Notes

…I was a child of the fifties, growing up in a communist country beset by shortages of practically everything—food, clothes, furniture—and that circumstance may have been responsible for my complicated attitude toward objects. We had few toys or books, and we wore mostly hand-me-downs. A pair of mittens, a teddy bear, and a chocolate bar for 5
Christmas were enough. Once in a while we also got skates, bikes, musical instruments. “Abundance” had no place in our vocabulary and in our world, but we were happy with what we had, in the way that only children can be. We were unaware that our lives were in any way circumscribed,1 although the reality we lived in trained us early on that there was a huge gap between wanting something and getting it. After all, even people with money 10
had to hustle and resort to underhanded maneuvers, including bribery, to buy things. … By the time I graduated from high school, I was a person of substance, or so I thought. The shortages never disappeared, but it was easier to get things. I had a Chinese fountain pen and two ballpoint pens, which I kept in my desk drawer and would only use at home. I boasted several records that my sister and I listened to on a gramophone player she had 15
been given as a name-day present a few years before. Some of them were by the popular Polish rock bands, and one was Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the only classical music record I had for a long time. I listened to it so often that to this day I can hum the whole piece from beginning to end. I also had a bookcase with a sliding glass front that was filled with books. My parents’ books were arrayed on three broad shelves in the bottom part of a cupboard in 20
what doubled as our living room and their bedroom. Although both my parents were readers, they rarely bought books, borrowing them instead from the public library. I was very possessive of the books I owned and only reluctantly loaned them to friends. When my younger sister took one out, I insisted she put it back in the exact same spot.
My possessiveness may have had a lot to do with how difficult books were to come by. 25
They were published in small numbers, and there was such a huge demand for them among the intelligentsia2 that the good ones disappeared from stores very quickly. On my way back from school, I often made a detour and walked by the local bookstore to look in the window where new arrivals would be displayed. That was how I spotted a four-volume War and Peace
that cost eighty zloty, not a negligible sum. I had only thirty. The clerk told me this was the 30
only copy in the store. I knew the book would be sold soon, so I decided to go to my father’s office and beg him for a loan, which he gave me at once. Clutching the money, I ran back to the bookstore, breathless and worried that the book would no longer be there. I realize that what I’m saying must seem pathetic to a person raised in the comforts of a free market economy3 where it’s enough to think of something to find it immediately in the store.
It might sound more poignant4 if I said that books and records helped me escape the
35
]]]=--==surrounding grayness and drabness and that my hunting for them wasn’t solely motivated
1circumscribed — limited
2intelligentsia — intellectual elite
3free market economy — an economic system based on supply and demand with little to no government control 4poignant — profoundly moving
Regents Exam in ELA — Jan. ’20 [22]
by my newly developed acquisitiveness5 or a collector’s instinct. But if I said that, I’d be practicing revisionist history.6 The truth is that we didn’t see the grayness and drabness— not yet. This realization came much later. So if it was aesthetic7 escapism, it was the 40
universal kind, not fueled by our peculiar political circumstances.
My youthful materialism thrived in a country where materialism—unless of the Marxist variety—was unanimously condemned as the ugly outgrowth of western consumer societies. We knew this was just an ideological cover-up for the never-ending shortages. My brand of materialism didn’t belong in a consumer society, either, because it was a kind 45