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The Ulams’ Lwów
About Lwów…Manners and the café culture…elementary and secondary education…learning about America
Lwów, Lvov, Lviv have been different versions of the name of my hometown (to be sure after the partition of Poland in the 18th century, it became for its Austrian masters Lemberg, and as such it stayed on the world’s maps, but none of the natives used this form). For the Poles it has been and remains Lwów, from the Middle Ages to the partition of Poland, one of the main urban centers of the old Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, third largest city in the reborn Polish State after 1918. With the Hitler-Stalin deal in 1939, eastern Poland, and with it the city, became part of the Soviets’ loot, and after the horrifying interval of the German occupation (1941-1944) it stayed on the map of the USSR in its Russian form, Lvov. Indisputably Polish in its ethnic character and culture as the city was, southeastern Poland in which it is situated is nationally and linguistically predominantly Ukrainian.
At the Yalta conference, President Roosevelt pleaded with Stalin that Lwów be returned to liberated Poland, but Stalin would not allow it. And so when the Soviet empire crumbled in 1991, and Ukraine became independent, the city of my childhood again changed a consonant in its name, becoming officially Ukrainian Lviv. How much history can be evoked by altering a single letter!
The awareness that I was living on the political fault line of eastern Europe came to me very early. I had heard my elders talk about dangerous developments all over the world: the depression, the war in the Far East and other portents of the horrors to come.
My first distinct memory of a political event is of the most ominous one: a Polish news broadcast from Berlin on the occasion of Adolf Hitler being appointed chancellor of Germany. The correspondent’s voice was strained: the news came as a surprise to him as to most political analysts. True, the Nazis’ popular support had grown with the severity of the depression gripping the country. But that support had crested, the party losing votes in the last election; one could hope democratic forces would reassert themselves. And then unexpectedly the old President Hindenburg appointed Hitler to head the government. The reporter was wiser than the majority of political pundits: once in power the Nazis would never surrender it, no matter what future elections and other constitutional paraphernalia. Hitler’s deputy, Goering, in a radio address celebrating the occasion recounted how a prominent Socialist sought him out and begged that he be allowed by the new regime to keep his job as a notary public. So much for your German democratic forces! Jubilant gangs of storm troopers were roaming the streets of Berlin and provincial cities.
At the time I found the event more intriguing than alarming. The young are seldom afraid of things and situations with which they are not familiar. War was something I had not experienced. Lwów had suffered Russian occupation in World War I, and at its end was the scene of armed struggle between the Poles and the Ukrainians. War to my mind was something which took place between armies of soldiers, hardly affecting the civilians. My father and brother had already instructed me about what Hitler represented. But I had also learned (one absorbed as if by osmosis in the Poland of the time), that Germany was a traditional enemy, and that any German government would, if it could, reclaim Polish territories Germany had to surrender after World War I. In a way, Hitler and his thugs, sure to outrage public opinion, would be less dangerous to Poland than their respectable countrymen playing on Western sympathies for poor Germany so horribly treated by the Versailles Treaty.
Austrian Poles’ privileged status contributed to a certain if good-natured feeling of superiority over their fellow nationals from elsewhere, a feeling which lingered after the reunification. Russia’s former subjects were believed to have imbibed some of the harshness and lack of ceremoniousness allegedly characteristic of their erstwhile masters. Those who had been under the Hohenzollerns had not been fully emancipated from the haughtiness and overseriousness typical of a German milieu. In contrast to such flaws the natives of Galicia believed themselves to be light hearted, tolerant, and appreciative of the finer things in life.
A sociologist might be skeptical of such generalizations, and whatever the regional differences they were being quickly homogenized in independent Poland. But it is indisputable that some of the flavor of Vienna had rubbed off on the culture of my part of the country. Architecture of the modern part of the city was reminiscent of certain quarters of the Austrian capital. Personal manners were elaborately ritualized. I would later discover how easy it was in America to make friends. In Poland, the process just as the entire social etiquette was much more complex and formal.
Take such seemingly simple courtesies as kissing the hand of your women acquaintances Upon meeting them or saying goodbye, the practice was quite widespread all over the Continent in those distant days before the explosion of feminism. But in formerly Austrian Poland it was elaborated into an intricate ceremonial which continued to be practiced after 1918, and remained the subject of dispute as to its details. The most fundamental one touched on the question of who was entitled to this form of salutation. Of course one kissed the hand of married ladies. But how about the unmarried ones? One would not do so with a young girl, not without arousing suspicion that the gesture meant more than a social amenity. But what was the proper procedure with regard to an older spinster? This was the subject of considerable contention.
Then there was the question of the mechanics. The most accepted form was for the man to bow while planting his lips on the palm of the right hand (left handers were an oppressed minority being usually forced to switch in their childhood). But how, if at all, should one incline one’s head while performing the rite and should it be nuanced according to the woman’s social status and/or the degree of her closeness to the man? There was yet another technique, one frowned upon by the traditionalists as suggestive of possible romantic intent: the hand was snatched impulsively and the kiss deposited on the fingers rather than on the palm. There was no Polish Emily Post to lay down the law to the contending factions.
The equally elaborate rules regulated social intercourse between men. That endearing American custom of people even of the most recent acquaintance calling each other by their first names was unthinkable. People could be friends for years and yet would address each other by Mr. with the verb in third person singular (e.g., does Mr. X desire some vodka?). Closer intimacy was signaled by inserting a companion’s first name after Mr. but retaining the third person singular. Only very very old friends and relatives would reach the level of complete familiarity (X, dost thou want vodka?). I shall spare the reader other convolutions of the procedure, such as when it was proper to use the diminutive form of one’s first name, etc. In the People’s Poland, such bourgeois feudal practices were officially frowned upon. Instead of “Pan,” and its feminine equivalent, “Pani,” you were supposed to use “citizen” and “citizeness,” and employ the second-person plural, which before the war was regularly used in talking to a person of lower social standing, e.g., by a city dweller to a peasant. Like many Communist innovations, this one never really took hold and finally expired with the demise of the “People’s Poland.” Except for forms of address implying social inferiority, those folk customs had really been innocuous, and the abandonment of “citizen,” all the more obnoxious because it aped the Soviet “comrade,” was a logical result of post -1989 Poland throwing off the yoke of Communism.
To be sure, social distinctions in prewar Poland instead of being obscured or concealed were only too discernible in everyday manners. There was none of your “Hi!” or wave of the hand in passing a casual acquaintance in the street. If one encountered a social superior, the proper greeting was a broad sweeping gesture with one’s hat. For men of lesser status one lifted the hat only slightly, or just touched it with the hand. Even when very young I felt the custom not only demeaning but ridiculous. Fortunately, new Poland has emancipated itself not only from Communism but also from that social backwardness and crudeness which hung so heavily over the country between the two world wars.
But to return to Vienna’s contribution to my hometown’s life. It would be excessive to ascribe the café culture which permeated Lwów to the lingering Austrian influence. Coffeehouses, bistros, and similar establishments have promoted sociability for centuries and all over the Continent; and they have been gathering places for artists, professionals, and politicians. In some ways, their function has been similar to that of the British or American club, but there are significant differences. In the first place the coffeehouse is egalitarian; it serves anyone who can afford a cup of coffee or a glass of beer and not just a select clientele. In the second place one frequents a club, i.e., drops in there after work for a drink, meal, game of squash etc. The real business of life is done at home and the place of work. The café goer reverses this routine. He spends his day in the coffeehouses with but occasional visits to his office and home. It is not surprising that being incompatible with the Anglo Saxon work ethic the institution never caught on in Britain or America, what passes for cafés there being in fact closer to bars or restaurants, rather than to their Paris or Vienna namesakes.
Lwów’s café culture followed the Austrian rather than the French model insofar as the customers were almost exclusively recruited from the middle class, rather that from a wide social spectrum, and the staple of consumption was in fact coffee rather than liquor. Of course one did occasionally order a drink or a meal, but for serious drinking you would go to a bar and for a festive dinner or lunch to a restaurant. Custom prescribed that no matter what or how much one consumed one could stay indefinitely. Most cafés were also reading rooms. No sooner would a habitué be seated at his usual table than the waiter would bring him newspapers, Polish or foreign, of his usual choice. The café goer would attend to his correspondence, write a lecture, confer with his business associates, or simply sit drinking coffee, smoking and reflecting. The surrounding atmosphere depended on the time of day. In the morning conversations were as a rule subdued; people attended to their business and did not seek to socialize. In the afternoons, the place became more animated; friends felt free to join you at your table. But it was in the evening that the café would become really crowded and noisy. Husbands, having discharged their domestic duties by dining at home, would abandon wives and children and repair to their favorite spot, there to argue and gossip for hours usually with the same men they would see night after night.
It would not be atypical, say, for a university professor after a morning lecture to attend a café, then to have breakfast and read newspapers. Then after lunch and a brief visit to his office he would turn to another place of refreshment where he might chat about his subject with some students and colleagues. And after supper yet another café, this time with his senior associates and personal friends. My brother Stan, when a young student of mathematics, would often spend a social hour with a couple of his professors in the Café Roma. After lunch they usually moved across the street to the Scottish Café there to be joined by other mathematicians. Some would play chess, others would kibitz and chat. But on occasions, the gathering turned into a veritable seminar with the problems and theorems discussed written down in a large notebook. As my brother was to reminisce, “ I recall a session with Mazur and Banach at the Scottish Café which lasted seventeen hours without interruptions except for meals” [S. M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician, New York p.33]. The book of problems kept in the custody of the café’s staff grew with the years, new theorems and problems being added by the participants in the café symposia right up to the German occupation of 1941. It was then hidden and miraculously survived the war. The Scottish Book was translated into English by my brother and became widely known to the international mathematical community as a memento not only of scientific achievement but of a way of life long gone. Communism was not tolerant of leisurely and unhurried sociability represented by the café culture. One could not lightheartedly engage in free animated chatter; the man at the next table might have well have been an informer. Nor is the budding capitalism in Eastern Europe likely to revive the old institution, so contrary to the American notion of how people ought to spend their time. Today’s café is in tune with the brave new world of the global market and the entrepreneurial spirit. One visits it occasionally and briefly.
My knowledge of that bygone tradition was derived not only from observing my elders. Beginning when I was twelve or thirteen my father would occasionally let me join him at his Sunday morning sessions in the coffee houses. It was a special treat; children were not as a rule seen in the establishments. Very early, after having been fortified by tea, we would set forth on a stroll through the still deserted streets to our destination. It was usually the Café Roma, which had nothing Italian about it but was favored because of its large collection of newspapers both Polish and foreign. We breakfasted in the still largely empty emporium. It must have been barely eight or nine in the morning. Then followed what had been the main purpose of the expedition: the reading of the newspapers. My father followed the longstanding habit, acquired before the war, of, after skimming one or two Polish journals, becoming engrossed in Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse. To my mind this was rather hard to understand: Vienna was now the capital of a small insignificant country. But in Austrian Poland, the liberal Viennese paper had been quite popular and my father, deeply conservative, remained faithful to the habits of his youth. What was happening in Austria was for him of interest second only to the interest he took in Polish politics, and the inroads made there by the growing impact of the Nazis, a source of deep concern.
Despite Poland’s semi-authoritarian regime, opposition parties were tolerated, and I favored the latter for my reading. Not that I had as yet any definite political outlook or any hankering after a specific ideology. But it was intriguing to follow political arguments and views clashing with those that official propaganda tried to drive into our heads in the schools, and to take note of veiled hints of scandal and corruption in high places (For if too overt, an article would be banned and its space in the newspaper would be left blank).The natural rebelliousness of youth combined with an aversion, which persists to this day, against the unctuous and pompous ways in which those in authority, and not only in nondemocratic countries, tend to present their actions and motivations. One must be fair: apart from its treatment of domestic politics, it was the Warsaw regime’s main organ Gazeta Polska (Polish Gazette) which represented the best in journalism. It had excellent correspondents in the major European capitals, and the analyses of the politics of the respective countries, especially of Britain, France, and the USSR, were most instructive, in some ways superior to what I could read in the leading Western journals. For a daily paper, an inordinate amount of space was devoted to articles about cultural and historical subjects, usually by leading authorities in the given field. I could now read English and French. Le Matin kept me informed and troubled by the turbulent politics of France in the 1930s. The Times and The Daily Telegraph conveyed on the contrary the impression of the solidity of British politics, but also, alas, of the irresolution and to me the inexplicable restraint of London’s policies toward the dictators. Like most Poles of my background I was brought up in the belief in the enormous power and masterful diplomacy of Great Britain. Pax Britannia was for me a vital element of the world order even as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini threatened the world itself. Britannia still ruled the waves, even if the American Navy was at least its equal. Why then did the British put up with Hitler’s impudence and Mussolini’s provocations? Questioning my elders did not produce satisfactory answers, since they also adhered to that 19th century image of Britain; and for Poland, the 19th century did not really end until 1939. In politics we were all Anglophiles, just as when it came to the arts and culture in general most educated Poles were enamored of France. Paris was the most potent magnet for those traveling abroad.
My interest in world affairs was thus spawned in a Lwów coffee house. It was not as yet informed by first hand experience, for until my journey to the United States at the age of sixteen, I had never really traveled abroad. The only experience of a non Polish environment came in early childhood. My family used to summer on the Baltic in the resort town of Sopot, then part of the territory of the free city of Danzig; today, near Polish Gdansk. The city, long under the sovereignty of the old Polish commonwealth, came, after the Partitions, to be under Prussian rule. The peacemakers after World War I had to manage reconciling the heavily German population of the area with the promise in one of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points that independent Poland should have a port on the Baltic. The ill-fated compromise turned Danzig into a free city under the League of Nations; i.e., an entity having complete political self government but with special rights reserved to Poland, a perfect recipe for an additional strain on the already tense relations between the new state and Germany. Predictably, Polish vacationers were not popular in Sopot, but they provided employment; and for them it was the country’s only seaside resort.
I have one vivid recollection from my summers on the Baltic. Most of my time was spent on the beach playing with other children. But on one occasion (I was eight or nine) my governess felt the need of a cultural diversion and most ill-advisedly took me along with her for a concert. The program consisted of several choral pieces by Wagner. I don’t know whether this is a rule whenever Wagner is performed in Germany, but on this occasion the audience behaved as if it were in church: no chatter between numbers, no clapping or anything else which might profane the sublime message of the music. Needless to say my own mood was one of boredom rather than veneration. But one number aroused my amusement, not so much on account of the music, but of the appearance of the performers: several corpulent gentlemen in formal morning attire were emitting, to me, raucous sounds in an unintelligible language. They finally concluded and made their bows. There ensued another interlude of decorous silence conducive to meditation, but not for long: because it was so quiet, the whole room became startled by an outburst of loud childish laughter. The charm was broken. Heads turned toward the culprit; there were shouts of indignation. A lady in a neighboring seat raised her umbrella as if to strike my poor governess, who hurriedly dragged me out of the concert hall. Whenever I hear Wagner I still recall my uncultured behavior on my first acquaintance with him.
Not long after this incident the free city of Danzig stopped being free except in name. Its good citizens entrusted their government to the followers of Hitler, and the city turned into a miniature Third Reich. We stopped spending summers in Sopot. My only trip to the Baltic after 1933 came on the occasion of my departure to the United States six years later.
During those years the family became dispersed. My mother’s illness required periodic trips to Vienna then famed throughout Europe for its medical facilities, and she died there in early 1938. My sister [Stefania] got married. Brother Stan finally moved to the United States, returning to Poland just for the summers. Much younger than the two of them, I was now left very much to my own devices, father’s professional obligations taking most of his time.
The economic circumstances of my family turned quite modest in those years. Father was a very successful lawyer but even so his practice was not very remunerative during the years of economic crisis. He continued working for his clients, mostly professional people and landowners, even when they remained delinquent with their fees. One simply did not abandon one’s client-friends but waited patiently, sometimes indefinitely, until they were able to pay. One such debtor whose financial distress did not evidently make him abandon expensive habits was the cause of my father’s relapse into an unfortunate addiction. During their consultations he kept offering him choice Cuban cigars and my father finally succumbed, with foreseeable consequences.
There was one bizarre fringe benefit enjoyed by the legal profession. Very occasionally my father took criminal cases. It was generally understood that lawyers so employed enjoyed immunity from the activities of their prospective clients, i.e., professional thieves. This surely sounds incredible, but I remember one occasion when my father’s stolen fur coat reappeared with an anonymous note of apology for such an unprofessional act, the writer protesting that he had not known whose coat he had stolen. There was certainly some honor among the thieves of Lwów.
Despite such intriguing sidelines of the profession, I had no inclination to be a lawyer. In contrast to the beginning of the century when my father joined the bar, the field was overcrowded. (Curiously enough,...
