“No. Americans are worse!” He slapped my shoulder, sending shivers through me, before halting at a sinewy cross decorated with a crown of thorns and a tiny Jesus. “Now this is just too much a pity.”

I stared for a long time before I understood what was wrong. The monument was generic, familiar, found in miniature in any Queens front yard. But then I realized—of course.

He shook his head. “And look what they wrote.”

The placard at the base of the monument was dedicated to “Poles,” with no mention of Jews, and doomed the dead to lie under a sinister Christian blaze of “perpetual light.”

I longed to go home, to lie down, and steel myself for Rosie’s arrival. My lunch was a roiling mush inside me. So many doughy pierogi, a brown rainbow of fillings: sweet cheese, lentils, fistfuls of meat. So many salty vegetarian hot dogs, enjoyed cold from the pouch.

“Disgusting, right?” Jakub said. “There’s a monument in here for the Jews, at least. Through there.” He flapped a hand at some trees. “But even so. Think of the others. There’s no monument in all Krakow, for example, to gays.” He looked at me pointedly. “There’s never any monument of gays, is there, Daisy?”

“I’m sure there are plenty,” I muttered, hoping he’d hurry past this revelation. If he thought I was a lesbian, he’d never touch me.

Jakub shook his curls and bounded across the park to the next point of interest: a hulking Communist monument, granite hacked brutally into the shape of bowing prisoners with a gash through their torsos. “You see this?” Jakub pointed out the inscription. To the memory of the martyrs murdered by the Nazi perpetrators of genocide in the years 1943–45.

“Martyrs volunteer,” I said.

“The Poles don’t come to this conclusion, but you are American. And Jewish, right?”

“Sort of. A little.”

“I love Jewish people.”

“Are you Jewish?”

He set a hand on his throat. “I must tell you, I feel Jewish so deeply in my heart. You know, Poland was once a diverse country. You don’t believe it, but we had many ethnic minorities—Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians—all living together so happily.”

I’d heard this argument before, from defensive Polish historians. “But things sort of changed, right?” I couldn’t help it. The populations he’d mentioned had been banished with border redraws, exiled, slaughtered, and burned.

His eyes narrowed, his mouth molding into that routine Polish frown. “Well, I suppose I can’t fight against you. But by now we certainly embrace Judaism. Haven’t you seen the restaurants in Kazimierz? The Jewish Culture Festival?”