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Aleksander Smolar - My relationship with my mother (134/201)

96 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 2:57 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2018 · News & Politics

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To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFwlxPLurqAOCrabBgGrqLA7

Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]

TRANSCRIPT: [VT] You remained alone in Poland and so did your mother. Were you very close?

I can't say that we were very close. I did, of course, visit her regularly and we saw one another regularly. I think I fulfilled my filial duties well and she certainly was always a good mother. But it's not as if we talked about serious issues. My mother and I didn't really share our troubles with one another. No, but I definitely told her that I'd decided to leave and she definitely didn't respond by trying to make me change my mind. I imagine that she accepted it as a natural course of events, that she was staying because she had to, because this was her world. Incidentally, I always said that she came from an assimilated family, but her uncle was a highly acclaimed Jewish poet. His name was Leib Najdus and to this day, there's a street in Grodno named after him. He was an eminent… he wrote as a child… as a young man he wrote poetry in Polish and in Russian. Later, he changed to Yiddish and translated the great works of Western authors from German, from French, from English. He was a polyglot. Someone later told me – someone who knew Jewish literature – told me with a hint of irony, 'But he was lifting all of that from the Romantic poets'. Perhaps that's true, I don't know. In any case, he was well known. He died of TB, I think, as a very young man – I think he was 27. But he was outstanding, that's true.

So then again it seemed like I wouldn't see her for a very long time, but later it turned out that the authorities were quite liberal and allowed her to leave each year. Every summer holiday, she'd come and stay either with my brother in Sweden, or she'd go to England or she'd come to us in Paris. She even came to see me during my first year of emigration. She came to visit me in Italy where I was at Johns Hopkins University so it was very soon after. I should mention here that by now, Gierek was in power so times were different. She was not engaged in politics and posed no danger in that sense. Well, in any case, you could say that in that first year of being an emigrant these personal relations – I met plenty of Italians, I came to know students from various countries who… To be honest, this is so intense that I don't remember that… well, I was meant to have gone to America but the Americans refused to give me a visa.

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