Special envoy to Hamtramck (United States)
There is a joyful drunken atmosphere at Whiskey in the Jar, a bar in Hamtramck, a suburb of Detroit.
It is barely noon and a crowd dressed in red and white - the colors of Poland - waltzes to the sound of the orchestra, the Polish Muslims ("Polish Muslims"), while drinking Tyskie, a beer from Silesia.
They are gathered like every year to celebrate Paczki Day (pronounced “ponchki”), a cream-filled donut that is eaten in Poland on Shrove Tuesday.
And nothing seems to disturb the festive mood, not even the muezzin's call to prayer, which sounds through the loudspeakers of the neighboring mosque.
For decades, this small Michigan town was an enclave of Polish Catholic workers, drawn to jobs in auto factories.
Following industrial decline, they gradually left elsewhere and were replaced, over the last thirty years, by successive waves of Yemeni and Bangladeshi immigrants, etc.
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