“My mother’s side of the family is Polish, but neither she nor my grandmother had ever been to Poland. I felt like if I ever had the opportunity to see where we were from, I should take it. So one summer, when I was 24, I strong-armed my friend Zuzanna, a Warsaw native who was then attending grad school in Moscow, into bringing me home with her. We stayed with her grandparents, who lived in this very bleak Soviet-style building, in what turned out to be a lovely apartment. I was struck by their hospitality—they rolled out quite a welcome for somebody they had never met before. When we first arrived, they served us a tomato-based soup that had some meat in it, and I was so jet-lagged I ate…
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Conde Nast Traveler (Digital) - 1 Issue, January/February 2021