"Ties and Knots: Bridges between Lands and Cultures," the theme of a September 2014 Conference at the University of Silesia in Poland, is truly rich and compelling. This theme has generated many fruitful scholarly explorations and has prompted me to investigate the ties between two lands and cultures, the country of Poland and the second oldest city in the United States, Salem, Massachusetts, colonized by Europeans in 1626. Compared with Poland's formidable timeline of roughly a thousand years, Salem's existence is, of course, fairly recent history! When Roger Conant and his followers were first settling on the shores of Salem Harbor in the early seventeenth century, the Kingdom of Poland had already cemented its historic association for over half a century with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, having formed the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569.