I return to Gdańsk, the place I grew up, after an eight-year absence, to complete a novel manuscript about fathers. On the plane over, I read King Lear for the first time, then reread The Tempest. I am not consciously seeking out plays about fathers and daughters, power and freedom, but they appear on my phone regardless, as if sent by someone.

In her memoir, Homesick, Polish-to-English translator Jennifer Croft defines homesickness as a refusal to surrender what has already been lost. I have returned to my motherland, or more accurately my fatherland — ojczyzna, as we call in Polish, after ojciec (father) — the place where my father lives. He has never been to Canada, my parents having divorced in 1981 when I was four and my father having spent the bulk of his life as a merchant marine on the world’s oceans and in the world’s exotic ports of call, Toronto not being exotic enough to be called upon. (He did dock in New Orleans when Katrina hit. During that major tempest, he got the closest to Toronto he ever would.) I am here on my own, without my English- and French-speaking partner and children, supported by a grant from an arts organization. I am here to research, to factcheck the manuscript I recently completed. This is my first work since my 2012 debut novel, which was set here, in Gdańsk, the place I have lost but have not surrendered.

Danzig (German), Gedanum (Latin), or Gdańsk (Polish) is Poland’s largest city in terms of area, a Baltic jewel claimed for over a thousand years by various warring actors: the Teutonic Order, Royal Prussia, Soviet Russia, Germany, and Poland, among others. It’s not the industrial port city you’d expect, but a gorgeous historic town full of ancient red-brick buildings. The “sledded Polacks” King Hamlet smote before his death were likely from here. It’s the birthplace of the Solidarity movement, albeit not its leader, Lech Wałęsa. People come here. There is a pull. Iodine is good for you, or so the saying in Poland goes. This is the nucleus of the dissolution of European Communism. After the Treaty of Versailles, it was the Free City of Danzig. When the Reich tried evacuating its population from here in 1945, seven thousand civilians drowned in the Baltic — the world’s largest brackish sea — when the ship Wilhelm Gustloff was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine. In a pinch, Baltic water is hydrating; in the winter, it’s deadly. After World War II, the population of the city was almost entirely replaced: Germans out, Poles in.

On the way to meet my father and his wife for dinner in the city’s ancient Starówka, which reminds some of Amsterdam, I walk through the Złota Brama (Golden Gate), which is topped with statues depicting Piety, Justice, Concord and Prudence. Prudence was the patron saint of the city’s motto, Nec temere, nec timide (Neither rashly nor timidly). I consider whether I actually know what prudence is. I find a definition on my phone: “The ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason.” My homesickness defies reason. I spent a mere decade here. This is not the same city I left in 1988, and yet I feel the missing in my bones.

I haven’t been to Gdańsk since 2016, when my children were small; before that, I was here with my partner in 2007; and before that with a boyfriend in 1998. I don’t come back often, but I do like to show it off. A thousand-year-old coastal city is cool. But return trips are expensive. There are more pressing things to do, like kitchens and bathrooms to renovate, Florida amusement parks and Icelandic glaciers to check off bucket lists.

I sit with my father and his wife in a restaurant that serves local fare to tourists from Germany and Scandinavia, expats and their foreign families. We haven’t seen each other in eight years. We are not in the habit of patching distance with technology. Our contact is sparse and spare. There is nothing to make of this fact. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is. This is a place of travelers, wanderers, runaways, migrants. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, ninety percent of Poland’s Jewish citizens left for North and South America. World War II claimed 5.6 million Polish lives and destroyed entire cities. In the early 1980s, before the fall of Communism, nearly a million people escaped Poland. After the country joined the European Union in 2004, more than two million people left. This place hemorrhages people, so the ones who are transfused are not welcomed back with fanfare and red carpets. We are pulled back and are met with a casual Thursday afternoon dinner.

“So, what are you researching?” my father asks. I don’t immediately answer, both because I don’t quite know what to say (my Polish is rusty and my emotions brittle), and because he follows the question with a statement that sounds ruder in translation than it sounds in his voice: “What, you’re some kind of writer now.” This is not a question. He has never read my book, in which he has a starring role as a gruff deadbeat dad, and which has never been translated into Polish. Some things cannot be translated.

My father orders two of everything. I am full before I have eaten my fish and potatoes. Dill is sprinkled on everything. “Try the schabowy,” he says and places half a pork schnitzel on my plate. “The mizeria is delicious.” He slides a small bowl of thinly sliced cucumbers, cream, and dill, toward me. I smile because mizeria sounds like misery. My brain does this thing with words, connects them in Venn diagrams, creates a kaleidoscope, organizes the chaos I feel inside.

“I should come back more often,” I say.

His wife says, “Only unhappy immigrants come back often.”

My mother visits annually.

“I am so happy to see you,” my father says and peppers me with questions about extended family, my mother’s siblings, and my sister from whom both he and I are estranged. He is estranged from his only sister, my godmother, too, even though she lives next door to him. Bad blood runs in our veins. There is no cure for what we have.

He doesn’t say he’s missed me.

He speaks quickly, repeats himself. I turn the questions onto him, asking him to tell me about his parents, grandparents. I want to know things before he’s gone, dead like all the grandparents, or locked away by Alzheimer’s like my aunt and uncle. My father is in his seventies and hasn’t enjoyed great health, although presently he looks good, certainly better than he did eight years ago. But I won’t be fooled into hoping that he’ll last for sto lat. People in our family don’t live long past seventy.

Instead of telling me about our ancestors, my father says, “Would you like a vodka?”

“No thank you,” I say. “I don’t drink,” but he doesn’t seem to hear me.

“Potato vodka is the best,” he says. “None of that wheat or rye swill. (Russian vodka is made of wheat or rye.) We have ten bottles of potato vodka at home.” His wife nods conspiratorially.

“Why?” I ask. “You don’t drink vodka.” This, I know: my father, the lifelong beer drinker; my stepmother, a wine connoisseur. Drinking vodka is not a Gdańsk thing. It has something to do with class. Only peasants drink vodka. Gdańsk comes by its snobbery honestly. In the seventeenth century, the preeminent Dutch poet Joost van den Vondel wrote an Ode to Gdańsk, praising its beauty and diplomacy.

“So we’re ready when the Russians come,” he says. They both chuckle.

I smile and survey the restaurant. People at the table to the left of us speak Ukrainian and laugh at their own jokes. Over to the right, a couple discusses something serious in Danish, or maybe Swedish. I cannot tell the difference.

“A kacap walks into a bar,” my father says, “and the Kashubian proprietor serves him a glass of ice-cold vodka. Potato. Only the best.”

Only the best. In Polish, kartofel, and in German, kartoffel, the tuber got its name from the Italian tartufo; it’s the peasant’s truffle. One of the country’s most celebrated poets, Julian Tuwim, even wrote a poem about the potato. So did Adam Mickiewicz.

I know my father to be an aggressive, hurried type, but not a vulgar one, and I know kacap to be a pejorative term. The word’s etymology is not entirely clear, possibly Ukrainian, meaning fool. Something to do with beards and goats, which is funny, because my father has worn a goatee since before my time. In any regard, a kacap is a Soviet, a Russian: the oppressor.

“It’s 1945, in a village in Pomerania, and, after a few glasses of vodka, the guest says, ‘Can you give me a few bottles of this delicious potato vodka to take home?’ The proprietor spreads his arms, gesturing to the ruined village around them, all rubble and devastation, and says, ‘Nie, panie, I don’t know when they will distill more. I have to keep some in the reserves. Who knows what the future holds.’ The drunk guest says he’d give anything. Anything. The proprietor scratches his face and says, ‘The war is over, and I don’t have a German helmet. All I wanted was a German helmet.’ The next day, the kacap, sober, comes in and plops a helmet on the counter. ‘There,’ he says. The proprietor cannot believe his eyes. It’s a Wehrmacht helmet alright, with a szkop head still in it.”

Szkop is similarly derogatory and comes from the German for castrated lamb.

“Russians keep their word,” my father says, and laughs and laughs.

I smile awkwardly, uncertain of what I am supposed to make of the story. Am I taking the joke too literally? My father, like Prospero and Lear, seems to be speaking in metaphors. I want to ask about the war next door, but he distracts me with dessert: two tarts, three orders of ice-cream, and four coffees (one of them slushy). I eat and drink, while he and his wife take turns telling stories about bartering for ivory in Zanzibar, rafting up the Amazon, and haggling with port agents in Macau, before changing the subject to their grandchild, her only son’s only son. I stuff my face and nod, groan in appreciation of their willingness to tell me some things, to be present for a child. Children need time and attention. Better late than never.

I am grateful not to have to speak too much. I am not a gifted linguist. I will never be a polyglot. I struggled with reading, and equally so with speaking. My stutter was so bad it kept words firmly locked in my mouth, where they’d roil around and have to be swallowed. My mother took me to a speech therapist. It helped, a little. English proved a better match. Its sounds and the physics of my body, the chambers that are my mouth and my throat, and their collaboration with the tongue made for smoother speech. But I still find the tongue and lip gymnastics of all spoken language hard, sometimes even torturous, especially when switching from one language to the other. I am terribly uncoordinated. And yet, I am and have always been, incredibly attracted to language. I seem to seek out difficult things.

Język Polski. Język, literally “tongue,” is the Polish word for language. It is such a beautiful sound. I love listening to it through my father and stepmother’s stories, through announcements on train platforms, and through museum audio guides. Polish is multisyllabic and complex, its sentence structure varied, several parts of speech (not only verbs) demand conjugation. It is a formal and elegant language.

I go to every museum I can find, to learn more about things that were kept from me, either because of age, or migration, or my own disinterest. I am a child of Communism brought up on propaganda. I was issued a single, uncontestable story of the fatherland. I spend hours listening, mimicking, catching up on the missed conversation time. Each day, little by little, my Polish improves. In contrast, my English becomes halting when I call Toronto to say “Hi” to my partner and kids.

My mistake is that I am trying to understand, which is impossible. I want to look up, research, find answers. I naturally lean toward science. I am not an artist. I enjoy explanations, the more complicated, intertwined, and interdisciplinary the better. When I was a child, I wanted to be a doctor, not the kind who injected her stuffed animals with her grandfather’s insulin syringes but the kind who studied her godmother’s medical textbooks (she wasn’t estranged from my father back then), seeking out more and more graphic content to understand. I wanted nothing to be mysterious or confounding. Nothing was too gross. I considered it all.

There is no way to understand a city like Gdańsk. My father, even though he was born in Gdańsk and is growing old in Gdańsk, is not a Gdańszczanin—a Danzinger—a fabled citizen of the City of Gdańsk, a city state as archaic as Milan, a Gdańszczanin as extinct as a Milanese. Think Günter Grass and Prospero. A mythical identity. When Germans were replaced with Poles at the end of World War II, Danzingers were erased. So were Gdańszczanins. Those who returned home and arrived from elsewhere in Poland became Poles, a monocultural nationalistic identity prescribed by a socialist government and ideology.

Today, the City’s three most prominent post-EU institutions are the Europejskie Centrum Solidarności (European Solidarity Centre) at the site of the former Lenin Shipyard, the Muzeum II Wojny Światowej (World War II Museum), and the black, ultra-modern Teatr Szekspirowski (Shakespeare Theatre). The theatre was built on the original site of Gdańsk’s first public playhouse, the Fechtschule (Fencing School). Travelling performers from England came here in the seventeenth century. Their first documented visit was in 1601, when Shakespeare was mounting Hamlet at the Globe. Storytelling is the main industry here. This is a modern, thriving metropolis built on a cemetery, a place that refuses to stop telling stories, no matter how gross and crude they are.

On my last night in the city, a university friend of my mother’s gives me a ticket to the premiere of Burza: The Prequel, a modern interpretation of The Tempest written by prolific and celebrated Polish artist Malina Prześluga. It’s a carefully chosen play to open the 29th annual Shakespeare Festival on the Baltic coast, the slogan of which this year is “Niech się głowy toczą” (“Let the heads roll”). At first, I am shocked by this festival motto. It seems so crass, so tone deaf. There is so much violence in the world, in the news, so much war. There are two wars raging with deep historic ties to this place, contested former Polish lands, expelled Poles building homes elsewhere. But then I decide that acquiescence to what is beyond our control is perfect and necessary. Surrender is the only thing that will let me write. There is only so much my father and stepmother can do about the war in Ukraine, which is to say nothing, besides sharing space with its migrants. I am here to listen and write things down.

I cannot help but to see Burza: The Prequel as entirely poetic and fitting of this moment in which I find myself. Prześluga’s Miranda is looking for home and tells a Milanese visitor to her island, “I used to be from there, and now I’m from here.” I used to be from here, and now I am from there. Canada is where I have spent the great majority of my life. There — Toronto. Here — Gdańsk. My homesickness for this place is disproportional to time. My first decade here seems weightier than subsequent decades there.

When Prospero shows Ariel Google Maps and the internet and seduces them with all the exotic places all over the world — the places my father used to visit instead of visiting Canada, the places my father bought Maasai sculptures and Chinese tea — Ariel is unimpressed, shrugs, and says, “There are only two places: one in which I am and the other in which I am not.”

I miss my children in Toronto. I miss my partner who refuses to go to Poland because Russian rockets have crossed the border. He doesn’t have the same risk tolerance Poles do. He’ll go when the war is over, he says. No one knows when that’ll be. In the meantime, for the first time in modern Polish history, Poles are returning more than they’re leaving. Life is pretty good here. It’s stable. Better than elsewhere, is what people in the street say. When I call home to check in, my partner asks, “How was it seeing your dad? Terrible?”

“It was lovely.”

My partner squeals with joy. Now that he’s a father himself, he reacts strongly to parenting stories.

“I think I missed him,” I say, and get unexpectedly emotional. My father was always more of a distant uncle to me than a dad. The sudden attachment of longing to him discombobulates me.

 

Back in Toronto, I take my kids to see Hamlet in High Park, a play about an adult child’s tragic longing for his father. The little one, who will be ten before the year is over, is very unhappy with me. “I like the Simpsons version better,” they say. They don’t have time to cover their eyes when Hamlet stabs Polonius in Gertrude’s bedroom, and say to me, in an angry whisper, “I hate you for bringing me here.” There is real venom in their eyes, resentment for bamboozling them. They’ve never before told me that they hate me. I recall thinking the same thing, albeit never saying it aloud to my mother, who brought me and my sister to Toronto in 1988. I was eleven and missed her terribly for two and a half years while she worked in Canada as a live-in nanny. Our reunion was a cruel hostage swap. I hate you for bringing me here, I thought while I longed for family back in Gdańsk.

By the end of the play, my child changes their mind. They don’t hate me. They’ve heard birds and seen bats, and the theatre lights look magical once the sun’s set. They’re pretty proud of themselves for understanding some of the weird English, and for making sense of the final scene. They’ve kept track of poisoned cups and tainted swords. “Actors used to go to Gdańsk to learn how to fight with swords like that,” I tell them.

“Cool,” they say, brows arched in admiration.

It’s a new feeling, being proud of Gdańsk factoids, Poland, the place attached to so much resentment while I tried to assimilate, acculturate to my new home as a self-conscious tween. There was nothing to be proud of back then, thought the eleven-year-old me, a sullen immigrant from gray Communist Poland. My family didn’t shelter Jews in their cellars.

“Don’t move back to Poland, okay,” my kid says, after I rhyme off yet another great thing about Gdańsk in the car on the way back home from Hamlet.

“I won’t,” I say, although I am not certain I am telling the truth. The leaving and the returning, they might just be bred into me, all much beyond my control. Who’s to say what will happen next.