ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 3, 1996 TAG: 9609040025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DECADE ago, it might have been the start of a good spy novel.
A soft-spoken college professor trades places with a communist artist in Poland. Cold War intrigue to follow - involving, perhaps, a flight to freedom, or a deadly assignment for the CIA.
But the Cold War is over now.
And truth to tell, Charles Brouwer just felt like going.
"There's something about the setting of the country and the way it looks that appeals to me," said the Radford professor, describing a years-long love affair for Poland that preceded the odd swap. "Sometimes I think it's just the color. Poland is beautiful countryside and very dark, plain-looking cities. I kind of like that look, even though it's sad."
Brouwer had been to Poland before.
Three times, in fact.
Still, those were all short visits, and he pined to stay awhile. But he had a job - not to mention a house - here in Radford.
Then there was the matter of money. Radford University, where Brouwer taught art, would provide the paid sabbatical - but maintaining homes both here and abroad would not be cheap.
Then it occurred to Brouwer that there might be someone in Poland with the same problem in reverse.
And he had an idea.
"It was a simple idea," Brouwer. "We trade homes, studios, lives."
In these post-Soviet days, of course, this is hardly "spy vs. spy."
Poland, after all, has become so democratic it threw Nobel Laureate Lech Walesa out on his ear in last fall's presidential elections.
McDonald's has come to Gdansk. Kentucky Fried Chicken, too.
But for Brouwer, who for years has been fascinated by this much-fought-over country between Germany and Russia, Poland is a new, brave world. A place where people are molding hard-won freedoms into a new society.
And it thrills him.
"There is this sense that here's a people who have struggled hard for their society," he explained, "and they're in the midst of winning."
They have certainly known losing.
Poland was part of the Soviet Bloc for 40 years, sealed off behind the Iron Curtain. Its freedoms are still so new, said Brouwer, that when an artist set up a copy machine recently on a Gdansk street corner, people lined up rapidly with articles and documents to reproduce.
It is the land of Auschwitz Concentration Camp - an atrocity for which Poles hold Germany wholly responsible, Brouwer said - and the birthplace of the pope. It is the setting for such landmark 20th-century novels as "The Wall," "The Tin Drum," and "Sophie's Choice" - all of them haunted by the Second World War, none of them happy books.
Gdansk itself is famous for its shipyards. A star-crossed city of some 450,000 people, it was once the most prosperous seaport on the Baltic.
Formerly known as Danzig, Gdansk in medieval times was an independent city, much like Venice. In the mid-18th century it had the largest population in Eastern Europe. It was seized by Prussia in the latter years of that century, however, and steadily declined.
When Poland refused to surrender the city to Germany in 1939, Gdansk won the unhappy distinction of being the site of the first shots fired in World War II.
It was in Gdansk that Brouwer found his man - Stanislaw Radwanski, a sculptor who once did commissions for the Community Party.
Beginning in late February, the two swapped homes for five months.
Radwanski headed for Radford with his wife and son, to teach two of Brouwer's sculpture classes for him, while Brouwer and his wife, Glenda, headed for Gdansk.
There the Brouwers lived in the Radwanskis' house. Charles Brouwer used Radwanski's studio on Mariatski Street in the historic district. The Brouwers even drove the Radwanskis' 1979 BMW - when it worked.
Radwanski, a big, jovial man who speaks little English but was reportedly nonetheless a great hit with Radford students, returned to Poland a month ago.
Brouwer, back home himself from his sojourn in Gdansk, talked recently about the country he had left. It is a place where people in the countryside cut grass with scythes, he said. Where people carry statues of the Virgin Mary through the streets of Gdansk on June 6, Corpus Christi Day, and place bright yellow Solidarity helmets at her feet.
Though Catholicism is said to be waning these days in Poland, the church the Brouwers attended on Palm Sunday was so crowded there was no place to sit down. People throughout Poland still go on pilgrimages to see the famous Black Madonna of Czestochowa.
On foot.
Poland also is a country after Roanoke Mayor David Bowers' heart - with passenger rail service to every city.
And Gdansk, which was heavily damaged in the war, has been painstakingly restored. Its architecture, reflecting the blend of cultures in a busy seaport, seems to have been imported from the lowland countries, with street after street of pretty pastel buildings with Dutch gables.
And people walk in Poland. Walk and walk. The old town area of Gdansk is off-limits to cars. Glenda Brouwer used to marvel at the well-dressed people she saw on the sidewalks.
"I thought, 'Everyone's so dressed up,''' she recalled. "Then I realized they were going to their jobs."
Her husband's love affair with Poland goes back seven years to a chance meeting with a Polish artist at an art symposium.
The artist, Krzysztof Stanislawski, was trying to set up a similar symposium in Poland - where artists were hungry, after decades of cultural isolation, for outside ideas. Brouwer pitched in, recruiting American artists to attend, and went himself to the Poland symposiums in 1990, '91 and '95. After his first visit, he was hooked.
This year, the symposium in Gdansk attracted several area artists in addition to Brouwer - including Judith Schwab of Craig County, Kathy Guest of Martinsville, and Brouwer's daughter, Jennifer Collins, a painter who lives in Radford.
The artists, who met with Polish artists and art students and worked in Gdansk studios, spoke on their return of eating mountains of potatoes and beets, walking the cobblestone streets and struggling to communicate in a language they did not know.
They also spoke of the plight of artists in a country with no money to buy art. "It was very refreshing to be there," Collins said. "It just proves to me that artists still go on, even if they don't get paid for what they do."
Schwab, who creates artworks from cast-off materials, found Poland especially tough going. People there - whether from need or habit - do not throw much away.
"There's no waste," said Schwab. And precious little dirt - "People were always sweeping and mopping."
For Brouwer, meanwhile, Poland is still a land of possibilities.
"A lot of great change is still possible there," he said. "There's a lot of turmoil going on - in a good sense."
Well, mostly good.
There are complaints, the Brouwers said, about the arrival of fast food restaurants in Gdansk.
```It's too bad they put Kentucky Fried Chicken right in the Old Town.' You hear that a little," said Glenda Brouwer.
Ditto McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Pizza Hut.
On the other hand ...
"They look real successful," her husband said.
LENGTH: Long : 137 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff. Radford University faculty memberby CNBCharles Brouwer is home from a five-month exchange with a Polish
artist. On the wall is a poster from a show
that Brouwer held abroad. color.