Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Izzy’s Polka

By Debra Cash

My great-uncle Izzy was a scamp. Just ask his sisters.

As a teenager he didn’t wait his turn to leave the Ukrainian shtetl where he was born to join his older sisters in America. Instead, he stole the produce delivery horse and went over the Romanian border, landing in Philadelphia without so much as a by-your-leave or I’m-sorry-to-leave-you-in-debt-for-the-warm-blooded-transportation.

He was a scamp as a kid, a twinkle-eyed soldier in his young manhood, a doting old man when I knew him.

And Izzy loved to dance.

His wife, my great-aunt Pauline, was no dancing partner. A big woman, Pauline’s legs bowed like the supports of a Chippendale chair jammed into tiny heeled pumps that were often balanced with a commensurate cocktail hat.

So at family weddings, the dancing fell to me.

He’d come by to the table and take me away from my parents who were finishing desserts and cigarettes. He took my right hand in his left hand. He put his right hand on the small of my back where the sash was caught in a drooping bow and instructed me to reach up to the shoulder of his suit jacket.

Then Uncle Iz taught me to polka.

It didn’t matter if the music was a real polka. Anything with the requisite thump would do. One and two and. One and two and. Two gallops east and a little hiccup, then two gallops west. You could dance a polka backwards and forwards. You could dance it left or right. You could twirl or make a beeline for an open spot. You could cover a lot of ground doing Uncle Izzy’s polka and we did, getting in the way of grownup couples, brushing past the uniformed waiters with their trays and barely skirting the edge of the hotel ballroom bandstand. The room swam, kaleidoscoped. Guests, relatives I knew and those I didn’t, were smiling at us, a girl dancing with an old man, but I only caught those smiles in snatches as we whirled past. One and two and. One and two and.

Polka, you see, was a kind of handkerchief wave to the Eastern Europe Uncle Izzy had so resolutely left behind him. Polka was a dance of defanged peasants and good cheer, of courting couples and communal links. Nothing was indiscreet about the polka; nothing was too hard to do if you had breath and stamina and a good band – or even a mediocre one – pumping away behind you. Dancing the polka I was a girl from the suburbs of Detroit, but I was also a kid who came over seas and years on the tailwinds of the shtetl’s remembered music. If I listened for that skipping hiccup on and, polka would even teach me how to change direction midstream without losing momentum.

Uncle Iz went on to the World Above where I imagine him drinking tea from a glass. He has a lump of sugar jammed into the side of his cheek and it doesn’t melt until the glass has been emptied. This, I believe, was his idea of Heaven. I still dance at parties, of course. But it’s been a long time since I’ve danced Uncle Izzy’s polka.


Debra Cash, a poet and user-centered design researcher, is a longtime Boston dance critic. She will be Scholar in Residence at the Bates Dance Festival in Maine this summer. Read her program notes for World Music/CRASHarts events posted at www.worldmusic.org/blog.

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