in places with claims to cosmopolitanism, live in the here and now, and are interested in what pertains directly to their lives. When I visit Poland, the situation repeats itself. No one seems very interested in my life in America. I feel like Irena, a character in Kundera's novel Ignorance, who on a visit to Prague invites her old friends to a restaurant in hopes of reviving their friendship. She would like to tell them about her life in France, but they want to talk about their own concerns. She feels that " by their total uninterest in her experience abroad, they amputated 20 years from her life. " In the same way, my life can be said to have been cut short both in Poland and in America. But I don't feel incomplete. Quite the contrary. I feel sometimes as though I'd been given a gift of two lives. I draw sustenance from two cultures, read books in Polish and English, write and translate in both languages. And while I'm fine with that situation,