First Person

Being There

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines Moving Up Mind the Gap How your cover letter can keep your presidential candidacy alive, or kill it. P&T Confidential Facebooking Your Way Out of Tenure How can you minimize the possibility that your blog or Facebook page might hurt your career? On Course Nudging Higher Education A professor looks for small changes he can make to move students toward making smarter choices. Career News No Jacket Required A scholar's study of her own students suggests that while a professor's clothing might affect initial impressions, it doesn't make a difference in the long run. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Christopher Phelps

Loaded down with luggage, I disembark from the train with my family, relieved to set foot in Lodz, yet not at all sure we should be happy to arrive. Our apprehension derives from a year's worth of disconcerting reactions when others learn that Lodz is our city of destination.

While we prepared for departure in the United States -- a phase I described earlier in this series chronicling my Fulbright year -- various American colleagues described Lodz to us as "the Manchester of Poland," a center of textile manufacturing, a bleak industrial city. My imagination sketched a skyline of Stalinist drab stretching for miles.

Travel books on Poland tend not even to mention Lodz, even though it is Poland's second-largest city, and when we arrive for orientation in Warsaw and Krakow, our conversations confirm that Lodz ranks far below such desirable addresses as the capital or the venerable medieval centers: Wroclaw, Krakow, Poznan, Gdansk.

I begin to kick myself. When filling out the Fulbright application, I left blank the line about preferred destination, figuring that if I authorized the program to send me anywhere, it would increase my odds of winning the fellowship. If I had known better, perhaps we would have wound up somewhere with more charm.

Alarm bells ring again when my host at the University of Lodz, Professor Wieslaw Oleksy, informs me by e-mail that the apartment assigned to our family is a mere 10 by 18 feet. We ask whether a family of five will fit comfortably in such a space for a year.

Back comes a stern note: The apartment is indeed 180 square feet, and we had best adjust ourselves to European reality. We resolve not to be Ugly Americans and to live like Poles. But it is a false front, and we worry.

In Lodz, we are met at the train station by Grazyna Gladlo, a young instructor in the American-studies department, and her husband, Michal. Grazyna, it turns out, is to be my officemate, and she assists us graciously in the myriad details of arranging our local affairs.

As she unlocks the door to show us the apartment, we discover, to our amazement, that it is actually almost 600 square feet -- three times larger than advertised.

Later, we find out the basis for the error. Professor Oleksy knew the apartment's dimensions to be 10 by 6 meters, or 60 square meters. Since a meter is about 3 feet, he multiplied 60 by 3. Problem: A square meter requires multiplication by 9. I empathize immediately. We humanities scholars, it turns out, are the same the world over.

The apartment is a handsome fourth-floor walk-up with parquet wood floors, gas stove, shower, washing machine, and simple beds that double as couches. Its floor-to-ceiling windows afford ample light and may be opened wide, like doors, to let in fresh air. It is beyond expectation.

Lodz, too, turns out to be a fascinating city that we come to appreciate as we explore it.

The name is pronounced "Wootch" by locals, though elsewhere in Poland "Woodge" is a common rendering. Upon discovering this, I play Elmer Fudd. "I wonder which Wootch is the weal Wootch," I say, and I retitle a Yiddish novel my wife Carol is reading in translation -- Of Lodz and Love, by Chava Rosenfarb -- as Of Wootch and Wuv. (Yes, I will stop now.)

The heart of the city, Piotrowska Street, is the equivalent of Broadway -- a long central avenue running from north to south, dividing this city of almost one million people. Off-limits to automobiles, Piotrowska is busy with pedestrians and traversed by pedal taxi carts. Crowded, alive, it is full of restaurants, pubs, coffee houses, and opulent shops. Its brightly painted, handsomely refurbished 19-century buildings are stunning in their ornate, high-bourgeois detail.

Near the end of the Piotrowska promenade is a brilliant new glass-and-steel mall, the Galleria Lodzki. Its dozens of glittering shops include a large outlet of the British supermarket chain Tesco. We prefer, however, the simple butchers and green grocers in our neighborhood. I even take to buying from the vendors who hawk produce on the street. Soups made of turnips, carrots, leeks, and potatoes become our staples.

Next door, a preschool admits our youngest two children, Rosa, 4, and Nowelly, 5. Our older daughter, Emma, 7, attends an elementary school six blocks away. Immersed each weekday in the Polish language, the children begin to pick it up, and I hire an undergraduate, Paulina Powtowska, to tutor them in Polish three days a week and help us clarify Emma's homework.

When attempting to figure out the children's school schedule or negotiate some complex postal transaction, we feel like those fabled turn-of-the-century immigrants who remained hermetically sealed in New York's ethnic enclaves. I aspire to a limited market functionality, but I am the least engaged of all the family in learning Polish. Had I been a Russian Jew on the Lower East Side, I would have read the Freiheit for decades, obstinately refusing to learn English. In fact, after escorting Emma to school in the morning, I often stroll to a store to buy the International Herald Tribune.

Just five blocks from our apartment is the Teatr Wielki w Lodzi (Great Theater of Lodz), celebrating 50 years of continuous opera performances. A stolid, monumentlike building, it dates from the Stalinist years. Directly across Narutowicza Street is one of the few socialist-realist remnants in Lodz, a gigantic sculpture of muscle-bound workers who seem to hold up a building. Inside the Teatr Wielki, however, is a magnificent hall with plush red seating.

We become regulars, enjoying repertory performances of Bizet's Carmen, Verdi's Rigoletto, and other classic operas. Seats cost a mere 35 zlotys, except for special events, like when Carol and Emma attend the Moscow City Ballet's staging of Romeo and Juliet.

As you may have inferred, I have learned the value of a zloty, the basic unit of Polish currency, which in international exchange is worth not quite 32 cents. I refer, however, to its experiential value. A zloty in Poland buys at least the equivalent of what $1 would buy in the United States. Hence, a 30-zloty pizza dinner may be calculated as worth about $10, but it means the same thing here that a $30 expenditure would in the United States.

While we are in Poland, the dollar reaches an all-time low against the euro. Just my luck, since the Fulbright fellowship is paid primarily in U.S. dollars. (Although Poland has joined the European Union, it will not qualify to adopt the euro for several years, but the zloty and euro tend to correlate.)

Lodz developed late, historically, but it bears traces of the past. Gigantic red brick factories stand as reminders of 19th-century progress. One day we walk in fresh snow to the Jewish cemetary, the largest in Europe. Lopsided tombstones bear the Star of David and Bundist symbols, and a desolate Ghetto Field testifies to Nazi barbarism.

Across the street from our apartment building is a lovely park block filled with old deciduous trees, benches, and a playground that our children take to with relish. Every few days I don my sweats and puff around the park's walkways. The Poles, especially the older ones, stare at me as if I am completely mad. I feel a bit like the first jogger in the United States, circa 1970.

Even so, Poles, by comparison with Americans, are very thin. This is a mystery to me, since their diet seems to consist of fat-laden sausages, breaded cutlets, sugary baked goods, and chocolate. The only green vegetable in all of Poland, it sometimes seems, is cabbage. No matter what one orders -- Greek salad, a Vietnamese egg roll, a hamburger -- Polish vendors are sure to garnish it with cabbage.

What then accounts for the Polish physique, so slight that it approaches gauntness? Urban pedestrian habits? Smoking? The custom of having soup in the evening, with larger meals earlier in the day? Or is it poverty?

While some Poles are phenomenally rich, the typical income is around 2,000 zlotys ($635) a month. Many Poles make less. In spite of the finery I have described, Lodz is a working-class city. Like other industrial centers, it was hit hard by the post-1989 "shock therapy" -- a program of radical economic reforms during the transition to capitalism that led to steep inflation and unemployment rates. Now the textile industry is eroding under global competition. Unemployment in Lodz hovers between 20 and 30 percent -- levels the United States has not experienced since the Depression.

The city's dicey reputation is partly a consequence of the crime rate that inevitably follows joblessness. Never once have we felt threatened, but we do see signs of poverty. Men rifle through the trash behind our building, hoping to find cans to exchange. Bleak, dilapidated buildings are everywhere.

Viewed from the quaint town squares of Poland's older cities, with their busloads of German tourists, Lodz must look shabby, gray, and dangerous. Its streets are tough and urban. But we might never have seen the many-sided complexity of Poland had we been placed elsewhere. We love our life in Lodz.