Where Is This Train Headed?

There's not much journaling to do. We got back late last night from our Mazury vacation. I gave my presentation about women in the US and all of the committee members came up and kissed me afterwards and told me, in broken English or half-Polish, that I was a very good young woman. There was a poetry reading on the final evening (it was nice to listen to, even if I couldn't understand it), followed by a wine-tasting. The whole conference was lovely and chilly and I ate a lot of Polish food. On the train back, all of the women from the conference were in the same car. We filled four compartments. These women, all 30-60, brought provisions of beer and vodka, sandwiches stolen from the hotel buffet, and seemingly bottomless bags of peanuts. Half of our car was actually a freight room, which eventually turned into a dance hall. As we lost passangers at each small town between Mazury and Wroclaw, the women joined in singing some old Polish song about riding the rails. It was quaint and incredible and even though I didn't understand most of what was going on around me, it may have been a necessary experience.

So maybe now I can transition into something more abstract. I found myself at the conference, as I find myself in most places, looking very closely at the women around me. I felt silly, at first, coming to Poland for an internship. From all outward appearances, it seems like I'm trying to find myself, or something else equally silly. And maybe I am, but the fact that it's Poland, that it's the land of pierogis and kielbasa and my grandparents' parents, is actually much less imprortant than the fact that I'm just very far away from everything familiar. But this certainly doesn't stop me from really staring at the noses and lips and cheekbones of everybody around me, maybe trying to find a little bit of myself in them. So I spent a lot of the conference doing this, and thinking about how I ended up where I am.

Today, when I returned from this conference, Ben had sent me this link to a recent Times article. The article is about the Jewish culture festival that I accidentally happened upon in Krakow, the very evening after I visited Auschwitz. So I'm in Poland, exploring my roots, visiting Auschwitz and Jewish culture festivals, and very soon, I will be in Jerusalem. May I quote a bit of Plath without sounding desperate? . . . "I may be a bit of a Jew." But what does this mean for me? For a shiksa who didn't know any Jews until highschool? Do I suffer from the same potentially commercial philia that the city of Krakow suffers from? Or (this is the option I've been taking more seriously lately), is there something drawing (or pushing) me towards this end? Maybe I've just had too much free time in Europe and it's making me crazy, but I can't help feeling that there is some imminent revelation about to unfold itself to me.