Word: nowak
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Nowak (Jeremy Irons) is a master electrician from Warsaw, come to London with three laborers to renovate the Kensington home of a wealthy Pole. For a month's hard work the laborers will be paid a year's hard currency. The men will toil in isolation, separated from their families, the outside world and, increasingly, Nowak. He has decided it must be that way: it is December 1981, when, unknown to the three laborers, the Polish government has imposed martial...
...Only Nowak speaks English; only he realizes the pressure that must be exerted to finish the job. And so he drives the laborers beyond their endurance. He steals food, then rations it. He intercepts calls and news from home "for their own good." He quarantines them from entertainment, and even from attending church. It takes no Soviet censor to find a political metaphor here: Nowak is the Polish statesman-Gierek or Kania or Jaruzelski-who must act the ruthless boss to satisfy his own ruthless boss. It is difficult, it is wrong, but it must be done to survive. Thus...
...owner, even as the local lads shout, "Go back to Poland!" at the uncomprehending laborers. At an intersection, fenders graze and tempers flare. In a supermarket, a woman in a fur coat filches consumer goods the Poles could neither find nor afford back home. (Her thievery gives Nowak the inspiration for his own shopping scam.) A derelict steals Nowak's food and saves him from being apprehended with it. London, the dowager queen putting her gaudiest remnants on fire sale, seems so different from Warsaw. But the enforced meanness of its spirit makes the displaced Poles feel almost...
However, Donna Nowak, who is seeking advice from her lawyer about how to file for the bankruptcy of her framing and print shop in nearby Royal Oak, has "mixed feelings" about the President's policy. Says she: "Sometimes I think it's terrible, but other times I think it's doing a lot of good because it's forcing us to take a lot of the fat out of business." Paul Kampka, a mailman in Warren, Mich., reports that the people to whom he delivers letters "are mad, real mad." Then he adds: "Personally, I think...