Radom

So much has happened in the last few weeks! I'm hoping to write a few posts in the next few days, but it turns out that a lot of stuff is continuing to go on.

I was in Radom on April 26th to give a lecture about a personal passion of mine, the American Civil War. Because that's an awfully broad topic, I confined myself to discussing just causes and effects. The problem is I'm very good at jabbering on about this particular topic, so it was hard to hold myself to the hour I was allotted.

I was in Radom at the invitation of that city's very active American Corner, one of about 400 worldwide sponsored by the Department of State. I gave two lectures, one to a crowd of younger students and one to a crowd of older students. Radom is not typically a place where a lot of foreigners go: it's most famous for its armaments factory, and it is (or at least was) an industrial city but without the cachet of Łódź (where Justin Beiber walked through airport security without his shirt). I got the sense they were glad to have me, and I was glad to be there.

I think the impression that people have of Radom, namely Łódź without the charm, is unfair. Downtown Radom is pretty in a gritty way. It's clear that the city is not as economically well-off as Kraków, and there is definitely more of an Eastern Bloc feel to the place. One thing that's quite interesting to see in Poland's economic development is how uneven that development is from town to town, or even in the same city, or even on the same block. Go to the Old City of Kraków, for example, and you might as well be in the West someplace. Go due east about two miles and it definitely looks like Eastern Europe. Even in the Old City I've noticed that if you go into a courtyard, i.e. look beyond the facades of the buildings, you'll see that a lot of remodeling is still needed. Leave Kraków or Warsaw and you'll notice that, again, the cities seem more post-Communist. This leads to some fascinating exercises in visualization, trying to picture in one's minds-eye what a particular city would have looked like 15 years ago, or what another city will look like 15 years from now. Five years ago Tarnów, for example, probably looked a lot like Radom.

I think the lectures themselves went well. The first, younger audience wasn't as interested as the second one, and part of this probably has to do with the levels of English present in each audience. I was willing to give the talk in Polish, but the organizers wanted English and who am I to argue? I did get a few very good questions, which was refreshing as normally people are terrified to ask questions of lecturers here for fear of looking stupid.

One aspect of the lecture that made me somewhat uncomfortable was the fact that I had to talk about some of the ugliest parts of the American experience, like slavery and racism. This put me in a bit of a bind because I wanted to be honest, and you cannot discuss the causes of the Civil War without discussing slavery. You cannot discuss the aftermath of the Civil War without discussing Reconstruction, and you can't pretend that Jim Crow never happened. On the other hand, I don't like bad-mouthing my country abroad. The thing is (as I'll discuss more fully in an upcoming post) there's a widespread impression here that America is the perfect country, aside from the fact that you need a visa to go there and it's very very difficult to immigrate. I've heard more anti-American sentiments on college campuses in the United States than I have in Europe. As I'll discuss later, I see this as both good and bad. 

The ladies running the American Corner were very helpful, and one of them, Karolina, took time to take me around the city. What I found rather funny was that they didn't seem to fully believe I spoke Polish, particularly when we were out to lunch with the teachers whose classes saw my lecture. When they were talking about something they didn't want me to hear, they would switch to Polish, but would speak with me in English. So, I got to be the proverbial fly on the wall, and speak English with Poles, which rarely happens.

Oh, and apparently they talked about me on TV.