who worked as a civil servant, was murdered in Katyń, although pan Florian never had proof of this. In Siberia, they survived in part thanks to the talents of pan Florian’s ­mother

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who was an excellent knitter, so they had goods to barter for food. Pan Florian described the difficulties of life t­ here, of manual l­ abor, food shortages, and illness. ­A fter his u­ ncle’s death in 1962, pan Florian learned as he went through his u­ ncle’s belongings that his grand­father or great-­grandfather (he could not remember which) was also deported to Siberia for participating in the uprising of January 1863 against the Rus­sian tsar.47 This time in Siberia s­ haped his social relations and morality a­ fter the war. According to pan Florian, Sybiracy, or p­ eople who had been deported to Siberia, understood what Stalin’s rule truly meant.48 Therefore, he had a perspective that was dif­fer­ent from the views of his peers. As a student in postwar Poland, pan Florian refused to join the Związek Młodzieży Polskiej (Union of Polish Youth), from which he would have received a stipend, saying to an acquaintance, “I’m not selling myself for money.”49 Indeed, he remembers his student years as very difficult ­because he felt scared and was “ostrożny” (wary, cautious) in relationships with his fellow students. He had no true friends (nie miałem przyjaciół), he said, b­ ecause of this. Pani Ania and ­others, he said, could have fond memories of their youth b­ ecause they did not live with the fear of living u­ nder Soviet rule that he and other Sybiracy did. His experience in Siberia also ­shaped his understandings of regional variations in Poland. When pan Florian and pani Ania learned of my research in Poznań, they wanted to know what differences I saw in ­people ­there. I tried to turn the question back to them to see what they thought. Pan Florian said that p­ eople everywhere are the same, but that t­ here are differences between p­ eople in Poznań and p­ eople in Wrocław. “They d­ idn’t feel the taste of the USSR, the real one. ­Because ­here we had a muffled, unoriginal [version]. But we [Sybiracy] had the au­then­tic one, we lived through it. And they ­didn’t live through it. But they lived through the Germans, and the Germans ­weren’t any better.”50 Poznaniacy (residents of Poznań) and Ślązacy (Silesians) “had no idea, for example, what Siberia was.”51 He said that p­ eople who did not know Soviet rule firsthand thought that someone who was deported to Siberia must have been a thief or committed a crime. “They ­didn’t know that it was b­ ecause you w ­ ere a Pole. They d­ idn’t know that.”52 For pan Florian, his exile in Siberia had a profound effect not only on his intimate relations and his understandings of his peers but also on his sense of what it meant to be Polish. It was this time in his life to which pan Florian would return again and again during our conversations. However, I learned that t­ hese stories w ­ ere

Remembering the Polish Nation • 117

not reserved for the American ethnographer; indeed, pan Florian was rather famous among the master’s and doctoral students who led classes and workshops at the University of the Third Age. Pan Florian and pani Ania participated in the workshop, “Spotkanie w czasoprzestrzeni: dialog między generacjami” (Meeting in Spacetime: Dialogue between Generations; see chapter 2), which consisted of both master’s and doctoral students in pedagogy as well as słuchacze from the University of the Third Age. Students led guided creative exercises that often involved remembering and storytelling. One such activity was to describe one Wigilia that one had experienced. Wigilia, or Christmas Eve, is the most impor­tant holiday of the year for most Poles, and is generally celebrated with a large ­family meal in the eve­ ning. The słuchacze and students alike ­were to compose a story about one Wigilia in their life, which they then shared with the group. A year a­ fter this activity, pani Ania fetched from their bedroom a folder overflowing with papers and pulled out pan Florian’s Wigilia story. Pan Florian read this story out loud to me during our conversation. It’s not as ­simple as it seems, for ­a fter all, ­there have been so many wigilie. Which to choose out of t­ hese over eighty holidays that I have lived through? The first few I can reject, for I c­ an’t remember anything from this period. And the rest? How to choose just one? Looking at the past, they all seem identical. Maybe only in childhood they felt and seemed dif­fer­ent, than this way in adulthood. A cheerful life without prob­lems. A beautiful Christmas tree with lit candles and sparklers, also called “Bengali flames.” ­Family—­mom, dad, ­sister, aunt and u­ ncle with ­daughter and son, who, ­every Christmas, rode to our place on a sleigh pulled by a h ­ orse, or rather a mare, whose name was Żeńka. In the following years, ­there was less delight. No more Santa Claus. The Christmas tree was like last year. And it was like that each year. In the next years, already fully grown up—­again ­great joy. This joy comes from seeing how much plea­sure our c­ hildren taken in this. Ok. But what came between ­these times of our childhood and the childhood of our ­children? Is it pos­si­ble t­ here’s a gap, a break, a blank? Unfortunately not, although one could perhaps call it that. Now, ­a fter this longish introduction, I’m arriving at the topic. For sure this w ­ ill be brief, since ­a fter all a gap cannot be large. This break began in September 1939. I’ll describe only one Wigilia—­ Wigilia in 1940. Why have I chosen this year? I think ­because this was the most wonderful Wigilia of the following five years. We w ­ ere far from our

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country, in a tiny village and a tiny l­ ittle h ­ ouse, on the enormous steppes of Siberia. Deep, white snow. On the horizon you ­can’t see a t­ hing—­not even a ­little bush or tree. Like in the desert or at sea. Preparing for Christmas began ahead of time. It consisted of stocking up on food, and so we had a loaf of bread, barley, a bit of millet, milk, and prob­ably a few eggs. Outside it appeared to be very cold. It was around −20 degrees. (Why “appeared to be”? B ­ ecause in the following months it was −40 degrees.) It was snowing. The first star would soon appear. We w ­ ere preparing for Christmas Eve dinner. Suddenly pani Jadzia appeared. She lived about 600 meters from us. She invited us to spend Wigilia together. I d­ on’t remember if we took our treats with us. (Pani Jadzia was a lot better off and helped us a lot, but that’s off-­topic.) We took a shortcut across the field. The snow was soft and we walked with thick snow up to our knees. I remember that I d­ idn’t have shoes; on my feet I had slippers wrapped in rags. When we got ­there, it was already dusk. It was snowing, so you c­ ouldn’t see the star. We went into the hut, shaking off the snow. I had it the best ­because the slippers covered with rags d­ idn’t let in the snow. The o­ thers had to empty the snow out of their shoes. In the cabin t­ here was a ­table covered with a sheet and two benches. In the win­dow, a kerosene lamp. A Christmas tree—­don’t even think about it. The forest is far. ­There’s not a twig or even a flower that could have substituted as a Christmas tree. Mom and pani Jadzia started to set the t­ able. I ­don’t remember if t­ here was a bundle of hay ­under the sheet.53 If pani Jadzia ­hadn’t thought of it ­earlier, then now it w ­ asn’t pos­si­ble to get it. But pani Jadzia was very resourceful, so surely ­there was a bundle of hay. On the t­ able t­ hey’re serving a loaf of real bread, a real roll sprinkled with poppy seeds and sugar.54 Peeled hard-­boiled eggs, salt, and prob­ably hot dumplings. I’m writing “prob­ably” ­because I’m not sure. Maybe ­these dumplings ­were only in my dreams. Pani Jadzia gives out the opłatki.55 We share opłatki and tears. Every­one had tears in their eyes. Every­one tried to hide them, and especially our moms tried to, so that we w ­ ouldn’t see them. It was hard to hold them off. ­A fter all, this is already the second year and second holiday without a ­father, without a husband. ­There are six of us. Two moms and four kids. Th ­ ere’s me, around fourteen years old, my ­sister Marysia, around seventeen years old, pani Jadzia’s son Tomek, around six years old, and his ­sister, whose name I d­ on’t remember, around eight years old. (Now I know her name—­A ntonina.) Pani Jadzia suggests a joint prayer. On our knees, we pray out loud for our ­fathers and our quickest pos­si­ble return to Poland, full of faith that she would recover in­de­pen­dence. We sit down at the

Remembering the Polish Nation • 119

t­ able, which pretty quickly was ravaged. We sang a few carols. Outside it’s completely dark. The snow is falling. I ­don’t remember how we got back to our cabin. Maybe I d­ on’t remember a lot of t­ hings, but it’s prob­ably ­because that real poppy-­seed roll was too strongly held in my memory. Maybe you’ll ask why I’ve chosen this Christmas Eve. A ­ fter all, t­ here have been eighty ­others, maybe more in­ter­est­ing and happier. I’ll tell you—­because this is a “dialogue between generations.” So that the youth would have at least minimal knowledge about the events of our generation, and maybe also so that ­they’ll understand that it’s necessary to value our homeland before it is lost.56

­ fter he read his story out loud at the meeting, he said, every­one e­ lse in the A group hid theirs away, presumably too embarrassed by the poignancy and emotion of his story. Pani Ania said that her story had been nothing special, nothing like pan Florian’s story; she just described a regular Polish Christmas, she said. The h ­ umble food that pan Florian described—­ the bread, boiled eggs and salt, dumplings (or perhaps just dreams of dumplings)—­contrasts with the more elaborate meals, the twelve dishes that customarily constitute the stół wigilijny, or Christmas Eve t­ able. Yet ­there is much in this story that is familiar to a Polish audience—­the memorable poppy-­seed roll, the hay u­ nder the table­cloth, the opłatki. ­These customs, on this day, in this faraway place, constitute the Polishness that pan Florian wished to convey to the students, to the younger generation. His closing remark that he wanted to convey “minimal knowledge” about the experiences of his generation suggest that this story lies at the core of what he takes to be essential about being Polish. During this time of extreme suffering for himself, his f­ amily, and the Polish nation, comfort for pan Florian was in sharing prayers, opłatki, and a poppy-­seed roll. Closer analy­sis of the language itself also supports this perspective on what pan Florian finds impor­tant in this narrative. Throughout the narrative, his writing switched between past and pre­sent tenses. Since this use of the historical pre­sent gives events immediacy for both the speaker and audience (Ochs and Capps 1996, 25), it is worth investigating in which sentences pan Florian used the historical pre­sent. Focusing just on the Christmas Eve scene itself (the fourth paragraph in the above excerpt), pan Florian used the past tense to describe the physical setting and of pani Jadzia setting the ­table, and the pre­sent to describe serving the food, sharing the opłatki, praying, and sitting down at the ­table.57 The food, the opłatki, the prayers, and the community ­were all brought temporally closer through pan Florian’s use

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of tense. In other words, the verb forms and the content combined to convey the key moral ele­ments of this Polish Christmas Eve story. Słuchacze and students alike w ­ ere moved by pan Florian’s tale. The students selected his story to include in the poster displays that hung in the entranceway of University of the Third Age at the end of that year. With his permission and encouragement, they also scanned, enlarged, and copied by hand letters that pan Florian’s ­sister had written in Siberia and sent to ­family in Poland; they l­ater used the letters in their own research. Pan Florian and pani Ania praised both the style and content of his ­sister’s letters, saying that they w ­ ere truly patriotic and exemplified “piękna polszczyzna” (beautiful Polish language).58 I never heard anyone refer to pan Florian’s speech as piękna polszczyzna, but his speech marked him as a former resident of the kresy (eastern borderlands). Younger p­ eople made affectionate comments about the distinctiveness of pan Florian’s speech, remarking on his use of “l” instead of “ł,” pronunciations of certain vowels, and the cadence of his speech. Such distinctions are not evident if one reads the text in print. Pan Florian himself must voice this story in order to convey its fullest pos­si­ble meaning to his younger interlocutors. For the students, then, it was not just the story he told, but how he told it that carried meaning. Through this embodied storytelling, pan Florian attempted to create continuity between his own experience and that of the younger generations. Deeply critical of pre­sent religious and po­liti­cal regimes as well as ones past, pan Florian found patriotism in s­ imple, embodied acts that created continuity. Against the ruptures in which he framed his story, I see his desire to tell ­these stories as a desire for continuity across generations. Through both his own story of Christmas Eve in Siberia and his ­sister’s piękna polszczyzna, pan Florian was trying to teach younger Poles how to live, as Poles.

The Promise of Continuity: Narrating Moral Personhood in Old Age Pani Wanda and pani Małgorzata sang patriotic songs, thus remembering the past and passing the time. Pani Alicja lamented the quality of Polish produce, wishing for security in her f­ uture and in her kin relations. Pani Cecylia railed against injustices, dreaming of proper kin relations and a noble Polish past. Pan Florian wrote of poppy seeds and opłatki, sharing his suffering in order to transmit patriotism. In all ­these narratives, it was Poland

Remembering the Polish Nation • 121

itself that grounded the narrators as moral persons. It was within the bounds of Poland, variously invoked as a land, homeland, and home, that t­ hese ­people located their relations and memories. Th ­ ese embodied spatiotemporal practices should not be dismissed as the nostalgic or dated ramblings of older ­people who cannot adapt to a new real­ity, but rather seen as practices meant to extend moral personhood into the f­ uture. For indeed, despite the focus on the past in all ­these narratives, ­these practices ­were deeply future-­oriented. Through t­ hese stories, pani Alicja, pani Cecylia, and pan Florian all shared concerns about their own bodily, familial, national, and existential ­futures. Through ­these storytelling practices, the older Poles are reaffirming their link to their ancestors and trying to ensure links to f­ uture generations—­perhaps ensuring their f­ uture status as ancestors themselves. Since the ethnographic rec­ord shows that not every­one equally becomes an ancestor (Feeley-­Harnik 1991, 138), it becomes an empirical question to ask which forms of remembering most strongly influence one’s ­future ancestorhood. In con­temporary Poland, it is the ability to locate oneself within a culturally valued understanding of the Polish nation that creates moral personhood in the pre­sent, and by extension, in the ­future.59 This future-­orientation is common to narrative practices cross-­culturally (Ochs and Capps 1996) and also relates to themes of continuity, an issue that has been shown to ­matter cross-­culturally in old age (e.g., Jakubowska 2012; Kaufman 1986; Lamb 2014; Myerhoff 1979, 2007). Yet ­because this continuity is created through connection with the Polish nation, which has complex and ambivalent meanings, ­these older Poles’ stories and memories can become caught up in the politics of memory in Poland and can form the basis of their own po­liti­cal marginalization. When studying the spatiotemporal dimensions of personhood, then, it is necessary to explore the po­liti­ cal implications of the par­tic­u­lar spatiotemporal scales that are created. In Poland, where active aging and aktywność constitute locally desired and positively valued modes of aging, in contrast to the negatively valued experience of growing old in institutional care, the historical Polish nation emerges as an impor­tant anchor for the moral personhood of older Poles across ­these sites. Given the importance of memory to maintaining moral personhood for older Poles, then, it seems that the memory loss and cognitive changes that occur with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease could pose a threat to moral personhood. In chapter 5, I extend this analy­sis by considering this limit case of moral personhood in late life: a center for p­ eople with Alzheimer’s disease.

5

Rethinking Memory Everyday Rhythms of Dementia

In late June 2012, I rode the tram from the center of Poznań t­ oward the day center for p­ eople with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) where I conducted long-­ term fieldwork. Even as an ethnographer with a critical eye t­ oward narratives of aging-­as-­decline, I found myself feeling apprehensive; two years had passed since my last visit and I anticipated hearing stories of decline—of someone’s worsening physical condition, increasingly severe dementia, or death. This feeling intensified as I approached the day center, where all participants had dementia, a condition overdetermined by stories of decline. Emerging from the under­ground passageway by the tram stop, I noticed the large blokowiska (block apartments) that fill the horizon in this district of Poznań. Walking through a mostly residential neighborhood of older, shorter buildings, I ran through the list of participants whom I had come to know well. How was pani Weronika, who always welcomed me with a warm smile and invited me to sit with her during activities? Was pan Piotr still flirting with his two lady friends who attended the center on dif­fer­ent days—­one on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the other on Tuesdays and Thursdays? Did pan Marcin still play with the center’s guinea pig, 122

Rethinking Memory • 123

in between sneaking cigarettes with his b­ rother, pan Adam? Would pan Ryszard tell me stories in En­glish about the “nice American boys,” or soldiers, whom he met during World War II? Agata, a rehabilitation therapist, opened the door that was locked from both inside and out, and greeted me with an embrace. In the sitting room on the right of the building’s single hallway, a few familiar f­ aces w ­ ere vis­i­ ble, as ­people drank juice, quietly read, or chatted in low tones. From ­behind the closed door on the left, Kasia led the group in physical exercises. In the office at the back of the small building, staff members w ­ ere chatting between activities. The man­ag­er and two occupational therapists greeted me, and we shared news of our lives. They talked of plans to build a new center, with a large donation from a Polish f­ amily in Chicago, and shared updates on the center’s attendees. During this conversation, pan Marcin entered the office carry­ing a fistful of grass and leaves in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other. The smell of cigarette smoke wafted in. He acted surprised to see me, asked where I had been for so long and if I had finished my studies, and kissed my hand in the way typical of some older Polish men. He then handed the lighter to a staff member, thanking her, and waved the grass around, inquiring if the guinea pig was hungry. The staff laughed and said of course, inviting pan Marcin into the office for a moment to drop the food for the guinea pig into its cage on the floor. As pan Marcin, the staff, and I smiled at the eagerly squeaking guinea pig, I noticed that I was relaxing into familiar patterns of conversation and be­hav­ior. The tension that I had felt all morning began to subside. As Kasia’s exercise class finished, ­people walked the few steps across the hallway from the physical recreation room to the sitting room, taking their usual seats. A man started singing harcerskie (scouting) songs; other voices joined his. Paying attention to the familiar patterns of this moment can help illuminate the spatiotemporal dimensions of moral personhood. The ease of interactions at the center notably contrasts with the ethnographic rec­ord on dementia, which documents strained social relations characterized by misunderstanding, anger, fatigue, and frustration (e.g., Chatterji 1998; Cohen 1998; Gubrium 1986; McLean 2006, 2007). Th ­ ese difficult relations can diminish moral personhood and contribute to the social death often experienced by ­people with dementia (e.g., Cohen 1998; Leibing 2006). Thus, it is especially impor­tant to understand how personhood can be maintained in t­ hese contexts. As chapter 4 demonstrated, everyday practices of

124  •  Aging Nationally in Con­temporary Poland

remembering are particularly impor­tant to the moral personhood of older Poles. In par­tic­u­lar, the memory of the historical Polish nation helps to shape the spatiotemporal contours of many older Poles’ personhood. In a center for p­ eople with Alzheimer’s disease, then, it seems that moral personhood would be especially difficult to sustain. In other words, when memory weakens and possibilities for remembering become transformed, moral personhood may be at stake. Yet, this chapter contends that ­people with AD could maintain or even strengthen their ties of relatedness and personhood through practices of remembering. Ethnographic moments like the familiar habits and rhythms of this center suggest new ways to understand experiences of dementia and AD, in which practices of remembering—­specifically shared, collective memory—­sustain personhood and foster ties of relatedness among p­ eople with dementia (Robbins 2019). Collective memory became evident explic­ itly, through cognitive practices such as conversations and word games that referenced the shared past, and implicitly, through embodied practices such as clothing and group physical activities. For instance, a therapist led a quizzing activity that was meant to elicit information about present-­day Poland, such as the name of the prime minister. However, the group’s answers, which referenced the Stalinist-­era leader of the 1950s, Bolesław Bierut, elicited laughter and joking (Robbins 2019, 490–492). Although the participants could not recall the name of the current prime minister, they could joke about the distant past, which was funny exactly b­ ecause of its distance. The shared national past thus formed the stuff of a collective sociality in the pre­sent. Similarly, the shared national past ­shaped embodied aspects of how participants at the center interacted with each other t­ here. For instance, two ­women whose appearance marked them as sharing a gendered class habitus of propriety (Jakubowska 2012) tended to throw withering stares at two men in the group who spoke too loudly or sang too boisterously, and gave each other and me knowing, disapproving glances. Th ­ ese judging be­hav­iors continued in a type of volleyball played at the center, in which the rules w ­ ere modified to fit the capacities of participants and the physical space of the center itself. Both t­ hese types of interaction—­the shared judging glances and the volleyball game—­resonated with generational histories of the participants. The socialist state, for instance, or­ga­nized leisure activities (Robbins 2019, 492–494). The forms of t­ hese interactions thus built on shared national experiences as well as more recent histories of daily life at the center. ­These

Rethinking Memory • 125

forms of remembering contribute to shaping moral personhood for center participants, despite their dementia. The spatiotemporal features of everyday life shape moral personhood for older Poles, both with and without dementia. This chapter shows how the spatiotemporal features of the center itself allow for new forms of relations that make moral personhood pos­si­ble for older adults with AD. The chapter documents the routines of everyday life at the center and the social relations that occur t­ here, in order to understand how they contribute to moral personhood. The overview of daily life at the center provides a context for understanding the sometimes difficult relations between caregivers for p­ eople with AD and ­people with AD themselves. Analyzing ­these relations within both the spatiotemporal context of the center and the life histories of the persons involved in ­these relations can demonstrate the potential for moral personhood for older Poles with dementia. The chapter concludes with reflections on how the affordances of certain places, such as the home and the Alzheimer’s center, shape the moral personhood of older Poles.

Daily Life at the Alzheimer’s Center Designed for p­ eople in the early and m ­ iddle stages of Alzheimer’s disease, the center was located in a residential neighborhood on a quiet street near a main traffic artery, and it occupied the ground floor of a building that also ­houses a hair salon and private residences.1 The front door of the center was always locked from the inside to prevent p­ eople from wandering out. The inside of the center felt small and relatively homely. Attendees w ­ ere in two activity rooms. The room to the right of the entrance hallway was where participants spent most of their time: h ­ ere they ate meals, had cognitive therapy sessions, socialized, and had holiday events. The other activity room, on the left side of the entrance hallway, was generally used for physical exercise. A few steps farther down the hallway revealed the coat­room area on the left, where some attendees spent a lot of time (several p­ eople spent the after­noon getting dressed in their winter coats and shoes to go home, well before it was time, and then undressed at the urging of staff members). Off the coat­ room area was a small office where a neurologist occasionally had consultations with attendees or f­ amily members. Further down the hallway to the left was a small kitchen where the staff, and occasionally some participants,

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FIG. 5.1  ​Main activity and dining room, Alzheimer’s center, Poznań

prepared hot drinks or snacks. Across from the kitchen was the man­ag­er’s office, where the staff often gathered informally to chat, and where f­ amily members met with the man­ag­er. This is also where the guinea pig lived in a cage on the floor. On e­ ither side of the kitchen w ­ ere the rest­rooms for attendees, one designated for men and one for w ­ omen, though the signs did not correspond to the way p­ eople actually used them. Th ­ ere was a separate small rest­room for staff. At the very back of the center was a small utility room. The walls of the center ­were covered in seasonal decorations made by the staff from colored construction paper: snowflakes and Christmas-­themed items in the winter, flowers and Easter-­themed items in the spring, flowers in the summer, and leaves in the fall. In the hallway, t­ here ­were also photo­ graphs of participants (­those whose families had allowed their pictures to be taken) on previous center trips: walks, museum outings, holiday cele­ brations. Th ­ ese decorations and crafts personalized the space and contributed to the warm, cozy atmosphere at the center. Some p­ eople had been attending the center since it opened in 2007, and ­others had started coming more recently. Although the proportion of men and ­women fluctuated as p­ eople joined or left the center, their share was

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about equal. When I began fieldwork, participants ranged in age from seventy-­five to ninety; a ­woman in her sixties joined the center during the time I was ­there. At the beginning of my fieldwork, the center had a waiting list of six p­ eople, although t­ here was one open space due to administrative delays. Admission to the center was run by the Miejski Ośrodek Pomocy Rodzinie (Municipal Center for F ­ amily Aid), which coordinated both the medical and financial aspects of admission. Payment varied by person, depending on their pension and ­family resources. During a return visit in 2012 staff lamented that their center had plenty of open spaces, but that the center for p­ eople with Alzheimer’s in more advanced stages was full. They attributed this to a lack of awareness of the disease; that is, f­ amily members or doctors only sought help when prob­lems had become more noticeable and difficult. Several ­people at this day-­care center, they said, should perhaps be at the other center for p­ eople with more advanced Alzheimer’s. Eight p­ eople worked at the center: the man­ag­er, three therapists, three physical therapists, and one caregiver (all ­women). Additionally, a psychiatrist and social worker made weekly visits for appointments with patients. The therapists ran cognitive exercise sessions, and the physical therapists ran physical activity and exercise sessions. The opiekun (care worker; nurse’s aide) assisted in r­ unning ­these sessions as needed, serving meals, and filling in whenever extra help was needed. The center was open from Monday through Friday from 8:45 in the morning ­until 4:00 in the after­noon. Most p­ eople attended five days a week, although some attended only two or three days. Participants ­were dropped off at the center in the morning by their caregivers. Th ­ ese ­were usually f­ amily members—­wives, husbands, d­ aughters, sons, and a son-­in-­law—­although t­ here ­were a few nonkin paid care workers. Participants entered the small, ground-­level building and headed down the narrow corridor to the large wardrobes on the left, where they removed and hung up their coats and replaced their shoes with their indoor slippers that they kept at the center.2 In keeping with the general fashion of older p­ eople in Poland in public, most p­ eople dressed quite formally—­several men wore ties, and one always wore the same light blue three-­piece suit that was at least two sizes too large for him (presumably b­ ecause he had become smaller with age). Most w ­ omen wore skirts, blouses, and sweaters. Having bid goodbye to their caregivers and changed into their indoor attire, participants walked into the main sitting room on the opposite side of the hallway where they took their usual seats at one of four rectangular t­ ables, each of which seats six to eight ­people.

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This activity room was the center of gravity for participants. ­Here, they ate, drank, chatted, sang, danced, remembered, and forgot. In addition to seasonal decorations, the walls w ­ ere covered with some arts and crafts proj­ ects made by the participants. The walls ­were painted a cheery light green color and large win­dows along two walls that ran almost floor to ceiling let in light, even on the darkest winter days. Bookshelves filled with exercise, activity, and craft books—­some designed for c­ hildren—­lined one wall and a corner of the room. Th ­ ere ­were containers of pens, pencils, and markers. A clock hung above a portable stereo that rested on a bookshelf. Over the door was a small wooden crucifix. Each ­table was covered by a table­cloth that can be wiped clean. A newspaper or magazine was usually lying on it. Meals w ­ ere served, beginning with breakfast at 10:00 a.m., once every­ one had settled in to their seats, and consisted of a pastry and coffee or tea. The first therapy session of the day began at 10:30. The group was generally divided in two according to cognitive ability. One group stayed in this room to do cognitive exercises with a therapist, and the other group went across the hallway to the exercise room, where a physical therapist led physical activities. ­A fter an hour or so, the groups switched rooms and activities so that every­one participated in both physical and cognitive exercises. In the warmer months, if the weather was nice, they sometimes went for a walk in the surrounding neighborhood. During t­ hese walks, pan Marcin often held pani Emilia’s hand, guiding her along the sidewalks and dirt paths through the forested area nearby. The room where the physical therapist led physical exercises was also a cheery place, though less decorated than the main room. Its walls ­were painted a soft yellow and a large win­dow at the front of the room covered in seasonal decorations let in light, though it was often noticeably darker in this room than in the main room. A ballet bar along one long wall and a stack of exercise mats against the back wall made it clear that this room was meant for physical exercise. ­There was also a portable stereo, which often played a local pop radio station or sometimes m ­ usic of the physical therapist’s choice. Against the win­dow in front w ­ ere balls of vari­ous sizes. A Velcro dartboard on the wall had small balls rather than darts sticking to it, although I never saw anyone playing. Sometimes a faint smell of body odor in the room lingered ­after exercise sessions. By around 1:00 p.m., both groups had finished their exercises and returned to the main dining room, again taking their seats at the ­table. ­People returning from the exercise room ­were sometimes visibly sweaty and

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FIG. 5.2  ​A walk near the Alzheimer’s center, Poznań

brought with them an odor of having physically exerted themselves. During this unstructured time, some sat quietly and read the newspaper or did crossword puzzles while o­ thers talked with their neighbors; some sat quietly, neither reading nor talking. Some read the same ­thing repeatedly; one man spent over twenty minutes reading the same advertisement. Some wandered through the center. A few ­people had also had strokes, making it harder for them to interact with o­ thers due to speech prob­lems. Occasionally someone started to sing harcerskie songs, especially if the radio was not on, and encouraged o­ thers to sing along. Th ­ ere was sustained flirtation between two participants, or rather three. Pan Piotr had two ladies with whom he flirted—­pani Ola on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and pani Ela on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They sat close to each other, and pani Ola in par­tic­ u­lar tried to encourage more physical closeness, often saying affectionately “chodź tu do mnie” (come h ­ ere to me) if pan Piotr happened to sit across the ­table from her rather than next to her. However, for the most part the ­women sat with and talked with other w ­ omen, and the men with other men. By 1:30 p.m., the catering ser­vice would drop off the day’s obiad, taking the typical Polish form of a soup and a main meat dish with a side of

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potatoes and another vegetable (usually cooked beets, carrots, or cabbage). A jug of artificially sweetened red juice or fruit compote was included. Some form of pork was the standard main dish, although Fridays w ­ ere an exception; the main dish was fish or vegetable rather than meat, according to the expectations of the Catholic participants. The food arrived in huge cafeteria-­sized pots that took two p­ eople to carry. One staff member ladled the soup from the metal vat into shallow white bowls with ruffled edges. Another walked around the small room, distributing the full bowls and spoons. Participants began eating as soon as they received the soup, commenting on the type and quality. As soon as the staff members finished distributing the soup to the last person, they collected bowls from ­those who first received the soup. Next, one staff member scooped out portions of meat and passed the plate to the next staff person, who scooped out the vegetables and passed the plate to another staff person, who distributed the full plates to all participants. One staff member distributed medicines to ­those who needed them. One staff member cut the meat into bite-­size pieces for participants who could not see well enough to cut their own food or who no longer remembered how to cut it themselves. When necessary, a staff member sat next to a participant with very poor eyesight, guiding her spoon to the bowl and her fork to the plate. As soon as a participant had finished eating, the staff collected the plates, scraping the uneaten food into a plastic container for this purpose and stacking the dirty dishes in a large plastic tub. When all this was done, the staff divided up the remaining food for their own lunch, ­going into the exercise room to sit on the floor, mats, or chairs to eat and chat while the participants resumed their reading, chatting, or singing. ­A fter participants finished lunch, they generally moved into the exercise room across the hallway, where the last session of the day gets u­ nder way around 2:40 p.m. The man­ag­er of the center explained that the post-­obiad activities ­were meant to be more relaxing and less vigorous than the morning sessions. In the after­noon, staff led games that involved tossing a ball (e.g., catch, modified volleyball) and ­were sometimes combined with cognitive exercises (e.g., the person with the ball had to say a word beginning with a designated letter). M ­ usic was often playing on the stereo in the after­ noon. Sometimes p­ eople remained in the main dining room d­ oing other cognitive activities, or every­one might watch a movie in the exercise room. Families began to pick up participants beginning around 3:00 p.m., so ­these activities ­were meant to be easily interrupted for ­people to leave. Almost

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immediately a­ fter lunch ended, several participants walked to the wardrobes to rummage around for their outerwear in preparation for ­going home. Staff members encouraged them to return to the group and wait u­ ntil their f­ amily arrived to gather ­these belongings and change shoes, although sometimes they w ­ ere not quick enough or able to convince participants to stay, meaning that a ­couple of p­ eople occasionally sat on the benches in the hallway waiting expectantly. ­These routines created a regularity to the spatiotemporal features of everyday life at the center. Despite participants’ strug­gles with memory loss, they engaged in patterned social activity that contained an internal logic. Although some of ­these activities might have seemed odd for ­people without dementia, such as putting on shoes and preparing to leave hours early, singing the same song over and over again, within the shared spatiotemporal framework of the Alzheimer’s center t­ hese activities made sense.3 Repeated interactions with the staff, ­whether in the leading of exercises or the serving of food, contributed to the rhythms of the days. Like the staff at the rehabilitation center and social welfare home described in chapter 3, who engaged in relations of care with patients and residents through intimate acts of diapering and feeding, relations with staff at the Alzheimer’s center helped to sustain moral personhood among center participants. As the next section ­will show, this sociality among caregivers and ­people with Alzheimer’s can be contrasted to relations with kin, with differing effects on moral personhood.

Bickering, Tea-­Sweetening, and Other Strained Relations: Kin Relations in Dif­fer­ent Places The primarily harmonious aspect of life at the center contrasted with the difficulties of kin relations that became vis­i­ble during certain moments of the day. Indeed, it is intimate relationships that so often become problematic when someone has Alzheimer’s disease. For instance, a reunion over obiad at the home of a ­couple whom I knew through the University of the Third Age (UTA) demonstrated the effects of Alzheimer’s on kin relations. As we ­were catching up, both the husband and wife emphasized the prob­ lems caused by the husband’s Alzheimer’s and skleroza, or sclerosis (they used the terms interchangeably). The previous time I had seen them, in 2010, he occasionally made a few comments about his memory, but in 2012, the

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prob­lems ­were evident even without his remarking on them. He forgot words, started a sentence and then lost his train of thought, and asked many unrelated questions. Formerly talkative, even garrulous (more than once, our conversations ended a­ fter eight hours only b­ ecause I was exhausted), in 2012 he strug­gled to carry on a conversation that lasted more than a few minutes. He and his wife, who previously had carried on an almost constant lighthearted banter, now lapsed into silence quite frequently, their words trailing off, as they cited Alzheimer’s as the culprit. They w ­ ere both more easily irritated than before and looked as if they had aged by more than two years. At the center, my direct observations of kin relationships ­were ­limited to the daily arrivals and departures of ­people with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers. Mornings ­were characterized by caregivers saying quick goodbyes to participants and brief greetings to staff, as caregivers dropped off center attendees and hurried off to work, errands, or other duties. After­noons ­were marked by caregivers’ admonitions to center attendees to find their shoes, to put them on quickly, and, in the colder months, to zip up their coats. In this light, it makes sense that some would seek out their outerwear right a­ fter lunch, despite staff members directing them to wait u­ ntil they ­were picked up. Occasionally, caregivers would talk with the directors about worrisome new symptoms, or how time was spent at the center. On Thursdays, caregivers would wait for appointments with the psychiatrist. The pace of interactions among kin felt rushed, tempers ­were occasionally short, and relations often seemed tense. In ­these moments, kin relations came across as strained and difficult. Such sentiments w ­ ere confirmed in my conversations with four of ­these caregivers, who spoke of vari­ous difficulties at home that they attributed to their relatives’ Alzheimer’s disease. ­Because of the constraints of institutional review board approval, I could not directly ask participants about their experiences at home.4 Thus, the stories ­here are from the perspective of the caregiver. I have tried, where pos­si­ble, to interpret how situations might seem from the perspective of the person with Alzheimer’s, but this is necessarily ­limited. Difficulties in caregiving w ­ ere a shared experience. I interviewed four ­women who served as caregivers; two ­were wives whose husbands attended the center and two w ­ ere d­ aughters whose parents (one m ­ other, one f­ ather) attended.5 All spoke to the difficulties of caring for their relatives with dementia, noting that their kin would make more demands of them, especially centering on food. They ­were all exhausted. Notably, the one

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d­ aughter who took care of her ­mother seemed less stressed than the ­others, citing mostly the increased attention her ­mother needed. One ­woman, pani Maria, spoke of the contraction of their social world since her husband, pan Marek, had developed Alzheimer’s disease.6 ­A fter she retired as a tour guide, she attended the UTA for six years, where she studied astronomy and Italian. “It was . . . ​it was pleasant, that old age.”7 For the three years since her husband had had Alzheimer’s, she could no longer attend the University of the Third Age—or maintain other relationships. In response to a question about ­whether pani Maria saw friends of her own, she responded: “Darling, now I have no personal life, nothing—­only taking care of my husband.”8 They ­were invited to attend his ­sister’s ninetieth birthday party that weekend in Leszno, a town not far from Poznań, but pani Maria de­cided against attending, a­ fter first saying that they would attend. Although it was an impor­tant event—­his s­ ister’s d­ aughter was making a f­ amily tree (drzewo genealogiczne) to which she wanted the w ­ hole ­family to contribute at this party—­pani Maria thought it would be too much trou­ble to take care of pan Marek ­there. The season made it difficult, she explained. Since it was winter, the party would be indoors and pan Marek would be wearing heavy clothing. If he wet himself, this would be problematic. Moreover, the young, healthy ­family members would not understand pan Marek’s prob­lems. But maybe if it w ­ ere summer, when the weather would be nicer and he would be wearing lightweight clothes that could dry easily, they could go. So pani Maria declined the invitation. Pani Maria described changes in pan Marek’s be­hav­ior since having Alzheimer’s disease. She noticed ­there was something wrong when he started to act strangely with regard to money. At the time of the interview, he no longer wanted to shower and would sometimes wet himself. She described a new “aggression” in his personality. “Aggression. Aggression. [Every­thing] has to be just how he likes it.”9 He had some prob­lems with memory, although ­these seemed less troublesome for pani Maria than the behavioral prob­lems. In a doctor’s appointment early in the diagnostic pro­cess, pani Maria was surprised to see that he could not tell time. She said that he did know who he was and when he was born, although he had some difficulties with remembering names. To remedy this, pani Maria quizzed him at home on their grandchildren’s and other relatives’ names, and this has helped him to remember. She also thinks attending the center has “slowed down” the progression of his disease,10 which she attributes to the cognitive exercises at the center. He was also taking medi­cation for Alzheimer’s: Exelon

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(rivastigmine). Pan Marek used to take it in pill form, but switched to the patch at the doctor’s suggestion so it would have less effect on his liver and stomach; however, pani Maria noticed that pan Marek would rip off the patch, so she was planning to ask the doctor to switch back to the pill. Even though it took over six hours each day for her to drop off and pick up pan Marek from the center, pani Maria was grateful for the care, since it allowed her to run errands.11 She could not run errands with pan Marek, since he once wandered away from her, boarded a bus, and dis­appeared: pani Maria found him near their home eating apples from a wild apple tree. However, it is notable that not all ­these hardships ­were entirely new. Pani Maria saw her husband, a retired tailor, as newly arrogant ­after developing Alzheimer’s, but described his personality as an intensification of be­hav­iors that she had always noticed. Somewhat hesitatingly, she referred to him as being selfish (samolubny) throughout their life together, citing an example in which he selected the best pieces of fruit for himself, rather than saving them for their c­ hildren. This made her heart hurt, pani Maria said. She explained such selfishness as a failure on her part, which she was trying to remedy: I’m a tour guide. So, I had unpredictable work hours. It varied—­sometimes I’d come home ­later, sometimes e­ arlier. So when I returned [from work], it’s pos­si­ble that I raised my husband and kids poorly. ­Because it’s also necessary to raise a husband. Listen—­I’ve been d­ oing every­thing from the beginning. Even—­would you believe it—my husband told me “when you sweeten my tea for me, it tastes better.” And I was young, so I sweetened it. And he got used to it. But not anymore. Now I put out honey, b­ ecause he drinks tea with honey. Despite every­thing, he . . . ​well, I’m trying [to do this]: his head is sick, but his hands are strong. So a­ fter all, maybe he can do a ­little bit.12

Despite having sweetened pan Marek’s tea for de­cades, pani Maria de­cided that she would no longer do it.13 Perhaps ­because his Alzheimer’s now required her to do so many ­things for him, she could no longer do the small ­things to which he had grown accustomed. I failed to ask how pan Marek responded to his new task of sweetening his own tea—­pani Maria spoke rapidly, as if she needed to tell ­these stories—­but I could imagine that pan Marek might be irritated or confused by her refusal to sweeten the tea. From pani Maria’s perspective, this seemed like a largely symbolic act: surely

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putting honey in his tea was among the least difficult or time-­consuming of the tasks that she performed for him, since she said he needed almost constant supervision and attention. She spoke of being worn out and exhausted. This change in their relationship seemed to be a response not only to AD, but to a lifetime of managing a relationship with a husband she saw as selfish. At the center, pan Marek did not seem selfish or aggressive; in fact, he was among the quieter participants. He always greeted me with a warm smile and was generally engaged in activities, although he would at times fall asleep during the cognitive exercises. He and pan Czesław became friends: they would often sit next to each other and pan Marek would frequently be among the first to follow pan Czesław’s lead in singing songs. In short, he seemed quite dif­fer­ent from the person pani Maria described at home. Throughout our conversation, pani Maria discussed her difficulties with pan Marek’s illness and the long-­standing difficulties between them. At the end of our conversation, however, pani Maria said that she too had significant health prob­lems. She was in “pierwsza grupa inwalidzka,” or “disabled—­ first level,” the category used by the Polish state to label the most severely disabled, meaning that she was not qualified for work. Eleven years ­earlier, she had a routine diagnostic procedure that went wrong; since then, she has had a colostomy bag, which also caused severe nerve pain. She needed an operation, she said, but had no time to get it done ­because she had to take care of pan Marek. Sighing, she said that one must be grateful and thank God for each day: “Clearly, it’s necessary to suffer on this earth.”14 Although visibly tired and harried, pani Maria looked younger than her eighty years and had a certain energy and vitality about her. It is also worth noting that this description of suffering fits well with the figure of Matka-­Polka, the martyred figure of the suffering Polish nation, yet pani Maria’s insistence that pan Marek now sweeten his own tea suggested that this category did not entirely fit—or perhaps it indicated exactly her strug­gle against it.15 ­These difficult changes in kin relationships are also emphasized in both clinical and ethnographic lit­er­a­ture on Alzheimer’s disease. Yet the exhaustion of pani Maria and the other ­women reflected not only the difficulties of taking care of a person with dementia who did not fully understand the work being done on his behalf but also the exhaustion of a lifetime of effort, a lifetime of care, a lifetime of tea-­sweetening (cf. Seaman 2018). Notably, it was not only pan Marek’s Alzheimer’s and incontinence that prevented

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them from attending his ­sister’s birthday party, but also pani Maria’s perception that ­others would not understand. Such strained relations took on generational stakes, as missing this party meant that pan Marek and pani Maria—­and their relational knowledge—­were omitted from the creation of the ­family tree that was to take place t­ here. For t­ hese w ­ omen caregivers, AD seemed to have exacerbated situations that w ­ ere already difficult, rather than to have precipitated a fall from some previous state of grace. In this light, then, the relatively peaceful, harmonious social environment of the center appeared remarkable. Indeed, rather than an atmosphere of tense interactions, the environment at the center felt relaxed and calm. The staff helped to keep the stakes low; interactions among attendees, who lacked the deep intimate and shared histories that define kin relations, did not m ­ atter in the same way that interactions with kin did. Being in a group of p­ eople who could not remember the president’s name was dif­fer­ent from being with a spouse who could not recall a child’s name. The lack of tension within the group at the center marked a significant change from difficult relations at home. This comment on the peaceful nature of the center is not made to suggest that t­ here was never any interpersonal conflict or discord; as with any group of p­ eople, t­ here ­were quarrels between par­tic­u ­lar individuals. Pan Marcin regularly amused and annoyed fellow attendees; pan Czesław’s songs alternately entertained and irritated p­ eople; pani Weronika became close with pani Teresa, but slighted pani Marysia by one day sitting at a dif­f er­ent ­table from her. In fact, this is part of the point of this chapter. As in any other group that habitually spends time together, friendships and cliques formed, excluding some, while o­ thers expressed no interest in such friendships, preferring instead to sit quietly by themselves. Relations within the group of attendees at the Alzheimer’s center ­were in some ways quite similar to ­those among the słuchacze of the University of the Third Age. Similar gendered patterns of sociality existed, wherein men and ­women tended to self-­ segregate; the w ­ omen chatted more among themselves, and the men w ­ ere more often engaged in solitary activities like reading or crossword puzzles or seeking attention from the group through loud be­hav­ior. Paradoxically, at the center, Alzheimer’s was no longer the defining feature of group interactions. Although the diagnosis structured the daily routines of cognitive and physical exercises, it was not the most impor­tant part of ­people’s interactions. Rather, ­people at the center engaged in be­hav­iors that align with gendered patterns of sociality throughout the life course, highlighting that memory is social as well as cognitive.

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The Sociality of the Past in a Place of Forgetting ­ ese observations of everyday life at a day center for p­ eople with AlzheimTh er’s disease challenge implicit popu­lar and scholarly understandings of Alzheimer’s disease as a kind of limit case for thinking about experiences of aging. ­Because growing old often reveals the interde­pen­dency of social relations that Euro-­A merican ideals of personhood mask (Buch 2018), Alzheimer’s has become an exemplar of the potential horrors of old age (Cohen 1998). However, like other ethnographic research on Alzheimer’s (e.g., Brijnath 2014; Driessen 2018; Seaman 2018), ethnography from this center in Poznań reveals that moral personhood can be created and sustained among persons with Alzheimer’s disease through everyday activities practiced by ­those without Alzheimer’s disease. Given the importance of practices of remembering to older Poles’ personhood, the loss of memory that characterizes Alzheimer’s disease would seem to be particularly devastating for older Poles’ moral personhood. However, as this research shows, that tendency is mitigated and even redirected by the kind of sociality experienced by participants in the center. This ethnography suggests that social relations with each other and the staff are key to sustaining moral personhood for center participants. Like the institutional care facilities described in chapter 3, intimate everyday relations of care powerfully shape the moral personhood of older Poles. Staff and participants alike participated in everyday rituals of commensality and group activities. Some relations of care had an upbeat quality, such as when pan Marcin and the staff joked together about feeding the guinea pig. Thus the spatiotemporal rhythms of daily life at the center, which are patterned in terms of physical location and types of activities, support the sustaining of moral personhood. Furthermore, the social relations among participants and staff are often characterized by a lightness of mood that contrasts with often difficult relations with kin at home. Observations of easy social relations at the center that contrast with severely strained social relations at home suggest that nonkin sociality plays an impor­tant role in creating or sustaining moral personhood for p­ eople with dementia. The importance of this nonkin sociality in shaping personhood thus demonstrates a connection between older Poles with dementia and t­ hose without. Like older Poles who create new relations at Universities of the Third Age or other active-­aging contexts, center participants are forming new relations that sustain moral personhood in the pre­sent.

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Perhaps b­ ecause ­these new social relations at the Alzheimer’s center do not contain histories of kinship, the pre­sent aspects of the relations come more easily to the fore. This resonates with other research on dementia showing that staying focused on the pre­sent moment can create lighter, less conflicted social interactions for the person with dementia (e.g., Selberg 2015; Taylor 2008). Additionally, t­ here are ele­ments of the shared collective past that form part of t­ hese relations (Robbins 2019). The collective past becomes evident explic­itly, through activities such as cognitive exercises meant to recall the past, and implicitly, such as when participants sang harcerskie songs. Together, ­these insights into the significance of everyday sociality and collective memory may help to reduce cultural fear of Alzheimer’s disease and stigma t­ oward persons with dementia. Participants who attend this center are also engaging in a sociality that occurs outside the home. Chapter 6 explores the role of memory and social relations in shaping moral personhood in social settings outside the home that are not marked as sites of e­ ither active aging or illness and debility, which are more typical of the experiences of many older Poles. While the Universities of the Third Age explic­itly promote active aging, and attendees aspire to this goal, and institutional care falls outside the ideals of active and aktywność, ­there are other sites in which older Poles more typically spend their time, such as allotment gardens, parish clubs, and se­nior clubs. Analyzing moral personhood in ­these contexts that are less fraught in their relation to ideals of active aging thus illuminates how the spatiotemporal dimensions of aktywność relate to practices and ideals of moral personhood in contexts not defined by education or health. In places such as allotment gardens, parish clubs, and neighborhood se­nior clubs, how does memory come to ­matter for older Poles’ moral personhood? This question ­will be addressed in chapter 6.

6

Gardens of Memory Reimagining Home and Nation On a sunny July day, a reunion with research participants from the University of the Third Age (UTA) in Wrocław provided new insights into moral personhood in late life. Pani Dominika and I spent the after­noon at her friend’s allotment garden on the outskirts of Wrocław. We met at the statues of the lions (symbols of Lwów) at the John Paul II Square and took the tram out past the new stadium that had been built that summer (2012) for the Eu­ro­pean soccer championship, past the neighborhood of apartment blocks where @ctive Se­nior was held, past Park Zachodni (which shows no signs of its past as a German cemetery), past the one active Jewish cemetery in town (often vandalized with anti-­Semitic graffiti), and past the new highway (also built for the soccer championship). We crossed the tram tracks and walked parallel to the highway on-­ramp on a grassy path with l­ ittle alleys off to the right side. ­A fter a bit of wandering, we found the correct grassy alley and walked down the path, surrounded by gardens in varying degrees of upkeep. At the garden of pani Dominika’s friend, we walked through the gate and joined the group of four ­women sitting at a picnic ­table ­under a canopy of grapevines, eating, drinking, and chatting. Some ­people knew each other through the University of the Third Age, ­others ­were related by marriage 139

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or had worked together for de­cades. A few more ­people joined the group an hour l­ ater. We spent the day chatting, eating, and drinking; every­one had brought food to share, and the hosts served it constantly throughout the five or six hours we w ­ ere t­ here. Mayonnaise-­based salads, apple pudding cake (this was especially popu­lar), grilled cheese, pickles, cookies, pretzels, apples (papierówki, which are pale-­g reen apples that ripen early in the season) picked from a tree in the garden. Tea, coffee, w ­ ater, beer, both flavored and regular. The w ­ omen chatted about their c­ hildren and grandchildren and joked about the difficulties of relationships with daughters-­in-­law. When a thunderstorm broke out, all eight of us crammed into the altanka (a small shedlike structure) on the allotment. It was in this crowded space that ­people started singing. For an hour, the w ­ omen egged each other on, singing twenty dif­fer­ent songs: folk tunes, World War I–­era songs, songs about postwar Wrocław, and wedding songs. The ­women said they had always known ­these songs, having sung them at camps as c­ hildren and at weddings as adults, and ­were surprised that I did not have a similar American repertoire ready to perform. A ­ fter the rain had ­stopped, we stayed inside the shed for a bit longer, and eventually took our leave, all walking back to the tram together, most of us with bags of papierówki and white string beans from the host. At first the allotment gardens appear distinct from educational institutions like the UTA and medically defined contexts like the rehabilitation center, state-­run long-­term care institution, and Alzheimer’s center. As emblems of the third and fourth ages, both UTAs and institutional care are marked as meaningful sites of aging, as exemplars of e­ ither active aging or a dreaded state of illness and de­pen­dency. Allotment gardens do not carry ­either of ­these meanings associated with old age, and are not places primarily defined in terms of old age. Although they are frequented by older adults, they are places characterized by the participation of multiple generational groups, and part of the everyday rhythms of Polish life. Yet as this chapter demonstrates, ­these gardens, similar to the other sites examined in this book, provide a space that nourishes the sociality of life for older p­ eople, takes them outside the home, and takes its meaning in part from the Polish national past. It was precisely the everydayness of the allotment garden that drew me to them as a context in which to understand moral personhood in late life. ­A fter eigh­teen months of living in Poland and completing fieldwork in the UTAs and institutional care sites, I realized the degree to which they did not necessarily represent more common experiences of aging in Poland.

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Although anthropology is not a field that produces knowledge solely by investigating normative experiences, I grew curious about the moral personhood of older Poles who neither participated in UTAs nor lived in or participated in institutions that ­were dominated by medical conditions. In conversations with older Poles and staff at t­ hese institutions, as well as with Polish colleagues and friends, I began asking where the “normal” older ­people ­were. I also explic­itly asked where the old men ­were, since both the educational and medical institutions ­were overwhelmingly populated by older ­women. Both questions elicited the same answer—­na działce, or at the allotment garden. Other social spaces, such as parish clubs, neighborhood se­nior clubs, and retiree clubs ­were also frequent answers. Building upon this knowledge, I sought out opportunities to visit allotment gardens and other social groups in Wrocław and Poznań during the summer of 2014. This research included older ­people who participate in groups of retired volunteers, retirees taking art classes and re-­creating period costumes, handicraft groups, a “house of culture” (dom kultury), retired engineers and technical workers, retired Solidarność (Solidarity ­labor ­union and po­liti­cal party) members, as well as older p­ eople who had no affiliation with any social group. Across t­ hese diverse contexts, the concept of aktywność emerged as a moral imperative for older Poles to engage in sociality outside the home. It was impor­tant as an aspirational ideal that s­ haped the participation of older Poles in ­these more typical activities. Central to this concept is the idea of participating in a sociality located outside the home, which constitutes a notable contrast to the ideal of being cared for at home in the case of illness or debility. Evidence from the Alzheimer’s center discussed in chapter 5 suggests that this extra-­domestic sociality remains impor­tant even as some types of memory fade. Concepts of home and nation continue to serve as anchors for the moral personhood of older Poles across diverse settings. This book has demonstrated that the practices constituting moral personhood crosscut ­these polarized extremes of late life—­the active aging of the UTAs on the one hand, and the de­pen­dency and illness of the rehabilitation center, social welfare home, and Alzheimer’s center, on the other. In this chapter, ethnographic data from allotment gardens and other normative places of aging (parish clubs, neighborhood se­nior clubs, and retiree clubs) confirm that moral personhood emerges through practices of relatedness with certain spatiotemporal dimensions. In t­ hese more normative contexts, Polish national history continues to provide a meaningful spatiotemporal

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framework for moral personhood in late life. Moreover, the history of allotment gardens shows that aktywność is a concept with deep roots. This chapter begins by sketching out the kinds of sociality that occurred at typical clubs frequented by older Poles, showing the continuity of types of social interactions across dif­fer­ent kinds of spaces for se­niors. This section focuses on a parish club and a retirees’ organ­ization of technicians and engineers, both in Wrocław. Next, the chapter considers in more detail the space of the allotment garden, a key site for older Poles’ moral personhood despite its not being labeled as a place for aging. A historical perspective on ­these gardens then demonstrates that their importance predates the socialist era, providing a connection to older ways of living. Fi­nally, ethnographic data from the gardens themselves demonstrate the importance of home and nation to concepts of aktywność and even to life itself. Insights from t­ hese contexts suggest that activity in late life is a fundamentally relational pro­ cess that gives life vitality.

“One Cannot Sit at Home within ­These Four Walls”: Extra-­Domestic Sociality in Late Life Ethnographic data from parish and retiree organ­izations shows that the category of aktywność encompasses a range of activities. Due to gendered ­labor histories and preferences for activities, the parish club consisted of all ­women and the organ­ization of retired engineers and technical workers consisted of a majority of men. “It’s sad to be at home alone,” remarked one ­woman at a parish club in Wrocław.1 As she sat around a t­ able offering poppy-­seed cake, layered lemon-­cream cake, and a ­bottle of fruit soda in a social room of a Catholic church, she and five other w ­ omen described the club’s activities and their own motivations for participating. On a weekly basis, they obtained and arranged the flowers that accompany the ser­vices, and helped to clean the church. They also helped to or­ga­nize prayer groups for parishioners in need and social events at the church. In contrast to neighborhood se­nior clubs, the w ­ omen remarked that parish clubs w ­ ere special ­because “we are connected, we know each other” and “we trust each other.”2 This was dif­fer­ent from se­nior clubs, they noted, where ­people who attend are “closed up at home.”3 They described this sense of connection as a gendered phenomenon, saying that men “­don’t need this connection” b­ ecause

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they have it through their female kin—­wives, ­sisters, and d­ aughters.4 In a sad but matter-­of-­fact tone, one w ­ oman commented that “men die more quickly ­because they ­don’t feel needed.”5 Every­one agreed, and the conversation moved on to a discussion of other activities in which they partake in retirement, such as exercise classes, gardening at their allotments, volunteering at a ­children’s hospice, singing in the church choir, and ­going on religious pilgrimages to Lourdes and Rome. In this conversation, the ­women ­were expressing gendered ideals of how one should age. In their late sixties to early eighties, they had differing l­ abor histories; they had retired from c­ areers in pharmacy, w ­ ater management, geodesics, and tourism, and one had stayed at home to raise ­children. A few ­were ­widows, while o­ thers lived with their husbands. All had ­children and grandchildren. Most had known each other for de­cades, as they had lived in Wrocław since at least the 1970s and had been attending that church since then. Although the parish club was not exclusively designated for older adults, t­ hese w ­ omen started participating a­ fter retirement, as the structures of their days shifted away from paid l­abor. For them, such activities w ­ ere not merely a way to spend their days; they provided meaning and purpose to their lives. Indeed, the stakes of t­ hese activities seemed to be life itself— by linking men’s lower engagement in social life to their lower life expectancy, ­these ­women w ­ ere engaging in sociality outside the ­house as not only a moral imperative but also as one on which life itself depended. However, not all men stayed at home and refused social engagement. One notable exception to the generalization that the ­women at the parish club presented was the retirees’ organ­ization at the Naczelna Organizacja Techniczna (Polish Central Technical Organ­ization). Housed in an imposing nineteenth-­century building in the center of Wrocław, the professional organ­ization of engineers and technicians established a group for se­niors. Originally a se­niors’ club founded in 1977, the organ­ization became a Se­niors’ Commission in 1983. They trace their history back to more informal se­niors’ circles that have existed since the interwar period (Danielewicz and Kupiec 2007, 2). During a conversation with four men (ranging in age from early seventies to nineties) who served in vari­ous leadership roles in this group, one man described that their group’s purpose was to c­ ounter social isolation: “We d­ on’t like loneliness.”6 They or­ga­nized social gatherings and outings to cultural events such as the opera, museums, and theater, “so that se­niors feel young.”7 One event that the four men remembered

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fondly was when the L’viv opera came to town, as it offered many of them a connection to the kresy, the eastern borderlands where two of them ­were born and that now belong to Ukraine. In addition to cultural events, they all agreed on the importance of physical exercise as one grows old, citing cycling and skiing as beloved activities. For one of ­these men, the bicycle offered a meta­phor for aging: “A person is like a bike; movement is necessary.”8 Another commented that t­ hese activities, cultural and physical alike, are meant to promote aktywność: “In order to be active, it’s necessary to get out of the ­house.”9 Like the w ­ omen of the parish club, the men at the retirees’ club shared a philosophy of aging in which social relations outside the home w ­ ere paramount to living a good life and thus maintaining moral personhood in old age. Across ­these differently gendered groups, the past played a strong role in shaping the pre­sent, since some of the groups w ­ ere based on past occupation and parish affiliation. ­These forms of aktywność represented continuity within the lifetimes of older Poles, such that aktywność in late life has parallels to aktywność in ­earlier times of the life course. Continuity is also evident in the forms themselves, as ­women in Poland have long been affiliated with the Catholic Church, and groups for retirees have existed since the interwar period. Through connecting to meaningful histories, both personal and national, t­ hese older Poles are sustaining moral personhood in late life.

Allotment Gardens across Eras This fact of continuity is evident in the allotment gardens as well, given their long history in Poland and the region. The allotment on the outskirts of Wrocław where I visited with ­women from the UTA was created in the 1960s in association with a machine factory also located in the western part of the city. Pani Dominika’s friend obtained that garden through her late husband, who was an employee of this factory. Hers was one of several hundred gardens in this allotment, which was governed by the Polski Związek Działkowców (PZD, or Polish Union of Allotment Gardeners). Allotment gardens created in this way ­were common during the socialist era, as they ­were considered to be a right of citizens of the socialist state (Lenkiewicz 1971 and Kondracki 1981 in Bellows 2004, 257). As part of the industrialization of Poland in the years following World War II, the number of ­people

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moving from rural to urban areas increased dramatically. In addition to factories, schools, and hospitals, socialist planners created new allotment gardens. They are thus associated with the socialist era in the Polish popu­ lar imaginary. However, allotment gardens have a longer history in Poland that predates the socialist era. Some of the allotment gardeners I met narrated their own understanding of this history to me. Proudly stating that some gardens in Poznań dated back over one hundred years, to the first de­cade of the twentieth c­ entury, one president of an allotment garden organ­ization ­there stated that the original ideal of allotment gardening was social assistance for the poor, so that they could have “their own piece of green.”10 He described a similar logic in France and Germany, where gardens w ­ ere meant to help provide food for p­ eople who could not purchase it for themselves; similar practices arose in the United Kingdom. Gardens in Kraków and Silesia likewise date back to the partition era in Poland (Bellows 2004). In the twentieth ­century, allotment gardens became mandatory as part of certain forms of postwar development. ­A fter World War II, allotment gardens w ­ ere regulated by a 1946 policy specifying the conditions in which they must be provided. For all housing developments in which at least 20 ­percent w ­ ere collective housing and for all workplaces employing at least two hundred ­people, allotment gardens ­were mandatory (Trembecka and Kwartnik-­Pruc 2018, 3). Regions that experienced more industrial growth thus had more allotment gardens; Lower Silesia and Greater Poland, where Wrocław and Poznań lie, are among the regions with the most allotment gardens in Poland (Trembecka and Kwartnik-­Pruc 2018, 7). As they did e­ arlier in their history, allotment gardens provided impor­ tant sources for food provisioning (Bellows 2004). Indeed, during state socialism, the percentage of cultivated plants that could be ornamental was ­limited, as opposed to the share of plants for consumption; only 10 ­percent could be ornamental (Szkup 2013, in Klepacki and Kujawska 2018, 125). This changed in the postsocialist era, as regulations from 2013 stated the purpose to be primarily leisure and recreation, with food production as secondary (Klepacki and Kujawska 2018, 125). This shift in purpose appears to be generational: the older gardeners with whom I met described the importance of cultivating fruits and vegetables at the garden, rather than using the space primarily for leisure, as described below. Moreover, the older gardeners’ descriptions of the l­ abor that they put into caring for their gardens call into question the category of leisure itself.11

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More recently, allotment gardens have experienced transformations due to con­temporary politics of development. In 2012 the EuroCup soccer championship included matches in four Polish cities (Warsaw, Gdańsk, Poznań, and Wrocław), for which new highways and stadiums w ­ ere built. Some of this construction occurred on the terrain of allotment gardens, which meant the destruction of t­ hese gardens. In 2014 gardeners in Poznań reported with sadness the liquidation of several long-­standing allotment gardens due to this construction. Although regulations required the state to designate new parcels of land to be used as allotment gardens, gardeners lamented the loss of the specific land itself and the difficulties of transplanting both plants and trees to new terrain. Also in 2012, the Trybunał Konstytucyjny (Constitutional Tribunal) declared that control of the land by the PZD was unconstitutional due its status as a mono­poly and its owner­ship of the land itself.12 Through a new statute enacted in 2013, the ­union would not necessarily retain control of the gardens. Rather, each set of allotment gardens would have to choose ­whether to join the PZD or to register as an association.13 According to research participants, the state’s goal in establishing this new law was to make it easier for the state to sell the land to private developers for new construction. The allotment gardeners protested and the majority of allotment gardens chose to remain part of the ­union rather than to form their own association.14 The physical spaces of the gardens are quite distinctive. Plots of land ranging from three hundred to five hundred square meters, typical allotment gardens in Wrocław and Poznań include a wide diversity of plant life, including fruit trees, many rows of dif­fer­ent types of vegetables and fruits, and flower patches, and an altanka, or small building, which can range from a tool shed to a small h ­ ouse with a kitchen and bathroom.15 Each set of allotments has its own regulations, and in some gardens, although ­people are not supposed to spend the night in the altanka, in the summer, some do. The garden often has a picnic ­table or other seating area, such as the one where I sat with the w ­ omen I knew from the University of the Third Age in Wrocław. Gardens consist of dozens to hundreds of allotments, usually arranged in double rows. The allotments are separated by fences, with access to each allotment through a gate from the mowed paths that run through the garden. ­These paths provide walking or biking routes through the ­whole garden; t­ here is generally a parking lot for cars at the entrance to each garden.

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For the entire set of allotment gardens, a świetlica, or communal event space is used to hold meetings as well as cele­brations. Each allotment has a dif­f er­ent appearance, depending on the preferences and habits of each gardener. As pani Zosia, one allotment gardener in Poznań told me, “each garden has its own personality.”16 Two allotment gardeners in Poznań, pan Bogdan and pan Tomasz, took par­tic­u­lar pride in their garden—­not only their own but also ­those of their neighbors. As they walked me around the gardens, with the sound of talk radio playing in one garden fading into the con­temporary Polish pop ­music playing from the stereo at another allotment, they boasted of the tidy maintenance, in­ter­est­ing landscaping, and creative plantings, especially of one ­woman, who had a small pond with fish in it and a bridge over it and immaculately manicured shrubs and trees. “Our garden is one of the most beautiful in the country,” said pan Bogdan. He pointed out the beautiful hollyhock plants in several allotments, noting that this has a “folkoristic” quality that makes it “our flower.”17 Although most gardeners I met had more space dedicated for vegetables, flowers also featured prominently at many gardens. Pan Bogdan remarked, “Flowers enliven the gardens. If ­there are no flowers, the garden is sad.”18 ­People described neighborly influences and perhaps even competition—­ for example, their comments suggested that if one saw that a neighbor at the garden had something new and nice, one would then want to get it for oneself. This was similar to comparisons that w ­ omen make among themselves in terms of makeup and cosmetics, said pan Bogdan. He also kept beehives at the gardens, similar to a feature of another garden in Poznań, which had an “insect ­hotel.”19 He struck a didactic tone in his conversations, noting the correct timing to prune this plant, the proper way to care for that one. However, theft was a common concern, as pan Lech noted, causing some gardeners to check on their plots daily year-­round (see also Wala 2012). Pani Zosia noted that some gardens ­were entirely abandoned by their ­owners and ­were then taken over by “Cyganów,” or “Gypsies,” explaining to me that ­these ­were the “Romanians” vis­i­ble begging in the streets with their c­ hildren.20 Indeed, allotment gardens are notable for the diverse groups of ­people—­older ­people, younger hipsters, Roma, the unhoused—­who gather ­there. ­These are groups whose paths or interests might not other­wise intersect, making allotment gardens a place with the potential for generative forms of sociality.

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FIG. 6.1  ​Walking at an allotment garden in Wrocław

Cultivating Life at the Allotment Gardens: The Vital Sociality of Plants and Land Singing familiar songs together, sharing food that was homegrown and homemade, the ­women who gathered at the allotment garden in Wrocław engaged in a form of sociality that had endured throughout their lifetimes. As retirees, they had new opportunities for leisure, but the practices themselves resonated with t­ hose from ­earlier in their lives. In this context, it was not the category of late life that mattered most. Rather, it was the ­women’s life histories as kin, workers, and persons. This continuity with the past emerged in conversation, song, reminiscence, and the terrain of the garden itself, including apple and plum trees, which the ­family of pani Dominika’s friend had cultivated for de­cades. The sentiment that allotment gardens should be passed down through generations was common, as noted by the head of an allotment in Poznań, who commented that an allotment garden should stay in the f­ amily. Indeed, this continuity was a notable feature of this activity for many older gardeners. The trea­surer of this allotment in Wrocław, pan Lech, had

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been cultivating his garden since 1966.21 At that time, he worked in the machine factory in town. At the time of our conversation, pan Lech had long since retired, was in his eighties, and came to the garden seven days a week, “even on Sundays.” As trea­surer for the past twenty years, he was responsible for collecting and organ­izing the regular payments made by all the gardeners. He also performed some maintenance on the building and equipment, helped to establish the worth of each allotment as ­people sold or transferred them to ­family members, and kept tabs on the frequent reports of theft. Pani Zosia, an allotment gardener in Poznań, received her allotment from her mother-­in-­law twenty years ago. Pan Tomasz, an allotment gardener at a dif­fer­ent garden in Poznań, had also been cultivating his garden for de­cades. A retired journalist for the Polish air force, he was now the secretary of his allotment organ­ization, which was set up for members of the air force. During summer months, he and his wife Anna spent most of their time at the allotment garden, sometimes sleeping overnight in the small altanka on the plot. The range of activities necessary to tend the garden can keep older Poles at their allotments—­and away from their homes—­for long stretches of time. The long Polish summer days mean that some are at their gardens for over twelve hours a day. A retired farmer, pani Zosia spent hours at her allotment garden ­every day. During a conversation with two of pani Zosia’s fellow gardeners at this allotment on the outskirts of Poznań, while sharing plates of cheesecake and cake with fruit gelatin in the świetlica, one w ­ oman stated, “I am at my allotment garden from morning to night, and do not want to return to the ­house.” Pani Zosia responded, “What is ­there to do at home? What is t­ here to do in the apartment building [blok]?” “What is t­ here to do at home?” repeated the first. “I ­don’t like not ­doing anything.” Answering her own question, pani Zosia commented, “Snoozing, having obiad, smelling the neighbors’ cooking,” as a description of daily life in her apartment block. “I escape from the commotion,” remarked the third ­woman, whose apartment building was on a busy street. In contrast, they described the feeling of being in nature that came from being at the allotment garden, including the sounds of birds, like jays and owls, and starlings, which land on the cherry trees, and the sights of animals, like foxes and wild boars. ­These descriptions of greenery and animals call up idyllic scenes of rest, and indeed, pani Zosia noted that the allotment was for her a kind of vacation, which, as a retired farmer, she could other­wise not afford. However, it was clear from my conversations and interactions with gardeners that their

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time at the garden was also full of activity. Pani Zosia noted that “an allotment is nonstop work,” as ­there is always something that needs tending.22 According to pan Bogdan, being at the allotment “is not a rest or break—­ only when we have guests [is it a rest].”23 He described the proper way to be an allotment gardener: “A real allotment gardener ­doesn’t sit [and rest], just works.”24 In ­these conversations, the gardens emerged as a place to spend one’s days in retirement—­a place where t­ here was always something to do and a place that was away from one’s home. Primary among the activities at the allotment garden is tending the plants, at least for older działkowcy (allotment gardeners). In Wrocław, pan Lech described the types of produce that p­ eople grew, depending on the seasons and the weather conditions—­beans, cabbage, onions, carrots, leeks, celery, tomatoes, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, peppers, cherries, pears, apricots, apples, plums, grapes, and gooseberries, but notably not potatoes ­because ­there had been pests in recent seasons. Gardeners used to sell their harvests in the 1960s through 1980s, he noted, but now the grocery stores are full of cheap produce, so ­people tend to share among their families. However, not all Poles preferred vegetables grown at the allotment gardens, he remarked, since even his son preferred the taste of cucumbers purchased at Tesco to ­those from the garden. Pan Lech thought the supermarket produce was both less healthy and flavorful from that grown at the garden. Pani Zosia remarked that the fruits of the garden helped them to prepare for winter, as they made jam, fruit compote, and fruit-­infused spirits. In addition to producing healthy food, the garden also helped sustain pan Lech’s own health. Although he was reticent about the details, he described his long strug­gle with cancer, and credited his garden with his continued survival. “I am alive, thanks to my garden,” he commented.25 This echoed the comments of ­women at an allotment in Poznań. Pani Zosia had a friend who used a cane to walk, but did not need it in the garden; another remarked, “Gardens are medicine.”26 Although pan Lech experienced pain from his cancer treatments, he noted that he was at the allotment daily, from 9:00 in the morning u­ ntil 6:30 in the eve­ning, and that the time flew by. As we spoke in the main administrative building, pan Lech tinkered with a broken light fixture, twisting and untwisting wires, screwing and unscrewing a lightbulb, in efforts to repair it. By caring for the plants, the infrastructure, and the social life of the allotment gardens, pan Lech cared for himself. ­These entwinements of material and social relations structured the rhythms of his days, as they had for de­cades.27

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The history of the Polish nation also provided a framework within which he understood his life. Like many older residents of Wrocław, pan Lech and his wife ­were born in the kresy, or borderlands, the territory that is now western Ukraine and Belarus, and moved to Wrocław ­after World War II. He participated in the rebuilding of Warsaw ­after the war, citing the well-­known slogan, “The entire nation builds its capital.”28 Although his wife was from a ­family of farmers, in their current division of l­ abor, she managed and cared for the home, while he took care of the garden. As a ­career factory worker, pan Lech lamented the demise of vocational schools and the increasing popularity of college education, asking who would take care of “­simple ­matters,” now that every­one wanted to obtain their master’s degrees.29 Pan Lech saw generational change not only in choice of ­careers but in style of gardening, as he noted that younger p­ eople ­were using allotment gardens more as lawns. This same term, “działki rekreacyjne,” or “recreational allotment gardens,” was used by other allotment gardeners in both Wrocław and Poznań, including pan Zbyszek, a friend of pan Lech’s with an allotment in the same set of gardens, to describe the habits of younger ­people who cared for allotment gardens. On tours of allotments in both cities, older gardeners pointed out to me the działki rekreacyjne of younger p­ eople, immediately vis­i­ble by the expanses of grass or even the presence of an above­g round swimming pool, rather than vegetable plots. Some younger ­people did not even cultivate the gardens, instead letting them become overgrown and wild. Rather than growing vegetables and fruit, younger p­ eople planted grass, shade trees, and renovated altanki for comfort. They used the gardens as a place to rest, unlike the active cultivation practices of the older generations. This contrasts with pan Bogdan’s declaration that a real allotment gardener does not sit around, but instead actively works and cultivates the garden. Not all gardeners w ­ ere as direct as this, but pan Lech and pan Zbyszek did see ­these differences as signs of a dif­fer­ent set of values and priorities. The values and priorities of allotment gardening for pan Zbyszek ­were fundamentally Polish. As soon as he learned that I was interested in allotment gardens, he declared that ­these are so popu­lar in Poland ­because of the Polish desire for having one’s own property (własność). Unlike the “tsarists” to the east, meaning Rus­sians, pan Zbyszek described Poles as needing their own property and land. By referring to Rus­sians as tsarists, pan Zbyszek was using terminology that was accurate during the partition era in Poland, when part of what is now Poland was ruled by the Rus­sian Empire. This

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language also implicitly recalled Polish histories of relations to the land; ­because the socialist state never fully collectivized agriculture in Poland, small farms existed throughout the socialist era, in contrast to other Soviet bloc states (Nagengast 2019). For pan Zbyszek, his con­temporary practices of gardening w ­ ere connected to the presocialist history of the Polish nation. For pan Zbyszek, ­these evaluative statements ­were also part of the sociality of con­temporary life at the allotment. That after­noon, we sat at a small ­table he had set up ­under a walnut tree (of the “Jacek” variety, known for its large fruit) covered with a red table­cloth (although he joked that it was not red like communism), onto which he placed a plastic tub that had once contained cream cheese from the Biedronka discount supermarket, but now contained raspberries he had picked from the garden, made extra tasty ­because they w ­ ere ripened by the sun, he explained, and a b­ ottle of sparkling ­water. Pan Zbyszek complained about the low productivity of a cucumber plant next to the green­house, despite his expectation that it should produce dozens of pounds of cucumbers. With the cucumbers that had grown, he was planning to make małosolny pickles for his wife upon her return from Ciechocinek, a spa town where she had been for the week.30 He fondly remembered the małosolny pickles he bought from seaside vendors in Sopot as a child. However, he was unsure ­whether or not they ­were offered at Ciechocinek, so he wanted to make some to welcome his wife home in a few days. One could tell the quality of a host or farmer (he used the En­glish word ­here) by ­whether he planted walnut trees, since they do not attract pests, provide good shade, and ­will not drop onto a ­table below. Allotment gardens are integrated into the fabric of the everyday life in Poland, extending beyond the domain of the gardens themselves. For instance, once a year, an allotment garden in Poznań or­ga­nized a “piknik z Alzheimerem,” or a “picnic with Alzheimer,” which brings together allotment gardeners and attendees of a local Alzheimer’s center and their caregivers. In 2014 approximately twenty-­five ­people attended the event, held in the outdoor communal space of the allotment. Picnic ­tables w ­ ere filled with grilled kielbasa, blood sausages, rye bread, mustard, pretzel sticks, grated carrot salad, cucumber-­yogurt salad, baked goods, and carafes of coffee. At the suggestion of one of the gardeners, someone distributed songbooks and began to sing. One of the ­women began singing “Serce w plecaku” (Heart in a rucksack), and the group joined in. Next, they sang “O Maryjanno,” another love song. Someone e­ lse called out, “What sad songs! How about something cheerful!” and the group moved on to “Lato, lato”

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(Summer, summer), a song about the beauty of the forest in summer. The group went on to sing four more songs, some of which ­were patriotic harcerskie or war­time songs, associated with the partition era or Polish re­sis­ tance during World War II.31 Some of ­these songs w ­ ere the same as t­ hose sung by the ­women at the allotment garden in Wrocław (described at the beginning of this chapter), by older Poles at the day center for ­people with Alzheimer’s (discussed in chapter 5), and during ­music therapy at the rehabilitation center and social welfare home. During this gathering of ­people with and without Alzheimer’s disease, sociality was linked to historical memory and the national past. Indeed, at each site that this book has examined, the forms of sociality and types of engagement with ­others have been linked to the national past and to practices of remembrance.

“A Synonym for Life” The views of older Poles presented in this chapter provide a perspective on aktywność that demonstrates continuity across individual lifetimes and across generations and po­liti­cal eras. Continuity is also pre­sent at the level of meaning, as social engagement in dif­fer­ent types of groups generates recurring themes. Taken together, they demonstrate how remembering can constitute a form of sociality that sustains moral personhood. In parish clubs, retiree organ­izations, and allotment gardens, older Poles actively cultivated connections with the past that sustained moral personhood in the pre­sent and generated possibilities for meaningful sociality in the f­ uture. A key ele­ment of this sociality was its occurrence outside the home. As noted by the ­women at the parish club, the men at the retiree organ­ization, and the allotment gardeners, staying home brings sadness, isolation, and lack of activity. In order to engage in aktywność, one must leave the h ­ ouse and connect with o­ thers. This suggests that the spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood extend beyond the bound­aries of the home. The ways that older Poles engaged with each other across ­these diverse sites evokes the nation and relies on shared aspects of national belonging. The men in the retirees group noted with pride the per­for­mance of the L’viv opera, and the w ­ omen in the parish club found meaning through their Catholic faith, a key aspect of Polish identity for this generation. The gardeners remarked on flowers that are “ours,” engaged in traditional foodways

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of canning, preserving, and infusing, and found a sense of Polishness in the relationship with the land itself. Fi­nally, t­ hese activities provide a vitality that are necessary for life. This was evident in the explicit statements of the ­women at the parish club who linked older men’s lack of social engagement to e­ arlier deaths, and the men at the retirees’ organ­ization who described movement as essential for ­human life. It was also evident in the flowers that gave life to pan Bogdan’s garden, and the gardens that gave life to pan Lech himself. This vitality stems from a sociality that connects persons, places, and times, across scales. Recalling the essay written by the słuchaczka at the UTA in Wrocław, who declared that “aktywność . . . ​is a synonym for life” (Warmuz 2006, 19; as described in chapter 1), older Poles across ­these diverse contexts ­were practicing a philosophy of life itself.

Conclusion

“Well, listen—­I never had anything so wonderful, but never in my life have I been hungry.”1 Pani Dorota often summed up her long life with ­these words. A patient at the rehabilitation center in Wrocław, pani Dorota was ninety-­eight years old when we first met in 2008. She was a long-­term resident, having lived ­there for the past six years of her life, ­after her ­daughter and son-­in-­law both passed away within a year’s time, and arthritis in her knees made it increasingly difficult for her to walk. She had been getting dizzy and was worried that she would fall; the cane she was using was not enough to keep her on her feet. Pani Dorota felt she could not trust the paid caregiver who briefly cooked for her and her son-­in-­law ­after her ­daughter died, and was worried that this caregiver might poison her, so she de­cided it would be safer to move to institutional care.2 Although her only grand­ son, who was in his mid-­thirties, lived nearby, his apartment was too small for both of them. He lived alone, and pani Dorota worried about w ­ hether he would find a wife. He brought her medicine for her eyes, which pani Dorota said ­were ruined from reading by the moonlight as a child. Pani Dorota was glad to be living at the rehabilitation center. Th ­ ere, she could feel safe and even “u siebie” (at home). Devoutly Catholic, pani Dorota was grateful that she could attend chapel daily. She became close with one of her roommates, who was also a long-­term resident. On the way to chapel, pani Dorota helped to move her roommate’s wheelchair into the hallway by sitting ­behind her, leaning forward with her arm on the back of 155

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the wheelchair, and pushing. E ­ very morning and eve­ning, they sang devotional songs in their room. Pani Dorota felt that the center was clean, the food was good (enough), and the staff provided good care. She noted that the staff made time to take care of patients, despite their busy schedule; indeed, the lone night nurse on the floor would bring tea if someone needed it. In addition to needing trustworthy care, it was the memories of her deceased ­daughter throughout her home that compelled pani Dorota to move to the rehabilitation center. Physical reminders of her ­daughter, who died at sixty-­eight, w ­ ere too much too bear. A ­ fter moving to the center, two vivid dreams, in which her deceased ­mother and deceased husband visited her, reassured her that she need not fear death and that the center was the best place to live.3 Indeed, it was to the topic of her kin that she turned again and again in conversations with her roommates, the staff, and me. She spoke about her d­ aughter’s death during each of our conversations. Pani Dorota attributed her d­ aughter’s death to the three packs of cigarettes she smoked a day, and expressed regret that she did not encourage her ­daughter to quit, although she also noted that she was unaware of the dangers of smoking, since at that time it was fash­ion­able. If only she had not smoked, she sighed, her d­ aughter might be ­here with her ­today. Pani Dorota told other stories as well—­about her ­daughter’s master’s thesis on the churches of Wrocław, about her f­ amily’s survival and lack of hunger during the war, about the man who proposed marriage to her as she was visiting her husband’s grave. Often pani Dorota would tell stories about her ­family’s life near Zaleszczyki, a small town on the Dniester River in what is now southwestern Ukraine, where she was born in 1910. Her parents and grandparents worked as administrators of the land for countesses in the Austro-­Hungarian Empire, although her m ­ other’s siblings emigrated to the United States before World War I. She boasted that her husband, who was from Lwów, was multilingual, able to speak Latin, Greek, German, and French, in addition to Polish. In Lwów, he worked as a clerk in the post office and pani Dorota worked as a merchant selling assorted goods (e.g., ink, hair dye, and cigarettes). ­A fter World War II, she worked as a groundskeeper and gardener at a white zinc factory. She was proud of her skills as a saleswoman, commenting that she “had a knack for selling.”4 Although pani Dorota did not often speak of World War II, when she did, it was to point out her qualities of resourcefulness, honesty, and generosity, which emerged in stories she told about food (acquiring and sharing it in times of need). Although her husband preferred cities to towns, ­a fter the war they moved to the town of

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Oława, about fifteen miles east of Wrocław, ­because housing was easier to find and it was not as devastated. Pani Dorota’s husband died in his eighties, in 1972 or 1973. At twenty-­five years older than her, he was born in 1885. In the context of ­these ­earlier strug­gles for survival, having someone to bring her tea was indeed something remarkable. The staff often lingered when bringing pani Dorota meals and medicine, and volunteers and I ­were often sent to her room to chat. Indeed, pani Dorota was a staff favorite; they often remarked to me on her optimism, good humor, and warm demeanor. Her advanced age—­a nd relatively good health—­afforded her extra authority and re­spect. Additionally, pani Dorota’s speech marked her as a former resident of the kresy, or borderlands (like pan Florian in chapter 4). Many Poles consider this to be a sweet and old-­ fashioned form of speech that recalls a nostalgic romantic Polish past. Her personal past was part of the story that the city of Wrocław likes to tell about itself as a new homeland, as the “ziemie odzyskane” (recovered territories) that connect Poland to its medieval Piast past, and as the heir to the memories and culture of Lwów and the kresy. Through both the form and content of the stories she told, pani Dorota fostered relations in which she could see herself—­and be seen as by o­ thers—as a person worthy of re­spect and dignity. I share this story of pani Dorota as an exemplar of sustaining moral personhood in the so-­called fourth age. Although the rehabilitation center was a medical space, defined by debility, and far outside the cultural ideal of receiving care at home from kin, the center provided pani Dorota with a sense of solace. Filled with the memories of her deceased kin, her home had become a place characterized by loss and absence; at the center, she shared ­these memories with o­ thers. Through repeated practices of remembering, pani Dorota was able to forge new social relations, thereby sustaining moral personhood in the “fourth age.” Central to this was her lived and remembered connection to the romantic ideal of the historic Polish nation. Although pani Dorota’s experiences seem a stark contrast to some of the other experiences of aging described in this book, such as the UTAs or the allotment gardens, older Pole across all t­ hese contexts create moral personhood through similar sets of practices. On a daily basis, ­these contexts offer forms of sociality that provide meaning, w ­ hether by singing hymns with coreligionists, learning En­g lish and writing poetry among ­women of the same social class, or tending a garden alongside longtime neighbors. Although life at the rehabilitation center falls outside categories of active

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aging or aktywność, moral personhood in all t­ hese contexts becomes pos­si­ ble through similar practices of sociality that draw on personal histories, presocialist and socialist pasts, and ideals of the Polish nation. Moreover, the historical Polish nation shapes imaginaries of aging in ways that are less obvious than explicit narrative connections. Spatiotemporal imaginaries of the Polish nation underpinned older Poles’ sociality and moral personhood. Recall the images of Pope John Paul II at the rehabilitation center and of the painting of the city of Wrocław framed with the words “UTA: Our ­little homeland” (UTW: nasza mała ojczyzna) at the UTA; the harcerskie (scouting) songs that older Poles sang at the social welfare home, the Alzheimer’s center, and the allotment gardens; and the older w ­ omen gathering to learn En­glish, embroider, or tend to their local parish, and older men tending their gardens. Taken together, t­ hese scenes create a portrait of aging that is characterized by a national form of sociality. ­These spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood are evident at the scale of individual lifetimes and across generational and historical time. By viewing the intimate experiences of aging as inseparable from the context of broader social change, the spatiotemporal contours of moral personhood help to overcome long-­standing tensions between phenomenological and historical political-­economic perspectives by refusing a separation of intimate experience and broader social change. Theories of relatedness that show how personhood is formed take a phenomenological approach, and questions about spatiotemporal scales reveal the historical political-economic qualities of moral personhood. Paying attention to ­these practices that shape moral personhood can help serve as a counterpoint to the dominant macro narratives of active aging promoted by global, Eu­ro­pean Union, and national initiatives that rely on an implicit distinction between a “good” and a “bad” old age. Although experiences of aging can threaten to diminish or weaken the ties that shape moral personhood, the ethnographic data across the three types of settings presented in this book demonstrate that multiple new forms of meaningful social relations can emerge even in the so-­called fourth age, thus expanding the cultural imaginary of what a good old age can look like in con­ temporary Poland. By shifting attention—­and funds—to the everyday social practices that can shape moral personhood, rather than focusing on predetermined domains of education and health, social policies could work to make moral personhood pos­si­ble for a broader group of older Poles.

Conclusion • 159

This inclusive view arises from this study’s consideration of the Polish term aktywność, a more expansive concept of activity that encompasses domains of life broader than ­those that currently fall u­ nder the rubric of active aging and the third age. As shown in chapter 1, the histories of the UTAs and the intellectual fields that ­shaped them predate the recent growth of policies and programs promoting active aging. Taking this historical perspective works to denaturalize implicit con­temporary gerontological desires for active, successful, productive, and healthy aging. That is, the differences between active aging and aktywność help to expand the imaginative possibilities for living a valued life in one’s final de­cades. This expansive, integrative view can work to break down barriers in studies of aging that are often influenced by biomedical paradigms and disease categories. This book has explored moral personhood in late life across contexts that are often kept categorically separate (i.e., third and fourth ages, ­people with dementia and p­ eople without cognitive impairment). By holding together in one analytic lens experiences of aging that are often kept separate, this book works to create a comparative and expansive gerontological imaginary. A historical perspective on active aging and aktywność can also offer new insights to the study of central and eastern Eu­rope. By highlighting practices of sociality concerning relatedness and care among the oldest generations, this book highlights aspects of continuity across lifetimes and eras, even in this region that has witnessed and endured so much vio­lence and rupture. One primary way that ­these continuities emerge is through the historical romantic imaginary of the Polish nation, which shapes a shared framework within which older Poles can create social relations, practice aktywność, or come to be seen by ­others as respected elders. This lens offers a dif­fer­ent perspective on the con­temporary po­liti­cal situation in Poland, in which older p­ eople who support the conservative nationalism of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which mobilizes and promotes this romantic national imaginary t­ oward exclusivist ends, can be dismissed as irrelevant, backward, or out of touch. By considering how the myth of the romantic Polish nation comes to ­matter in the lives of older Poles, it becomes pos­si­ble to develop more nuanced explanations of support for such right-­wing policies. But it is also not the case that all older Poles who connect to this romantic national imaginary support PiS and its conservative policies. Indeed, some older Poles who made this person-­nation connection most strongly w ­ ere supporters of

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the Civic Platform party, largely due to its pro-­EU leanings. This shows the dynamism of such personal-­national connections. As the population ages, the p­ eople who have firsthand experience of events that have been so significant to romantic Polish national my­thol­ogy are shrinking in number. Indeed, the oldest p­ eople whose stories appeared in this book w ­ ere small c­ hildren during the partition era and young adults during World War II; since the time of my fieldwork, they and o­ thers have died. Current centenarians in Poland ­were born during the interwar period, lived their childhood and adolescence during World War II, and young adulthood in the early socialist years. As each subsequent generation ages and eventually passes away, how do the stakes of remembering, relatedness, and moral personhood shift? As firsthand experience of events with such cultural and po­liti­cal significance dis­appears, how ­will this transformation in forms of knowledge shape personal, kin, and (trans)national relations and politics? I do not intend ­these questions to motivate a sort of salvage attitude t­ oward studying older p­ eople, but rather to explore how memory and relationality might shape moral personhood for the generations that have not yet reached the so-­called third or fourth ages. Tracing ­these connections between the life course of persons and nations, at both experiential and imaginative levels, reveals the spatiotemporal ele­ments that shape the sociality of life itself.

Acknowl­edgments

This book owes much to the accumulated wisdom, kindness, and generosity of the many extraordinary p­ eople in whose com­pany I have been lucky to find myself over many years. Above all, I thank my research participants in Wrocław and Poznań, without whom this research would have been impossible. Although I cannot list most of them by name, I am indebted to the many staff, patients, residents, słuchacze, działkowcy, and older adults for allowing me into their worlds over a long span of time. I am grateful for the unfailing gościnność, warmth, humor, and openness with which I was welcomed into institutions and homes. Some I can list by name; in addition to thanking all for their generosity of time and knowledge, I would like to especially thank Marek Ferenc, Anna Jakrzewska-­Sawińska, Aleksander Kobylarek, Linda Matus, Robert Pawliszko, Andrzej Rossa, Grzegorz Tymoszyk, Walentyna Wnuk, and Lidia Wrocińska-­Sławska. I am also grateful to my transcription assistants, Magdalena Michalak, Anna Wiatr, Julia Beger, and Bartłomiej Zgolus, who sensitively and patiently listened to hours of conversations, decoding recordings often made in less-­than-­ideal conditions. Many of the p­ eople whose stories appear on ­these pages have passed away. I hope that this work might serve as a testament for ­those who shared so much of their lives with ­others. My academic colleagues in Poland have been open, warm, and hospitable. I am grateful to the Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology at Adam Mickiewicz University for providing me with an academic home during my time in Poznań, and the University of Lower Silesia in 161

162  •  Acknowl­edgments

Wrocław for inviting me to participate in conferences and seminars. Many fellow anthropologists of (and in) Poland have inspired me with their work, and helped me to feel at home as an anthropologist in Poland. I thank Monika Baer, Natalia Bloch, Michał Buchowski, Hana Červinková, Thomas Chivens, Katarzyna Chlewińska, Kamila Dąbrowska, Mariusz Filip, Karolina Follis, Marysia Galbraith, Elżbieta Goździak, Izabela Kołbon, Agnieszka Kościańska, Jan Lorenz, Erica Lehrer, Siobhan Magee, Izabella Main, Katarzyna Majbroda, Joanna Mishtal, Agnieszka Pasieka, Helena Patzer, Marek Pawlak, Danuta Penkala-­Gawęcka, Kinga Pozniak, Tomasz Rakowski, Małgorzata Rajtar, Jaro Stacul, Agata Stanisz, Joanna Zalewska, and Magdalena Zych. Elizabeth Dunn nurtured my fledgling interests in Poland and graciously helped to make key introductions. Anna Wiatr and Edyta Zierkiewicz broadened my understanding of Polish society through their own research and activism. The generosity of Jerzy Rozenblit and Alicja Kusiak-­Brownstein made my research pos­si­ble as they shared a lifetime of friendships and connections in Wrocław and Poznań. In Poland, friendships with Emilia Staniek, Elżbieta Trypka, Leszek Janik, Elżbieta Janik, Henrietta Lorenz, Rachel Cooke, Justyna Marciniak, Wojciech Olejniczak, and Agnieszka Juraszczyk sustained me through shared conversations, meals, and adventures. I am grateful for the financial support that has made this book pos­si­ble. Long-­term fieldwork in Poland was supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant (#7736) from the Wenner-­Gren Foundation, a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (#0819259) from the National Science Foundation, a Jean Monnet Fellowship (jointly funded by the Eu­ro­pean Union Center of Excellence (EUCE-­MI), a grant from the Eu­ro­pean Commission, and from the Horace H. Rackham School of Gradu­ate Studies at the University of Michigan), the Elderhostel K. Patricia Cross Doctoral Research Grant, a Community of Scholars Fellowship from the Institute for Research on ­Women and Gender at the University of Michigan, and an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunity award (with support from the US Department of State Title VIII). One summer-­long and three yearlong Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships (U.S. Department of Education Title VI) made learning Polish pos­si­ble. I am also grateful for the multiple forms of support that enabled me to write the book. The Center for Rus­sian, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Studies (CREES), the Copernicus Endowment, the Weiser Center for Eu­rope and Eurasia, the Horace H. Rackham School of Gradu­ate Studies, and

Acknowl­edgments • 163

the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (US Department of State Title VIII), and Wayne State University provided crucial support for study, research, and writing. The Department of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Barbara provided institutional support post-­fieldwork. None of the organ­izations is responsible for the views expressed herein. I am so fortunate to have an institutional home in Wayne State University, where a vibrant intellectual community has supported this proj­ect. At the Institute of Gerontology, Peter Lichtenberg has steadfastly supported and believed in this work, in ways both material and intangible. I thank DeAnnah Byrd, Malcolm Cutchins, Jessica Damoiseaux, Ana Daugherty, Heather Dillaway, Heather Fritz, Jennifer Gómez, Tom Jankowski, Gail Jensen Summers, Vojko Kavcic, Carrie Leach, Mark Luborsky, Cathy Lysack, Patricia Morton, Noa Ofen, Tam Perry, Naftali Raz, Fayana Richards, Kimberly Seibel, and Wassim Tarraf for being the most generous and encouraging interdisciplinary colleagues one could hope for, and for their brilliant, inspiring research on aging and the lifecourse. I am also grateful to Catherine Blasio, Cheryl Deep, Alex Garcia, Christine Green, LaToya Hall, Kelly Hicks, Syed Hussain, Odessa Jackson, Karen Janiga, Donna MacDonald, Vanessa Rorai, and Carol Talbott for creating a constantly welcoming, friendly, and upbeat community that supports gerontological research and works to improve the lives of older adults. I am grateful for the collegiality and the conviviality of the Department of Anthropology at Wayne State University. I thank fellow medical anthropologists Mark Luborsky, Todd Meyers, Andrea Sankar, and Jonathan Stillo for their collegiality and sustained intellectual engagement with this proj­ect. Several colleagues provided notable inspiration, motivation, solidarity, and wisdom on writing, in addition to friendship; ­here I would like to especially thank Yuson Jung, Todd Meyers, and Andy Newman. I thank Allen Batteau, Tamara Bray, Steve Chrisomalis, Tom Killion, Julie Lesnik, Barry Lyons, Guérin Montilus, and Krysta Ryzewski for supporting this work with their intellectual curiosity and good humor. The departmental Aries w ­ omen have been a special and enduring form of solidarity and joy. I am grateful for the expertise, warmth, and care of Uzma Khan, Deb Mazur, and Sue Villerot. I also thank my students at Wayne State for their intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm that helps me to see anthropology through new eyes. Outside my departmental homes, I am grateful for the collegiality of John Bukowczyk, Lauren Duquette-­Rury, Ewa Gołębiowska, Kevin

164  •  Acknowl­edgments

Deegan-­K rause, Jennifer Hart, Faith Hopp, Michelle Jacobs, Alina Klin, Michael Kral, Marc Kruman, Karen Marrero, Dave Merolla, Tracy Neumann, Aaron Retish, and Rick Smith. Writing this book has been a long pro­cess, and I am grateful to the numerous p­ eople who nurtured it over many years. Gillian Feeley-­Harnik’s inimitable and expansive curiosity, generosity, and erudition have been a tremendous and abiding source of inspiration—­her anthropological imagination has indelibly ­shaped my scholarship. Lawrence Cohen’s writing provided the initial spark for this work, and the depth and breadth of his creativity, combined with his enduring generosity and warmth, continues to inspire me. Holly Peters-­Golden has provided unfailing enthusiasm, inspiration, and support in the form of a rigorous, empathetic, and humorous critique that both affirms and challenges. Holly is a trea­sured interlocutor; when writing fieldnotes, I imagine that I am sharing ­these stories with Holly. Early on in gradu­ate school, Brian Porter-­Szücs offered a warm welcome to the world of Polish studies that helped me to feel like ­there was a place for this work; since that first bowl of bigos in Warsaw many years ago, I have appreciated and relied on his wide-­ranging expertise on Polish culture, society, politics, and history. Krisztina Fehérváry and Alaina Lemon have been ideal mentors and interlocutors in the anthropology of eastern Eu­rope and postsocialism. Each has s­ haped this proj­ect with comparative insights, care, patience, and good humor. Many in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan supported this proj­ect in countless ways. In par­tic­u­lar, I thank Kelly Askew, Marcia Inhorn, Judith Irvine, Webb Keane, Stuart Kirsch, Conrad Kottak, Bruce Mannheim, Laurie Marx, Erik Mueggler, Damani Partridge, Elisha Renne, Liz Roberts, Jennifer Robertson, Andrew Shryock, and Tom Trautmann. I am incredibly fortunate to have learned about Poland from the rich network of area-­studies colleagues at the University of Michigan. I am grateful to Ewa Małachowska-­Pasek and Piotr Westwalewicz of the Department of Slavic Languages and Lit­er­a­tures for teaching me the Polish language with patience, skill, and wit, and to Ewa Małachowska-­Pasek for generously assisting with copyediting the Polish-­language text in the book. Over the years, conversations with Pam Ballinger, Meghanne Barker, Paul Brykczynski, Thom Chivens, Danielle Czarnecki, Herb Ea­gle, Erica Feldman, Alex Gerber, Kathryn Graber, Emanuela Grama, Jodi Grieg, Anna Grzymała-­Busse, Laura Hilburn, Jeremy Johnson, Deborah Jones, Lavrentia Karamaniola, Michael Kennedy, Erica Lehrer, Benjamin Paloff,

Acknowl­edgments • 165

Geneviève Zubrzycki, and Jessica Zychowicz have been enormously helpful. Sonja Luehrmann is dearly missed. Thank you to the staff of the Center for Rus­sian, East Eu­ro­pean, and Eurasian Studies, and especially Rachel Facey Brichta, Marysia Ostafin, and Donna Parmelee, for providing intellectual and administrative support and community. I am grateful to Michael Brown, David Edwards, and the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Williams College for cultivating a fledgling interest in anthropology, leading me to the University of Michigan, and making this book conceivable. I am grateful to have grown up in the public school system of West Hartford, Connecticut, where I learned critical lifelong skills of reading, thinking, and writing. The generosity, skill, and care of many colleagues have helped to improve this book. Members of the Care and the Lifecourse Writing Group, Elana Buch, Laura Heinemann, Julia Kowalski, Aaron Seaman, and Kristin Yarris, have constituted an ideal intellectual community of creative, vibrant, and patient scholars from whom I have had the privilege to learn ­every week. Their brilliance and solidarity makes this work joyful. Over the course of a year, Amy Benson Brown helped to transform this manuscript through her careful, curious, insightful reading. Together, their comments and suggestions are evident on nearly ­every page of this book. At the University of Michigan, I thank the members of the EthnoLab 2010–2013, who, ­under the expert guidance of Gillian Feeley-­Harnik, read early versions of this work with generosity, creativity, and critical insights: Sumi Cho, Tara Dosumu Diener, Kelly Fayard, Henrike Florusbosch, Anna Genina, Federico Helfgott, Katie Hendy, Sarah Hillewaert, Geoffrey Hughes, Anneeth Hundle, Kelly Kirby, Jane Lynch, Erin Mahaffey, Emily McKee, Scott McLoughlin, Janak Rai, Xochitl Ruiz, Aaron Seaman, and Jack Tocco. This book has also benefited from feedback from colleagues outside formalized writing group structures. Clara Berridge, Maryna Bazylevych, Heidi Bludau, Sheri Briller, Alison Brysk, Jennifer Carroll, Tatiana Chudakova, Susanne Cohen, Anna Corwin, Jason Danely, Kelly Fayard, María Cristina García, Amal Hassan-­Fadlalla, Sarah Lamb, Annette Leibing, Caitrin Lynch, Meghann Pytka, Fayana Richards, Mikaela Rogozen-­Soltar, Jessica Smith, Scott Stonington, Janelle Taylor, Cecilia Tomori, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle, and Emily Wentzell have all provided valuable insights on aspects of this work. Comments at conferences and workshops from Joelle Bahloul, Toni Calasanti, Janet Carsten, Susan Gal, Carol Green­house, Mary Hancock, Chris Hann, Ruth Holliday, Tomasz Inglot,

166  •  Acknowl­edgments

Sharon Kaufman, Anne Kerr, Erin Koch, Frode Fadnes Jacobsen, Krzysztof Jasiewicz, Sarah Lamb, Annette Leibing, Julie Livingston, Cheryl Mattingly, Elżbieta Matynia, Seth Messinger, Tiago Moreira, Tsveta Petrova, Sarah Phillips, Frances Pine, Eugene Raikhel, Danilyn Rutherford, Janelle Taylor, Tatjana Thelen, and Graziella Van Den Bergh helped to improve and refine this proj­ect. This work benefited from comments of the participants in the Midwest Historians of East Central Workshop at the University of Illinois–­Chicago, the Therapeutic Encounters workshop at Indiana University, the Wenner-­Gren-­funded workshop Beyond Active Aging and Abandonment at the University of Lower Silesia, members of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa, and the Ageing Socie­ties group at the University of Leeds. Working with Rutgers University Press has been a dream. I thank the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript, whose suggestions and comments greatly improved the book. At Rutgers University Press, I thank Kimberly Guinta, Jasper Chang, Alissa Zarro, and the entire editorial, marketing, and production teams, and at Westchester Publishing Ser­vices, I thank Cheryl Hirsch and Terry Malhame. I also thank Sergey Lobachev of Brookfield Indexing Services. Their expertise, care, and contributions have made this book better. Thank you to Sarah Lamb for her editorship of this series and long-­standing support and mentorship. All errors, omissions, and shortcomings are my own. This work has been buoyed by dear friends whose love and support have been essential. I am so grateful to Elana Buch, whose intellectual companionship and friendship create both a sense of lightness and meaning. Kelly Fayard, Kate Graber, Mikaela Rogozen-­Soltar, Jessi Smith, John Thiels, Cecilia Tomori, Emily Wentzell, Laura Hilburn, Stephen Smith, Megan Biddinger, Afia Ofori-­Mensa, Jenn Solheim, Urmila Venkatesh, Holly Peters-­ Golden, Marc Peters-­Golden, Liz Malinkin, Brady G’Sell, Aaron Seaman, Catherine Trundle, Sarah Gollust, Ezra Golberstein, Kizzy Charles-­Guzman, Terry Yasuko Ogawa, Kristin Mannke, Allie Robbins Mace, Sarah Schiavetti, Margaret Scoo­lidge, Danielle Tarantolo, Kristine Taylor, Kristin Wikelius, Hannah Aneiros, Catie Hawkins, Emily Morrison, Alexa Roggeveen, and Allison Mandich have brought humor, kindness, and warmth to my life, over the course of many years and hardships. I am so grateful for the collective care and wisdom of so many dear friends who have come into my life via anthropology (sometimes indirectly): Ellen Block, Rebecca Car­ter, Sumi Cho, Shaira Daya, Daisy Deomampo, Kaitlin Deslatte, Eva-­Marie

Acknowl­edgments • 167

Dubuisson, Lizzy Falconi, Hussein Fancy, Anna-­A lexandra Fodde-­Reguer, Ema Grama, Bridget Guarasci, Fanny Gutiérrez-­Meyers, Britt Halvorson, Margarita Huayhua, Anneeth Hundle, Jim Kim, Jane Lynch, Emily McKee, Robin Nelson, Rick Nance, Maria Perez, Janak Rai, Josh Reno, Elana Res­nick, Xochitl Ruiz, and Marissa Sobolewski-­Terry. Andrea Aagesen, Miles Colwell, Susan Ernst, Heidi Johnson, Angela Kueck, Richard Lieberman, Kevin Reynolds, Jon Sekiya, Yolanda Smith, Corey Snyder, Cosmo Van de Ven, Claire Weiner, and Societe Indoor Cycling have helped to keep me healthy with care, expertise, and kindness. Fi­nally, my ­family has been my greatest source of support, and joy. My sibling, Courtney Robbins, has been an enduring source of solidarity and laughter for as long as I can remember. My parents, David and Karen Robbins, have provided me with e­ very opportunity, supported me at ­every juncture, and provided inspiring examples of life as fundamentally intellectual, relational, and loving. My in-­laws, Kathy Panko and John and Judy Panko, have been loving kin and enthusiastic cheerleaders of this work. Ellie and Sadie Panko, my dear stepdaughters, have filled my life with a new energy, hope, joy, and sweetness. Fi­nally, my beloved partner, Ken Panko, has provided true kindness, support, and humor in equal mea­sure, all underpinned by an abiding love that bolsters me e­ very day. My gratitude for our life together knows no bounds.

Glossary

aktywny ​active aktywność ​activity; activeness altanka ​small shed-­like structure on an allotment garden andragogika ​andragogy blokowisko (pl.—­ka) ​block apartment building dla siebie ​for oneself Dom pomocy społecznej ​Social Welfare Home dy żurka ​shift room; ­here, nurses’ station działka ​allotment garden gościnność ​hospitality harcerski ​scouting kresy ​borderlands; used to refer to the con­temporary borderlands of Lithuania,

Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland that used to lie within the Polish state

mieszkaniec (pl.—­ńcy) ​resident (label used for ­people at the social welfare home) moherowy beret (pl.—­owe, -­ety) ​literally, mohair beret; politicized label to refer to

an older person (usually a w ­ oman or group of ­women) who supports nationalist Catholic po­liti­cal parties

obiad ​traditional midday meal (now often replaced by lunch, but still observed by

many older p­ eople, and by many Poles on weekends and holidays)

169

170  •  Glossary

opiekun (fem. pl.—­ki) ​care worker; nurse’s aide opłatek (pl.—­ki) ​Christmas Eve wafer pacjent (pl.—­ci) ​patient (designation used for p ­ eople at the rehab center) pan ​formal term of address for a man pani ​formal term of address for a w ­ oman przyjaciel (pl.—­ele) ​close friend siostra dyrektor ​literally, sister-­director; the term for the director of the rehabilita-

tion center in Wrocław

siostra oddziałowa ​ward s­ ister; the nurse man­ag­er and day-­to-­day director of

operations and care at the rehabiltation center in Wrocław

słuchacz (f.—­ka; fem. pl. —ki; pl.—­e) ​auditor; how attendees of the University of the

Third Age refer to themselves

starość ​old age starszy ​older stary ​old

świetlica ​common room; communal event space Sybirak (pl.—­cy) ​Siberian; refers to Polish deportees to Siberia in the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries

terapia zajęciowa ​occupational therapy u siebie ​at home Uniwersytet Trzeciego Wieku ​University of the Third Age Wigilia ​Christmas Eve Zakład opiekuńczo-­leczniczy ​Medical Care Institution; this was the formal name

for the rehabilitation center

Notes

Introduction 1 This ethnographic example and the story of pani Joanna (­later in this introduction) appear in Robbins (2013b). 2 As described ­later in this chapter and in chapter 2, Universities of the Third Age are a type of lifelong learning institution specifically for older adults that is common in Poland and in some parts of the world. 3 See Mishtal (2015) for an ethnographic study of the moral politics of reproductive rights in the context of low fertility rates in con­temporary Poland. 4 Other organ­izations such as the United Nations, Eu­ro­pean Union, and the Organ­ization for Economic Cooperation and Development have also made definitional and aspirational statements that aim to transform the aging pro­cess. 5 See Gilleard and Higgs (2011) and Higgs and Gilleard (2014, 2015) for extensive analy­sis of the discursive constructions of the third and fourth ages and their relation to historical and cultural pro­cesses. 6 See Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2014b) for an extended discussion of categories of analy­sis and categories of practice regarding the term “postsocialism” in the current study of eastern Eu­rope. 7 This example appears in Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2013). 8 Other media outlets include Telewizja Trwam (I Persist Tele­vi­sion) and the newspaper Nasz Dziennik (Our Daily). 9 “GŁOSUJ, albo one zrobią to za Ciebie!” “One” is the feminine third-­person plural form, indicating that this is specifically directed t­ oward w ­ omen. 10 See Nicholas Kulash, “Wired Youth Aim to Sway Poland’s Vote,” New York Times, 21 October 2007, http://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/2­ 007​/­10​/­21​/­world​/­europe​/2­ 1poland​ .­html​?­pagewanted​=a­ ll&​_­r ​= ­0 (accessed 12 November 2019) for an English-­ language discussion of this generational conflict and to see a video clip of the ad. The rock band Big Cyc also had a song titled “Moherowe berety,” https://­w ww​ .­youtube​.­com​/­watch​? ­v ​=Z ­ hlgdFxOq​-­U (accessed 1 November 2019).

171

172  •  Notes to Pages 6–18

11 ­These are too numerous to detail ­here, but PiS has made extensive changes to Polish laws and policies in many domains (e.g., judiciary, media, education, ­women’s rights, and immigration) that have dramatically weakened the rule of law, freedom of speech, and Poland’s status as a demo­cratic state. Poland has faced EU censure for ­these changes, and ­people within Poland who are not Catholic, ethnically Polish, heterosexual, or cisgender have become increasingly threatened. See Brian Porter-­Szücs, http://­porterszucs​.­pl​/­blog/ (accessed 12 November 2019) for an insightful, detailed English-­language analy­sis of current events in Poland. 12 “Pani” is the respectful term of address for w ­ omen in Polish; “pan” is the equivalent for men. I include them ­here to reflect ethnographic usage. This ethnographic example and analy­sis appears in Robbins (2013b). Except for certain public figures, all names are pseudonyms. 13 “Coraz lepiej.” 14 “Taki jest nasz naród, że ludzie za nim tęsknią.” 15 “Naród wybrany przez Boga.” 16 “Teraz, młodzi ludzie chorują, to straszne. Teraz, nie zostało dużo ludzi. . . . ​Mi szkoda dzieci i wnuków.” 17 “Polacy są pracowici i gościnni. To bardzo dobre cechy narodowe.” 18 “Wspaniałe powietrze.” 19 “Boże. Same ruiny. Wrocław, Warszawa.” 20 “Babciu, opowiedz nam bajkę!” 21 “Udokumentowana.” 22 See Zubrzycki (2011) for a careful explication of Polish national my­t hol­ogy and analy­sis of the historical, affective, sensory, and material means and modes through which it comes to endure, become contested, and potentially transform. 23 This is a drastically shortened description of centuries of history. For an overview of Polish history, see Lukowski and Zawadzki (2006). For a history of partitioned Poland, see Wandycz (1993[1974]). For a critical and comprehensive history of the relationship between Poland and the Catholic church, see Porter-­Szücs (2011). For a critical ethnographic exploration of religious pluralism in con­temporary Poland, see Pasieka (2015). 24 See Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2014b, 44–46) for a more detailed description and analy­sis of pani Małgorzata’s narratives. 25 See Kharkhordin (1999) for a detailed historical analy­sis of the person in Rus­sia, in which the role of Chris­tian­ity and politics intertwine. 26 Many cities proudly claim their antisocialist uprisings in this postsocialist period. 27 The rehabilitation center run by nuns was a Zakład opiekuńczo-­leczniczy, or Medical Care Institution, that focused on rehabilitation. The state-­run center was a Dom pomocy społecznej, or Social Welfare Home. 28 In conversations with participants, I tended to use the adjective “starszy” (older), which is a more polite way to refer to an older person’s age. The term “stary” (old) is often interpreted as a rude way to refer to an older person’s age. However, t­ here has been a resurgence in the use of “stary” among some older Poles who are trying to counteract stigma by reclaiming it as a neutral word.

Notes to Pages 25–30 • 173

Chapter 1  Histories of Active Aging 1 “Dynamiczny rozwój polskich UTW nie byłby możliwy bez zaangażowania społecznego wielu osób w tworzenie nowego modelu starości—­pogodnej, aktywnej, pożytecznej i mądrej” (Bilewicz 2001, 6). 2 “Aktywność jest właściwością każdego człowieka, jest synonimem życia, opóźnia procesy starzenia się. Aktywność człowieka ma określony kierunek wyznaczony przez cel (biologiczny lub społeczny), którym podporządkowany jest jej przebieg. Może przejawiać się w różnych formach i różnym nasileniu” (Warmuz 2006, 19). 3 “Znaczenie aktywności w życiu człowieka starszego można zamknąć w słowie ‘SAMODZIELNOŚĆ.’ Samodzielność w czynnościach życia codziennego, samodzielność w pokonywaniu trudów życia. A jeżeli spojrzeć na elementy składowe tego słowa to odczytamy, że SAMODZIELNOŚĆ—­to: Siła—­Ambicja—­ Miłość—­Otwartość—­Działanie—­Zapał—­Inicjatywa—­Energia—­Wytrwałość—­ Nadzieja—­Odwaga—­Świadomość—­Cierpliwość” (Warmuz 2006, 22). 4 ­There are multiple Polish words for the En­g lish word “in­de­pen­dence.” Samodzielność means self-­reliance, niezależność means in­de­pen­dence as in autonomy, and niepoledgłość means in­de­pen­dence as in “In­de­pen­dence Day.” It is pos­si­ble that the author could have used niezależność ­here as well, insofar as this term appears in conversations about old age, but given that it stems from “nie” (not) and “zależny” (dependent), it could have dif­fer­ent connotations than the words spelled out in the acrostic. 5 See Sivaramakrishnan (2018) for an extensive analy­sis of the way local and regional concerns shape gerontological knowledge and frameworks in so-­called developing nations in ways that do not necessary align with historical gerontological concerns about the welfare state. 6 Polish Gerontological Society, http://­w ww​.­gerontologia​.­org​.­pl​/­index​.­php​?o­ ption​ =­com​_­content&view​=a­ rticle&id​=­2&Itemid​=­4 (accessed 12 November 2019). 7 Statistics Poland (GUS), https://­stat​.­gov​.­pl​/­cps​/­rde​/­xbcr​/­g us​/­L ​_ ­prognoza​ _­ludnosci​_n ­ a​_ ­lata2008​_­2035​.­pdf (accessed 12 November 2019). See also GUS, https://­stat​.­gov​.­pl​/­obszary​-­tematyczne​/­ludnosc​/­ludnosc​/­ludnosc​-­piramida/ (accessed 12 November 2019) for an interactive population pyramid for Poland from 1970 through 2050. 8 GUS, https://­stat​.g­ ov​.­pl​/­cps​/­rde​/x­ bcr​/­g us​/­L ​_ ­prognoza​_ ­ludnosci​_­na​_ ­lata2008​ _­2035​.­pdf; https://­stat​.g­ ov​.­pl​/­en​/­topics​/­population​/­population​-­projection​ /­population​-­projection​-­2014–2050,2,5​.­html. Reports published in 2009 contain data at the time of fieldwork, while the report from 2014 provides the most current population-­level data. 9 GUS predicts the Polish population ­will fall to around 36 million in 2035, from just over 38 million in 2008. 10 See Chłoń-­Domińczak (2016) for an overview of proposed changes in the retirement age and effects on pensions. 11 “Informal economy” is defined ­here as an economy “that provides goods and ser­vices through nonmarket, nonregulated channels” (Calsanti and Zajicek 1997, 457). 12 EUROPOP, https://­ec​.­europa​.­eu​/­eurostat​/­tgm​/­table​.­do​?­tab​=­t­ able&plugin​ =­1&language​= e­ n&pcode​= ­tps00200 (accessed 12 November 2019).

174  •  Notes to Pages 30–40

13 See Muehlebach (2012, 136–164) for a discussion of links between active aging policies and programming, the welfare state (including pension reform), and the generational contract in Italy. 14 “Bezczynność—­zwiastuje śmierć” (Zawistowicz-­Adamska 1948, 167, in Zalewska 2009, 21). 15 “Żyć aktywnie do samej śmierci, pragnąc jej zdecydowanie z chwilą pojawienia się symptomów niedołęstwa” i ta dominowała zdecydowanie; druga—­“żyć mniej lub bardziej pasywnie do śmierci nie pragnąc jej z chwilą pojawienia się symptom.w nawet zupełnego niedołęstwa” (Olędski 1991, 175, in Zalewska 2009, 21). 16 For a detailed study of hospitals and welfare in Wielkopolska in the seventeenth and eigh­teenth centuries, see Surdacki (1992). 17 The report from the Centrum Badania Opinii Społecznej (CBOS; Public Opinion Research Center) survey can be found at: https://­cbos​.p­ l​/­SPISKOM​ .­POL​/2­ 012​/­K _​ ­094​_­12​.­PDF (accessed 17 July 2020). 18 According to a biographical film about her life (Doktor Halina, 2007, http://­ filmpolski​.­pl​/­fp​/­index​.­php​/­525082), which aired on state tele­vi­sion in 2007, her work as a spy helped the Allies’ destruction of key sites in Hamburg. A ­ fter the war she worked as a doctor in Poznań. 19 See Formosa (2019) for comparative data on Universities of the Third Age worldwide. See Findsen and Formosa (2011) for a comprehensive discussion of Universities of the Third Age in the context of educational, psychological, and so­cio­log­i­cal theories of older adult learning. 20 Many thanks to Aleksander Kobylarek for his generous discussions of the history of the Universities of the Third Age in Poland and the fields of andragogika and pedagogika dorosłych. 21 Zdrowy-­senior, https://­zdrowy​-s­ enior​.­org​/­uniwersytety​-­trzeciego​-­wieku​-­w​-­polsce​ -­w​-­liczbach/ (accessed 9 November 2019). 22 Such long-­serving leaders may contribute to institutional stability in the face of po­liti­cal turmoil; conversely, quick turnover in UTA leadership may have negative effects for the long-­term success of UTAs in Poland (Kobylarek 2018). 23 “badania te ukazują, jak ważna jest rola UTW wobec starszej społeczności lokalnej i szerszej—­miasta, kraju, a nawet świata” (Bilewicz 2001, 5). 24 The first scientific adviser of the UTW, Czesław Kempisty, was a medical doctor and the director of the Geriatric Clinic at the Regional Hospital in Wrocław (Bilewicz 2001, 7). During the first few years of the University’s existence, Kempisty met with all słuchacze once a month for individual conversations, along with medical checkups (Bilewicz 2001, 10). The scientific adviser from 1984 to 1989 was also a medical doctor, Franciszek Bielicki, who worked at the Medical Acad­emy and the Department of Surgery (Bilewicz 2001, 16). Upon Bielicki’s retirement in 1989, Wanda Lubczyńska-­Kowalska, a doctor at the Red Cross Hospital and the Medical Acad­emy, took the position (Bilewicz 2001, 16). 25 This desire for social contact can be seen in other contexts: as Bronwyn Ellis and Michael Leahy write about Universities of the Third Age in Australia, p­ eople who join often do so as much for social as for academic reasons (Formosa 2014, 9). 26 “Wśród powodów zgłaszania się do STW wymieniali oni zarówno potrzeby zdrowotne i poznawcze, jak też emocjonalne. Oczekiwali, że w tej instytucji znajdą ulgę w trapiących ich kłopotach, że zmniejszy się ich niepewność, lęk przed samotnością czy śmiercią, niepokój, smutek, bezradność i zagubienie. Udział w

Notes to Pages 40–52 • 175

27

28

29 30

31 32

33

zajęciach pomagał studentom w nawiązaniu nowych przyjaźni oraz zmniejszał poczucie osamotnienia. Nadto poprawiał i rozwijał sprawność psychofizyczną poprzez rehabilitację, sport i racjonalny wypoczynek” (Bilewicz 2001, 11). STW stands for Studium Trzeciego Wieku, the original name of the institution. “Odbywające się tu spotkania służyły przede wszystkim wzmocnieniu indywidualnych wartości i wrażliwości w kontaktach międzyludzkich oraz poczucia radości życia. Okazały się one też bardzo korzystną formą terapii grupowej. Uczestnicy zajęć zaczęli okazywać sobie wzajemną pomoc w rozwiązywaniu osobistych prob­lemów, związanych na przykład ze sprawami mieszkaniowymi, dokonywaniem zakupów, wspólnym planowaniem wyjazdów na wczasy czy do sanatorium” (Bilewicz 2001, 9–10). “Uniwersytet jest organizacją społeczną, prowadzącą działałność w dziedzinie kultury, oświaty i ochrony zdrowia obejmującą osoby w starszym wieku niezależnie od ich formalnego poziomu wykształcenia” (Woźnicka, A. Regulamin UTW 1979–1997, p. 1, in Bilewicz 2001, 15). “Słuchacze w tym dniu mogli zgłaszać się z prośbą o pomoc, np. w sprzątaniu, głośnym czytaniu, wspólnym spacerze czy drobnych naprawach” (Bilewicz 2001, 20). “Tak jak i wcześniej UTW nadal prowadzi działalność w zakresie profilaktyki gerontologicznej oraz w dziedznie oświaty, kultury i zdrowia na rzecz emerytów i rencistów. Celem pracy jest ‘. . . ​dbanie o zachowanie i zwiększenie intelektualnej i fizycznej sprawności osób starszych, aktywizacja społeczna tych osób oraz pomoc osobom starszym w zakresach możliwych do realizacji przez Uniwersytet’ ” (Regulamin UTW 1997, in Bilewicz 2001, 30). “Ustawiczne kształcenie se­niorów, stymulowanie ich rozwoju osobowego, rozwijanie sprawności intelektualnej i fizycznej se­niorów, i upowszechnianie profilaktyki gerontologicznej.” TWWP, http://­w ww​.­t wwp​.­wroclaw​.­pl​/­index​.p­ hp​?­option​= ­com​_­content&task​ =­view&id​=­26&Itemid​=­36 (accessed 12 November 2019). The Uniwersytet Latający boasts of its famous participants, such as Marie Skłodowska-­Curie and Janusz Korczak. During the time of fieldwork in Wrocław in December 2008, the Poznań trade fairgrounds made international headlines as the site of the UN climate change talks. Since 2010, ­there have been trade fairs called “Aktywni 50+!” [Active 50+!] directed at retirees. See http://­50plus​.­mtp​.p­ l​/­pl/ (accessed 12 November 2019) for more information.

Chapter 2  Aspiring to Activity 1 A more detailed analy­sis of this newspaper series and the ensuing discussion at the University of the Third Age in Wrocław can be found in Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2013). 2 See Taylor (2008) for a similar discussion of the use of the word “still” in the case of ­people with dementia. 3 Discussions of Wnuk’s use of “Eurose­niors” appear in Robbins (2013a, 86–88) and Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2013, 163–164; 2014b, 43; 2015, 277–280; 2017a, 116). 4 See Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2017a, 2017b) for related discussions of class aspirations and histories.

176  •  Notes to Pages 52–57

5 See Dunn (2004) and Ledeneva (1998), respectively, for discussions of getting ­things done po znajomości in Poland and of blat in Rus­sia. Po znajomości means to accomplish something “through acquaintances,” while blat is notoriously difficult to translate into En­g lish; ­these terms both refer to informal social networks upon which p­ eople rely to accomplish vari­ous tasks and activities, and ­were especially impor­tant during the socialist era. 6 This example also appears in Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2013; 2015). 7 See Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2017b, esp. 202–206) for an extended discussion of sociality at the UTAs and its links to forms of responsibility. 8 See discussions of @ktywny Se­nior in (Robbins 2013a, 86–88; Robbins-­ Ruszkowski 2015, 274–277, 2017b, 199–200). 9 Interestingly, one of the major goals of @ktywny Se­nior is social integration, including intergen­er­a­tion­a lly; this seems to run contrary to the enforced age segregation of communities like Sun City (see http://­w ww​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2010​/­08​ /­29​/u­ s​/­29children​.h ­ tml [accessed 9 November 2019]). See also http://­w ww​ .­w ysokieobcasy​.­pl​/­w ysokie​-­obcasy​/­1,98083,13259625,Sun​_­City​_ _­​ ­​_­miasto​ _­szczesliwych​_­emerytow​.­html (accessed 9 November 2019) for coverage of Sun City in the Polish press; and see Cohen (1998) for a comparative context in which “admiration for the Other leads to the perception of not mea­sur­ing up at home” (107). 10 The Popowice apartment buildings w ­ ere the first in Wrocław built with the prefabricated materials that became a hallmark of the eastern Eu­ro­pean urban landscape in the 1970s and 1980s (Thum 2011, 165–166). 11 Andrea Muehlebach (2012) describes a similar link between active aging programming and neoliberal ideals of self-­care in Italy. 12 The Eu­ro­pean Social Fund is a branch of the Eu­ro­pean Commission’s Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion division, which focuses on supporting employment possibilities in EU countries. See https://­ec​.­europa​.­eu​/­esf​/­home​.­jsp (accessed 12 November 2019) for more information. 13 Eu­ro­pean Social Fund. 2009. “Introduction to Programme,” May 13. Ministry of Development Funds and Regional Policy. https://­w ww​.­efs​.­2007–2013​.g­ ov​.­pl​ /­english​/­Strony​/­Introduction​.­aspx (accessed 9 November 2019). 14 “Do przodu Se­niorzy!” “Se­niorzy górą!” “Teraz do nas świat należy!” “Se­niorzy też ludzie!” 15 See Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2015, 276) for more detailed analy­sis of this point based on a similar formulation in an advertisement by the Eu­ro­pean Social Fund. 16 The plea­sure that older Poles took in the activities of @ctive Se­nior and the UTAs recalls Muehlebach’s (2012) findings in Italy. Older Italians who participate in ballroom dancing w ­ ere experiencing “moments where the ethical l­ abor regime became intensely enjoyable, and where the moral neoliberal found its most pleas­ur­able expression. . . . ​The ‘work’ they put into the cultivation of a healthy body and m ­ ental disposition became doubly pleas­ur­able ­because their ­labor on the self si­mul­ta­neously represented ­labor for society, a ­labor that lessens the burden on ­f uture generations and that thus allows them to think of themselves as nonegotistical and useful” (Muehlebach 2012, 162). Some older Poles similarly understood certain practices of active aging as linked to the postsocialist world order, including in a moral sense, although the more expansive concept of aktywność also has a moral quality. See also Chudakova (2017) for a discussion of how older

Notes to Pages 58–69 • 177

Rus­sians’ health-­seeking activities are linked not only to self-­care but also to a collective ethic of care. 17 Jaka jest różnica między se­niorem francuskim, se­niorem niemieckim, se­niorem polskim. A teraz posłuchaj bo to jest ważne. Będę mówi powoli. Se­nior francuski wstaje rano, zjada kontynentalne śniadanie, bierze katalog i patrzy, gdzie i na którą uczelnię może iść i czego się uczyć. Niemiecki emeryt czy se­nior wstaje rano, wypije bawarkę, to jest taka wiesz, herbata z mlekiem, bawarka, zjada ciasteczko, bierze katalog i patrzy gdzieś na wycieczkę albo gdzie wyjechać na wycieczkę. A polski emeryt wstaje rano, siusiu do słoika—­wiesz co to jest siusiu?—­i idzie do przychodni. Rozumiesz? . . . ​co to mówiliśmy, prawda, o przychodni, kolejka . . . ​ Bo on wierzy, że przychodnia buduje zdrowie. Nic bardziej błędnego. Nic bardziej błędnego. To chcemy zmienić. Żeby nie chodził rano ze słoikiem z siusiu, z moczem do przychodni. Tylko żeby brał katalog. Internet. Wyszukał. Zapisał się. Poszedł. No tak wiesz, no . . . (laughter). 18 ­There are many German tourists in Poznań and Wrocław, which are situated not far from the German border. 19 A related analy­sis of ­these ethnographic data can be found in Robbins-­ Ruszkowski (2015) and Robbins (2020). 20 For an overview of research on Alzheimer’s disease prevention, see National Institute on Aging, https://­w ww​.­nia​.­nih​.­gov​/h ­ ealth​/­preventing​-­a lzheimers​ -­disease​-­what​-­do​-­we​-­know (accessed 12 November 2019). Cognitive training has been shown to improve the par­tic­u­lar skills being trained but not to prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Nevertheless, numerous companies are devoted to creating and selling such games (e.g., https://­w ww​.­lumosity​.­com/ [accessed 12 November 2019]). 21 One such song is “Tylko we Lwowie” (Only in Lwów). 22 I did ­later interview her ­mother, with the explicit purpose of sharing the recording with her ­family. Although her ­mother consented to be part of my study, I was unsure of her cognitive capacities so did not include the interview as part of this study. 23 They took inspiration for some of t­ hese activities from the work of the Italian pedagogue Duccio Demetrio.

Chapter 3  Beyond Activity 1 This interaction occurred in 2012. 2 The nuns who run the rehabilitation center are part of the order of St. Elizabeth, established in 1842 in Nysa (then the Prus­sian Neisse) (Herbermann et al. 1913). The order is named a­ fter St. Elizabeth of Hungary, who lived during the early thirteenth ­century, and was the ­daughter of King Andrew II and Queen Gertrude of Hungary; ­a fter being widowed at age twenty, she donated her money to build hospitals and took care of patients herself (Bihl 1913). Her name day is celebrated by nuns at the rehabilitation center with the giving of roses and rose-­themed gifts (e.g., rose-­shaped and rose-­scented candles, greeting cards printed with roses), ­a fter the miracle in which St. Elizabeth turned bread into roses to hide her charity from her disapproving ­family. According to the ­sisters who work at the rehabilitation center, the Siostry Elżbietanki (­sisters of St. Elizabeth) is one of the smaller o­ rders of nuns in Poland.

178  •  Notes to Pages 69–87

3 Following the terminology of the staff and the patients themselves, I refer to the persons being cared for in this institution as “patients” (pacjenci). See the introduction for discussions of the overwhelming majority of w ­ omen in the rehabilitation center and the gendered nature of the life course in Poland. 4 Not all medicines are reimbursed by the NFZ. For instance, according to research participants at the time of this study, the best drug to treat certain kinds of multiple sclerosis was not covered, meaning that the disease often progresses much more quickly and severely than among patients who have the means to pay for the best drugs (interferons). NFZ policies ­were subjects of complaint among my research participants and are echoed in the media. 5 This historical information comes from a website maintained by the staff of the rehabilitation center. To maintain the anonymity of my research participants, I have chosen not to provide the link to the website b­ ecause it would immediately identify the institution, staff, and patients. Th ­ ese data w ­ ere also confirmed via conversations with the administrative staff who compiled this historical material. 6 See the introduction for more on the far-­right nationalist conservative media conglomerate and private university operated by Tadeusz Rydzyk and their connection to national politics. 7 See Buch (2015b) for a comparative ethnographic case of bound­aries as shaping relations in home care of older adults in Chicago. 8 I took scratch notes throughout my day and captured par­tic­u­lar phrases as I could. This account is based on notes that I wrote up from t­ hese scratch notes as well as the scratch notes themselves. 9 “Już czystą pupę ma pani.” 10 “Żeby pani nie zmarzła.” 11 “Tak jak małe dziecko.” 12 “Pięknie pachnie.” 13 “Kto tu siedzi?”; “Jeszcze troszeczkę.” 14 “Żeby nie było kukuryku.” 15 “Robiłas kupę, czy nie? Załatwiła pani czy nie?” 16 “Pupa czysta. Robiłaś coś?” 17 “Sweter czy golf?” 18 “Cycki jak flaki”;“Starość nie radość.” 19 Though a rather pe­tite ­woman, pani Kasia was strong enough to move ­these ­women physically. When patients ­were too large for one opiekunka (care worker), another nurse was called in to help. 20 “Otwórz buźkę”; “Otwieramy buźkę.” 21 “Straszne, nie?” 22 Interestingly, Alzheimer’s disease is considered a physical ailment, not ­mental, and (in theory) ­people with Alzheimer’s end up in institutions for the physically ill. (The only ­people with Alzheimer’s whom I encountered at the Social Welfare Home w ­ ere very ill and unable to talk or feed themselves.) 23 At times, pani Władzia took to calling me “pani Jessiczko,” a creative and affectionate-­sounding diminutive form of my name (­here, in the vocative case). She was the only person who came up with an appropriate Polonized diminutive of my name. 24 “Jeden drugiego, jakby mógł, toby w łyżce wody utopił.” Robbins interview, 24 July 2009.

Notes to Pages 87–96 • 179

25 Robbins interview, 24 July 2009.The word “kombinować” has no easy En­g lish translation. It can be variously translated as “to arrange,” “to put something together,” “to contrive,” “to scheme,” and often has connotations of sneakiness, or getting around official rules. It is similar to załatwić, although the connotation is often sneakier than załatwić implies. Kombinować is often accomplished po znajomości, or “through acquaintances,” referring to an informal network of acquaintances. See Wedel 1986 for a more detailed discussion of t­ hese words as used during the socialist era, and Dunn 2004 on the postsocialist era. 26 “Ja go kocham nad życie. Iii . . . ​nad życie. Naprawdę. To znaczy, ja mam taką kolejność: Pan Bóg, Boguś i kot.” Robbins interview, 24 July 2009. 27 “Jesteśmy sobie potrzebni. Jedno drugiemu pomaga, na miarę swoich możliwości. W miłości sobie żyjemy, w zgodzie, jak dwa siwe gołębie.” Robbins interview, 31 July 2009. 28 This focus on the pre­sent and elision of the past recalls Haim Hazan’s (1987) work on the “time universe” of el­derly Jewish Londoners who attend a day center. 29 Similarly, Elana Buch (2014) has shown how older adults in Chicago maintain their sense of moral worlds by giving gifts to home-­care workers, thus working to preserve an ethic of kinship and a sense of in­de­pen­dent personhood. 3 0 For example, pictures of Pope John Paul II at the end of his life have become iconic in Poland. See Zubrzycki (2011) for a detailed analy­sis of the role of Pope John Paul II in con­temporary Polish my­thol­ogy. 31 Experiences of disability highlight the fundamental interdependence of h ­ uman sociality. As Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (2013) argue, experiences of disability are fundamental to ­human life and thus should be centered in anthropological analy­sis.

Chapter 4  Remembering the Polish Nation 1 This ethnographic example appears in Robbins 2013a, 79–80. 2 “To był straszny cios.” Robbins interview, 16 January 2009. 3 His b­ rother fought for the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) during World War II, and like other former Home Army members, faced severe discrimination at the hands of the postwar Polish government. 4 Soon ­a fter we spoke, I became ill with a virus that was sickening both patients and staff at the rehab center, meaning that I could not return for over a week (I was worried about spreading germs to vulnerable patients). 5 Older Poles’ expansion of their moral personhood through practices of memory recalls Nancy Munn’s (1986) analy­sis of the practices through which Gawans achieve fame. 6 In Polish, the quote in the subheading is: “Miły wodzu mój!” 7 Józef Piłsudski was a Polish military leader during World War I, the first leader of the Second Polish Republic (the interwar Polish state), and the first marshal of the Polish army. As a military figure who fought for in­de­pen­dence and then served as the first leader of post-­partition Poland, he has enormous symbolic importance in the collective Polish memory. As Erica Tucker notes, this con­temporary heroic perspective of Piłsudski is selective, glossing over his time as an authoritarian leader (2011, 35n9). See Törnquist-­Plewa (1992, 172–174, 202–205) for discussions of the growth of what she calls the “cult of Marshal Piłsudski” (202–203) in

180  •  Notes to Pages 96–98

8 9 10 11

12

conjunction with oppositional activities in the 1970s and early 1980s. See Sokolewicz (1991) for a discussion of Piłsudski’s life in universalist mythical terms and an image of a folk sculpture of Piłsudski. Pani Wanda used the words “w niewoli,” which could also be translated as bondage or imprisonment. Kasztanka was the name of Piłsudski’s favorite h ­ orse (Rothstein 2011) and also lives on in popu­lar memory, often appearing in portraits of Piłsudski. See, for example, Mackiewicz (2012). This song dates from 1915. The lyr­ics ­were written by Wacław Biernacki and the melody is a folk tune (Rothstein 2011, 16). Pani Wanda: A teraz ta niepodległość. Niepodległość. To Piłsudski, nie? Jessica: Tak. PW: On, w 1918ym roku, to.. 1918.. Polska od . . . ​odzyskała niepodległość. Bo Polska była po 123 latach—123 lat. J: Tak. PW: W niewoli. To wszystko nagrywa pani? J: Tak, tak, . . . ​PW: Polska była podzielona na trzy rozbiory, na trzy części. Wschód pod Rosją. Wschód Polski zajęła Rosja. Zachód zajęli Niemcy. A tu jaka eh, tu, góry, Zakopane, Austria. Kraków, Zakopane, to Austria. 123 lata. I później były zawsze powstania. Bo się buntowali, Polacy, i powstania były. Powstania. Powstanie styczniowe, powstanie listopadowe, tak, tak jak teraz, odzyskali, to listopadowe, a niepodległość. J: No tak. PW: Tyle lat niewoli. Okropne. Bo kraj Polska, leży pod—­nie jest duży obszarem—­a le leży, ehh, bo Rosja jest wielkie państwo, Niemcy tak samo. J: No. PW: I oni zawsze chcą zlikwidować tego małego, ten kraj. J: No, no. PW: O matko święta. Już? To dziękuję. Staff member: [Brings drinks and silverware for obiad.] No mówię, czas minął. PW: Tak, ale my to poważnie mówimy. SM: Jak tam poważnie? PW: Ah, poważnie, to nie. Poważnie. SM: Gdzie tam to poważne . . . ​PW: No ale ciekawe, ciekawe. A Piłsudski, to był wódz. On wytrwał. To był Piłsudski, kiedy zmarł, to było 1935 roku, 12ego maja. Zmarł Piłsudski. J: Dobrze pamięta. PW: Tak. I ja chodziłam już do szkoły, i szliśmy, eh, na msze świętą, szarymi chorągiewkami, i wiersz mówiłam o Piłsudskim: To nieprawda, że Ciebie już nie ma. / To nieprawda, że jesteś już w grobie. / Chociaż płacze dziś cała Polska ziemia. / Cała Polska ziemia w żałobie. / Byłeś dla nas posągiem ze stali. / Byłeś nam i orderem wspaniałym. / Ty coś Polskę wydźwignął i ocalił, / I wydźwignął na szczyt i chwały. Ojej, jak to będzie pani miała to ciekawą rozmowę. J: No, tak, to dobrze. Ja pani dziękuję za rozmowę. PW: Nawet taką piosenkę znam, o Piłsudskim, to patriotyczną. Je . . . ​[starts to sing] Znam. Zaśpiewać ją tak krótko? J: Proszę, proszę. PW: Tak? J: Proszę. PW: Jedzie, jedzie, na Kasztance, na Kasztance, / Siwy strzelca strój. / Hej, hej, komendancie! Miły wodzu mój! / Hej, hej, komendancie! Miły wodzu mój! / Gdzie szabelka Twa ze stali, Twa ze stali, / Przecież idzie w bój, / Przecież idzie w bój, / Hej, hej, komendancie! Miły wodzu mój! / Hej, hej, komendancie! Miły wodzu mój! / Gdzie Twój mundur generalski, generalski, / Złotym zszywany, / Złotym zszywany, / Hej, hej, komendancie! Wodzu ukochany! / Hej, hej, komendancie! Wodzu ukochany! To jest o Piłsudskim. To jest o Piłsudskim, bo on jeździł na Kasztance. O Piłsudskim. To święto jest dobrze, że jest, to ważne, ta niepodległość. Robbins interview, 12 November 2008. Robert Rothstein (2011, 16) notes that this song and another about Piłsudski pre­sent him as ­humble in his wearing of a rifleman’s uniform instead of a general’s.

Notes to Pages 99–103 • 181

13 Pani Wanda was the only person during my fieldwork who sang this song and recited this poem. Rothstein (2011, 16–18) writes that many songs about Piłsudski address him using the vocative case; terms include wódz (leader), komendant (commandant), brygadier (brigadier), naczelnik (chief), bohater (hero), and dziadek (grand­father). Although t­ hese terms are mostly military titles, the vocative indicates a direct relationship between the singer and Piłsudski. 14 To jest Ameryka! / To słynne USA! / To jest bogaty kraj, na ziemi raj! / Ach, to chce mieć cztery żony, / Ten musi mieć mi-­li-­on-­y! / To jest Ameryka! / To słynne USA! / To jest bogaty kraj, na ziemi raj! Robbins interview, 12 November 2008. 15 The full text of this song, according to one Polish ­music website, includes references to the United States that appear exotic to many Poles, such as skyscrapers, Niagara Falls, and Native Americans, and apparently including four wives. See https://­bibliotekapiosenki​.­pl​/­utwory​/­A meryka (sl_A_ Jellin_i_L_Szmaragd)/ tekst (accessed 12 November 2019). ­There is a long-­standing and still-­present fascination with Native Americans in Poland. During my fieldwork, this emerged in conversations with Poles of all ages who made orientalist comments about their love of Native American culture and connection to nature. See Paryż (2013) and Łaskiewicz (2016) for analyses of Native Americans in Polish socialist-­era lit­er­a­ture. 16 In Polish, the quote in the subheading is: “My dziady nie mamy nic.” 17 A shortened version of pani Alicja’s story appears in Robbins 2013a, 81–83. 18 Pani Alicja described where she was born as: “w rzeszowskim, na Podkarpaciu . . . ​ tam jak się jedzie na Lwów.” Robbins interview, 16 October 2008. 19 Pani Alicja: W Ameryce też takie choroby są? Jessica: Tak, oczywiście, tak. Pani Alicja: Tak? Ja myślałam ze nie ma, że tylko w Polsce te udary są. To nadciśnienie się nie leczy, tego się nie leczy. Robbins interview, 16 October 2008. 20 See Seaman et al. 2019 for an extended analy­sis of pani Alicja’s desires for phone calls and the staff’s interpretation of ­these, as part of a comparative discussion about the unknowable and unpredictable aspects of care. 21 Polish first names are generally ­either Slavic (e.g., Bogusława, Lech) or Christian (­either biblical or ­a fter saints) (e.g., Anna, Piotr) in origin, meaning that foreign first names can be difficult for Poles to grasp. I found that this was especially true for older ­people of lower socioeconomic status, but see chapter 3 for the diminutive name I was given at the Social Welfare Home (pani Jessiczka). 22 “Jessiko” is the improvised vocative form of my first name. 23 This day, pani Alicja first said that he had passed away in 2005, and then 1995. In a ­later conversation she commented that she had been a w ­ idow for thirteen years, suggesting that her husband had passed away in 1995, not 2005. 24 “Taką sierotą jestem. Tak się mówi w Polsce, jak nie ma ojca ani matki, to sierota, jak nie ma dzieci też jest sierota. Daj mi chusteczkę.” Robbins interview, 16 October 2008. It is also notable that pani Alicja’s son was still alive, suggesting the importance of ­daughters for older w ­ omen. 25 Wianki are garlands or wreaths. H ­ ere I think pani Alicja was referring to wiecha, or greenery placed on a construction site during construction. 26 Pani Alicja used the term “Ruski” to refer to Rus­sians (and Rus­sia, although this was nonstandard). This is an impolite term for Rus­sians that I heard not infrequently from my research participants.

182  •  Notes to Pages 103–105

27 ­Here pani Alicja used the word “dziady,” which I have translated h ­ ere as “losers.” Its meaning changes based on context: it can mean “geezers” or “beggars” and is related to “dziad” (grand­father or forefather), although in ­those cases the plural is the more programmatically correct “dziadowie” rather than “dziady.” See below for another use of the word in the title of Mickiewicz’s play Dziady. 28 It was occasionally difficult to understand pani Alicja’s speech; she spoke in a low, quiet voice and it sounded as if the stroke had affected her speech. I have indicated with [. . .] when speech was unintelligible, as determined by both native speakers of Polish and me. The Polish text follows: Pani Alicja: Ale wnuczek ukończył studia, geodetą, wnuczka też robiła geodetę, inżyniera geodetę, i pojechała do Anglii, tam mają swój zakład [. . .] mąż zrobił studia geodezyjne, pokończyli. Tam budowa strasznie ruszyła, idzie, i robią wianki pod budowę [. . .] Mają tak że zarabiają dobrze. Wnuczka była, cieszy się że dobrze zarabia, ale mówi tu, babciu, nie wrócę, bo tu nie widzę się. Co ja tu zarobię. Grosze. [Tam . . . ​za miesiąc zarobię . . . ​trzy miesiące . . . ​we Wrocławiu].” Jessica: Aha. PA: Pojechała tam i tam siedzi bo im tam lepiej. Więcej pieniążków. J: Mmm, no, rozumiem. PA: A tu nie ma pieniążku[. . .] Inna ta Polska nie płacą, nie tego. A teraz jak tę komunę wyrzucili, stąd to strasznie się nalęgło dużo złodziei. Za komuny nie było tyle złodziei. Była polityka inna, Ruskie brały, ale wkład dla ropy, gaz. A teraz jak nam gaz zakręcił Ruski, to my dziady nie mamy nic. Ani ropy, ani benzyny, ani gazu, nie ma nic w Polsce. Oni mają wszystko. Mają gaz, mają ropę, mają wszystko, benzynę, wszystko mają w tej chwili, co najbardziej potrzeba. J: Mmm. PA: Kiedyś samochód w Polsce to kosztował bardzo dużo pieniędzy, a teraz nie, bo drogie utrzymanie. To nie kosztuje tak, już są tanie samochody. Bo utrzymać samochód to jest bardzo ciężko. Benzyny kupić, ubezpieczenie, to wszystko płacić, to ciężko, to trzeba dużo, być bogatym. Trzeba bardzo dużo zarabiać. J: No, ma rację. PA: Jak się nie ma studiów, wykończonej szkoły, to się mało zarabia. A tam chyba w Ameryce? J: Tak jest, samo . . . ​a le wszyscy ma kredyt. Robbins interview, 16 October 2008. 29 Roommate’s d­ aughter (RD): Pani Alicjo, wtedy to było tak, że także gospodarzyli że na półkach był ocet i musztarda. I nic więcej nie było do jedzenia. Pani nie wie, bo pani na wsi mieszkała . . . ​ile pani trzymała świń, krów, i wszystkiego, na półkach nie było w ogóle jedzenia. Pani Alicja: Wszystko szło do Rosji. RD: No właśnie. PA: Bo wszystko potrzebowali. RD: No dobrze że potrzebowali ale myśmy mieli co. Pani miała jedzenie bo pani była na wsi. Ale myśmy nie mieli jedzenia. PA: Ale teraz wszystkiego mają za dużo, za nic nie płacą, było za darmo. . . . ​R D: Także, ja nie stwierdzę że wszystko wtedy było złe. (dzień dobry) Ale nie można mówić, że było, że było, dobrze, i że było wszystko wspaniale, bo, eh, Pani głodna nie chodziła. Ale myśmy, wie pani, dostali—­PA: do Wrocławia. [. . . .] RD: Myśmy szynki przez całe lata nie widzieli. Na Boże Narodzenie dostaliśmy w zakładzie pracy kilogram szynki na pracownika i na Wielkanoc był kilogram szynki na pracownika. A tak to się nie widziało. A mieliśmy kartkę, dwa i pól kilo mięsa, bo pracownicy umysłowi. Eh, to wszystko razem, ze kośćmi, ze wszystkim. Dwa i pól albo dwa siedemdziesiąt. Na cały miesiąc. Także wie pani, no, i mąka była wyliczona, i cukier, i wszystko, i masło. PA: Wszystko szło do Rosji. RD: No. Także, wie pani, to nie można tak powiedzieć. PA: [. . .] RD: Budowało się bo ludzie gdzieś pracowali. Musieli. PA: [. . .] RD: A jak po wojnie rolnik nie zapłacił to szedł do więzienia, pani Alicjo. Moja mama pracowała w

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30

31

32 3 3

34 35 36 37

urzędzie stanu cywilnego . . . ​To cały czas, pisała [. . .] chłopi nic nie wiedzieli, do więzienia brali bo krowy nie oddał, nie oddał mięsa, czy czy czy . . . ​PA: [. . . ​hektarów.] [Zabrali] mięsa, tyle ziemniaków, półtorej tony zboża za darmo. Trzeba było wyprodukować za darmo [. . .] Zabrali wszystko. A nam w kraju nie, to było potrzebne. Wszystko do Rosji. RD: Nam tez było potrzebne, bo myśmy też musieli jeść. Ale widzi pani . . . ​PA: Ale teraz wszystkiego za dużo [. . .] zamiast do Wrocławia nikt się nie pyta, ziemniaki takie brudne, a marchewka taka brudna. Wszystko holenderskie . . . ​R D: Eeeehh, już mądrzeją ludzie, pani Alicjo. To głupi tylko tak biorą. Mądrzeją ludzie. Na . . . ​PA: Uczą się. RD: Uczą się, uczą się. Wiedzą że opryskane i takie . . . ​Ja teraz wszystko patrzę czy polskie. Jak nie polskie, to nie biorę. Jak gdzieś, na przykład . . . ​na PLUSie jest napisany produkt, tam, czy Hiszpania, czy Polska, czy Holandia. Pewnie że banana, nie kupię z Polski bo w Polsce bananów nie ma. PA: Nie ma. RD: To kupuje bananę. Ale kartofla, nie kupię innego jak polski. Wie pani, są czasem durni ludzie ale większość, wie pani, chce polskie ziemniaki, chce polską marchew, polskie produkty mleczne, bo są lepsze. PA: Nie ma tyle chemii. RD: No, nie są tak konserwowane, także . . . ​PA: Holenderskie, to jest bardzo dużo chemii. Oni od nas kupili ziemie, sieją, tak dają nawozu [. . .] marchewka, pietruszka, jarzyny [. . .] nie będę jadł bo to śmierdzi nawozem [. . .] RD: I całe szczęście że u chłopów teraz nie jest tak na nawozie, lepsza żywność. PA: Opryski . . . ​To nie kupuje. RD: [w ogrodzie bo swoje . . .] a na sprzedaż [. . .] to robić wszystko bez nawozu i przynajmniej jest zdrowsze. PA: [. . .] ogrodnikiem [. . .] a nie nawozami sztucznymi tylko, swoimi nawozami. RD: Także pani Alicjo, historia jest bardziej skomplikowana niż nam się wydaje. Były dobre momenty i było bardzo dużo złych, a więcej tych złych niż dobrych. The ethnographic rec­ord shows that other rural Poles expressed similar concerns about the decline of Polish agriculture (Galbraith 2004, 75–76; see Dunn 2004, 28–57, for a case study of the cap­i­tal­ist logic and practices that eliminated the market for local produce). In Polish, the quote in the subheading is: “Bo jak bez Chopina? No jak?” Thanks to Michael Kennedy (via the Polish Studies Association listserv) for this reference on complaining. A 2013 conference on the social, cultural, historical, and public nature of complaining in eastern Eu­rope and Eurasia (“Complaints: Cultures of Grievance in Eastern Eu­rope and Eurasia,” Prince­ton University, 8–9 March 2013) also indicates the regional importance of this social form. A shortened version of pani Cecylia’s story appears in Robbins 2013a, 84–86. Despite not having oral consent, I include information from this first conversation for two reasons: first, during a ­later meeting pani Cecylia gave me permission to include this information, and second, she repeated all this information during conversations that followed. In ­later conversations, she mentioned distant kin relations to the Czartoryski and Lubomirski families, both influential and famous noble families with centuries-­ long ancestry in the Polish lands. See Jakubowska (2012). “Polska zawsze była w Europie. Jest dokładnie w centrum.” Cf. Galbraith (2004, 2011). “Bo takie czasy były, po prostu.” Robbins interview, 22 July 2009. Dziady, a play by Adam Mickiewicz, the nineteenth-­century Polish Romantic poet, depicts Polish life u­ nder Rus­sian rule (Wandycz 1993[1974], 180–182). H ­ ere,

184  •  Notes to Pages 111–113

pani Cecylia was likely referring to the student protests that broke out a­ fter a per­for­mance of Dziady in 1968, catalyzing the po­liti­cal crisis and anti-­Semitic expulsions of that year (Kubik 1994, 193n19). During state socialism, performing Dziady was itself a po­liti­cal act. Quotes from Dziady ­were used in Solidarity leaflets and monuments to ­those who died in the uprisings of 1970 (Törnquist-­ Plewa 1992, 225–226). (However, see Kubik 1994, 75–102, for an analy­sis of the incorporation of characters from Dziady, along with other legendary and historical figures, into a public spectacle in the 1970s that reinforced party rule.) 38 Fryderyk Chopin grew up in Warsaw and left for Paris at age twenty, where he was a con­temporary of Mickiewicz. He has long been hailed in Poland as a ­great national artist. He supported nationalist movements, although it is debated to what extent he intended his m ­ usic to be heard along nationalist lines (see Bellman 2010; Pekacz 2000; and Trochimczyk 2000 for more information). See Zubrzycki (2011, 34–38) for a discussion of the synesthetic components of Chopin in Polish culture. The International Chopin Festival was first held in Duszniki Zdrój, a spa town near the Czech border, in August 1946 and takes place annually. See http://­festival​.­pl/ for more information (accessed 12 November 2019). ­There is also the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition that has been held in Warsaw e­ very five years since January 1927. See https://­chopin2020​.­pl​/­en for more information (accessed 12 November 2019). 39 Pani Cecylia: Są niektórzy ludzie tacy jacyś źli, tak innym zazdroszczą, chcą wszystko nieuczciwie, po trupach, dojść do celu, byle jemu, kiedyś ta władza, nawet ta ta ważna władza, to była służbą dla narodu, służbą dla społeczeństwa. Swój kraj, swoje, to się ceniło inaczej. Był ten patriotyzm. I te dzieci się wychowały w tym duchu. [sigh] Teraz . . . ​“ta? Polska? Teraz jest Europa!” No jak Europa? Ja mówię, co za Europa? Europa, Europa, bo byliśmy w Europie, jesteśmy tak usytuowani, ze jesteśmy w Europie od tysięcy lat. Nikt nam Europy nie dał! Ale jak mam swoje państwo, swój język, swoją religię, swój pieniądz, prawda? Ważna jest bardzo swoja, mieć swoją. To zupełnie coś innego—­swój Sejm, swój parlament, to swoje sądownictwo, swoje oświatę, swoje dodatek, inne, wszystko, swoją kulturę. No u nas na przykład, po wojnie, była taka sytuacja, że zakazano lektury w szkoły Dziadów Mickiewicza. Jessica: Mmm. PC: No. Jak można zabronić Dziadów Mickiewicza? J: Mmm. PC: To cały, studenci, profesorowie wszystko, się . . . ​cały naród się zbuntował. Szopena. Zakazano na uczelniach wyższych, szkołach muzycznych muzyki Szopena . . . ​No i w ogóle nikt nie słyszał że Polacy mieli Szopena. To wymyślił nasi profesorowie, nasi konserwatorzy sztuki, to oni wymyślili konkurs szopenowski. Konkurs szopenowski, żeby ta muzyka została dla następnych pokoleń. Bo jak, bez Szopena, no jak? I nawet tutaj, w tym parku naszym południowym, [name] był jednym, z takich ważnych, którzy, który dążył do postawienia pomnika Szopena tu w tym parku południowym i został odlany z brązu i jest piękny pomnik. W Dusznikach, w Krynicy, odbywają się te konkursy szopenowskie, i to jest bardzo przyjemne, tak? J: Tak. Robbins interview, 22 July 2009. 40 “Rota” (The oath) is a well-­known patriotic Polish song from the early twentieth ­century that was written as a protest against the de-­Polonization and Germanization ­under the Prus­sian partitions. It was a candidate to be the national anthem. Since pani Cecylia was active in Solidarity, perhaps she remembers the song from that context. Barbara Törnquist-­Plewa describes the resurgence of po­liti­cal and

Notes to Pages 113–115 • 185

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patriotic songs as part of the social movements of the early 1980s: “Community singing of hymns and songs was a public manifestation of society’s attitudes and aspirations at that time. P ­ eople returned to ­those old hymns, bound by tradition to the in­de­pen­dence issue. As previously mentioned, ‘Dąbrowski’s Mazurka,’ ‘O God who through the Ages’ or ‘The Oath’ w ­ ere sung in vari­ous versions with ­great emotion and feeling. The song of Piłsudski’s Legions, ‘The March of the First Brigade,’ and many other insurgent songs previously unknown to young ­people of the post-­war generations ­were revived, appearing in duplicated songbooks distributed by Solidarity organisations during the cele­bration of national anniversaries” (1992, 227). Jessica: Czy to znaczy, że teraz pani nie cieszy się, że Polska jest w Unii? Pani Cecylia: Kochana, ja się z tym bardzo cieszyłam. I bardzo bym się cieszyła, tym że, na przykład, moje wnuki będą mogły sobie wybrać uczelnię. Będą mogły sobie wybrać kraj gdzie będą chciały żyć i pojechać. Ale chciałabym, żeby one czuły, że tu jest ich kraj, ich ojczyzna, ich korzenie, prawda? Żeby oni się czuli Polakami. I żeby jednak dążyli do tego, żeby w Polsce działo się dobrze. J: Mm. PC: Żeby nigdy nie byli tą drugą czy trzecia kategorią ludzi, którzy są gorzej opłacani w obcym kraju, czy gorzej traktowani, czy . . . ​no niby rasizm nie istnieje ale jednak istnieje. Jednak jak jest jakiś kryzys to dopiero w ten czas to się tak bardzo uwidacznia. Bo najpierw w takim kraju oni myślą o swoich rodakach, a nie o obcokrajowcach, którzy przyjechali tam zarobić czy dorobić, prawda? J: Tak. PC: I w pierwszej kolejności zwalniają obcokrajowców. Ale dlaczego nie mają mieć swojego kraju, swojej ojczyzny, swoich bohaterów. Przecież tyle co Polska wycierpiała i tyle co było wojen i napadów i ile ludzi wymordowanych. Ile jest mogił takich nie znanych jeszcze. Jest, tysiące ludzi ginęło i walczyli, bo . . . ​to rozbiory, to wojny przesiedlenia, to różne rzeczy były. Ale cały czas była ta miłość wpajana do ojczyzny, hymny narodowe, prawda? Roty śpiewali “nie damy, damy . . . ​pogrześć wiary, polski my naród polski lud” i tak dalej. Albo . . . ​no, bardzo dużo jest tych pieśni różnych patriotycznych z książek i tak dalej. Ale Polak Polakowi nie jest równy. Jedni są bardzo uczciwi i bardzo sumienni i w tej chwili im jest ciężko. Bo tacy cwaniacy, kombinatorzy tacy, właśnie, kilku się zbierze, przejmuje za darmo. Ustalają sobie premie, nagrody jakieś kosmiczne. Jak właśnie w rządzie były premie po 400 000, teraz 3 000 000 przed tym na nagrody tak dla 3 czy 4 osób z rządu z sejmu. No to nawet przed takim kryzysem jak w tej chwili jest to wstyd. Jak różnie mają po 600 zł i niektóry tam z tej renciny czy 400 zł czy nie mają pracy, czy . . . ​To ja bym nie potrafiła wziąć takich pieniędzy i nie myśleć o tych co się dzieje z tymi ludźmi których tak pozbawili wszystkiego. No powiedz Jessika, czy ty byś mogła wziąć na przykład 500 000 do kieszeni czy tam 400 000, wiedząc że się zwalnia, zamyka zakład pracy i wyrzucać się tysiące ludzi? Tysiące hektarów ziemi, bo najpierw, to, tak samo z tymi rolnikami . . . ​Robbins interview, 22 July 2009. However, pani Cecylia’s stories did not reveal judgments about degrees of Polishness based on class status, as Tucker describes (2011, 28, 28n1). Rather, her stories seem to oppose all Poles—­former landed gentry, farmers, and industrialists alike—to foreigners (primarily Germans). See Galbraith (2004, 69) for an example of a younger Pole expressing a multicultural vision in which ­there is a place for both Eu­ro­pe­anness and Polishness. In Polish, the quote in the subheading is: “Dzielimy się opłatkami i łzami.”

186  •  Notes to Pages 115–119

45 See Robbins (2020) for a shortened discussion of pan Florian’s story. 4 6 Pan Florian identified the place where he was born as part of what was then the wojewódzstwo wileńskie, or Wilno voivodeship, designating its proximity to what is currently the Lithuanian city of Vilnius. This fell within the interwar borders of Poland. The area where he grew up is now part of Belarus. He and his m ­ other and ­sister ­were deported to a region that now belongs to Kazakhstan. In order to reflect ethnographic usage, I follow pan Florian and ­others’ designation of this location as Siberia. 47 Janet Carsten (2007b, 21–22) describes how she and her b­ rothers found official state documents of their parents when cleaning their ­father’s desk a­ fter his death. Her discussion shows well the role of the state in kinship and memory, and differential knowledge of the past distributed among kin relations. 4 8 The term “Sybiracy” includes ­people sent to Siberia during the deportations of the nineteenth as well as the twentieth centuries. 49 “Ja się za pieniądze nie sprzedaję.” Robbins interview, 12 May 2009. 50 “Oni nie poczuli smaku ZSSR, takiego prawdziwego. Bo tutaj mieliśmy już ściszony, nie . . . ​nie . . . ​nieoryginalny. Ale myśmy mieli oryginalni, przeżyliśmy. A oni tego nie przeżyli. Ale oni przeżyli Niemców. Niemcy też nie lepsi.” Robbins interview, 14 April 2010. 51 “Nie mieli pojęcia, na przykład, co to Sybir.” Robbins interview, 14 April 2010. 52 “Oni nie wiedzieli, że za to że Polakiem jest. Oni tego nie wiedzieli.” Robbins interview, 14 April 2010. 53 Placing a small bundle of hay ­under the table­cloth at Christmas Eve dinner is a Polish custom (see Bigda 2012 for a popular-­media discussion of Polish Christmas Eve customs). 5 4 Baked goods with poppy seeds are customarily served on Christmas Eve in Poland. 55 Opłatki are wafers (similar to communion wafers, but not consecrated) that ­people break off and share with one another on Christmas Eve, while exchanging wishes for the coming year. P ­ eople also place opłatki in Christmas greeting cards. 56 Nie jest to takie proste, jak się wydaje. Przecież było tyle wigilii. Którą wybrać z wszystkich przeżytych (ponad 80 świąt)? Kilka pierwszych można odrzucić. Bo przecież nic z tego okresu nie mogę pamiętać. Ale reszta? Jak to wybrać tę jedną jedyną? Patrząc w przeszłość, wydają się wszystkie jednakowe. Może tylko w dzieciństwie odczuwało się i przeżywało inaczej, niż w wieku dorosłym. Życie radosne, bez kłopotów. Piękna choinka z zapalonymi świeczkami i zimnymi ogniami nazywanymi również “Ognie Bengalskie.” Rodzina—­mama, tata, siostra, ciocia, wujek z córeczką i synkiem, którzy na wszystkie święta przyjeżdżali do nas saniami zaprzęgniętymi koniem a raczej klaczą, która nazywała się Żeńka. W latach następnych mniej zachwytów. Nie ma Mikołaja. Choina jak przed rokiem. I tak co rok. W następnych latach, już całkiem dorosłych, znów wielka radość. Radość z tego, że widzimy, jak bardzo cieszą się nasze dzieci. Tak. Ale co między naszymi, naszym dzieciństwem i dzieciństwem naszych dzieci? Czy może być luka, przerwa, dziura? Niestety nie. Można jednak tak to nazywać. Tu, po przydługim wstępie, przechodzę do tematu. Na pewno będzie krótki, bo przecież dziura nie może być duża. Ta przerwa rozpoczęła się od września 1939 roku. Opiszę jednak tylko jedną wigilię. Wigilię w 1940 roku. Dlaczego ten rok wybrałem? Myślę dlatego, że była to najwspanialsza wigilia spośród następnych pięciu lat. Byliśmy daleko od kraju, w maleńkiej wiosce i maleńkim domku, na

Notes to Page 119 • 187

olbrzymich stepach Syberii. Głęboki, biały śnieg. Na widnokręgu nie widać nic—­ani krzaczka, ani drzewka. Jak na pustyni lub na morzu. Przygotowanie do świąt trwało już wcześniej. Polegało na gromadzeniu żywności i dlatego mieliśmy bochenek chleba, pęcak, trochę kaszy jedlanej, mleka i chyba kilka jajek. Na dworze wydawało się, że bardzo zimno. Było około -20 stopni. (Dlaczego wydawało się? Dlatego, bo w następnych miesiącach zimno było -40 i więcej.) Padał śnieg. Zbliża się pierwsza gwiazda. Szykowaliśmy się do kolacji wigilijnej. Wtem przychodzi pani Jadzia. Mieszkała około 600 metrów od nas. Zaprasza nas na wspólną wigilię. Nie pamiętam, czy wzięliśmy ze sobą swoich smakołyków (pani Jadzia miała się znacznie lepiej i wiele nam pomagała, ale to nie na temat). Poszliśmy na skróty przez pola. Śnieg był miękki i maszerowaliśmy gęsiego w śniegu po kolana. Pamiętam, że ja nie miałem butów, miałem na nogach kapcie owinięte szmatami. Gdy doszliśmy, była już szarówka. Gwiazdy nie było widać, bo padał śnieg. Przychodzimy do chaty, otrzepujemy się ze śniegu. Ja przy tym miałem najlepiej, bo owinięte szmatami kapcie nie wpuściły do środka śniegu. Pozostali musieli wysypywać śnieg z obuwia. W chacie stał stół przykryty prześcieradłem, dwie ławki. Na oknie lampa naftowa. O choince nie ma co myśleć. Do lasu daleko. Nie ma ani gałązki ani żadnego kwiatka, który mógłby zastąpić choinkę. Mama i pani Jadzia zaczęły zastawiać stół. Nie pamiętam, czy było pod prześcieradłem sianko. Jeśli wcześniej nie pomyślała o tym pani Jadzia, to teraz sianko jest nie do zdobycia. Ale pani Jadzia bardzo zaradna, na pewno sianko miała. Na stole podają bochenek prawdziwego chleba, prawdziwą bułkę posypaną makiem i cukrem. Obrane jajeczka na twardo, sól i chyba gorące kluseczki. Piszę chyba, bo nie jestem pewien. Może te kluseczki były tylko moim marzeniem. Pani Jadzia podaje opłatki. Dzielimy się opłatkami i łzami. Wszyscy mieli łzy w oczach. Wszyscy starali się je zatrzymywać, a zwłaszcza nasze mamy starały się, żebyśmy nie mogli tego zobaczyć. Trudno było się wstrzymać. Przecież to już drugi rok i drugie święto bez ojca i bez męża. Jest nas 6 osób. Dwie mamy i czworo dzieci. To ja—­około czternastolatek, moja siostra Marysia—­około siedemnastolatka, synek pani Jadzi—­Tomek—­około 6 lat i siostra (nie pamiętam imienia)—­około 8 lat. (Już teraz wiem, jak miała ona na imię—­A ntonina). Pani Jadzia proponuje wspólną modlitwę. Modlimy się głośno, na kolanach w intencji naszych ojców i najszybszego powrotu do Polski pełni wiary, że odzyska ona niepodległość. Zasiadamy do stołu, który dość szybko został spustoszony. Zaśpiewaliśmy kilka kolęd. Na dworze już pełna ciemność. Śnieg tylko prószy. Nie pamiętam, jak wróciliśmy do swojej chaty. Nie pamiętam może wiele więcej, ale to chyba dlatego, że zbyt mocno zatrzymała się w mojej pamięci ta prawdziwa bułka z makiem. Może spytacie, dlaczego wybrałem właśnie tę wigilię. Przecież było 80 innych. Może ciekawszych i weselszych. Odpowiem—­d latego, że jest to dialog między generacjami. Żeby młodzież zdobyła choć minimalną wiedzę o dziejach naszego pokolenia, a może i dlatego, żeby zrozumieć, że ojczyznę swoją należy cenić, zanim się ją straci. Robbins interview, 14 April 2010. 57 In my translation, it also appears that pan Florian used the pre­sent tense to describe the distance to the forest (“The forest is far”), but in Polish this is actually a sentence without a verb (“Do lasu daleko”). The present-­tense translation feels like the most accurate English-­language equivalent, but I have excluded it from the past versus pre­sent tense contrast above to try to remain more faithful to the original Polish.

188  •  Notes to Pages 120–133

58 “Polszczyzna” is generally used to refer to the use of the Polish language that is meticulously grammatically correct, according to literary standards. ­People who appreciate piękna polszczyzna often do so with a sense of respecting the history of the Polish language, and contrast this historical integrity with con­temporary (often spoken) errors. The following examples from a lecture at the University of the Third Age in Poznań (Anna Piotrowicz, 21 November 2009) illustrate this point. (1) Words with Latin origin do not have stress on the penultimate syllable, as is the general rule, but instead on the third-­to-­last syllable. Therefore, when saying words like “opera” and “logika,” the stress must be placed on the first syllable. ­There is a trend in con­temporary spoken Polish to put the stress on the penultimate syllable. (2) When using the second-­person plural (formal address), the verb form must agree with “państwo,” which follows third-­person plural conjugation rules. Therefore, proper usage would be “Jak państwo widzą,” not “Jak państwo widzicie.” Th ­ ere is a trend in con­temporary spoken Polish to replace the second-­person plural (formal address) verb form with the second-­person plural (informal address) verb form, but to retain “państwo” as a marker of formal address. During the lecture, this lack of polszczyzna was attributed to younger generations and a lack of re­spect for the language, suggesting that discourse around polszczyzna constitutes a linguistic ideology (Irvine 1989). I did not read the letters from pan Florian’s ­sister, so I am not sure ­whether this type of polszczyzna was evident in them, but the use of polszczyzna in other contexts suggests that it could be true for t­ hese letters as well. Pan Florian emphasized that his s­ ister should receive full credit for t­ hese letters, but I have not included her real name ­here in order to protect anonymity. 59 See Caldwell (2007) for a discussion of older Rus­sians as guardians of tradition.

Chapter 5  Rethinking Memory 1 Since the time of my fieldwork, the center has moved to a newly constructed building in another part of town. The descriptions ­here relate to the center during the time of my long-­term fieldwork from 2008 to 2010. 2 It is common in Poland to remove one’s shoes inside the h ­ ouse and instead to wear slippers. Th ­ ere was also a notable distinction between clothing that ­people wore at home and in public; p­ eople often wore comfortable, casual clothing at home, but dressed much more formally in public. The day-­care center was an in­ter­est­ing combination of t­ hese two dimensions: ­people tended to be dressed quite formally, but wore footwear that marked this place as a homelike environment. See chapter 3 for a discussion of indoor/outdoor footwear at the rehabilitation center in Wrocław. 3 See McLean (2007) for an analy­sis of how narratives by persons with dementia can become coherent despite a lack of facticity. This recalls long-­standing anthropological conversations about the nature of rationality (e.g., Evans-­Pritchard 1968; Good 1994). 4 See the introduction for a discussion of fieldwork methodology and institutional review boards. 5 A sizable minority of caregivers w ­ ere men, but it was more difficult to approach them. They seemed more harried and did not enter easily into conversation the way that w ­ omen did. 6 Robbins interview, 3 February 2010.

Notes to Pages 133–146 • 189

7 “To była . . . ​była przyjemna, ta starość.” 8 “Kochana, ja już życia osobistego nie mam, nic, tylko opieka nad mężem.” Note the contrast to findings from the United States, in which f­ amily caregivers sometimes understand their work as “­doing nothing” (Seaman 2018). 9 “Agresja. Agresja. Musi być tak jak on uważa.” 10 “Tu trochę się zahamowało.” 11 She used the phrase “załatwienie różnych spraw.” 12 “Ja jestem przewodnik turystyczny. Także, ja miałam takie niewyznaczony wymiar godzin. Różnie to bywało. I raz późno wracałam i raz wcześniej. Więc jak wracałam, może ja źle wychowałam i męża i dzieci. Bo męża też trzeba wychować. Proszę panią, od początku wszystko ja robiłam. Nawet, wie pani, mąż mi powiedział, ‘jak słodzisz mi herbatę to lepiej mi smakuje.’ Ale ja młoda, słodziłam. On się przyzwyczaił. A teraz już nie. Już postawię miód bo z miodem pije herbatę. Musi sam jednak, staram się jak mógłby tak. Głowa chora. Ale ręce ma silne. No przecież co, może trochę robić.” Robbins interview, 3 February 2010. 13 The practice of wives sweetening their husbands’ tea is perhaps a cultural pattern. A news article quoted Lech Wałęsa, the former president of Poland and leader of the Solidarity movement, as having to “to sweeten his own tea and slice his own bread” when his wife was on a book tour. He would not have minded if he had been ­doing it all along, he said, but it was difficult to learn how to do so a­ fter fifty years of marriage. See http://­wiadomosci​.­gazeta​.­pl​/­wiadomosci​/­1,114883,13062044,Walesa​_­​ _­Nie​_­zgadzam​_­sie​_­z_​ ­zona​_ ­​_­ale​_­nie​_­na​_­tyle​_ ­​_­zeby​.­html (accessed 10 November 2019). Thanks to Brian Porter-­Szücs for this reference. 14 “Widocznie trzeba na tej ziemi cierpieć.” 15 Thanks to Brian Porter-­Szücs for pointing out the connection to the Matka-­Polka ­here.

Chapter 6  Gardens of Memory 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

“Smutno samemu w domu.” “Łączymy się, znamy się.” “Mamy do siebie zaufanie.” “Zamknięty w domu.” “Nie potrzebują łączności.” “Szybko odchodzą, bo nie czują się potrzebni.” “Nie lubimy samotności.” “Żeby se­niorzy czuli się młodzi.” “Człowiek jak rower—­ruch jest potrzebny.” “Żeby byli aktywni, trzeba wyjść z domu.” “Swój kawałek zieleni.” Thank you to Magdalena Zych for generative conversations on the lack of a boundary between work and leisure at allotment gardens. 12 See https://­w ww​.­t vn24​.­pl​/­wiadomosci​-­z​-­kraju,3​/­ustawa​-­o​-­dzialkach​-­niezgodna​-­z​ -­konstytucja​-­trybunal​-­podwaza​-­polowe​-z­ apisow,264222​.­html (accessed 8 November 2019). 13 The Act of 13 December 2013 on Allotment Gardens, http://­prawo​.­sejm​.­gov​.­pl​ /­isap​.­nsf​/d­ ownload​.­xsp​/ ­W DU20170002176​/­T/​ ­D20172176L​.­pdf (accessed 10 November 2019), as cited in Trembecka and Kwartnik-­Pruc (2018, 3). 14 However, other antidevelopment groups argued that allotment gardens ­were inaccessible and closed to the public, as opposed to public parks, which would

190  •  Notes to Pages 146–155

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31

make better use of space. One cannot garden in public parks, however, and t­ hose who engage in allotment gardening often do not have other forms of recreation or leisure, or access to green spaces. The gardens thus became a place through which ­people debated the nature of the public good. See http://­pzd​.­pl​/o­ grody​.­html (accessed 10 November 2019) for information on allotment garden regulations. “Co działka jest inna osobowość.” “Kwiaty nasze.” “Kwiaty ożywiają działki. Jak nie ma kwiatów, działka jest smutna.” “­Hotel dla owadów.” It was common for older Poles to use the term “Cygan” and “Romanian” interchangeably. Many Roma in Poland ­were indeed from Romania, perhaps leading to the conflation of t­ hese terms. Research participants often expressed ste­reo­t ypical views of Roma, a highly marginalized group in Poland and elsewhere. Shortened versions of pan Lech’s and pan Zbyszek’s stories appear in Robbins-­ Ruszkowski (2017a). “Działka to praca non-­stop.” “To nie jest odpoczynek, tylko jak mamy gości.” “Prawdziwy działkowiec nie siedzi, tylko pracuje.” The power of gardening to give life to and remove pain from the older gardener is echoed in comparative ethnographic data from the United States (Robbins and Seibel 2019). “Działki to lekarstwo.” See Duszczyńska (2012, 220) for a nearly identical statement from an older gardener in the Kraków region. A moving essay about the role of the allotment garden in the life of an older widowed man, pan Jan, describes how maintaining the garden helps him stay connected to his late wife. It was her passion and love for the garden that motivated them to acquire one in the first place; over the thirty years that they tended it together, it became a structuring feature of their lives. A ­ fter her death, he had to relearn how to care for the garden on his own, and with time, found that it served as a means of creating relatedness with his late wife (Kożuch 2012, 104–112). See Robbins and Seibel (2019) for comparative examples from older gardeners in Detroit. “Cały naród buduje swoją stolicę.” This slogan is famously and prominently engraved on a building on Nowy Świat Street in Warsaw. The phrase pan Lech used was “wszyscy chcą być magistrami.” Magister is a master’s degree, received a­ fter five years of postsecondary education. Małosolny, which literally means low-­salt, are a particularly beloved type of pickle in Poland. Similar to what are known in the United States as fresh or new pickles, they are pickled for only a few days, and are generally obtained from friends or ­family rather than a store. Other songs included “Dziś do Ciebie,” “Mały biały domek,” “Jak dobrze nam,” and “O mój rozmarynie.”

Conclusion 1 “Ja, proszę pani, nic cudnego nie miałam, ale głodna w życiu nie byłam.” Parts of this material are presented in Robbins (2013b) and Robbins-­Ruszkowski (2014a; 2017a, 122).

Notes to Pages 155–156 • 191

2 Pani Dorota mentioned that she thought this w ­ oman was Ukrainian, implying that this was a further reason not to trust her. Such negative attitudes t­ oward Ukrainians ­were not uncommon among older p­ eople in Wrocław, as a result of atrocities in what is now western Ukraine during and a­ fter World War II. Older Poles often referred to the Ukrainian nationalists as bandyci (bandits). See Snyder (2004, 133–201) and Brown (2004) for more on this geo­graph­i­cal region and period. 3 See Pine (2007, 118–122) for an analy­sis of dreams about the dead as a way of maintaining relatedness ­a fter death among the Górale in the highlands of Poland. 4 “Miałam żyłkę handlowca.”

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. active aging: aktywność (activity) vs., 4, 159; con­temporary discourses of, 27; field sites, 17–18; historical perspective on, 31–32, 159–160; institutions of, 22, 27; limits of, 61–64; meanings of, 3, 22, 25–26; ­people excluded from, 88–89; practices of, 4–5, 29, 54–55, 57–58, 63, 143–144, 176n16; promotion of, 22; slogans for, 56–57; spatiotemporal features of, 22, 47, 51; studies of, 16, 24; value of, 121 Act on Social Care, 33 Adam Mickiewicz University, 42 aging: experiences of, 4–5, 13, 47, 63–64, 67, 89–90, 137–138, 140–141, 157–160; gendered ideals of, 19, 53, 63, 143; institutional care and, 32–33, 66–67; negative views of, 3, 42, 45–47, 63–64, 66, 93, 121; normative places of, 141; population, 3; 28, 160; positive views of, 3–4, 15, 42, 46–47, 121; so­cio­log­i­cal study of, 27–28 aktywność (activity): active aging vs., 4, 159; concept of, 22, 24, 26–27, 31, 141, 142; connotations of the word, 4; forms of, 144; historical perspective on, 31–32, 159; as mode of promoting in­de­pen­dence, 43,

153; moral personhood and, 43; national ele­ments of, 51, 58, 159; as practices of remembrance, 59–60; social obligations and, 43–44; a synonym for life, 26, 154 @ktywny Se­nior organ­ization: creation of, 54–55; feedback about, 57; goals of, 47, 55–56, 58; programs of, 55, 57; slogans of, 56; sponsors of, 56 Alicja, pani (patient at rehabilitation center): background and ­career of, 100–101; complaints about Rus­sia, 102–103, 104–105; language of, 182n27; life during the socialist past, 103, 104, 105–106; loneliness of, 102; medical prob­lems of, 101, 106; moral personhood of, 106; pension of, 101; phone calls to relatives, 101–102; po­liti­cal views of, 102–103; on quality of Polish products, 105–106, 120; references to national history, 94, 106; relatives of, 102, 107, 181n23, 181n24 allotment gardens: abandoned, 147; in active aging, role of, 17, 18, 140–141; activities at, 149–151; design of, 146–147; destruction of, 146; everydayness of, 140; gender and, 19; historical perspective on, 142, 144–145; inherited, 149; older 205

206  •  Index

allotment gardens (cont.) ­people and, 19, 190n27; politics of, 189n14; purpose of, 145, 150, 151–152, 153–154; regulations of, 146, 147; sentiment of, 148; social gatherings at, 138, 139–140, 141–142, 147, 148, 152–153; transformations of, 146; types and quality of produce, 150; values of, 151; view of, 148 Alzheimer’s center: activities and exercises at, 124–125, 128–129, 130–131; admission to, 127; attendees of, 122–23, 125, 126–127; caregiving at, 132–133; daily life at, 20, 125, 127–131; development of moral personhood at, 23, 124–125; dining room of, 126, 128; view of neighborhood around, 129; fieldwork at, 122, 123–124; interior decorations of, 128; kin relations, 132; location of, 122, 125–26; meals at, 128, 129–30; opening hours of, 127; peaceful nature of, 136; social relations at, 125, 129, 136, 137–138; spatiotemporal features of, 125, 131, 137; staff of, 127 Alzheimer’s disease (AD): cognitive training and, 59, 177n20; cultural fear of, 59, 138; difficulties of caregiving, 132–136; impact on relationships and be­hav­ior, 131–132, 133, 134, 135–136; lack of awareness of, 127; medi­cations, 133–134; moral personhood and, 137; as physical ailment, 178n22; popu­lar and scholarly understandings of, 137 andragogika (andragogy), 39, 44 Ania, pani (wife of pan Florian), 116, 117, 119 Armia Krajowa (Home Army), 36, 179n2 Bielicki, Franciszek, 174n24 Biernacki, Wacław, 180n10 Bierut, Bolesław, 124 Bishop Jordan Bridge, 1–2 Bogdan, pan (allotment gardener): allotment garden of, 147, 150 Bogusław, pan (resident of Social Welfare Home): care for loved one, 89; creation of moral personhood, 88; illness of, 85; intimate relations of, 87–88, 89 Bożena, pani (resident of Social Welfare Home), 66

“brain-­training” classes, 59–60 Buch, Elana, 179n29 care: allotment gardens and, 147, 150, 151; anthropology of, 67–68; as constitutive of personhood, 12–14, 23, 79–80, 89–90, 137, 157; gendered ideals of, 19, 53; histories of, 31–35; reciprocal practices of, 85–88; responsibility and, 55; state and, 30–31 care institutions: Catholic influence, 89–90, 130; daily life, 67; histories of, 32–33, 34–35; moral personhood and, 68, 88, 137; practice of covering footwear, 188n2; residents of, 68, 90; social aspects of, 67, 69; spatiotemporal aspects of, 67–68, 69, 90; stigmatization of, 34–35, 67. See also care care workers: duties of, 76–79, 123; gift exchanges among, 73–74, 179n29; pay rate, 79 Carsten, Janet, 186n47 Cecylia, pani (attendee of University of the Third Age): apartment of, 109–110; on Chopin, 110–111; conversations with, 107–108, 183n33; on dishonesty of politics, 112; f­ amily photo­g raphs of, 109; on idea of building of close relationships, 114; life story of, 107–108; on Mickiewicz’s Dziady, 111, 112, 184n37; patriotism of, 111, 112–113, 114–115; on Poland’s EU membership, 113, 114; on Polish identity, 113, 185n42; references to national and geopo­liti­cal events, 93, 107, 108; relations with relatives, 113–114; religious beliefs of, 110 Chopin, Fryderyk, 111, 112, 114, 115, 184n38 Chopin Festival, 111, 184n38 Civic Platform (PO) party, 5, 160 cognitive training, 59, 124, 177n20 community care, 33 Czesław, pan (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 135, 136 dementia: fear of, 59; care of person with 135–136. See also Alzheimer’s disease dependence: as feature of old age, 4;

Index • 207

relationship to policy, 25, 27, 30, 31, 43. See also fourth age Demetrio, Duccio, 177n23 Dominika, pani (attendee of University of the Third Age): on friendship, 53–54; walk at allotment garden, 139–140 Dorota, pani (patient at the rehabilitation center): attitude ­toward caregivers, 155, 156; death of d­ aughter, 156; illness of, 155; life story of, 156–157; moral personhood of, 157; personality of, 155; speech of, 157; view of Ukrainians, 191n2; war memories of, 156 Dziady (Mickiewicz), 111, 112, 115, 183n37 Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint, 177n2 Emilia, pani (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 128 EuroCup soccer championship (2012), 146 Eu­ro­pean Union (EU): connections to aging, 5, 58, 63, 88; Polish views of, 6, 52, 95, 107, 108, 111–114 Eu­ro­pean Social Fund, 56, 176n12 “Eurose­niors,” 30, 52, 58, 60 Ferenc, Marek, 55, 57 Florian, pan (attendee of University of the Third Age): birthplace of, 186n46; Christmas Eve story, 94, 117–120, 187n57; conversations with, 115; letters from ­sister, 120, 188n58; life in Siberia, 115–117, 120; moral personhood of, 120–121; m ­ other of, 115–116; social relations of, 116, 117; speech of, 120 food: connection to Polish identity, 94, 104–106, 118–119; gardens and, 145, 150; generational ele­ments of, 75; as part of care, 14, 84, 130–131, 132, 156; sharing during fieldwork, 75, 106, 115, 123, 140; shortages, 8, 104, 116 fourth age: ideals of, 4, 14, 17–18, 47, 66; institutional care and, 6; links to Polish nation and, 15; moral personhood and, 64, 157, 158 gardening, 139, 190n25, 190n27. See also allotment gardens Gazeta Wyborcza (Electoral Newspaper), 45

Genowefa, pani (patient at rehabilitation center), 7, 9 geriatrics, 28 gerontology: connections to Universities of the Third Age, 36, 39, 41, 51; history of, 27, 28–29, 66 Ginsburg, Faye, 179n31 Grażyna, pani (participant in @ktywny Se­nior), 56 Hazan, Haim, 179n28 health care: cost of, 66; demographic change and, 30; older Poles’ attitudes ­toward, 55, 109; privatization of, 35; reform of, 35 ­Human Capital (Eu­ro­pean Social Fund), 56 illness: categories of, 83; as feature of old age, 4, 25; temporality of, 68, 90 in­de­pen­dence: as feature of old age, 4, 13; as feature of Polish nation, 7, 10, 41, 96–99, 112; ideals of, 26, 43, 89–90; relationship to policy, 27. See also third age Institute of Social Economy, 34 interdependence: aging and, 137; disability and, 179n31; ideals of, 90; role in policy, 31, 43 International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition, 184n38 isolation: spatiotemporal aspects of, 84–85 Jadwiga, pani (participant in @ktywny Se­nior), 56 Joanna, pani (patient at rehabilitation center): background of, 8; connection with times and places, 9, 14–15; conversation with, 6–8; friend of, 7; outfit of, 7; on Polish nation, 7, 9, 11, 15; relations with son, 14–15; war experience, 9 John Paul II H ­ otel in Wrocław, 65, 66 Kaczyński, Jarosław, 11 Kaczyński, Lech: death of, 10–11 Kasia (nurse’s aide): duties of, 76–79, 123, 178n19; pay rate, 79 Katyń massacre, 10 Kempisty, Czesław, 174n24

208  •  Index

kinship: Alzheimer’s disease and, 131–132, 138; anthropological studies of, 13; ethic of, 179n29; memory and, 93, 186n47; patterns of, 32; Polish nation and, 14–15, 114; relatedness and, 13, 68, 190n27 Knowles, Malcolm, 39 Kobylarek, Aleksander, 36 kresy (borderlands): legacy of, 17, 144; relationship to speech, 120, 157 Law and Justice (PiS) party, 5, 6, 10, 159, 172n11 Lech, pan (allotment gardener): allotment garden of, 148–149, 150, 151; background of, 151; health of, 150 Lubczyńska-­Kowalska, Wanda, 174n24 Lwów (L’viv, Ukraine): beauty of, 8; history of, 9; memories about, 61; Polish connections of, 8, 17, 37, 157 Małgorzata, pani (patient at rehabilitation center): on cele­bration of In­de­pen­dence Day, 98; moral personhood of, 100; reference to Polish history, 96; singing of patriotic songs, 100, 120 małosolny pickles, 151, 152, 190n30 Marcin, pan (attendee of Alzheimer’s center): conversation with, 123; social relations of, 128, 136 Marek, pan (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 133–134, 135 Maria, pani (wife of pan Marek), 133–135 Marianna, pani (attendee of University of the Third Age), 61 Marysia, pani (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 136 Matka-­Polka (Mother-­Pole): figure of, 9, 135 McCarthy, Cormac, 45 “Meeting in spacetime: dialogue between generations” group, 61, 62, 63, 117 memory: collective, 60, 107, 124, 138, 153, 179n7; connection to kinship, 13, 93, 186n47; emotion and, 61, 119; loss of, 23, 124, 131, 132, 133. See also remembrance Mickiewicz, Adam, 114; Dziady, 111, 112, 115, 183n37 Mieszko I, ruler of Poland, 2, 10 Ministry of Health, 34

moral personhood: acts of caregiving and, 89, 90; aging and, 4, 6, 15, 30, 32, 47, 140–142; Alzheimer’s disease and, 23, 131, 137; collective past and, 60; concept of, 12, 13; ethic of kinship and, 179n29; fourth age and, 64; gendered and classed aspirations of, 52–58; in institutional care, 22–23, 88; practices of aktywność and, 43–44, 58; practices of creating, 157–58; remembering and, 23, 121, 123–24; social relations and, 15, 66, 93, 179n29; spatiotemporal framework for, 11, 14, 47, 59–64, 67, 93–94, 120–121, 123, 141–42, 158; studies of, 4, 13–14, 68 Munn, Nancy, 179n5 narratives, 7–9, 11, 23, 45–46, 92–94, 116–120, 121, 155–157 nation. See Poland National Health Fund, 69, 70 Ola, pani (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 129 old age: characteristics of, 4; de­pen­dency ratio, 30; ­labor and, 56; ste­reo­t ypes about, 21 older p­ eople: attitude ­toward death, 31–32; binary vision of, 17, 46–47; changing concept of, 38; connection to Polish national history, 8–9, 91–94, 158; de­pen­dency of, 28; economic productivity of, 30–31, 56; ethnographic study of, 6, 20–22; gendered patterns of be­hav­ior of, 19, 41, 52–53, 63, 142–144; institutional care of, 18; life narratives of, 7–9, 11, 23, 45–46, 92–94, 116–120, 155–157; moral personhood and, 4, 6, 15, 30, 32, 47, 140–142; patriotism of, 120–21; as providers of care, 32; in public discourse, 45–46, 88; residence preferences, 34–35; state care for, 30–31, 35; statistics of, 27, 28; ste­reo­t ypes about, 5–6, 30, 46–47, 56; young generation and, 11 parish clubs, 18, 24, 138, 141, 142–143, 144, 153–154 personhood: complexity of, 26; cultural variations of, 12, 13; individual vs.

Index • 209

relational ideals of, 12–13; neoliberal ideals of, 26, 55, 61; social relations and, 11–12, 14. See also moral personhood Piłsudski, Józef: c­ areer of, 179n7; favorite ­horse of, 180n9; in popu­lar imagination, 11; songs and poems about, 98–99, 180n12, 181n13 Piotr, pan (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 129 Piotrowski, Jerzy, 28 Poland: Catholic imagery and rhe­toric, 89–90; consumer prices, 66; cost of medicine, 66; demographic change, 3, 30; domestic affairs, 6, 172n11; economic development of, 109, 173n11; emigration from, 94; EU membership, 52, 95, 107, 112–113; fertility rates, 28; France’s connection with, 36; generational politics, 5–6; health care system, 34–35; historical transformation of, 4–5, 8–9, 10, 94–95, 107; intergenerational tension, 46; life expectancy, 28; messianic myth of, 9–10; myth of the suffering nation, 99; old-­age care in, 31–33; old-­age de­pen­dency ratio, 30; partitions of, 96–97, 99; po­liti­cal transformations, 28–29, 58; population of, 27–28, 173n9; postsocialist aspects of, 31, 35, 39, 47, 52, 55, 63, 95, 107, 145, 171n6, 172n26,176n16; quality of products, 119; regaining of in­de­pen­dence, 96, 99; religion, 10; residential apartments in, 109–110; retirement policy, 29; Rus­sia’s relations with, 102–103; social injustices in, 112–113; socialist past, 95, 103–106; spatiotemporal imaginaries of, 14–15, 27, 93, 100, 124, 158; welfare system, 29–30 Poles: attitudes t­ oward other Poles, 87, 113; attitudes ­toward Roma, 147, 190n20; attitudes ­toward Rus­sians, 151–152, 181n26; attitudes ­toward Ukrainians, 191n2; deportations of, 8, 59–60, 108, 115–116; hospitality of, 86, 88; relations to the land, 32, 106, 108–109, 121, 152, 154, 183n30 Polish customs, 107, 134–35, 186n55, 186nn53–54, 188n2, 189n13, 190n30 Polish ­Free University, 33 Polish Gerontological Society, 28

Polish identity, 6, 87, 95, 106, 107, 112, 114, 119, 153–154 Polish language, 188n58 Polish Medical Society, 28 Polish names, 181n21 Polish nationalism, 5, 10, 99, 159 Polish national my­thol­ogy, 8, 9–11, 16, 99, 159–160 Polish songs, 120, 152–153, 181n13, 181n15, 184n40 Polish Union of Allotment Gardeners (PZD), 145, 146 Popowice neighborhood in Wrocław, 55, 176n10 Poznań (Poland): allotment gardens in, 145, 146, 148, 152; cathedral of, 2; history of, 16; Municipal Center for ­Family Aid, 127; in national my­thol­ogy, role of, 16; population of, 1, 16; residential neighborhood, 122; ste­reo­t ypes about, 17, 51 property, 108–111, 151 Provincial Council of Trade Unions, 38 Radio Maryja (Catholic radio station), 5, 71 Radlińska, Helena, 34 Rapp, Rayna, 179n31 rehabilitation center in Wrocław: building of, 70, 74; care for patients, 77–78; clinical and religious rhythms of, 70–71, 75–76; cost of living in, 69; daily life at, 67, 69–70; emotional atmosphere of, 76, 79; establishment of, 177n2; f­ amily visits, 70; food and meals at, 75, 78–79, 97–99; funding of, 69, 70; gift exchanges, 73–74; interior decorations of, 71, 72, 73; kitchen at, 74; laundry and cleaning facilities, 74; meals at, 75; media in, 70–71; medical staff of, 72–73; morning routine at, 77–78; nurse’s duties, 76–79; occupational therapy groups, 70; patients of, 68, 69; practice of covering footwear, 74; relationships of care, 79–80 remembrance: Alzheimer’s disease, and, 124, 137–138; as constitutive of moral personhood, 13–14, 23, 24, 93, 153, 157; practices of, 8–9, 59–60, 61, 93–95, 123–125; of war­time suffering, 59–60

210  •  Index

retirement communities, 55 Roma ­people, 147, 190n20 “Rota” (The oath) (song), 184n40 Rothstein, Robert, 180n12, 181n13 Rydzyk, Tadeusz, 5, 71 Sector 3: Wrocław Center for the Support of Nongovernmental Organ­izations, 54–55 Se­niors’ Commission (se­niors’ club), 143–144 Skarga, Piotr, 33 Smoleńsk crash, 10, 11 social care, 33, 34 social insurance system, 35 social pedagogy, 33, 34, 44 social relations: active aging programs to enhance, 52–53, 55–56; personhood and, 11–12, 66; practices and ideals of, 12–13; in socialist era, 32, 53 Social Welfare Home in Wrocław: administrative staff, 82; admission to, 83; building of, 80–81; cost of living in, 81; daily life at, 81–82, 85; interior renovation of, 81; interviews with patients of, 19–20, 83–84; lack of trust between residents, 87; meals at, 80, 84; ­music sessions, 86; painting of Jesus in, 81, 82; pets at, 86; prob­lem of isolation, 84–85; relationship building at, 85–88; residents of, 68, 80, 81, 83, 84; rooms of, 80; typical issues of, 83, 84–85 Social Welfare Homes: types of, 83 social work, 33–34, 44 Solidarity movement, 110, 141, 184n40 successful aging, 3, 26, 159. See also active aging Stanisław II August, King of Poland, 33 St. ­Brother Albert’s Aid Society, 83 Synak, Brunon, 33, 34 Szwarc, Halina, 36, 37, 174n18 Teresa, pani (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 136 therapy: art, 69, 72, 73; ­music, 69, 86, 153; occupational, 19, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73; physical, 19, 74, 96, 106

third age: ideals of, 3–4, 66, 159; links to Polish nation, and, 15 “time universe”: notion of, 179n28 Tomasz, pan (allotment gardener): allotment garden of, 147, 149 Törnquist-­Plewa, Barbara, 184n40 Tucker, Erica, 179n7 United Nations Second World Assembly on Ageing, 3 Universities of the Third Age (UTAs): academic affiliation of, 36, 39, 41–42; choirs and cabaret groups, 60–61, 63; concerts and per­for­mances, 61; cost of education, 38; development of, 27, 28; educational programs, 39, 42, 52, 59–60, 171n2; growing number of, 27, 37; handicraft groups, 60, 63; histories of, 38–42; holiday events at, 41; institutional continuity of, 37–38; interior views of, 48, 49; international network of, 36, 37; language learning at, 52; lectures and workshops, 1–2, 61, 63; limitations of, 46, 63–64; medical aspect of, 39; memory-­training classes, 59–60, 65; mission of, 3, 25–26, 38, 41–42; origins of, 35–38; promotion of active aging, 3, 15, 25–26, 42, 138; recruitment at, 20; regional distinctions of, 47; social function of, 40–41, 52–54; space organ­ization in, 48–51; students of, 1, 2, 18, 38, 41, 46; ­women at, 53 University of Physical Education, 39 University of the Third Age in Poznań: atmosphere of, 50; attendees of, 51; field trips, 54; growth of, 41–42; lobby of, 50; location of, 49; as model establishment, 37 University of the Third Age in Wrocław: academic affiliation of, 39; appointments at, 48; atmosphere of, 48; field trips, 51; foundation of, 37; importance of, 38; importance of social relations, 40; interior views of, 48, 49; location of, 49; medical ser­vices, 39, 174n24; as model establishment, 37; past director of, 36 Vellas, Pierre, 36, 37

Index • 211

Wałęsa, Lech, 189n13 Wanda, pani (patient at rehabilitation center): lecture on Polish language, 95–96; life story of, 96; moral personhood of, 100; on Piłsudski, 97–98; praise of Americans, 99; references to Polish history, 94, 96–97, 99; songs and poems recited by, 98–100, 120, 181n13 Watson, Peggy, 35 welfare system, 29–30, 35 Weronika, pani (attendee of Alzheimer’s center), 136 Władysława, pani (resident of Social Welfare Home): care for loved one, 89; illness of, 85–86; intimate relations of, 87–88, 89; moral personhood of, 88

Wnuk, Walentyna, 51–52, 55 Wrocińska-­Sławska, Lidia, 41, 42 Wrocław (Poland): allotment gardens in, 148, 148–149, 153; history of, 9, 16–17; marketing of, 17; in national my­thol­ogy, 16; population of, 16; ste­reo­t ypes about, 17, 51 Zbigniew, pan (patient at rehabilitation center): illness of, 91; life story of, 91–92; references to Polish history, 92 Zbyszek, pan (allotment gardener): allotment garden of, 151–152; references to Polish history, 151–152 Zosia, pani (allotment gardener): allotment garden of, 147, 149–150

About the Author

is an assistant professor at the Institute of Gerontology and the Department of Anthropology at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan.

JESSICA  C. ROBBINS