Kasia Jaronczyk, the author of Voices in The Air, was inspired by “stories of escape over the Iron Curtain.” Her novel’s story of escape is based on the hijacking of a Polish airliner during the two years that Martial Law was in effect in Poland (1981-1983). To be clear, it draws on a particular incident, but also on a larger general trend of attempts at escape from the Polish People’s Republic. In an interview, Jaronczyk reveals that the two years of Martial Law saw 15 planned airplane highjackings, 10 of them successful. Moreover, as Julia Furman, one of the novel’s five protagonists and sometime author surrogate, explains about the actual Antonov 42 highjacking, “out of the fifty passengers,…thirty-six, or two-thirds, knew about or participated actively…, and about a hundred people knew about the plan, but no one had reported it” (p. 132). Most intriguing is the fact that women were involved in the planning of the skyjacking, and brought their young children along despite the danger to them and everyone else on board.
“The research…is only one of many highly commendable aspects of the novel, but for me it is all-important.”
One wonders, how could any mother risk her children’s lives that way? Most readers will find it hard to imagine. Yet on April 30, 1982, a LOT Polish Airlines (An-24B) on its way to Warsaw was seized and redirected to Tempelhof airport in (at that time) Western Germany. There’s even a documentary film by Krzysztof Magowski that features interviews with the hijackers. It’s listed in the resources section of Jaronczyk’s book, along with numerous other texts (all of them interesting at a glance), which the author consulted while writing Voices in The Air. The research to which this testifies is only one of many highly commendable aspects of the novel, but for me it is all-important. After all, a novel isn’t like a documentary film, even if parts of it are meant to limn one (precisely the narrative hallmark of the novel’s second part, “Flight”). To wit, fiction relies on its own internal logic, as well as the artistry an author imbues it with to be compelling. A novel like Voices in The Air—ostensibly about a hijacking, but in reality, about the lived experience of Polish women during and after Soviet-imposed communism—must be meticulously detailed to succeed. An in-depth understanding of this period in Poland’s history is crucial. Without vivid depictions of Poland’s post-war grimness, the oppressiveness of everyday life, no author would convince readers that women could be desperate enough to board a plane with their children and then participate in the ensuing violence of a skyjacking.
Together, Jaronczyk’s five female protagonists—Marta Ludek, Iwona Artecka, Bożena Bryla, Julia Furman, and Ania Kwiat—function like a wide-angle lens on life in Poland during and after communism. The women, each with their own unique experience and understanding of the circumstances that impair their lives, are all connected either through family ties or the hijacking itself (though not all took part in it). It is Julia’s work on the documentary about the hijacking, which begins in 1992, seven years after that fateful event, that creates the clearest links between the women. In fact, Julia’s film, which includes interviews and voiceovers with archival footage, serves as the book’s framing device, but readers won’t know this for certain until they reach the third part, “Back on Earth.” It’s not until the novel is nearing its end that we find an articulation of Julia’s vision for the documentary she’s hoping to make, one that mirrors the structure and aims of Jaronczyk’s novel: “As Julia followed the banal scenes [of a movie she was watching about a hijacking of a plane], which were unbelievably bad…, she realized there was a film she could make. And the story would begin at the end, here, in the West, and move back to 1981, Poland” (p. 231). Unlike the film, the novel—consisting of the protagonists’ distinct but interwoven stories—begins in 1981. These flashback-like, third-person narratives then move forward in time, toward and past the hijacking, where we observe the lives of four of the five women unfold in the West.
This novel is valuable both as literature and as portrayal of life in late- and post-communist Poland. In terms of the latter, Jaronczyk effects the somber reality of life under communism by describing the minutiae of day-to-day existence: shortages or unavailability of ordinary food items made worse by the government’s introduction of ration cards; the low quality or sameness of non-essential goods; long lines; living arrangements that don’t ensure privacy; the neglect and squalor of public spaces; and poor health care. As usual, it’s the women who bear the brunt of the scarcities, especially those with children. One of the hijackers is Iwona, a teacher of literature. Her story begins this way:
The Warsaw Central Station stunk of urine and cigarette smoke, particularly in the alcoves of the mezzanine and around the granite columns….Iwona held a basket filled with hard-boiled eggs, ripe, fragrant tomatoes, and a few sticks of garlicky kabanos sausage which she’d miraculously purchased in from of the Supersam grocery store from a farmer with dirty hands. His stall was new and attracted a lot of interest from the desperate shoppers who squabbled over places in the line. Iwona felt satisfied the children wouldn’t get hungry during the trip. (p. 35)
At the start of the novel, Iwona is on her way to visit her little daughter at a paediatric hospital. Zofia is there for surgery on her congenitally-crippled leg. After the operation, Iwona and her husband Jerzy realize that the treatment Zofia requires in order to walk is not available in Poland, though it’s routine in the West. Thus, in the second half of the novel, when Julia interviews Iwona for her film, we hear her rationale for taking part in the hijacking:
The day we returned from the hospital, as I bathed Zofia, I couldn’t stop crying. I was so sick of living in a Communist country, of the drunk, incompetent doctors, the dirty, under-equipped hospitals….
Jerzy and I fought a lot. I wanted to leave Poland in any way possible. While he was at work, or attended Solidarity meetings, or demonstrated on the streets with other patriotic, deluded fools, I took afternoons off work and stood in lines in front of the Australian, Canadian and American embassies. I took Zofia with me. Her legs stuck out of the stroller, immobilized with metal braces and leather straps, and I hoped it would make the embassy employees sympathetic. (p. 142)
Iwona doesn’t manage to procure a visa. Instead, she takes part in a women’s protest. A voiceover with archival footage section follows Julia’s interview with Iwona, supplementing the more limited first-person account Julia obtains in the interview:
On July 30, 1981, about fifty thousand people, mostly women, walked in a demonstration called the Hunger Strike in Łódź. In the front were women with strollers. The march was reported by about a hundred foreign journalists….The women were so frustrated with decreasing food supply and food ration cards that they felt they had no other choice. There was real hunger. (p. 143)
The voiceovers with archival footage, appearing between the interviews Julia has conducted, are written in a reportorial style and provide historically relevant information. In other words, readers see more of what Poland was like, and why many dreamed of leaving.
Many doesn’t signify all, however. Marta, when we first encounter her, is a frame operator in a factory producing linens. Working-class, religious, and modest in her expectations, Marta has no wish to leave Poland. She is merely impatient to move out of her mother-in-law’s small apartment and into one which she and her husband Zygmunt can have to themselves. It is Zygmunt who despairs that Poland will never be free of communism. He plans the hijacking, going against Marta’s wishes. When we read about Marta in the third part of Voices in the Air, she’s an immigrant in Canada. Her two children are fully integrated and view themselves as Canadians, while she continues to pine for the country she left behind. This portrait of Marta poignantly captures the sensibilities of Poles who left as adults and never fully adapted to drastically different conditions in the West.
Ania, the stewardess, never leaves. She is young, attractive, and ambitious at the start of the novel. She enjoys the many perks of a career that was prestigious at the time, and included access to goods not ordinarily available to other Poles. She’s on the hijacked plane by coincidence, and though she considers staying in West Germany once the plane lands (mainly because Ania sees it as a chance to start a new life with one of the pilots, a married man with whom she had an affair). She opts not to defect, and later marries a successful businessman. At the end of the novel, Ania is part of Poland’s newly formed upper middle class, and living in the exclusive suburb of Podkowa Leśna, just outside Warsaw (Jaronczyk gives readers a glimpse of the country’s transformation since the end of communism in Poland in 1989). Sadly, she’s the mother of a severely autistic ten-year-old girl, and as her daughter’s main caregiver, her life will remain restricted and difficult.
Voices in the Air is a polyphonic, mixed-genre work. In addition to its window on late communist-era Poland (apart from Eva Stachniak’s Necessary Lies [2000], I’m not aware of any other novel written by a Polish-Canadian author that explores Polish society of this period), and its unconventional structure, there are many passages of memorable, evocative writing. Here, for example, we see Julia’s growing interest in film-making after her father’s passing from consumption:
She wished she had made recordings of him on film. All she had left were these photographs and his chest X-rays. When she looked at her father’s pale, cloudy lungs, housed in the ribbed, cathedral-like vaults on both sides of the white spine, she realized how much she wanted to know what people held inside them. Not the soft organs in the hollow skeletal rooms of the body (her father had hoped she would study medicine) but the thoughts and feelings that filled them like music in a cathedral. (p.120).
Not all of the five protagonists are as well-spun as Julia and Iwona. I was much less enamoured with Bożena, who is terribly parochial at the start of the novel, although I accept that she is/was representative of a certain segment of Poland’s rural population. Bożena’s recasting at the end of the book doesn’t strike me as credible, and the last chapter feels contrived (I would have preferred to see Ania in the year 2000 as the novel’s conclusion). These are minor cavils, however, especially when one adds up all there is to admire about Voices in the Air. There are Jaronczyk’s delicate and fitting references to the destruction of Polish Jewry during the Holocaust throughout the novel. There are clever descriptions of the challenges Julia faces in Poland and then in the West, which any immigrant writer or artist would appreciate. Before the hijacking, Julia is a budding filmmaker deftly negotiating censorship at filmówka, Poland’s acclaimed National Film School. Afterwards, first in West Germany, then in France, her career flounders. Jaronczyk’s insights are empathetic and witty:
Julia had been trying to write, but it wasn’t going well. She was surrounded by foreign languages, German, French, and Italian, and now that she was free to write anything she wanted, she was blocked. She missed the metaphorical surreality of life in the Polish People’s Republic….
Julia had met several local artists and writers but had been unable to connect with them. They didn’t understand the Polish Cinema of Moral Anxiety because they had no idea what life was like there. They had different concerns and interests, and they wrote for a different audience. (pp. 228-9)
Four of Jaronczyk’s protagonists live as expats either in Canada or in Western Europe. Iwona, residing with her children and ex-husband in West Germany, has reinvented herself as a translator. Like so much other unwanted baggage from her previous life, she has thrown off the shackles of a marriage that made no room for her professional aspirations. Marta, also divorced, maintains an apartment in Poland and flies there often, despite being a Canadian citizen.
Voices in the Air offers stories of flight, displacement, immigration, and the global transformations that shape and reshape individual lives. It’s an excellent example of today’s transnational fiction, and a welcome addition to the literature we can celebrate as Canadian and Polish-Canadian.
About the Author
Kasia Jaronczyk is a Polish-Canadian writer, artist and microbiologist. She immigrated to Canada at the age of 14. Her debut short story collection Lemons was published in 2017 by Mansfield Press. She is a co-editor of the only anthology of Polish-Canadian short stories Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (Guernica Editions, 2017). Her stories were short-listed for the Bristol Prize 2016 and long-listed for CBC Short Story Prize 2010. She has published in Canadian literary magazines such as TNQ, Room, Prairie Journal, Carousel, The Nashwaak Review, Postscripts to Darkness, and in anthologies Wherever I Find Myself. Essays by Canadian Immigrant Women (Miriam Matejova, Ed. Caitlin Press, April 2017) and The Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology (2016. Vol 9.). Find out more about Kasia on her website: https://kasiajaronczyk.weebly.com/
About the Reviewer
Olga Stein is an academic, writer, editor, and university and college instructor. She was born in Moscow, the capital city of the former Soviet Union. She immigrated to Canada with her parents as a child, and has lived in Toronto her entire adult life. Stein earned her BA and MA at the University of Toronto. She studied philosophy, political science, literature, and languages. After serving for two decades in medical and literary publishing, including as chief editor of the literary book review magazine, Books in Canada, she returned to academe, and completed a PhD in contemporary Canadian literature and cultural institutions.
Stein has been writing literary essays and cultural commentary for nearly two decades. Since completing her PhD, she has also been writing short fiction and poetry. She has three children. Love Songs: Prayers to gods, not men is her debut collection of poems.
Book Details
Publisher Palimpsest Press
Publication date Feb. 15 2025
Language English
Print length 250 pages
ISBN-10 1990293891
ISBN-13 978-1990293894