I saved the receipt from the Glasgow green-grocer to remind me of Marta’s accent. She was a new resident of Scotland from Poland, working for Asians, and I imagined hearing all of that when she spoke. Throughout that neighborhood, commerce was being livened up by more new Britons (see LBN post Those Persians 25 March 2009). Eastern Europe used to be far away, but EU-member Poland in particular has been exuding a country-next-door come-hither aura.
This is not unfamiliar to me: Polish surnames (some Jewish, some not) were common at my grade school near New York City. Later on, Joe, the handy-man at my college dormitory, was Polish, and
He took care of his girls.
Under the circumstances this was a near-heroic stance: some of the local farmers in the New York countryside blamed crop failure on the young female students (offered as a postscript to recent remarks by an Iranian cleric who blamed natural disasters on scantily-clad, promiscuous women, statements which conjured up the images of Joe and Marta), girls who wore strange clothes and often spoke in loud tones, emphasizing their urban origins and accompanying disregard for country life. Joe was a Catholic family man, the son of pre-WWII immigrants. He turned up regularly with kielbas, as he called it.
Only the real Polish sausage for my girls.
Another encounter dates from the more recent past: one day I called my bank in Amsterdam to ask them to verify whether or not their internet banking system was experiencing an interruption of normal services. The customer service representative was very friendly and sounded sincerely apologetic about the breakdown. She spoke Dutch with an East European accent, and, yes, she confirmed, she was working out of a call center in Poland, one of Western Europe’s destinations for near-shoring (out-sourcing and paying lower wages) operations. This woman was delightful, in possession of a sweet voice and a willingness to depart from the call center script. She had been drafted from the population of new Dutch residents of Polish origin (and that story is not all peachy: see LBN post I Promise You 31 December 2008) to go home and earn a living there speaking Dutch. I hope she didn’t lose her job as a result of our conversation.
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