It was an accident. There never was a clear plan for achieving fluency in Polish. At the time, I would have preferred Hungarian, Finnish, Basque, or even Romanian. I was studying philosophy of language, and it struck me as provincial that someone who spoke only English, and maybe a little German or French, would philosophize about the nature of language with only limited exposure to the wide variety of languages spoken by human beings.
In addition to all that, this was Communist Europe. Growing up during the Cold War in the US, I had heard all my life so much about communism and communists, that I couldn’t pass up the chance to see it for myself. This was an opportunity I wasn’t going to miss out on.
In the interests of full disclosure, other than an ex-wife, I have no familial or genealogical connection to Central and Eastern Europe, not even in-laws.
The story begins with my undergraduate studies in the United States. I enrolled in the State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton for the Fall Semester of 1986. My plan was to double major in Philosophy and German, then go to grad school in Philosophy. The reason for studying German was to be able to read Nietzsche in German. Part of the German program at SUNY-Binghamton was a semester or a full academic year as an exchange student at Universität Graz in Graz, Austria.
