Int'l academics team up to educate about Poland
Poles were next to invisible in the overall American Historical Association meeting, one of the largest U.S. annual meetings of academics.
Except for a session on socialist factories in which a young Columbian researcher, Katherine Lebow, talked about the previous era at Krakow's Nowa Huta, Poland was only mentioned in terms of the Holocaust.
That wasn't the case with Hungary or the Czech Republic or especially Russia, which continues to be analyzed, past and present, in great depth by the hundreds of U.S. Russian scholars.
A jam-packed Central European cocktail party had few historians from Poland or countries to the East because "Central Europe" is defined as Germany to these historians, although a Central European journal editor noted that "Poland is trying to define itself as 'Central European' these days."
Actually, Poland is intent on defining itself as European, period. Away from center stage, however, there was much organizing and academic activity underway, not just to study Poland and Polish Americans but to shape links between U.S. scholars and this nation that will pay off tomorrow.
This is under the rubric of the Polish American Historians Association (PAHA). A cocktail party was sponsored by the University of Ohio Press, which is inaugurating a series of books on Polish and Polish-American history.
The Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America (PIASA) will hold its annual meeting here for the first time since it was founded in 1942 by six Polish scientists who had immigrated to the United States. Many more joined as the war worsened and the exodus escalated. In 1952, with the Soviet Union in control of Poland, the communists took over the Polish scientific body's property and resources "and created a Polish Academy of Sciences modeled after the Soviet one," said Thaddeus Gromada, executive director of the New York-based Polish Institute.
Starting in 1989, when Solidarity reformers took power from the communists, the Polish scientific institute "has reemerged and is trying to recover its property," he said. The point person for that is paleontologist Kazimierz Kowalski of Krakow.
This June, about 250 members of the 1,500-member PIASA are expected to attend the annual meeting in Krakow.
"We thought it was about time," said Gromada, who was born in the United States to parents who had emigrated from the Tatra Mountains in the late 1920s.
PIASA, in addition, has begun urgent efforts to protect and consolidate historical material, working with Stanislaw Flis of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw and Poland's National Archives. "It would be virtually impossible to write history without archival records," PIASA said, and those records are at risk right now.
Thaddeus Radzilowski, president of Saint Mary's College in Orchard Lake, Michigan, is looking into ways to establish its presence in Poland. It already enrolls more Polish college students than any other higher educational outfit in Michigan 67 of them.
Polish immigrants founded Saint Mary's in 1888 as a liberal arts college. It now has a seminary. "We're Catholic but not attached to any religious order," Radzilowski said. Authorized by Pope Leo XIII, today's Saint Mary's is active in Catholic-Jewish relations, between Poland and the United States and within the U.S. community as well.
One of the conduits for the college's surge in Polish students, for instance, was Detroit Attorney Michael Traison of Miller, Canfield, which has law offices in Warsaw. Traison has been active in Polish-Jewish affairs and in getting recognition for Polish Catholics who have helped preserve and protect the "memory" of Polish Jews today.
Radzilowski has been talking to the new rector at Jagiellonian University, Andrzej Zieja, an American literature specialist, but said nothing had been worked out in terms of cooperation with Saint Mary's.
Testament to the fact that U.S. textbooks give short shrift to Poland in contempory world history comes from ex-Ambassador John Kordek, who teaches European history at DePaul University in the United States. He also co-teaches courses on the Holocaust with Romanian-born Miriam Ben-Yoseph. Kordek, who was a diplomat in Poland during the communist era, gave a lecture to University of Illinois students last fall about the 60th anniversary of the start of World War II. Afterward, a student stood up and asked some pertinent questions.
"How come I never knew that World War II began with the invasion of Poland until now?" Kordek said the student asked. She said none of her professors had ever mentioned that and texts gave it only a sentence or two, if any.
Kordek, meanwhile, is part of a DePaul team, with academics at Indiana University and Ball State (also in Indiana) that will team up with academic leaders from six Polish universities to share insights about strategic planning. The project will be launched this spring with the visit of Polish rectors from Warsaw, Poznan, Torun, Wroclaw and two from Lublin to U.S. campuses. In mid-June, the U.S. academics and executives will travel to Poland. Kordek will be accompanied by DePaul President John Minogue.
All of that helps raise Poland's profile in the contemporary world after its long hiatus in the web of state socialism.
Northeastern Illinois University is taking a slightly more bizarre route to interest its students in the region. It has signed up 30 students for a March 18-April 1 tour through Austria, Germany and Poland called "The Divine and the Demonic in Modern Europe, 1756 to Present." Half of the students are music majors - and the arts and composers spotlighted on the trip include Franz Liszt, Frederic Chopin, Wolfgang Mozart, Anton Dvorak and Ignacy Paderewski. The "demonic" aspect: Mozart was born in Salzburg and Adolf Hitler less than 40 miles away in Braunau. One of the four professors on the trip is Lidia Filus, a Polish-born mathematician.
