Foreword

Summary

“Most of all, sir, I miss the porcelain.”

Czesław Miłosz strikes a soft and unexpected note here in his 1947 poem “A Little Song about Porcelain.” Inscribed now on the wall of a café that bears the poem's name, the rhyming verse, jocular in tone until it is not, juxtaposes timeless happiness of youth with the shocks that break time in two—into childhood and adulthood, peace and war, before and after. Pink swimsuits and flowered teacups are left by the riverbank, the one now crossed by the treads of a tank.

The café is in the cellar of a restored manor in Krasnogruda, as it happens the very place where Miłosz, as a young man, spent his summers, swimming in the lake and drinking tea from porcelain cups decorated with flowers. At the time, in the 1920s and 1930s, the manor house was a pension run by two of Miłosz's aunts, just on the Polish side of the border with Lithuania. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland: the area around Krasnogruda was first overrun by Soviet tanks, then ceded to Nazi Germany.

The Sejny region, which includes Krasnogruda, was and is a borderland in every sense. In medieval Europe it was part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which after 1385 was associated with the Kingdom of Poland. The area was a refuge for Russian Old Believers, who fled Russia after the religious reforms of the seventeenth century. The languages of the countryside were Lithuanian, Belarusian, Polish, and Yiddish. A white synagogue occupied the central square of the town of Sejny. The Germans drove the Jews of Sejny eastward across the border and then murdered them when they invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

The Red Army returned in 1944, defeating the Germans—and then also defeating the Poles who had been fighting the Germans. In the Sejny region in July 1945, the Red Army rounded up thousands of men who had resistedthe Germans and murdered hundreds of them. The region was again part of Poland, this time one that became communist. Lithuania, now a Soviet republic rather than an independent state, was once again just across the border. The pension in Krasnogruda ceased to exist, its porcelain buried for safekeeping. The manor where Miłosz spent his summers fell into disrepair and then decay.