Current mood:mostly foggy
i've been having trouble getting the recorder to work. or rather, i have been having trouble with the rube goldberg-ian system of pulleys and cables necessary to hook my microcassette recorder into my four track. otherwise, i would be able to send the interviews we recorded in poland off to my mom for proper translation. instead, i am relying on memory of my mom's on-the-fly translations during our trip. but i've been telling this story a lot lately, which prompts me to get some version of it into words, where others can see.
my grandfather was 17 or 18 when he was wounded in world war I. he was living in the russian-occupied area of what used to be poland (at the time, and until the first world war ended, poland had been divided and occupied by russia, prussia and austria. it ceased to exist.) and appears to have been drafted into the russian army. the bullet went into his head and should have killed him. here he is recovering in the hospital.
his miraculous survival prompted his mother, my great grandmother, to come to the conclusion that god spared him for a reason, that he had a higher calling. she told him that he was going to become a priest. it appears that he did not argue.
things get a little fuzzy here. my grandmother used to tell my mother that jakub was left with a tremor from the bullet in his head, a tremor that interfered with his ability to hold the chalice with the blood of jesus in it. so, no roman catholic priesthood for him. but what we were able to piece together told a slightly different story.
according to a couple of different sources, it appears to have taken him longer than the rest of his class to get through seminary, which probably had something to do with his injury. my grandfather was days away from being ordained as a roman catholic priest when a friend made a comment to him about how exciting it was, something along the lines of "hey! you're going to be a priest!"
apparently my grandfather said the equivalent of "it's about fucking time." his friend reported him, which prompted the church to investigate him for pride, to determine whether or not he was fit to be a man of the cloth.
well, that pissed him off, which is not surprising, since we are still unsure whether or not he wanted to be a priest, or if it was all his mother's doing. so, he stormed off and joined the polish national catholic church, a then-illegal spinoff of the roman catholic church that refused to recognize the authority of the pope, thought that priests should be allowed to marry, and thought that the church should be about the people, going so far as to insist that sermons be given in the language of the residents of any given area, instead of latin. he was fined for giving funeral services and fined for visiting the sick and lived in a decaying house with a crooked roof.
this story prompted my mother to look at me and say, "see, you get your stubbornness from your grandfather ... and your grandmother ... and your great uncles ... and your great aunts and your uncles and your mother."
i guess it explains a lot.
my grandfather was 17 or 18 when he was wounded in world war I. he was living in the russian-occupied area of what used to be poland (at the time, and until the first world war ended, poland had been divided and occupied by russia, prussia and austria. it ceased to exist.) and appears to have been drafted into the russian army. the bullet went into his head and should have killed him. here he is recovering in the hospital.
his miraculous survival prompted his mother, my great grandmother, to come to the conclusion that god spared him for a reason, that he had a higher calling. she told him that he was going to become a priest. it appears that he did not argue.
things get a little fuzzy here. my grandmother used to tell my mother that jakub was left with a tremor from the bullet in his head, a tremor that interfered with his ability to hold the chalice with the blood of jesus in it. so, no roman catholic priesthood for him. but what we were able to piece together told a slightly different story.
according to a couple of different sources, it appears to have taken him longer than the rest of his class to get through seminary, which probably had something to do with his injury. my grandfather was days away from being ordained as a roman catholic priest when a friend made a comment to him about how exciting it was, something along the lines of "hey! you're going to be a priest!"
apparently my grandfather said the equivalent of "it's about fucking time." his friend reported him, which prompted the church to investigate him for pride, to determine whether or not he was fit to be a man of the cloth.
well, that pissed him off, which is not surprising, since we are still unsure whether or not he wanted to be a priest, or if it was all his mother's doing. so, he stormed off and joined the polish national catholic church, a then-illegal spinoff of the roman catholic church that refused to recognize the authority of the pope, thought that priests should be allowed to marry, and thought that the church should be about the people, going so far as to insist that sermons be given in the language of the residents of any given area, instead of latin. he was fined for giving funeral services and fined for visiting the sick and lived in a decaying house with a crooked roof.
this story prompted my mother to look at me and say, "see, you get your stubbornness from your grandfather ... and your grandmother ... and your great uncles ... and your great aunts and your uncles and your mother."
i guess it explains a lot.
 | Currently listening: The Best of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds By Nick Cave Release date: 23 October, 2001 |
