Milosz's ABCs

Milosz’s ABC’s
Czeslaw Milosz
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2001

Czeslaw Milosz was born in 1911, in Szetejnie, Lithuania, then a satellite of Czarist Russia. In 1940, he left Soviet-occupied Wilno (Vilna, in Russian), the city where he had attended high school and university, for German-occupied Warsaw, where, along with other work, he published anti-Nazi poems in underground journals. After the war, a Polish diplomat, he lived in New York, Washington D.C., and Paris. In 1960, Milosz immigrated to the United States, where, until 1978, he was a Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California at Berkeley.

Crafted in a genre of short alphabetically arranged pieces, "Milosz’s ABC’s" is a book that musters memories of friends and acquaintances, European History, literary critique, and philosophy. It begins with "Abramowicz, Ludwik." A Mason "by conviction"—during Milosz’s boyhood, Lithuania was rife with Masonic lodges, including the Scoundrels’ Society, which met in the House Under the Sign of the Dogcatchers, and the Zealous Lithuanian Lodge--, a "spokesman for an ideology in which democratic thinking, multinationalism, and ‘localism’ were united," Abramowisz published, "at his own expense," The Wilno Review, "a slender journal," which the poet feels had an influence on his politics.

Reading "Milosz’s ABC’s," I was surprised by the irrationality of Milosz’s encyclopedic mind. As he is now 90, I looked under O. Instead of "Old Age," I found "Obligation." To what? To "‘Polish culture,’ but not that crippled one which was divided into exquisite refinement and boorishness." (A postmodern position.) A few pages on, I found "Polish Language," under which is written: "There is no way to rationalize one’s love for a language, just as one cannot rationalize love for one’s mother."

This lead me to think of Czeslaw Milosz’ fellow countryman, Nobel Laureate, and exile, Issac Bashevis Singer, whose childhood in Poland was a much different experience than that of the Catholic Milosz. I found a reference to Singer under G, for "Grade, Chaim," who, "in the opinion of the majority of (Yiddish-speaking New York Jews)…was a much better writer than Singer, but little translated into English, which is why members of the Swedish Academy had no access to his writings."

Like Singer with his beloved Yiddish, Milosz, fluent in English, still writes in Polish, which is then translated into English, affording us a literature that draws its sustenance through an etymology rooted in centuries of Indo-European culture. (Lithuanian, a language with obscure, non-Indo-European, roots, was rarely spoken when Milosz was growing up. Only recently, with the independence of Lithuania, has it begun to make a comeback.)

As I began with A, I’ll end with Z, for "Zagórshi, Stefan." Nicknamed "Elephant" "Tall, slightly stooped, and somewhat clumsy," Stefan was "gentle in interaction with people, because he was a master of quiet, gentle dry humor." Milosz weaves engrams of Elephant, who "was not granted a very long life," with their swims in the Wilia, "a river worthy of respect, even though once I almost drowned in it." An honest voice—he couldn’t swim, and had to have his head ignominiously held above the water by friends—that permeates this appealing book.