"My silence has been deafening" is not a catchy headline.

But I hope you'll read this anyway.

I haven’t written in a while. According to the calendar on the wall, my last Around the Block was posted on August 18th. This lack of productivity is certainly not due to a shortage of topics about which to opine, particularly regarding the election,

Yes, Trump keeps digging a deeper and deeper hole of lunacy each time he speaks. Yes, the media — I talking about you, The New York Times and The Washington Post — continue to critically dissect everything Kamala Harris does or doesn’t do in their news coverage, while only reporting, but without substantial comment, on Trump’s racist, misogynistic, antisemitic (yes, antisemitic!), apocalyptic, unhinged rants. Folks, is America really the country Trump describes every time he opens his mouth? Are we really the stupidest, worst country in history? Are “tens of millions of murderers and rapists” really swarming our borders? Is our economy really terrible and our military really weak? Is it possible that in a mere four years, we’ve gone from the “nirvana” of the Trump presidency to the dark ages of Biden’s?

Yes, there is plenty to write about. But so much is being written and broadcast by the professional commentators, I wondered if there was really anything substantial I could add. I suspect most readers of this blog are aware of what’s happening in this presidential race. So, why burden you with yet another email to trash before reading? At least I’m not asking for money as are 80% of the emails and texts I receive.

(BTW, have you noticed the simple act of unsubscribing to these emails, or responding Stop2End to the texts, actually increases their frequency exponentially? But I digress.)

Overburdening you, dear readers, with my opinions hasn’t stopped me before, so why now?

Simply because I’ve begun to work on some other writing projects. And, I’m traveling. In fact I’m writing this today from a hotel in Krakow, Poland.

As some of you know, I’ve had an interest, some might call it an obsession, with Poland for quite some time. But, can I pinpoint when my “Polonia-mania” began?

Perhaps it was my first visit in 1988. Poland was still behind an quickly rusting Iron Curtain. The Polish Solidarity movement was on the rise. With that backdrop, Sharon and I flew to Warsaw to see our then 11-year old daughter who was touring Poland with Soviet, Polish and American kids in Peace Child, a musical revue promoting peace among nations. The best description of Warsaw that summer was gray. The buildings were gray. The food was gray. The people were gray. Today Warsaw is a modern international capital with soaring, shiny skyscrapers and gleaming, modern urban shopping malls featuring all the major international retailers. Of course, Warsaw has not forgotten its darker side, which a walk through the former Jewish Ghetto is a stark reminder of.

Maybe it was the Jewish heritage trip to Poland we took with the Marin JCC eight years ago that heightened my Polska obsesja (Polish obsession).

Most likely, while these trips provided the foundation, I really believe it was the genealogy project that Sharon and I embarked on about10 years or so ago that built on that foundation. Our research allowed us to trace Sharon’s familial roots back to the early 1800’s and eastern Poland — Łomża where her paternal grandfather, Rafal Kolniak (Ralph Kolnick) was born; Nowogród where Rafal moved to apprentice to a tailor, Szolim Mendel Kon (Cohen) and eventually marry his daughter, Etka Dwojra (Ethel) and where Sharon’s father, Leibel Hersz (Louis Harvey) was born in 1913.

In fact, one of the reasons I’m here in Poland is to visit the site of the old Jewish cemetery in Nowogród which is being restored, funded by Friends of Jewish Heritage in Poland. (click on this link for more information)

But, visiting the cemetery is not the only reason I’m in Poland.

I mentioned that JCC trip several years ago. What I didn’t mention was the most important thing that came out of that trip — the relationship that began after meeting one of our tour guides, a 30-something woman named Kamila. During our time together Kamila told us a bit of her history, the most important aspect of which was her discovery, while researching her own genealogy as a student at Krakow’s Jagiellonian University, that her heritage was Jewish, not Catholic. Sharon and I are very close to Kamila and her now almost 14-year old daughter, Sara. We’ve visited them in Poland many times; Kamila has traveled with us throughout Poland, introducing us to more heritage, Jewish and Polish, than one could ever get on a tour. We consider Kamila and Sara, as well as Kamila’s fiancee, Pawel, family, as they do us. In fact when Kamila told Sara about my visit, she told her schoolmates, “My Jewish grandpa from America is coming.”

Earlier in this essay, I mentioned “other writing projects.” One of those projects is a collection of short stories entitled “Bashert,” the Yiddish term for “fate” or “destiny.” Kamila will be the subject of one of those stories as her’s is truly bashert. I’m here on this trip to fill in the blanks of Kamila’s story. In that process I’m discovering that in Kamila’s case, there might be more than one bashert.

Stay tuned.