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GAZETTE

May 2012
Text Box: by Sue Orsen "I was playing a polka and my mom was giving me the show of her life. She danced the polka as if she were eighteen." ~CHEZ Personal stories by Chez Reginiak and his friend Janie Jasin of Victoria are interwoven throughout their books, their shows, their talks. Their latest theme is the polka, that old traditional song and dance that lives in the hearts and feet of an old traditional people and still captivates people of all ages and cultures today. You can't ignore a polka. Everywhere in the work of Chez and Janie can also be seen the accompanying influence of their mothers. A melding of music and mothers would not be incidental. As the beat of a song defines the dance, so the beat of a mother's heart defines the home -- whether that home be in the USA or in Poland. If there is music in the mother's heart, there is music in the home. Especially if it's a mother's polka. "The floor in our 100-year old house was squeaking underneath her feet to the rhythm of her dance, a beat for each of her six children." When Chez sought to escape from Poland back in 1985, he was 25 years old. There was no guarantee he would not be captured and jailed, no guarantee he'd be able to cross the Alps on foot or would find the refugee camp in Austria, no guarantee he would arrive safely in the United States of America, and surely no guarantee that he would ever see his mother again. "You will come back, won't you, Son? We can't live without you. And who will eat these potatoes?" His mother asked these simple questions of him, but they belied a huge history that was not so simple. Her father, the grandfather of Chez, died in Auschwitz. Her mother, the grandmother of Chez, spent years in prison during World War II. And now her youngest son was saying goodbye as she sat peeling potatoes outside the front door of the family home in Lukta, a small town in Poland where her husband had once served as vice-mayor. "I looked at her. Oh, Mama! And my tears said what my lips could not. She answered with her tears falling on the potatoes." *** Janie Jasin arrived in Victoria in 1994, having moved here from nearby Lake Minnewashta. She grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Old Countries of her ancestry are Ireland and Germany. Click here to continue A Mother’s Polka.

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952-902-2014
Text Box: A Mother’s Polka