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On a windy late winter day, six months before the fiftieth anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, I walk north, parallel to Stalin's Palace of Culture, in the direction of what used to be the ghetto. Along the broad sidewalk I notice a row of appliance stores selling coffeemakers, space heaters, clothes washers, food processors. It reminds me that I want a teamaker for my office on Nowy Swiat (New World) Street: The commons room at the University of Warsaw's English Institute, where I' m a visiting scholar, has a plastic contraption that brews lukewarm water, and you have to walk from your office to the porter's room and sign out the key to the commons room, open the commons room, pour the water, lock the common's room, take the key to the porter's room and sign it back in, return to your office, unlock your door, put the teabag in the water, and then sit back and wonder why you did all that. I go into two of the stores along Swietokrzyska Street to price some German models, and though I find a pretty good teamaker for twenty dollars, I can't buy it now; the store doesn't take credit cards.
Back on the street, the people around me walk silently, accustomed to bad weather. It' s not quite raining, but umbrellas are out over the faces of teenagers in fake leather jackets, and women are holding newspapers over their orange hair (it's chic to go red in Warsaw, but salons are botching it). A pornographic film appears in the window of a video kiosk. I'm looking for the synagogue on Twarda Street, the only one left in Warsaw, but so far my only clues are disembodied graffiti: hangmans' scaffolds with Stars of David dangling from the ropes, black swastikas. I pass an elementary school, a pizza parlor. Then I discover, near Twarda, the Jewish Theater, where Yiddish plays are performed to audiences wearing Polish-translation headphones. Two bored policemen sit behind a screen in its lobby, and a pleasant old fellow on the other side of the room leans against a table with postcards and posters on it.
I buy four postcards: the Bialystok market in 1930, a cracked Hebrew gravestone from an eighteenth century...