TWO YEARS IN POLAND AND OTHER STORIES

An adventurous grandpa recounts his years of elation and isolation while teaching English in a foreign land.

Most retirees wouldn’t follow Siddall’s example–they’d rather spend their golden years calmly traveling or nesting at home. Instead, the 67-year-old joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Poland in 1997. There, he took a crash course in both language and teaching techniques, and was subsequently sent to the small, drab town of Swidnica to teach high school-level English. The author remained for two years, experiencing culture shock on many levels. But Siddall was familiar with feeling out of place, having spent three years in Munich, during the ’50s–first as a soldier for the U.S. Army and then as an art-history student at the local university. The author eventually blended in, growing so comfortable that when it was time to head home, he craved one last adventure. His solution was to drive a VW Beetle with a Norwegian friend to New Delhi, trekking through the heart of the Middle East just as tensions over the Suez Canal brought the region close to war. It’s this part of Siddall’s memoir that is truly fascinating. He recreates the five-month trip, and his month-long stint working on a cargo ship, with a combination of vivid detail and historical context that adds relevance to the turmoil of today. Oddly, it’s this same tendency that bogs down the other section of the book–the titular two years teaching in Poland–as those pages are packed with excessive detail on museums, side trips and the residue of communism, often only hinting at the raw isolation and classroom frustrations that Siddall endured each day.

A balance of emotion and context would make this memoir even more engaging; even so, his life story is fascinating.