The Immigrants' Granddaughter Retraces, with Care and Doubt, the Long Way Home:
An Introduction
By Linda Nemec Foster
I stole the above title from one of my own poems, "My Name." All four of my grandparents immigrated to America from southern Poland in the early 1900's before World War I. My mother and father were first-generation Polish Americans, born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1919 and 1920, respectively. My particular position as a granddaughter of Polish immigrants has influenced my life as an American woman and my work as a contemporary poet. This strong and unwavering sense of cultural identity compelled me to finally travel to Poland for the first time in 1996--not only to visit family members still living there, but to reclaim an ethnic heritage and to search for myself in the mirror of my family's history. This first visit (I have since gone back to Poland four times) was a pivotal trip for my life and my poetry. It inspired my book, Amber Necklace from Gdansk (LSU Press, 2001) and gave real meaning to the countless stories about The Old Country that I heard as a young girl from my paternal grandparents: Frank and Zosia Niemiec.
It is their collective spirits that inspired "History of the Hand" and "History of the Toenails": two "almost true" narratives imbued with a sense of myth and metaphor that reflect not only their lives but also the landscape they left behind. I was very close to both of them, especially my grandmother Zosia. Her instructions to me (at the end of "History of the Toenails") to learn the language of her homeland is particularly poignant for me, the Americanized granddaughter who barely speaks Polish.
The last poem I selected to be included here is "Contour of Absence," a piece that has a strong, personal resonance. It was inspired by my maternal grandparents, Tomasz and Marianna Kumor, and a real tragedy that engulfed their family before my mother was born -- the deaths of two of their daughters. Haunted by these losses, both of my mother's parents died early deaths from heart disease. By the time my mother was 15, she was an orphan. I never knew her parents as I had known my father's and that fact always left an empty place in my heart. It took me over 20 years to write "Contour of Absence." The poem's central theme is as much about the absence of those grandparents in my life as it is about the absence of those two girls in my grandparents' lives.
Reflecting on these pieces, I have a sense of the overwhelming power of personal history. And I feel honored to be able to write my poems from this history and to share it with the rest of the world. The immigrant sensibility -- the sense of joy and sorrow, pain and resilience -- was invoked by my cousin Maria when she first met me in 1996 at the airport in Krakow. Holding a large bouquet, she said, "Look, Linda, I bring you wildflowers from your grandmother's garden."
Poems by Linda Nemec Foster
History of the Hand
--for Frank Niemiec
History of the ditch digger, stone mason, countless men in factories,
on the line. History of abundance, of miracles because it is by our hands
that we become who we are. "Marry a man for his hands," my father said.
Probably remembering his own father and the mangled right hand
that was torn in half by the machine at the woolen mill. But what did the old
man know about machines? He was a foreigner who couldn't speak
the language, a peasant farmer born in Poland when it wasn't even called
Poland. His hands knew only two things: black earth and how to coax
the miracle of green from it. Each spring he would perform the miracle
in his small American garden. His left hand did the mundane chore
of clearing the winter's debris, breaking the ground with hoe and shovel
and pickaxe. His right hand--that terrible, wondrous hand--performed
the ultimate magic: placed each seed in its proper spot, made sure
it grew into a cabbage or pepper or summer squash. I remember
how carefully he would wash that hand after the day's work. Pat it dry.
Place it almost casually on my shoulder. Luminous, enchanted.
"History of the Hand" was previously published in Living in the Fire Nest (Ridgeway Press, 1996).
Copyright, 1996 by Linda Nemec Foster.
History of the Toenails
A quiet, shy character (a male poet) in an American short story
insists that toenails grow wild and uncontrollable in East Europe.
There, they do not need conscious thought to thrive
and flourish. They do it in spite of themselves, without
thinking. He feels this part of the world is the only place
where history really does matter and, in effect, allows the toenail
to be nothing more, nothing less than a toenail. In Poland,
Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania, old women
sift through oppression in tight shoes, binding stockings and
never bother to cut their toenails; they know it is the one part
of themselves that is forever replenishing. A prime example--
my grandmother from Krakow. Wild and uncontrollable at 86,
she cursed her Cleveland-born sons and decided to live
in the attic. Finally, she ran away from home in late January
with no shoes, her bare feet clicking on the ice. The sound
of hard, blue toenails long and curved over the edge of the toes
like naturally fitted tap shoes. And the last image she left me
was of her dancing out a little secret code spelling VISTULA,
ZAKOPANE, TATRA, JASNA GORA. Take off your shoes
and learn it, she said.
"History of the Toenails" was previously published in Living in the Fire Nest (Ridgeway Press, 1996).
Copyright, 1996 by Linda Nemec Foster.
Contour of Absence
--after the painting, "Provincetown in Winter, 1918"
by Gerrit Beneker
Is this what the new world has given us?
A place of broken ice, its center of negative
space devoid of real color except for the dream-
like mauve, teal, and red of boats locked
and listing in their quiet sleep of winter.
Half-way into the continent, in a place of factories
not boats, my mother is being conceived
by her immigrant parents. Not for love
or passion or longing but to erase the contour
of absence: the silhouette of two daughters
who died the previous year. By illness
or accident, it makes no difference. The death
of a child releases one soul and enslaves
all others. The mother forgets to brush
her hair for weeks. The father can barely
remember how to walk down his street.
But how can my mother know this,
starting the thin journey to her life?
And how can the winter with all its snow and ice
mask true sorrow when everything
in this frozen universe hopes for spring?
The two boats leaning into each other
as if in unmarked graves. The sky,
gray and calm, waiting to be born.
"Contour of Absence" was previously published in Talking Diamonds (New Issues Press, 2009).
Copyright, 2009 by Linda Nemec Foster.
CR
Linda Nemec Foster is the author of nine poetry collections including Amber Necklace from Gdansk (finalist for the Ohio Book Award in Poetry), Listen to the Landscape (short-listed for the Michigan Notable Book Award), and Ten Songs from Bulgaria. Her most recent book, Talking Diamonds, was published in 2009 by New Issues Press. www.lindanemecfoster.com
