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Lala land By Aviva Lori Tags: israel news, poland  When he walks in the street or enters a Jerusalem hotel, everyone turns to stare at him. He is wearing a brown velvet jacket, a floral shirt, a broad necktie, a black vest, and striped black-and-white trousers tucked into black leather boots. He is carrying an antique walking stick capped by a silver animal head. He might have stepped out of a fin de siecle photograph of European aristocrats - albeit without the homburg, which he left behind in Warsaw. From an antique gold chain dangling from a pocket hangs a large jewel; part of the chain is connected to a shell-shaped box that contains antidepressants or small change, another part to a watch. "Lala" is also the story of the Polish aristocracy and intelligentsia, of china and highly polished manners - all of which are disappearing. Dehnel is a master of the Polish language, with its different registers and subtleties, and the excellent Hebrew translation by Boris Gerus preserves, with irony and amusement, Polish's melody. Fascinated by his grandmother's life story and enthralled by her colorful personality, the author conducts conversations with her and transcribes them almost verbatim. The plot is founded on Lala's memories, and she lures him to the place where it all began. As the story progresses, her memory and Dehnel's maturation undergo opposite processes: The old woman's memory grows hazy and fades, while the narrator, the little boy, grows from being a passive listener into a man who, at a certain stage, takes command of Lala and her memory and finally adopts a properly detached adult point of view. Advertisement Granny Lala was born in Kielce in 1919. Her first husband, Julek Rogozinski, was a translator of French literature. Her second husband, Zygmunt Karpinski, Dehnel's grandfather, was a forester. Dehnel's paternal grandfather was an officer in the Polish navy, captured by the Germans in World War II and incarcerated in a prisoner-of-war camp; his father, Jacek II, was born in Gdynia, a port city on the Baltic Sea. Dehnel: "In the 1960s, my grandfather was transferred to Gdansk, which is close to Gdynia, and in the 1970s my parents met and married and thus I was born." He and his brother, two years his junior, grew up in Gdansk, the city of Lech Walesa. His father works in computers and his mother is a painter. As a boy, Dehnel spent a great deal of time with his grandmother, Lala, who lived nearby. From a young age it was clear to him that he, too, would be a painter. "Mother painted in gouache and tempera, and I also painted a great deal during these years, but because I was asthmatic I could not paint with oils," he explains. "I studied at the academy of art, but could not take part in the oil-painting workshops. All I could do was learn the theory and draw or paint in aquarelle. Talent? Well, I had some sort of talent, but it's the same with writing. Talent is one thing and hard work is something else." He also began to write poetry at a young age: "That happened by itself. I was a smart-aleck kid. We had an open house and I was always present when my parents entertained. I read a lot, and in comparison with most 10 year-olds, I had a very coherent, broad worldview. According to our house code, it was clear that every person must express himself artistically. One did not have to be a piano virtuoso but, for the sake of personal development, one had to do something: play the guitar, paint in aquarelles, scribble in the margins of notebooks - the main thing was to be creative. At the age of 18, Dehnel entered the University of Warsaw's humanities program. He still believed he would earn a living largely from painting and that writing would be only a hobby. "I painted large works in the style of the French Symbolists, the way people painted in the fin de siecle period," he recalls. "I showed works in exhibitions and I still have paintings at home which I find difficult to part with." At 19 Dehnel started to send poems to literary competitions, winning prizes. His name began to stir interest in literary circles as the next hot thing in poetry. His first poetry book was published in 2004 and earned him the Koscielski Foundation Literary Award - Poland's second most important literary prize. "That helped," he says. "Things began to get easier." He has published several books of poetry and his poems have been translated into French, Basque, Gaelic, Lithuanian, Slovakian, Slovenian and English. Dehnel started to work on "Lala" at the age of 20, but after completing the novel did not try to contact a publisher. His new book, to be published this fall, pursues the theme of romantic nostalgia and includes a collection of old photographs Dehnel collected or bought in flea markets, juxtaposed with literary texts that uncover the secrets underneath the graphic images. Why does someone so young revel in past history instead of looking toward the future? "I think it is the role of parents and grandparents to make sure young people know the world did not begin yesterday, but has been around for a few years. I am aware that this soil on which we are walking is covered by a thin layer of dust we created, but beneath it are a great many other layers that were created by earlier generations. It is my feeling that every word I use, and all the things around us, were here long before us and will remain long after we are gone." All the women in "Lala" are strong and independent, the men far less so. Dehnel always thought this was the case in his family only, until he says he discovered that these traits are typical of all women. "It is also typical of Poland," he notes. "Men fought in the wars and took part in the rebellions, and women stayed behind and looked after the house, the children, even entire estates. So it happened that a woman, who formerly was weak and pale and spent her time playing a grand piano, suddenly was compelled to deal with large property holdings and to see to the livelihood of the family and the workers." Lala's family had two such estates in the Kielce area. Over time they fell into disrepair, just like the aristocracy and the intelligentsia. "If the national character of the Poles can be summed up in a word, it is poetry," Dehnel says. "Every Pole is a potential poet." In addition to being a full-time writer and poet, he works in television as an editor and hosts a weekly cultural program. "That made it possible for me to buy an apartment, for which I am still paying," he says, "because to make a living from literature alone is a bit difficult." Why the cane? "For the pose - and for the asthma. It gives me confidence in the street. At first I walked with an umbrella and now with a cane. I have a collection of antique canes. But maybe it is really more because of the facon. One of the advantages of homosexual relations is that one can exchange clothes with one's boyfriend. Yes, I have had a boyfriend for five years now, and my impression is that this will not change soon." Dehnel's family responded to that news with mixed feelings - his mother far better than his father, who perhaps understood that in Poland's intolerant climate, the prospects for a Jacek IV are not great. Dehnel did not come out of the closet publicly, but is also not secretive about his identity. He believes that the more exposure the subject gets, the more naturally the phenomenon will be accepted in Poland. "I never made a fuss about it. I went out with boys freely and openly," he explains. "The formative experience was the first time I saw the film 'The Neverending Story.' I must have been about eight. I took a great liking to the boy and felt that something odd was happening to me. That was my first awareness of my sexual difference. I had my first boyfriend at age 17, but my parents suspected nothing until I told them. "Parents," he continues, "have a rare ability not to see things and to ignore even telltale signs. It was immediately clear in the broader sense as well; even before I began to become famous, I wrote love poems in the masculine case. But I never went public and did not turn it into a circus, as people sometimes do when they confess in tabloids." Most gays and lesbians in Poland lead a secret life, Dehnel adds: "I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of famous people who have come out publicly, and this has implications for society as a whole." His partner, Piotr, is 26 and is working on a Ph.D. in history. They bought their apartment together. A number of Jews entered Dehnel's large family through marriage in earlier generations, but left no legacy to speak of. When the Nazis built concentration and death camps on Polish soil, the Poles knew they would be next in line, Dehnel says: "Today, when I walk around Warsaw, I cannot forget what happened in those streets - the poverty, the ghetto, the executions, the Umschlagplatz [where Warsaw Jews were collected for transport to death camps]. It is terrible. For me, the Jewish fate and the Polish fate are intertwined." Did your grandmother also tell you about the pogrom perpetrated by Poles against Jews in Kielce after the war? "During the war, Grandma was no longer in Kielce, but in Warsaw. But yes, she knew many Jews, friends and acquaintances, and felt terrible about what happened." Lala died a year ago. "During her last years she was quite cut off from things," her grandson says. "She stopped talking and responding. She just sat in an armchair or lay in bed, and communication with her was generally limited. Sometimes, though, she would snap out of it and throw herself into life tempestuously. "One day a friend came to visit me. He felt ill and lay down on the sofa to listen to an opera by Puccini - 'Tosca.' By then, my grandmother no longer remembered anything and could not tell the difference between a violin and an orchestra. But some portal was suddenly opened for her: She said, 'He is now going to be executed and I do not think that will help your stomach ache.' Or one day she asked my mother and me, 'Tell me, darlings, do you remember or is it just my imagination that I had a torrid, erotic life?'"W Bookmark to del.icio.us   Human guinea pigs A medical panel concludes that Anthrax experiments on IDF troops were unjustified. Good Deeds Day Palestinian children from the West Bank perform for Holocaust survivors.

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