In The Polish Town

My first trip overseas was to Poland and I'd move there except my house is Polish already, with a flowering meadow across the lane, etc. Finding Sylvia Plath's grandmother's Polish home address I Google-Mapped it. Ernestine Kottke Plath died in an Oregon mental hospital in 1919 but her childhood home still stands: 12, Strozewo (a village).

I saw the address in Ernestine Plath's Oregon State Hospital record.

Just six miles away is a Plath landmark town, under German rule spelled "Budsin," today in Polish spelled "Budzyn," population 2,000. It's Plath's grandfather's hometown. Sylvia called it a "manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia." Theodor Plath married local girl Ernestine in 1882 and settled there. I think Ernestine gave birth to Otto in Grabowo because she had relatives there, but Otto grew up in Budsin, and tired of maps I wanted to see the place.

"Strolling" through the older part of Budsin I saw where the Plaths might have raised their children, not quite to their adulthood. The year Otto was born the German Empire's increasingly menacing army started cleansing the empire of Russians, Poles, and Jews. Masses of ethnic Germans like the Plaths were already leaving for the U.S., partly to escape conscription. Otto was 15 when he went to the U.S. His father, and then his mother and five siblings, ages 4 to 13, left Prussia the following year, 1901.

Traditional Polish houses are stone covered in paintable stucco. I learned Gmin means local government, and this is Budzyn's City Hall at the center of town.

Poles put flowers wherever they feel like it. It's a celebratory thing.

For the address of the Plath house in Budsin I'd need church or civil records not readily accessible. But I like Poland for itself and felt at home there. My mother's parents were Polish immigrants. They died when I was very small but I remember the Polishness of their house and ours. I hope you too grew up amid abundant cabbage-rose decor.

Sylvia's "Remote Mongolian Ancestor" and "Ariel"

People's Republic of Mongolia flag, 1939-45. Stalin suggested the emblem's design.

Sylvia Plath maybe did have a "remote Mongolian ancestor" as her husband Ted Hughes told his editor she did -- more than a year after Sylvia had killed herself. [1] Hughes said she wanted a heroic horse-and-rider image, as on the former Mongolian flag, printed small on the cover of her book Ariel; that she "prided herself" on this ancestry. As an alternative, Plath had suggested the image of a rose.

Neither image came to be. The publisher bound Hughes's edit of Ariel in the red cloth Sylvia had wanted, but without horse and rider or a rose.

Like many people, Sylvia wished for a heritage more interesting than her own. On her mother's side, records back to the late 1600s show Roman Catholic ancestors all baptized and married. The question "Was Sylvia Jewish?" is now settled: The answer is "No." Did she have a fortune-telling "gypsy (Roma) ancestress" as the poem "Daddy" said? Not in her mother's line.

But farther back, where there are no family records, 13th-century nomadic Mongolian armies on horseback harrowed Asia and Europe, conquering China, Kiev, Moscow and Baghdad, Krakow and Vienna; burned Pest to the ground and flattened Meissen in northern Germany, expanding their Great Khan's empire to four times the size of the Roman Empire.

It matters, I think, to Sylvia's poem "Ariel" that the Mongols controlled their horses with their heels and knees, freeing their upper bodies for deadly archery. They murdered, tortured, pillaged, and raped, leaving as a legacy their blood type, B, a genetic variant originating in the Himalayas.

The Mongolian empire's growth is echoed in today's geographical distribution of blood type B. CC BY-SA 3.0

How Plath learned about her possible Mongolian ancestry we don't know. [2] Except in rare cases, we are born with either our mother's or father's blood type. Aurelia Plath wrote on a health card that Sylvia's blood type was O. Aurelia Plath had type O. Aurelia's ancestors might have had some B, but Aurelia did not have it. Because Otto Plath's heritage was Polish and north German, he might have had type B blood, but as of now there is no proof. We know only that Sylvia cannot by her blood type alone be linked with Mongolia. Only DNA testing could rule it in or out.

Very likely her link was spiritual, as with the Jews she envied for their history and traditions, and her wish to align with the oppressed. During the fight of her life, the fury that inspired Ariel, Plath came to claim descent from one of a Golden Horde of ruthless warriors -- if what Ted Hughes said is true.

Thank you, Eva Stenskar, for sending me the question about Plath's claim to Mongolian ancestry, and the documentation, and the flag image.

[1] Ted Hughes to Charles Monteith, 7 April 1964.

[2] The link between Mongolia and Eurasians with blood type B was established in the 1940s, after Otto Plath's death, so Plath did not hear about it from Otto.