The Exile Mission. Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

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СКАЧАТЬ croaking—that a writer from Poland and a Polish American can understand each other perfectly, that can learn from each other, and that they both desire this understanding and knowledge.”¹³³

      The same goal of building bridges between the exiles and American Polonia was frequently repeated in subsequent issues of Tygodnik. Letters from the readers’ section featured correspondence from Polish-American subscribers—frequently Polish-American priests—including one from Rev. S. A. Iciek, who expressed his genuine excitement over the work of so many recognized Polish intellectuals and artists and pleaded with them: “Stay with us also after the war! Keep up the weakening immigrant spirit.”¹³⁴ Soon, a handful of authors ventured into Polonian communities, presenting reports from visits with miners in Pennsylvania, trips to Polish Chicago, or occasional interviews with Polonia activists.¹³⁵ Beginning in April 1944, Tygodnik included a page with short notes about events in the Polish-American community and paid more attention to the exploits of the Polish-American soldiers fighting with the American army in Europe. In an unprecedented move, the entire expanded issue of Tygodnik of May 28, 1944, celebrated the creation of the Polish American Congress in Buffalo, New York, and was devoted to American Polonia, its history, organizations, and achievements.¹³⁶ In 1946 and 1947, for reasons that included a rather thinly veiled desire to attract financial backing, Tygodnik made a conscious effort to reach out to Polonia. At that time Polonia activist Francis Wazeter began publishing excerpts from his radio show, Talks with Polonia, and distinguished Polish-American figures and business people were featured in the column Profiles (Sylwetki).¹³⁷

      In 1946 Lechoń wrote an extensive report on his trip to Chicago and on the author’s evening of poetry organized for the Chicago audience. First, he expressed his anxiety that no one was going to attend the meeting: “For certainly everyone is tired and overworked, and not many would bother to occupy one free Sunday afternoon with my lecture.” But, he added, his work for Tygodnik brought out numerous examples of vivid interest among American Polonia for intellectual pleasures, good books, and good poetry. When the lecture began, the spacious hall of the Polish Museum of America was filled with people. Many Polonia activists, including the busy Charles Rozmarek, were in the audience. “His presence is also a special declaration that Mr. Rozmarek properly esteems the present significance of culture and art for national life; it is a declaration and a call for others,” commented Lechoń.¹³⁸ Tygodnik, however, struggled financially, and its editors had to look for support from other sources, both in America and abroad. Rozmarek and the PAC did not show any interest in supporting an enterprise that they considered elitist and that had no clear appeal to the broader masses of American Polonia. By the end of 1946, in private correspondence to Aleksander Janta, an angry and disillusioned Lechoń would write of Rozmarek as a symbol of “the ocean of indifference” drowning the more ambitious initiatives.¹³⁹ Despite these efforts to extend the publication of Tygodnik, the weekly had to be discontinued for lack of funds. The last issue of Tygodnik closed with the poignant quotation from Joachim Lelewel, a nineteenth-century Polish politician, historian, philosopher, and representative of the Great Emigration. Lelewel’s words expressed a pure, Romantic version of the exile mission and sounded like a testament that the new exiles had a duty to fulfill:

      Exile is an indescribable affliction; one needs to experience it to learn the magnitude of its misery. There is no language that could fully depict it. It contains, however, something that lifts a person up, calling forth his strength and courage. In misfortune, a captive is made to give himself up to his fate, bound by impotence and slavery. An exile is free and able to rely on his free will and to resist misfortune. It is up to him to reject and defeat his fate, which afflicts him with so many adversities. . . . Moreover, an exile in his fragile freedom has the responsibility of action, stemming from his being a Pole and a human being. He took this responsibility on himself of his own accord, went into exile of his own free will, and has the means and can meet his duty.¹⁴⁰

      Lechoń survived in New York a few years longer, with financial support and care from both his Polish friends and some wealthy Polish-American sponsors. In 1956 he committed suicide by jumping from a New York skyscraper.¹⁴¹

      Lack of knowledge about each other was, perhaps, one of the greatest obstacles in the development of closer personal relationships between exiles and Polish Americans. Kazimierz Wierzyński dedicated a moving essay, “The Walnut Tree Called Dewajtis,” to Long Island Polonia, made up of generations of successful farmers.¹⁴² Unlike Lechoń, Wierzyński did not look to Polonia only for its resources; he approached this community with genuine and warm interest. He noted the accomplishments of the Polish immigrants, their struggle for survival, and their attachment to Polish culture. He and his wife made personal friends among the old immigrants, as they did among Americans of non-Polish backgrounds. Irena Lorentowicz, on the other hand, noticeably struggled with her feeling toward Polish Americans. At first patronizing and aloof, at other times moved and enthusiastic, Lorentowicz displayed much curiosity about the lives of Polish Americans and claimed to have formed lasting friendships.¹⁴³

      The wartime group of Polish exiles included an exceptionally high percentage of inteligencja and intellectuals—the social, political, and artistic elite of prewar Poland—who felt entitled to political and cultural leadership. As they struggled to establish contacts with Polonia, they also tried to define their own role within the Polish diaspora and to adhere to the ideals of the exile mission. They considered the continuation of the Polish nation in exile their responsibility and understood that this historical role of the inteligencja was made more urgent by the extermination policies of the Third Reich. Perhaps their longest-lasting accomplishments were the cultural institutions they initiated to preserve and develop the intellectual heritage of the homeland. KNAPP, the most representative political body of the early wave, failed to attract a mass following and gradually disappeared from the political scene. However, its impact on the creation and the early policies of the Polish American Congress make it an important legacy from the exiles. Speaking with the voice of the most illustrious writers and poets, the exiles expressed the suffering and spirit of the fighting homeland, while they themselves adopted the exile mission tested during Poland’s nineteenth-century struggle for independence.

      This historical obligation became even firmer, as the guilt of absence overwhelmed the refugees. Władysław Gieysztor poignantly wrote about the long, meaningless, lonely, and gray days of an exile, filled with worry and anxiety: “We seem to be alive—but really I often do not know whether present life is reality or fiction. Poland and our people in Poland are so far. . . . Far away are reality and painful concern for the beloved people and land—far at the end of the world!” After nights of troubling nightmares, Gieysztor still encouraged an equally depressed friend to be strong and full of faith, since Poles in Poland suffered so much more:

      The threat of death looms over them day and night—and we are safe here. We have food—they starve. Their hardship is greater than ours. This is all true. But they fight, they are together, at home; they see Polish sun, listen to Polish skylarks sing. Polish storks return to them, not to us each spring! They take their strength from the aromas of the Polish land!

      They do not know what the madness of hopeless longing can do to the Polish soul. What the blindness to foreign beauty, foreign sun means. They do not know how deep is the torment of the gray refugee days, days outside of life.¹⁴⁴

      Irena Lorentowicz revealed the agony of listening to the news about the Warsaw Uprising and the city’s lonely struggle in 1944: “We lived through it with despair and fear from afar, we ‘happy,’ we ‘free.’ . . . Nights of waiting, nights of hope. We hear the echoes, safe behind the ocean, undeserving, unharmed, fed full, worthless refugees.”¹⁴⁵ Feelings of guilt accompanied the realization of their gradual loss of legitimacy to speak for fighting Poland. For example, Jerzy Paczkowski, himself a poet of the Skamander generation who had fought in the Polish resistance movement organized in France, in 1942 wrote a bitter response to a poignant war poem in which Kazimierz Wierzyński called for sacrifice in the struggle. Paczkowski СКАЧАТЬ