Throughout Women in Translation Month, I’m taking a closer look at recent translations gaining attention and acclaim. Jennifer Croft’s translation of Wioletta Greg’s Accommodations follows 2017’s Swallowing Mercury, Greg’s previous autobiographical novel. (I’m late to Greg’s work, and am eager to read this novel’s predecessor.) In 1994, Wiola leaves her rural Polish village to attend college in Częstochowa, a neighboring city. Accommodations is a lingering meditation on the relationships between individual and community, especially how those connections can serve as a conduit for cultural trauma.
Early reviews of Accommodations observed how it dangles the possibility of one genre before the reader, then proceeds full speed in the opposite direction. But its narration is more subtle than any bait-and-switch ploy. The novel opens with Wiola recounting her bus ride to the college town on “Friday, September 30, 1994.” After a disturbing encounter with a drunken man, she lugs her suitcase through the city’s outskirts, past “a lumber yard” and “faded graffiti v[ying] along the wall for attention: ‘Soviet = with you from birth.’” By orienting us in such a specific time and place, Accommodations implies a clear path forward; we’re beginning a campus novel about a young woman coming of age in the post-Communist era. There’s little indication yet of the diverse cast of characters about to burst on the scene.
So where and why does this work take a sharp left turn? Once Wiola settles into a grungy hostel, her college life fades into the background, beyond a brief mention of falling asleep in class or a short conversation with a classmate. A wide range of other voices take over: hostel manager Waldek, two young Russian men, petty criminal Scurvy. When her time at the hostel reaches an abrupt end, Wiola takes up residence at a convent, where she encounters a nun haunted by the Holocaust. Far from a linear narrative about a young woman’s experiences, it begins to feel as if Wiola is a minor character rather than a protagonist. She may be dragging a suitcase around Częstochowa, but the emotional baggage she bears is not her own.
This approach risks alienating the reader. In one sense, a young woman taking a backseat in her own story hardly feels innovative. But like a graduate student who had visited her village, Wiola often seems a participant observer in her own culture, bearing witness to unforgotten atrocities of the Second World War and the Soviet period. From Scurvy, we learn that Waldek, who waxes sentimental about his long lost love, endured a savage beating from paramilitaries who scared “even the biggest thugs” in a communist prison. In another scene, she sees a homeless man who once went to prison for attempting to steal butter. The Mother Superior of the convent recalls how her father and brother were massacred during the Nazi occupation. None of these memories can be erased by a hectic new era of prosperity, “a time of privatization, acquisitions, cable TV, securities, the issuing of bonds.” The novel ends with a primal scream, a fitting tribute to this collision between a woman and her community: “…I scream—tentative at first…then louder and louder, until finally it’s so loud the whole building can hear me, and all three Avenues and Jasna Góra combined.” Jasna Góra, a local monastery and site of pilgrimage, feels analogous to Wiola’s own journey through suffering and young adulthood.
Accommodations provides a thought-provoking take on the transmission and emotional toll of cultural memory, and is worthy of a top spot on your reading list.
Wioletta Greg, Accommodations, trans. Jennifer Croft (Transit Books, 2019)
Photo Credit: twarezak via Pixabay.
