Joe Jezioranski

Everything was happening at once. My father bought a house near Warsaw (capital city of Poland). My mother was traveling. My brother got scarlet fever and had to have a nurse.

The house was full of strange people. A fat one used to bring food – must have been the cook. The talkative one used to run from room to room disturbing my toys. The others were strange, except of course for my father who was nice but mostly busy, and my mother who was warm and kind but mostly concerned.

Footnotes

There was not much furniture yet in the house. Pieces were coming from our apartment in Warsaw and the old house at Byki [1]. My brother’s room was mostly off limits and guarded by a white-dressed terror.

Every morning, when I woke up, I waited for my father to begin stirring. As soon as he looked at the clock he would get up in a hurry and hit his head against the sloping ceiling. On the days he did not hit the ceiling I was very disappointed. I liked to hear his excited exclamation. The statement issued was so different from the ones the older kids and our servants used. I always thought the kind of exclamation people used somehow reflected their cultural background.

Somewhat later my mother would appear and discuss with my father the latest condition of my brother. He was getting worse. More doctors and other strange people. Nobody to play with... They would let me go out, but not before a traumatic experience of dressing up. When finally I was let out, I first watched the marvelous expanse of white snow covering the slope in front of the house. To the right, one could march along the top of the slope to the kitchen, but I had never yet been to the left.

1. Byki is the name of the farm on which my father was born. Originally owned by the Polish Crown with a house built for one of the Polish Queens, it was donated by the Crown to a Polish nobleman who took his name from the name of the farm. The family that owned the farm originally sold it in the XVIII century to one of my forefathers.

I climbed down the steps and slowly moved through the deep snow toward the corner. I could see now the trees spread out here and there throughout the garden. If I could only reach them... The snow, shallow near the house because it was partially melted by the heat coming through the wall, was deeper as you moved away from the house. As I moved further, the snow was getting deeper. I decided to sort of scramble and jump. After some three or four such exercises, I could no longer see anything but the sky. Did I fall? As I tried to extricate myself I saw even less. I cried and shouted, but nobody came. I sat down and cried a while.

I have to go back, I have to go back! I stood up, reached up and to the side, then climbed backwards. As I lay spread out on top of the soft snow, it supported my body. Since I was not sinking into the deep snow, I was able to roll over towards the house where the snow was packed harder and permitted me to walk back to the door.

My mother was saying good bye to the doctor.

“Did you have enough walking?”

I would not go out again for the rest of the winter. It seems to me that that winter we had the deepest snow – or was it only that as I grew up, the snow did not seem to be as deep?

Despite the lack of roads and difficult winter conditions, all the furniture finally arrived. My brother was feeling better and was writing a story, “Winter in Mlociny,” with some editing help by my father. My brother was big now: next year he was going to kindergarten.

Now that he was better, my mother went on the rampage: she burned and destroyed all our toys. We were promised two new toys for each burned one, but who wants new toys when all your favorite toys are being eliminated?

We were now quartered together, my brother and I, and my life became very full again. He was the leader in all our games. We had a room to ourselves. Our beds stood at opposite sides of the room, mine under a sloping ceiling. When I stood up in my crib I used to try and reach toward the ceiling, but it was always too high.

“Why am I so short, not like Johnny?” I complained to my mother.

“You are not short, he is just older.” I knew she was not telling the truth. Johnny was always taller and lighter. And smarter, and had better toys, and could read books...

Between our beds there was a double framed window. My brother used to bring a chair to the window, climb on the chair and open a little section in the middle of the inside frame, then blow hard on the outer pane making a round opening in the frozen surface.

“I want to see! I want to see!” I cried.

We had to put a box on top of the chair and bring heavy books from downstairs to place on top of the box. When it was all finished I could see the dense bushes of the Stamirowskis’ garden and the bare balcony of the house where the rabbi always sang his monotonous evening prayer. I could even, by turning sideways, see the empty house and, yes, there it was, the wall of Mennas’ mansion... Woops! I slipped and hung on by dear life to the bottom of the small airing window. I made an awful shout of despair while my brother was trying to make me quiet.

A moment later my mother was holding court and telling my brother what she thought of the precarious arrangement. So now we had to play at the desk, which stood by the window. It was my brother’s rolltop desk, but originally must have come from some forgotten age. It had innumerable little drawers, each holding some of our treasures.

When I was bored, I used to climb all over it and discover different collections in each drawer. Some held unfinished manuscripts of dictated stories (my brother was dictating his memoirs to my mother), others a collection of stamps nicely arranged in books, the pages of which were held together by screw and socket arrangements. Later on when my brother was older, there were boy scout trophies and school prizes, as well as innumerable albums of pictures taken at holidays, meetings, school gatherings, etc.

When this desk finally became mine, I could never match such magnificence. The drawers that held my collections were mostly drab-looking shells or rocks or strings, caps for my pistols or little toys with which I played no longer.

At two corners of the room, there were walk-in closets. The large front one held our clothes which always looked so small and forlorn in the big closet. I was greatly surprised when, during the war, cousin Alka and her daughter Ania were using this room, to see how small this closet looked against the background of their clothes. The other closet, near the window, we used mostly as a prison to hold the guy who lost the battle of cossacks and hussars. My brother kept the key to this one. I could never find it. In time I learned to open the door from the inside. I also learned that the other side of the closet led to the servant’s room, but that is another story more applicable to my later years.

In the morning when we woke up, we would fight over who should say prayers first. The room was cold even after the servant girl started the fire in the glazed stove, which was built into the wall between our room and the staircase. If I decided to play on the floor in my pyjamas, I always played in front of the stove. This game usually involved the lead soldiers that I hid in the dresser standing next to the glazed stove. Even if the room was still cold, one could see the reflection of the fire in the bottom compartment, which was open until the coal really got hot. The reflection of the fire kept one’s hope alive that soon one’s extremities would warm up.

It was fun to wait to go to the bathroom until my father was being shaved by the barber, who used to come on a bicycle from the village. We could then observe the ritual of my father’s face disappearing behind a huge volume of lather or warm towels. Even more mysterious was the whacking he got all over his face and bald head by the barber at the end of the ritual.

When my brother went to school, the year after we moved into our new house, my favorite play was to turn over a chair, sit on its back and push it along the floor imagining that I was driving a car. I would start at the bathroom door and move to the top of the staircase along the railing, passing on my right the door to the servant’s room and then, around the corner, the door to our room and the door to the attic, all the way to my parents’ room and then back. Most of our chairs carried a worn-out spot at the top of their back as a memento of the game I devised.

When my brother came home, we would get to the stair landing. My brother squeezed between the pillars of the railing and would land on top of the big hutch holding the everyday family dishes, which stood in the passage. I complained bitterly that I couldn’t reach down to there from the landing, so my brother devised a rope contraption hanging from the railing of the landing. The top of the big hutch was used as a ship or a castle or a house as the case may be.

The rope gave him an idea to hang a swing affair from the top of the railing and swing over the bottom part of the stairs. When I tried it the first time, I fell down all the way into the front hall and couldn’t say a word for a few minutes. My brother and his friend convinced me that I should not cry as it was not such a big thing. Still, my behind hurt for a few days and I had to be careful how I placed my body in bed.

As you stood at the bottom of the stairs, you saw in front of the stairs the doors to the living room. To the right, the door led to my father’s study and farther along the hall there was the double main door. We, the untidy kids, used the spacious area between the two doors to dump our skis, sleighs, clothes and outdoor toys. I have no recollection of anybody using it for anything else except on gala occasions when visitors would insist on going through the front door.

From the front door on the left there was my father’s study, on the right the living room. Opposite the main door there was a dining room and the passage under the stairs, ending at a door leading to another passage to the kitchen. I believe that the house must have been built with the kids in mind – we loved all those passages. Nobody else could find any use for them.

In the spring my mother decided to put a high fence around our two-acre garden. This was supposed to help keep us inside the garden, but when my brother went to school a year later and the environment got sort of bleak, I found a way to climb to the top of the garage and from there onto the fence and down the other side.

Our house stood on top of a hill. The upper gate was on the same level as the house while the lower gate was at the bottom of the hill. Next to the lower gate there was a wooden garage, which generally held junk. The gate of the garage led onto the road while the back of the garage was sunk deep into the hill. The top of the garage stood only about four or five feet above the ground at the back. Leaning against the garage wall was a wooden box holding garbage cans and a pile of wood.

Whenever my brother and his friends were playing war, they used the top of the garage as a fortress. As I always tried to participate in those games, my brother would pull me up onto the garbage box first and then to the roof of the garage from the top of the garbage box. In the heat of battle the warriors would forget about me, and I had to climb down hanging precariously from the top of the garage and then climbing down the woodpile.

After one such encounter, my brother put a box (or a piece of wood, I don’t remember which) at the top of the garbage box for me to climb down. In my excursion I used the box to climb onto the top of the garage and then moved from the top of the garage along the top of the gate and down the wire netting of the fence.

The question was what to do now? Well, I realized that I could not go back, since the gates were locked and the fence looked very high from outside (I was only three years old). On the other hand I remembered the trips with my nanny to the store and the candy which was available there. So I trudged a mile and a half to the store. My mother was greatly surprised when the store owner asked on the phone for authorization to give me candy. My parents had an arrangement whereby they paid the bill once a month and the servants got all the necessary items on credit.

The first year was very exciting. Not only was my brother still at home, but also the garden was being laid out, with mounds of earth being moved from one place to the other.

A lawn was placed around the house with topsoil brought in and laid before the grass was sown. Here and there the ornamental trees were planted: Japanese firs, tall cedars, silver pines and blue spruce. Colorful groups of bushes afforded wonderful places for our forts and play hideouts.

Across the middle of the garden, the gardener planted a line of mock orange bushes. The straight branches of those provided wonderful material for swords, and the row served as a boundary between two different imaginary countries.

As the garden sloped down behind this division, we used the slope for driving down in our wagons and in the winter for sliding down on our sleighs.

At the bottom and to the left there was a hand-driven water pump. A large wheel with a handle served as a swing in those days. As my brother pulled on the side of the wheel I implored him not to let me go too high. When my brother was pulling the wheel, he was not able to pull me up to the top of it, as he was at the time not yet six years old. When the next-door neighbor kid pulled me, I rode up to the top of the wheel, and he held me there for several minutes until my screams finally alerted my mother of my distress.

Even with all the fun and games, I was very bored and depressed during the day when my brother was at school. One day my mother brought a dog home. He was a mutt with a roguish disposition and looks. He had a brown patch over one eye, a large brown circle on one side, and the tail was part brown, part white.

“Who is this dog for?” I asked.

“Why, for you, of course!” my mom answered.

Finally I had somebody on my own level of height, ability and intelligence. He was interested in food, love and mischief – he fit me like a glove. We roamed through the garden together, slept together and when mealtime arrived I would take my plate to my father’s study – a temporary home for my dog’s box – and we ate together. He seemed to eat faster than I did, but whereas he seemed to prefer the middle course, I could get faster to my dessert. Unfortunately my mother was disappointed in the arrangement.

There came a day when my mother took us, me and my brother, to the movies. I remember it well because it was the last movie that I have seen with Pat and Patachon [2]. When we came home, the dog was gone. I tried to find him but to no avail. My mother told me that he was run over by a car. I cried for weeks.

2. Two comics of the silent screen era, very popular in Europe. One was very tall and skinny and the other short and fat.

Some months later I saw a dog on the road, which looked very much like my dog. A lady was holding tightly to a leash, while a little white and brown mutt was trying to get away, steering in my direction. My mother would not let me investigate. I always suspected foul play there.

In the summer my father had to decide what to do with the old house at Byki. During the vacation, we packed our things into my father’s old Chrysler and travelled over the dusty roads to the old house.

My father did not drive. He always employed a driver. Both I and to some extent my brother tried to sit in front with the driver. About the first experience I remember is sitting on the knees of my father’s driver as he turned the car around. I was convinced that I was driving the car. A trip to Byki was all of 150 miles, but considering the state of the roads at that time, it was a major excursion.

I do not remember very much of the old house. The items that impressed me were the long driveway in front of the house and the dark and huge ballroom.

This house was reportedly built for Bona [3], a queen of Poland, and bore a distinct resemblance to some old Italian XVIth century large houses (“the castle,” we called it). Today it is apparently used as a museum.

The long driveway was nice. Old trees on both sides provided a green tunnel, quite a change from the hot and dusty drive on the gravel-surfaced roads of Poland. The car was an open, cabriolet type of the end of the 1920s, thus giving little protection from the outside environment.

The great hall, or ballroom as the case may be, was moist and dirty. During the first world war it was apparently used to house horses of the German cavalry. A huge fireplace seemed to be intended for whole trees to be placed there, but one could hardly hope to warm the place with it.

3. A Polish queen, wife of Zygmunt Stary (old) and mother of Zygmunt August. Bona, born to one of the Italian nobility, is credited with bringing a number of vegetables to Poland. She also brought a number of Italian artisans in her retinue, who introduced renaissance architecture to the Polish countryside.

My only other memory is of how glad I was to go back. The trip back was even less enjoyable than the trip there. My father was bringing some old relatives with us. The house and the rest of the farm were going to be rented to somebody.

As we later found out through digging in the old family books and papers, this house was bought from the noble family of Jaxa Bykowski during the reign of the first Saxon king of Poland [4]. As were many other Polish noblemen, the family was broke and sold it to great-great-grandfather, who allegedly came from some eastern part of Poland. Now the house seemed to be destined to be sold again. The only person in my family who made a solid attempt at running the farm and thus using the house to a great extent was my great grandfather.

Of his sons one was a jurist, the other (Wladyslaw) an engineer. Of another I am not sure what his occupation was, but I know that we had some cousins.

My grandmother apparently lived in the old house and entertained some. Her life was not very happy. Of nine children, seven died in childhood, mostly due to tuberculosis. Apparently all the cattle in the area were infected. Blessed were those who could not afford milk.

My grandfather (Joseph) started out as a cadet in the Russian Tsar’s [5] guard. As the last Polish insurrection [6] began, the story goes that my grandfather broke his sword and refused his commission. I always worried that he must have hurt his knee very badly in the process. The poor old Tsar must not have been too happy, as my grandfather was alleged to be at the top of the cadet class. History says however that the Tsar survived, and so did my grandfather.

He went on to help Kronenberg [7] (don’t ask me who the heck that is) organize the first Polish insurance company and apparently stayed with this company till his death. He did not get married until late in his life. Since he fell in love with his niece (the Jezioranskis were great for falling in love with somebody – I am not always sure that the reciprocal was true), he had to have the Pope’s dispensation to marry.

4. Polish kings were elected by a group of electors. The electorate comprised of all the nobility (ie townsmen and peasants were not part of the electorate). The elections tended to be influenced by powerful lobbyists who presented their favorite candidates. Certain powerful families promoted the Saxon dynasty, which in turn favored their promoters when appointing candidates for senior government positions.

5. Poland was defeated by a coalition of three powers: Russia, Prussia and Austro-Hungary at the end of the XVIII century. This particular part of Poland belonged to Russia since the Vienna Congress (1815) and was often called Kongressowka (after Congress).

6. A revolt against the Russian (Tsarist) rule. The insurrection started in 1863 and was defeated by Russian troops early in 1864.

7. Apparently one of the best known industrialists. Organized the first Polish railway and one of the earliest banks (Bank of Commerce) in addition to the WTU.