Polish Households During the Economic Transformation

Two topics are presented in this paper: a short history of the Polish economic transformation, begun in 1989, and analyses of aggregate data describing the life conditions of Polish households in the period immediately following the transformation.     

Polish Foreign Trade: A Retrospective View

The unspecified visual art referent in Akhmatova’s enigmatic poem, “An Old Portrait” (Staryi portret, 1910), dedicated to the painter Aleksandra Ekster, has long inspired critical speculation. scholars (superfin and Timenchik, Rosslyn, Rubins) have proposed numerous readings, but none has entirely resolved the poem’s mysteries. I will argue that the ballets Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cléopâtre, performed in the first Paris season of the Ballets Russes, provide hitherto unexplored subtexts for the spare but dramatic poem. Considered within the context of the ballets, the poem’s characters and details take on more specific and meaningful contours. By analyzing these ballets’ respective libretti, costume designs and stage sets, it becomes possible to detect in the poem references to the Gobelins portrait depicting the deadly enchantress in Le Pavillon d’Armide, the poisoning of Amoun at the conclusion of Cléopâtre, and Vaclav Nijinsky’s performances as Armida’s servant in Le Pavillon d’Armide and Cleopatra’s slave in Cléopâtre. The poem also demonstrates Akhmatova’s early fascination with portraiture, especially the complex relationship between artist and sitter. In this sense, “An Old Portrait” anticipates the poet’s eventual cultivation of her own image in portraits painted by her contemporaries.     

Polish complementary schools in Iceland and England

Since 2004, the opening of labour markets has spurred a considerable number of Poles to emigrate e.g. to Iceland and England. Families with school age children have had the challenge of adapting to foreign environments and school systems. Polish complementary schools have played an important, albeit ambivalent, role in this process. Through focus group interviews with students in Polish complementary schools in one city in Iceland and one city in England, we gathered information showing common threads between both schools as well as differences in their structure, role, origin and the student motivation to participate. Saturday schools abroad are considered to be less demanding by students than regular schools back in Poland, but more so than regular Icelandic/English schools, which many rate as unsatisfactory in terms of their academic development. The tension between the need for freedom and high expectations for the academic outcome of education influences student opinions, not only about schooling, but also about the host society.     

The Polish Peasant in Oberlin and Chicago

This paper examines the historical sources for W. I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki’s celebrated monograph on The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. It first characterizes the work itself, a monumental interpretive casebook of largely biographical material about individuals and groups. It then seeks the origins of these qualities, looking first at Thomas’s prior work, then at the personal influence of Florian Znaniecki and Robert Park. Since these sources do not sufficiently account for the unique qualities of the work, we then turn to three other important sources: 1) the casebook tradition in the social reform literature and beyond, 2) the psychiatric concept of the life history, and 3) the literary sources that Thomas had taught in his prior career as an English professor. We close by identifying the autobiographical roots of the work in Thomas’s own life history.     

Bulgarian and Polish Women in the Public Sphere

The aim of this article is to describe and compare the situation of women in two countries from Central and Eastern Europe. Its focus is to account for the participation of women in the public sphere. The justification for choosing Bulgaria and Poland lies in the argument that although a more or less uniform regime of state socialism provides the background of a shared past, many other factors affect the assessment of women's current situation. First the historical and cultural contexts are described. Then the current situation of women is compared to that of men, yet paying attention to the differences that exist within the groups of women. Next the analyses of participation of women in formal politics on both the national and local levels as well as in women's NGOs are presented. The outcomes of public opinion polls concerning the "women's problem' in Bulgaria and Poland are compared. I argue that despite the generally more advantageous situation in Poland women in both countries experience comparable problems, though for dissimilar structural reasons.     

The Square of Polish Innocence: POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw and its symbolic topography

The text refers to the space around the Nathan Rapoport’s Monument to the Fighters and Martyrs of the Ghetto and the Museum of the History of Polish Jews POLIN in Warsaw (Poland). The site of death – at the heart of the former Warsaw Ghetto – has now become a site overloaded with other symbolic messages. Two main symbolic centers (the 1948 Monument and the 2013 Museum) are today encircled by ten other, additional memorials. The message emerging from the content as well as the proportion of commemorations is that Polish solidarity with the Jews was a fact and it stood the test of terror and death brought by the Germans. Although it does not undermine the veracity of the few and isolated exceptions, such a version of events is drastically different from the actual facts. Both symbolic centers are perceived as emblems of Jewish minority narrative. Additional artefacts are a message formulated by the Polish majority. They constitute a kind of symbolic encirclement, block. Emphasizing the dominant majority’s version of the events in this place is in fact a symbolic pre-emptive action. It is meant to silence the unwanted narrative or suppress even the mere possibility that it might emerge. What turns out to be at stake in the dominant Polish narrative about the Holocaust and Polish-Jewish relations is the image of Poland and the Poles. This shows not only the topographic and symbolic situation but also the socio-cultural context of the functioning of the new Museum.