Re: “Don’t Send Your Kids to College. At Least Not Yet.” (The New York Times, Opinion, April 5, 2016)
To the Editor:
In a recent piece, Abigail Falik argues that one way to improve the American university system is to encourage students to take a gap year after high school. She cites issues like high stress levels among college students and increasing freshman dropout rates. Although gap years can be very beneficial for some students, they are not the solution to these specific problems. Students who are unprepared to succeed in college are likely to be just as unprepared to benefit from real-world experience during a gap year.
Whoever said it was impossible to ruin hard-boiled eggs clearly did not take a gap year.
During my gap year I struggled with time management, budgeting, and self-care while trying to hold down a job, and I wish I had had the opportunity to learn these lessons in an environment populated with my peers and with resources at hand to assist me. Falik mentions some universities that have developed ‘bridge year’ programs that provide guidance for students (as well as financial assistance) during gap years. However, in addition to needing more support during my gap year, I felt that the time off caused some of the skills I perfected in high school, such as exam taking, to evaporate entirely. This negatively impacted my grades during my freshman year and has already limited my employment opportunities. Until labor market outcomes post-graduation are less dependent on grades, gap years may come back to haunt students later in life.
College should be a safe space where students can develop from teenagers into working adults. Growing up is stressful wherever you are and whatever you happen to be doing. Let’s let kids finish the process in each other’s company, while getting the education they need to succeed in the real world.
Photo courtesy of Arthur Goldhammer – @artgoldhammer
“When the army found out that I could speak French, they sent me for training in Vietnamese,” Arthur Goldhammer explains. Thus began his foray into translation, which would turn into a career of three decades. With a bachelor’s degree and PhD in Mathematics from MIT, Goldhammer took a less traditional route to translation. That does not seem to have been a problem, however: over the course of his career, Goldhammer has translated over 135 French works, more than any other single French to English translator.
If it had not been for the draft notice Goldhammer received in 1968, it is possible his career would have taken an entirely different path. Goldhammer left for Vietnam intending to return to MIT and pursue a career as a mathematician, but as he says, “unbeknownst to me my passions had changed” during his time as an interpreter and translator in the army. In Vietnam, Goldhammer found that because the Vietnamese officers with whom he was working had been trained under the French colonial system, it was easier for them to communicate using their second language, French. “I really used my French in that capacity,” he explains. Having spent that time abroad, Goldhammer discovered he wanted to see the world. He recalled his first trip to Paris and wanted to go back. But despite his restlessness toward the end of the War, Goldhammer’s pragmatism took over: “I figured that my best shot would be to finish graduate school so I’d have something to fall back on,” if Paris did not work out.
Goldhammer’s translations run the gamut—he has translated both fiction and non-fiction, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Emile Zola and Albert Camus. Most recently, he translated the French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014) and The Economics of Inequality (2015). Goldhammer’s translation of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published by the Harvard University Press, was the first book published by a university press to top the New York Times non-fiction bestsellers list, selling over 1.5 million copies in its first year.
Goldhammer came upon his first translation project, a book by the French sociologist Michel Crozier, somewhat by chance. Living in Paris after graduate school, Goldhammer decided to look for work and turned to translation because, as he recalls, it “was an obvious thing to do.” A friend connected him to Crozier, who was looking for a translator in Paris. Goldhammer had no professional translation experience apart from what he had done in the army. “At the beginning, I did a lot of ancillary reading of works connected with the book that I was translating because I was really learning the subject as I was going along,” he says, the truth of this is obvious from the walls lined with overflowing bookshelves in his living room. “In non-fiction, you’re usually translating for a community of scholars so I wanted to know how similar books had been [done] before, what the established jargon, technical vocabulary in the particular field was.” Despite needing to be abreast of the appropriate vocabularies, he explains that in the end, the shape of the final product is up to the translator: “You have a great deal of liberty.”
Goldhammer translates professionally from French, using English as the target language. He is more comfortable translating into English because he has a stronger grasp on grammar and stylistic conventions: “When I translate into French, I don’t have that same strong feeling that I’ve got it right.” He mentions a theory of translation based on a study that correlates cognitive skills with success translating in both directions. The study found that success translating into the foreign language was correlated with mathematical skill while success translating from the foreign language was tied to musical skill. Given his math background, Goldhammer is an anomaly to this study as his math background is much stronger than his musical ability, but he has had more success and comfort translating from French into English. Goldhammer says, “I thought, ‘this is interesting because mathematical ability has to do with logic, deduction and structure and the ability to have intuitions about structures’—I have that ability, but I don’t have the same confidence translating into French.”
Goldhammer retired in September 2015, after translating Piketty’s The Economics of Inequality. Reflecting on his career of 30 years, Goldhammer says, “translation allowed me to range widely. I’ve learned a lot of things about a lot of different fields that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to become as deeply involved in as I have. I would have been very impatient about having to stick to one thing.” Instead, he explains, “I feel I have a depth of connection with another society that would have been hard to acquire in any other way. So for me, that’s a very privileged position.” He points out that despite only living in France for a short time following graduate school, he travels there often and feels that he’s “really a part of the culture.” It’s almost, he says, like being a French citizen.
Looking ahead, Goldhammer plans to pursue his own writing. “Being able to write well in your native language is just as important as being able to understand the foreign language,” he notes. Goldhammer writes prolifically on his blog, “French Politics” and has a regular column in The American Prospect covering European politics. He describes his newest book project as a comparison of French and American democracy growing out of his translations of Tocqueville. Remembering his translations of Tocqueville and others on democracy, Goldhammer smiles: “part of the challenge was to differentiate styles so that they didn’t all sound like Goldhammer.” Now as he focuses on his own writing, it is going to be all Goldhammer all the time.
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Arthur Goldhammer: I was an undergraduate at MIT majoring first in physics and then in math. I started graduate school at MIT in 1967 and at the end of that first year of graduate school, so the summer of 1968, I went to Europe for the first time. When I got to Paris, I fell in love with the city and it was all over. French was the language that I had studied starting from the 8th grade, but since I was totally involved in science I never thought whatsoever about ever winding up in France.
When I got home, I found a draft notice waiting for me. I went in November of ’68. When the army found out that I could speak French, they sent me for training in Vietnamese. So after going through several months of training, basic training and intelligence school, I was sent to Vietnam as a Vietnamese interpreter. When I got to the country and was assigned to an intelligence unit, I found out that the Vietnamese people that I’d be working with had mostly been trained under the French colonial system so they spoke French. My French was better than my Vietnamese. I really used my French in that capacity.
When I came back, I intended to continue with mathematics, but unbeknownst to me my passions had changed. I had always wanted to write fiction as well as to do math, but in those days, the government was giving out lots of scholarships for people who were talented in math and science because Sputnik had been sent up and we were behind the Russians, or so they thought… I figured I’d do math and write fiction on the side.
So I went to Paris. When my money started to run out I thought what can I do to make money while I am living here—translation was an obvious thing. I had an American friend who had taken a job with Michel Crozier, the French sociologist, who had just finished a book and was looking for a translator. Since he spoke English quite well, he wanted to supervise the translation and was looking for somebody in Paris. I was there, so he agreed, even though I had no experience, to take me. He didn’t really supervise the translation. When I was all finished we had lunch and he kind of riffled through the pages and sent it off to the University of Chicago Press.
That was a really fortuitous connection because Chicago, at that point, was very interested in translations. It was doing more translations than any other press in the country and they had signed up a bunch of works in French history by annales historians like Jacques Le Goff, Georges Duby. They liked what I had done with Crozier and asked if I’d like to try those.
They started me on this series of French history works. It was a great opportunity for me because annales history was in vogue and widely read. They had enough to keep me busy steadily for several years and if you’re a freelancer, that’s always the difficult part of the job because there are sometimes lapses in between commissions, and then, how do you survive during that time. So I had pretty steady work, which was very lucky for somebody who didn’t have very much experience at that point. That job got me connected with the Harvard University Press. They had this series, A History of Private Life, which was a five-volume work by different authors. That was great because it meant that I would have work for 3-4 years. I did a number of multivolume works after that and having worked for both Chicago and Harvard, my reputation was well established, so I got lots of other commissions and that pretty much kept me busy for 30 years. It was incredible.
Sammy Marrus: Did you find that once you had connections at Harvard and Chicago you were able to have more say over what you translated?
AG: Getting a book approved for a university press is a complicated process because there’s an acquiring editor who then sends the work out to a board of reviewers; it’s a long time consuming process. Occasionally I did suggest a work, but then you’d have to wait a long time for it to happen and I found it wasn’t worth my while. I found the books that I was getting were interesting enough so I stopped trying to influence the process.
SM: Would you approach a book in exactly the same way each time or would it depend on the topic?
AG: It depends very much on the topic. At the beginning, I did a lot of ancillary reading because I was really learning the subject as I was going along. In non-fiction translating, you’re usually translating for a community of scholars, so I wanted to know how similar books had been translated before, what the established jargon was, so I’d read related books. I still do that to some extent. As I got more experienced, there was less necessity.
SM: How do you see the role of the translator? Do you have liberty to change the text and make it make more sense in an English context?
AG:Yes, you have a great deal of liberty. I’ve often availed myself of that liberty. In the case of Piketty, it was less necessary because he writes in a straightforward style. That book sold more books than any other book I’ve translated. It was not the most challenging book to translate by any means because the language was straightforward and inflected by English economists. Piketty himself had taught at MIT and written in English, so the rhythms of his style were more congenial to English than some other books.
With works in French history, there’s often an elaborate rhetorical style that doesn’t go very easily into English, so you have to do more work shaping the sentences to fit into English. What I often found was that the first one or two chapters of a book would go more slowly than the remainder because you have to work into each author’s style; there’s a certain resistance at the beginning.
The collective works posed a particular challenge—you’d have 30 or 40 different authors writing about similar themes. Part of the challenge was to differentiate styles so that they didn’t all sound like Goldhammer. Preserving the voice and what I like to think of as the music of the prose is very. It’s not just about understanding the ideas; there are other elements to prose. I always thought of myself as a writer first. Being able to write well in your native language is just as important as being able to understand the foreign language.
My role is to serve as a bridge between the author and the community. With a work of history or economics or sociology, you know that you’re writing for a group of scholars, so they’re educated people who understand the kinds of ideas that are being expressed in the book. Your role is to transmit the writers’ thoughts as forcefully as you can, in a matter that reflects, in your judgment, the manner in which the author would have if he were a native English speaker.
SM; Does it change the ease or your approach if you’re able to meet the author and understand his or her positionality?
AG: I have to say, no. In the early days, it was rare for French historians who were kind of hexagonal in their orientation, to speak English well. Now, with the younger generation, most educated French people do speak English well. I have been able to communicate with them more freely about the work. So with Piketty, for example, I worked very closely.
For me, the process of writing is a very silent process. It’s communing with the text and seeing how it sounds in your inner ear. You fall back instinctively on how it sounds, you tinker with the sentence until it clicks into place. When I translate in the other direction, into French, I don’t have that same strong feeling that I’ve got it right. I’m much more timid as a writer because I know that certain things are correct. There are ways in which I would be more daring in English that I am not in French because I’m not sure that it’s correct.
There’s a book on the theory of translation that cited a study in which they correlated skills with success in translation in both directions. They found that success in translating into your own language corresponded to musical talent, but translating into the other language, particularly Latin, correlated with mathematical ability. I thought, this is interesting because mathematical ability has to do with logic, deduction and structure and the ability to have intuitions about structures—I have that ability, but I don’t have the same confidence translating into French.
In the article “Early Missteps Seen as a Drag on Bernie Sander’s Campaign” (April 3) Patrick Healy and Yamiche Alcindor discuss how Senator Sanders’s lack of campaigning in 2015 has hindered his success in early Democratic primaries. However, his missteps have not been limited only to the early part of his campaign. Sanders has won seventeen states thus far, the majority of which hold caucuses and not primary elections. Caucuses tend to favor candidates with extremely enthusiastic supporters, something Sanders has in droves. His campaign has thus been able to exploit the caucus system to their benefit. However, with only two Democratic caucuses remaining, the question remains whether or not this strategy of relying on the devoted base will work in states which use primary elections to assign electoral delegates.
Caucuses, one of the systems used during presidential primaries to select candidates, ought to be abandoned. Caucuses are the original system of American voting, a holdover from the days when land-owning white men, many of whom did not have professions, were the only Americans with the right to vote. Today the caucus system continues to discourage participation from working-class voters. Caucuses take hours, and a participant needs to be present the whole time. A low-wage worker, someone who works multiple jobs, or a parent without access to childcare can easily spend a few minutes casting a ballot at a local polling station. However many of them cannot afford to clear their schedules and devote a whole day to caucusing.
Although Senator Sanders often speaks of his desire to improve conditions for blue-collar workers, he has focused on campaigning to Millennials worried about college costs and retirees worried about their pensions and Social Security. Sanders’s rallies provide soundbites for the Internet generation, but he’s neglected the kind of small-time, face-to-face campaigning that tends to be popular with working-to-middle-class voters. These people often cannot participate in caucuses, but they vote. Unless Sanders’s campaign strategy changes, many of those votes won’t go to him.
Re “Should You Pay for Your Child’s College Education?” (NBC News, April 3, 2016):
You make the point that it’s okay for parents to decide not to pay for their kids’ college when they don’t have the means. This is certainly true, but such parents are not addressed in the article. Your suggestion that parents make their financial support conditional on their children’s grades and have them take a gap year to work—at most likely a minimum-wage job—is not financially useful for parents who truly don’t have the means to pay. Parents who really can’t pay could decide not to send their child to college at all, but nowhere does the article suggest that this is an option. The parents the article actually addresses are those who don’t want to pay but still expect their children to find a way to go to college.
In case these parents feel a twinge of guilt about forcing their kids to take on massive debt to pay for college, the article soothes their concerns: “Not all high school seniors are academically or emotionally ready for college.” A year in the working world “gives them a sense of accountability,” says the article, so making your children work to pay for college is actually good for them. To judge from its title, the article is about the parents’ finances. However, a child’s emotional readiness has little to do with finances, except that it excuses parents’ unwillingness to pay.
Some parents have good reasons not to pay for college. Those addressed in the article do not. Parents who have the means to pay for college and expect their children to go to college should pay for their children’s college education.
Although Stanley accurately points out Trump’s absurd attributes that have led to his popularity, Trump is not a uniquely American problem. Americans are heavily criticized for Trump’s shocking success in the presidential race. He mocks minorities, promises to build a wall blocking immigration from Central and Latin America, and threatens to ban Muslims from entering into the United States. While Trump has considerable public support, especially for his strict immigration platform, we cannot blame American ideological shortcomings alone for Trump’s popularity. In fact, his kind of radical anti-immigration philosophy is shared among many other world leaders. For example, Marine le Pen received 18% of the vote in the French presidential election in 2012 and is speculated to run for office again in 2017. Le Pen was charged with a hate crime for a speech in 2015 in which she compared Muslims to Nazis. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán built a 175km fence along his country’s border with Serbia and Croatia and established new asylum laws in order to purge Hungary of refugees. Although there are still progressive and humane leaders in Europe, the growing popularity of these immoral immigration policies warrants concern, as they close borders and promote hostility in an already tumultuous political climate. The rising fear of terrorism incites individuals to agree with these conservative ideologies, increasing the chances of the populist, conservative, anti-immigration political factions being elected into office. Donald Trump “isn’t quite as out of the mainstream as he first appears,” as Stanley points out, but in fact he is part of a global phenomenon of xenophobia that will tear the world apart if it is not recognized and stopped.
Gun control is assuredly a contentious issue in the United States. Gail Collins points out the hypocrisy of the GOP leadership—whose members advocate for the abolition of gun-free zones but haven’t fought the Secret Service’s decision to ban guns at the Republican National Convention. The Bill of Rights may give Americans the right to keep and bear arms, but that does not mean civilians need to exercise that right at all times. Alarmingly, many disagree with that sentiment. This is evidenced by the change.org petition to allow firearms at the RNC that received thousands of signatures from many who were unaware of its satirical nature.
Meanwhile the GOP forges ahead with flawed policies that expose the hypocrisy of its position: in Texas, people licensed to carry a firearm may bring loaded and concealed weapons onto the premises of all state colleges and universities. Essentially, GOP leaders push for lax gun regulations where they are not personally at risk, such as on college campuses, but when the Secret Service tells them they can’t bring firearms to their own convention they don’t fight back. Why isn’t this an intolerable infringement upon a fundamental right? What happened to the legendary GOP firepower on this issue they claim to care about so passionately? While the GOP leadership sorts out its hypocritical relationship with firearms, the public ought to realize that just as there is no need for firearms at a political convention, there is no room for guns on college campuses.
Peter Coclanis’s article points out what he calls the “Seven Deadly Sins” of study abroad. These “sins,” he says, allow “immature” students to treat foreign countries as their playground. He ignores the fact that many of these “sins” are committed in the U.S. He also premises his argument on the notion that most, if not many, students are easily led into temptation (and ruin).
Mr. Coclanis argues that readily available “suds” make American students abroad more inclined to spend their time drinking than studying. But students abroad who show up to their 9 a.m. classes hungover are probably doing the same thing back home. Mr. Coclanis disregards the many study abroad students who are less apt to partake in party cultures, or are simply more capable of balancing their social and academic lives.
He derides “slide courses”—classes taught in English that are not up to par with American university standards—as a study abroad phenomenon, again ignoring that they exist in the U.S. as well. Of course, just as not all students abroad indulge in “suds,” not all classes abroad can be pegged as “slide courses.” At the same time, if the classroom experience is the be-all and end-all of study abroad, then students might as well “stay at State U,” where Mr. Coclanis implies classes are superior. Education abroad, on the other hand, might take place in more unconventional settings, such as at a cooking workshop, or in a discussion with one’s host family.
From his perch in academia, Mr. Coclanis has pinpointed a handful of actions he finds objectionable and attributed them to the study abroad experiences of immature students. What he demonstrates, however, is the seventh deadly sin of armchair criticism: stereotyping.
Re: “Another Bombing, This Time in Pakistan” (editorial, March 28): Your editorial reminded me of my first childhood encounter with terrorism: September 11th. The memory of this terrorist attack shaped my understanding of terrorism as something that happened to major Western metropolises, like New York City. When attacks occurred in Paris and Brussels earlier this year, I–like doubtless many other Americans–felt I was reliving the experience of seeing a distant yet familiar city come to harm. However, when Beirut and Lahore were attacked this year, we, as Americans, were guilty of minimizing the pain felt by the Lebanese and Pakistanis.
One has to wonder: if Americans can relate to the French and the Belgians, what makes Pakistanis so different? The Times’s editorial quotes a spokesman for the Taliban who states that the attacks were meant, surprisingly, to target Christians enjoying an Easter outing. Since the majority of Americans identify as Christian, it would make sense for Americans to identify with Christian Pakistanis rather than Muslim Pakistanis, toward whom many Americans might feel hostile. Yet it seems that American indifference writes off all Middle Easterners as “Muslim terrorists,” raising the question: why do Americans so deeply fail to accept that Western and non-Western cultures share certain basic values? Though our geographic isolation and radical individualism may be to blame, this American urge to villainize the Middle East suggests that many Americans fail to imagine a Middle East outside the framework of terrorism and inside the greater context of humanity. Our reactions to recent attacks in distant places speak poorly for the state of cultural education in this country.
The United States, heralded as a melting pot of cultures, is a largely monolingual nation. The US Department of Education (DOE) says that only 18% of US citizens can speak a language other than English at a conversational level. When compared to over 50% of Europeans who are proficient in at least two languages, according to surveys done by the European Commission, the US figure is embarrassing. An investigation into what the US is doing wrong is long overdue. To understand this unfortunate difference we need to look at our school system. Logically, it is there that most Americans should get the opportunity to learn a foreign language.
Foreign language instruction in our schools suffered a considerable decline in the first decade of the 21st century. According to the DOE’s own statistics, the percentage of middle schools offering foreign language classes dropped from 75% in 1997 to 58% in 2008. The chief agent of this decline was the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, which set ambitious goals for educational success. NCLB defined success in terms of students’ achievement on newly-created standardized tests. These standardized tests had high stakes, making school funding and teacher evaluation contingent on the students’ performance. Because these tests focused heavily on math and science, schools shifted their curricula in response, cutting offerings in the arts, athletics and, of course, foreign language.
Worse, NCLB did not affect all schools equally. Rural schools were more likely to experience harsh cuts and declines in the quality of education offered. Even before NCLB, schools in rural areas were barely half as likely to offer foreign language as their urban counterparts. Little wonder, then, that the US lags far behind Europe where over 50% of the population can speak at least two languages conversationally and mandatory foreign language instruction begins in primary school. This, however, is a far cry from a demand for compulsory foreign language education in the United States; it is easier than that. The option to take a foreign language in school must first be offered nation-wide.
The benefits of learning a second language far outweigh the negatives. From a cognitive standpoint, learning a foreign language at a young age enhances development and correlates to academic success. According to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL), students who begin studying a second language in middle school or earlier are much more likely to become proficient than those who start in high school or later. Years of research by the ACTFL have demonstrated that learning more than one language makes students smarter overall by teaching them to think critically and creatively and to imagine worlds beyond their personal cultures, values and traditions. Language education helps students think across cultural bounds by teaching them to communicate and build relationships.
On a practical note, being multilingual in our increasingly globalized world is an asset. ACTFL studies have shown that multilingual people in the workforce are promoted at higher rates and considered assets to their companies. While the public school system does not exist solely to prepare students for the workforce, it is a part of its function—and one that it fails at with regard to language instruction.
Individuals who feel strongly about learning a foreign language do have options outside of school. There are numerous online and audio tools that allow for self-instruction, but this type of program is not ideal for every student nor is it as successful as a classroom experience that involves speaking, listening and reading comprehension exercises. Further, putting the onus on students to learn outside of school assumes that all students have both the means and time to do so, which is not a safe assumption. The public educational system needs to offer foreign language so students do not have to seek it out themselves. As it stands right now, the United States cannot legitimately claim to be an integral part of the global community if it educates students who are unable to imagine cultures beyond their own. Rather than declining, foreign language instruction should be on the rise in schools across the United States. Instruction needs to start now and with students as young as possible.
From the beginning of Ida, religion is central to the film’s development: the first scenes are mostly close-ups on various religious symbols in the convent, like crosses, a statue of Jesus, or the nuns’ habits. The audience understands within the first five minutes of the film that religion has been the main factor in shaping the life of Anna, the protagonist. She is a novice nun who was abandoned at the convent as an infant, and is about to take her vows. The viewer discovers quickly that Anna is in fact a Jewish girl named Ida and, alongside her, we learn that almost her entire family was killed during the Second World War. Her only living relative is her aunt Wanda, from whom she learns her family’s tragic history. Wanda appears to be a direct rejection of the vows of piety, chastity and poverty Ida is preparing to take: she is a heavy drinker, a chain smoker, and has frequent sexual encounters with strangers. This tension proves central to Ida’s development: there are two paths that she can take: she can go back to the convent and take her vows or she can stay with her aunt and live a life filled with earthly pleasures and disappointments. She learns throughout the film what life outside the convent may entail: love (which she learns through her romantic and sexual interaction with Lis, a man that she and Wanda meet on the road), loss (through her family history and the death of her aunt), tragedy, and maybe even redemption.
The tension between her two options is made clear throughout the film, as the main focus is placed on Wanda and Ida. The rest of the characters have very few lines and don’t make frequent or lengthy appearances; Wanda and Ida spend the majority of the film in proximity to each other. In these scenes, the two protagonists are portrayed as diametrically opposed. Ida is completely innocent and does not know about life outside of the convent; she has been protected her whole life from reality. Her innocence may slowly fade throughout the film, but she does not lose her faith. Wanda, on the other hand, has seen so much tragedy and violence that she has lost all faith, though it is clear that she used to be a “true believer” in the communist cause. In fact, the reason she was not killed during the war like the rest of her family is because she was part of the anti-Nazi resistance. In order to cope with her guilt and loss of faith, she numbs herself constantly with alcohol and sex to help distance herself from her terrible past and grim reality. Though Wanda may gain some degree of hope—and even faith—from her time with Ida, her suicide toward the end of the movie makes it clear that she could not survive her grief.
This contrast between the two protagonists is emphasized during a scene in which Ida states that she wants to go find where her family is buried. At this point Wanda asks Ida, “what if you go there and discover there is no God?” She knows that this experience will be disturbing and may shake Ida’s belief system—her religion and her faith, which are the basis of her entire identity. Then, Wanda smiles and says, in an almost patronizing tone, “I know, God is everywhere”. Here, the viewer understands that believing in God, and keeping her faith, will be a way for Ida to be able to cope with learning about her family’s past.
However, the director, Paweł Pawlikowski, did not make this film to convey any particular religious message or even to represent religion in a favorable way. It is made clear that religion is often used as an excuse for silence or as a way to cover up heinous crimes: we learn that the priest who lived in the same town (Piaska) as Ida’s parents during the war claims to not know anything about them. We also see learn that the Skibas—the family who hid then killed Ida and Wanda’s family during the war—are deeply Christian. When Ida is in their home discovering the truth about her family, she stands in a doorway, where there is a large cross the wall above her head, and when Ida first arrives at the house, she is asked to bless the family’s crying baby. These two instances make clear the social privileges that Ida has because she is a nun. Moreover, she was not killed as an infant because she was able to pass for a gentile. As such, religion is represented in a very complicated and nuanced way, which allows the viewer to see some of the elements that are not given much attention or detail in the movie, like politics.
Religion is used as a conduit for the viewer to be able to understand the multiple political elements that complicate the plot and movie background, since the political context is not made entirely clear: the war is only referred to briefly in the movie, and even then there are only allusions to things that happened to Ida’s family during that time. The audience understands the historical context through references to religion and/or religious identity—chosen or inherited, which allows the filmmakers to not clarify in depth the movie’s historical or political context.
The audience also understands how deeply Roman Catholicism is intertwined with Polish national identity, as it is more frequently talked about than communism. In fact, there are only two obvious references to politics and the state: one, when Wanda is at work as a judge and two, at her funeral—where a government official reads an emotionless eulogy about “Comrade Wanda’s” great contributions to “making a new Poland.” These scenes both serve to help us understand the fundamental tragedy of Wanda’s life: she tells Ida that she had no idea what she had been fighting for during the war. It is clear that while Wanda once had faith in this system, she has lost it entirely. It is also crucial to explore why the film chooses to highlight religion, given the fact that it is based in Poland during the country’s communist era. Though Polish communism was inherently anti-religion, many of the film’s characters are deeply Catholic. This demonstrates that religion serves as a tool to create and maintain individual identity in a politically totalitarian country, just as faith provides Ida with a reprieve from the harrowing reality that she faces upon learning the truth about her family.
Ironically, it doesn’t appear as though the filmmakers are making any overall comment on religion or the role of religion in Ida’s life. It is simply provides a perspective to better understand her history and her life. This is indicative of the film itself, which uses cinematic simplicity to convey deeply complex themes and realities.
