The Long and Winding Road through Inner and Outer Trenches of Post-Soviet Europe Available to Purchase

Two books, one by an Iranian-born German philosopher writer, another by a Polish reporter, create travelogues that shed a meaningful light on Poland and more or less adjacent countries and territories heavily tried by history and the present. Navid Kermani actually travels through Poland on his circuitous route through post-Soviet countries to the land of his birth, leaving us a thoughtful and quite readable travel diary, as the English publishers—the book is a translation from German—call it. Tomasz Grzywaczewski, the Polish journalist, specializes primarily in reportage travelogues, but more recently also in war correspondence.¹ The book under review records his travels along the former, prewar border of the Second Polish Republic to meet the people who within their long lives recall something from that not so distant historical past, and the transformation of those lives and their environs from that time to the present. This naturally includes cutting through...