Canada Blues

Canada brings to mind the Niagara Falls, snow-capped mountain peaks reflected in the lakes, and maple syrup. The participants of the “Canada Blues” meeting, organized on April 24 at the Przemyśl Public Library, will remember other images.

Mieczysław Szabaga – poet, actor and director, who has been involved in organizing amateur cultural activities for years. He is one of the co-founders of RSTK in Przemyśl, and has been its president since the 1990s. For his work, he has been awarded the following badges: Meritorious Cultural Activist, Meritorious for Polish Culture, and the following medals: Jakub Wojciechowski for Merit for Workers' Culture, Success Leader, Meritorious for Culture Gloria Artis. He has published three volumes of poetry: "Pętla bytu", "Kwantyfikacja", "Na delfijskim etacie". This year, he was admitted to the Rzeszów branch of the Association of Polish Writers.

Meeting with the family

The Workers' Association of Culture Creators in Przemyśl is the organizer of many author meetings, both of "club members" and friendly writers, but the work of president Mieczysław Szabaga is presented extremely rarely, and the promotion of a book written in poetic prose in Polish and English took place for the first time. "Terminal No. 1, the Boeing's fat belly spat out passengers..." - this is how "Canadian Notebook" begins, which was created as a result of the author's stay in the Land of the Maple Leaf in 2014. It is a story about maintaining family ties and searching for Polish accents among a multicultural community.

It is also an opportunity to follow the fate of the Kowalewski family, who were thrown thousands of kilometres away from their homeland by the turmoil of war – first to Argentina, where they learned to live in a new reality, learned the local culture and shared their customs. On the pages of the “Canadian Notebook” we find descendants of those people in Toronto, as heirs to a thriving company – Roots, whose headquarters are located on one of the city’s main streets, and whose brand is known throughout the country.

“Auntie is a Canadian bastion of Polishness” – thanks to her, the generation born in Canada can speak broken, but still Polish, to their guests. Her home, full of memorabilia, radiates warmth, and the stories are endless.

Canadian Landscape

“I take a picture after a picture, and the water from the waterfall splashes into tiny droplets and soaks me painfully from head to toe.” Niagara, the CN Tower, the town of King City, the Polish Military Cemetery, the Chopin restaurant are just some of the places the author visited and immortalized in photographs. He included his impressions in notes, which were translated into English by Agnieszka Andrzejewska.

The slide show from the trip displayed during the meeting was prepared, presented and set to the atmospheric blues by Zdzisław Czernecki.

“The Canadian Notebook” is a travel document and a link between people who are related by blood thousands of kilometers away. Those living in North America naturally forget about the country of their parents, but maybe, at least once in a while, someone will come across a bilingual book by a relative from Poland and be reminded that somewhere across the big pond there is a country where their Canadian family roots are.

Joanna Lorenowicz