Friday, October 8, 2021

Trochimczyk's "The Rainy Bread: More Poems from Exile" in Paperback, October 2021


The Rainy Bread. Poems from Exile. ISBN 978-1-945938-00-9
Paperback64 pages, $10.00 plus shipping

The Rainy Bread. More Poems from Exile. ISBN 978-1-945938-47-4 
Paperback with color photos, 124 pp. $40.00 plus shipping

The Rainy Bread. Poems from Exile. ISBN 978-1-945938-01-6  
 EBook, expanded version with 60 poems and color photos, $8.00
 

The Rainy Bread: Poems of Exile, a poetry collection by Maja Trochimczyk has been enlarged by 31 poems and reorganized into six parts. An updated e-book is available. The book now includes 61 poems about forgotten stories of Poles living under the Soviet and German occupation during WWII, especially in the Eastern Borderlands of Kresy. They were killed, deported, imprisoned, or oppressed after the invasion of Poland by Germany on September 1, 1039 and by the invasion by the Soviet Union on September 17, 1939. Some of these brief portraits capture the trauma and resilience, ordeals and miraculous survival stories of the author’s immediate family. Their experiences of displacement, hunger, cold, and poverty during the war are typical of Polish civilians. 

Maria, Stanislaw Wajszczuk, with children Henryka and Jerzy, Baranowicze, 1938.

These fictionalized fact-based memories are coupled with depictions of survival of other Poles deported to Siberia, the Arctic Circle, or Kazakhstan; those left the Soviet Union with the Second Corps of the Polish Army under the command of General Władysław Anders; those who were transported to refugee camps in India or Africa; and ended up in Argentina, Canada, Australia or the U.S. Their tragedies and survival stories are not widely known, so it is only fitting that a book of poems dedicated to family and personal resilience would touch upon these forgotten histories as well.

A monument to Polish civilians shot by Germans during Warsaw Uprising.

The book is a companion to “Slicing the Bread” (2014), with which it shares some poems, including vignettes from the author’s childhood in Warsaw. Organized into six parts - Destinations, Nowhere, Hunger Years, Resilience, There and Back, What Remains - the updated book follows a trajectory of descent into the hell of deportations, imprisonment, hunger, mass murder, and ascent into resilience and survival. The dark rain of sorrow changes into the diamond rain of delight with life. Trochimczyk writes: It has been quite difficult to select poems for the "uplift into light" section that brings a "happy end" of sorts to the harrowing experiences of an entire generation of Poles - exiled, starved, murdered. Finally, the idea to bring them to the author's present happiness in the garden, mixed in with some sweet childhood memories turned out to be the the best solution. 

Maja Trochimczyk reads from The Rainy Bread, at Kresy Syberia conference 
in Warsaw, September 2016.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Maja Trochimczyk, Ph.D., is a Polish American poet, music historian, photographer, and author of seven books on music, most recently “Gorecki in Context: Essays on Music” (2017) and “Frédéric Chopin: A Research and Information Guide” (co-edited with William Smialek, rev. ed., 2015). She currently serves as the President of the California State Poetry Society, managing editor of the California Quarterly, and President of the Helena Modjeska Art and Culture Club in Los Angeles, promoting Polish culture in California. Trochimczyk’s nine books of poetry include “Rose Always,” “Miriam’s Iris,” “Slicing the Bread,” “Into Light”, and four anthologies, “Chopin with Cherries” (2010), “Meditations on Divine Names” (2012), “Grateful Conversations: A Poetry Anthology” (2018) and “We Are Here: Village Poets Anthology” (2020). This is her ninth poetry collection.

Nike - Monument to Warsaw Uprising, Warsaw, 2014.

SAMPLE NEW POEMS

≡ ONCE UPON A TIME IN BARANOWICZE ≡


This city is a cipher without a face. Just splinters 
of images caught on paper, my Mom’s old photos. 
A blustery winter street with a round poster stand, 
just like in Warsaw. An opulent interior of the studio
with a bearskin for naked babies. A mahogany stand 
for First-Communion girls, with rosaries and lace gloves. 
Flowers for Marshall Piłsudski, tightly held in a fist
by the prettiest girl, with dark locks of curly hair.

That’s all. No childhood street corners, no velvet 
and muslin curtains. No church bells. 
Some forgotten shrines.

This was the site of battles. In 1916 — 100,000 dead, 
less than the 700,000 of Verdun and known to no-one.
Still, each life matters. Once more: Baranowicze. 
Here, forty-eight priests and teachers murdered 
in cold blood. By Germans? Soviets? The German rule 
meant disappearing in the ghetto. Half of the town gone. 
The Soviet rule meant crowded freight trains to Irkutsk, 
to Arkhangelsk, to Kazakhstan. The Gulag Archipelago.

For me, this city is a cipher, 
only existing as the birthplace of my Mom.

Lucyna tells a different story—bus trips to Świteź,
Mickiewicz’s poems, silver ponds at Grandpa’s farm.
The family home, her Mom says, “stood on the hill, near 
a pine-fir forest, with broad meadows full of flowers 
and all sorts of birds spreading out. Skylarks sang, 

soaring high above the fields. From the courtyard 
you could see dark forests looming in the distance.” 

In May: white bells of the lilies of the valley, 
picked by the bucket. Heavenly scent. 
In July: gold fields in bright sunlight, 
sunflower heads, huge as dinner plates. 
In September: The Soviets came. 

Nothing could save them from deportation — 
ruin — you know — the usual fate. 


NOTE: Quote from a poem by Maria Rorbach, survivor. 
“...stał na górce pod lasem 
sosnowo świerkowym,
u podnóża rozpościerały
się łąki kwieciste z mnóstwem
wszelkich ptaków a nad polami
unosiły się wysoko rozśpiewane
skowronki. Z podwórka widać było
w dali ciemne lasy...”




≡ LANGUAGE ≡


— is all there is, all you take with you when you go
from country to country, carried by the winds of change.
The merciless gale of history blows you backward
to the time before homes were homes,
before love.

Hold on. Language is all there is. You’ll leave 
your sentimental treasures — a miniature
flower vase from your cloistered Godmother, 
brown like her Franciscan habit and warm eyes.

A worn sapphire, set in the ornate gold ring 
Dad bought in Moscow for your Mom’s engagement —
scarred by work and trouble, washing dishes, 
work, always more work.

A suitcase of photos you are too raw 
with grief to open — one day, you say, 
I promise, I’ll do it, one day.

Language is all there is. Words slip back 
under the avalanche of hours. What you took 
was yours then.  What is yours now? 

You left behind your Grandma Nina’s 
Belarussian, her Dad’s Ukrainian.
You did not keep Aunt Basia’s sing-song
intonation from Trzebieszów that crept in
despite Grandma Maria’s fierce battle to 
keep the Polish pure, literary, unspoiled. 

Your kids picked up the dialect of the locals 
in weeks of summer, only to lose it after coming home. 
Alas, your Polish bears an English accent. 
American, with strange rounded “R’s.”

Rough tones of Polish mountain village resound 
through the gilded salons of an L.A. mansion.
They speak a 17th century peasant dialect in Quebec.

Out of one accent, not yet in another, 
you sound foreign everywhere, to everyone.
You keep your words in-between kingdoms.

One day, you’ll find your treasures.

Language is all there is 
until this New Day comes. 


Trochimczyk reads poems from The Rainy Bread in Warsaw, September 2016






≡ THE ANTIDOTE ≡


Chaos breaks out in our cities full of noise, 
toxins, radiation. I withdraw into my garden,
compress the sphere of attention, 
intensifying the focus on minute details.

The liquid patterns of finches’ song, repeated 
like a broken record. The sediment lines 
on the layered rock from Big Tujunga Wash.
The translucent oval of a quartz stone, 
smoothed by the Pacific on Oxnard Beach.

The imperceptible motion of leaves 
expanding skywards, while their roots 
stretch down invisibly, moist with dew.

Is it not enough to taste a pomegranate,
really taste each tart aril, bursting in your mouth? 
Is it not enough to turn your face up, 
to be kissed by noon sunlight?

“No fear, no hate, not even a slight dislike” – 
says St. Germain. I clear the rubble 
of memories of past pain, stronger, 
more clingy than the pain itself.

The mind is full of useless knowledge.
The body remembers on its own.
Pitiful. The heart locks itself 
in a hard shell of protectiveness.

I have to conquer this chaos within, polish 
the lamps, wash the windows into sparkling 
translucence, letting the light in, clear light – 
the antidote to chaos.


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