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Aleksander Smolar - My wife, Irena Grosfeld (135/201)

494 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 3:50 · Indexed 10 October 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: And then I remember… well, but the most important meeting was with my current wife; she's been my wife for a very long time. We'd arranged by letter to meet in Budapest. I, of course, wasn't able to come to Poland. I think we spent 10 days together during which she, having come from Poland, was supporting me. I was as poor as a church mouse. It was a wonderful time we spent together, going to restaurants, and emotionally, too, it meant a lot to me. We decided then that Irena would join me in England. I was granted – I don't know if I already knew this then but in any case, shortly afterwards I applied to five different countries, which I've already mentioned, including England where I was given a grant by Birkbeck, University of London. And Irena joined me. We've been together ever since. We've been together although she didn't… I wasn't her first husband. I married her off to an English friend of mine so that she could hold on to her Polish passport without the English authorities giving her any grief. It was a 'marriage blanc' as the French call it, a marriage of convenience. David Elwood – she became Mrs Elwood, Mrs David Elwood. So she joined me and began her PhD at the London School of Economics which she continued when she moved with me to France where there was a job waiting for me at Raymond Aron's centre and where for a year we had incredibly good conditions. Later, I was accepted by the CNRS in the normal way. It wasn't simple, no it wasn't simple. It was against the rules. I'll tell you about that in a moment.

Well, anyway, since then, we've been together. I knew Irena when I was still in Poland where she was a student in my department. I met her when she came to sit her entrance exam where she – I remember I was checking her… she was coming into the exam room where she was going to sit her exam. I saw her name on her identity card and asked her if she was the daughter of Professor Grosfeld. He was a famous historian and he worked with my mother at the Academy of Science. She was very… 'yes', she blushed, lowered her eyes and said, 'yes'. And that was our first meeting. I came to know her during her studies and she used to come and see me quite often. She had this, well, like she still does to this day, she has this very warm and caring attitude towards people. And she… mainly, she'd come over to my place and would listen to me, to my monologues, which I usually gave while I was drunk. And then later, in our letters we decided that we'd meet in Budapest. So that was my most important meeting in Italy – it was a meeting that was pure Warsaw you could say – Polish. It was a meeting, of course, a meeting in… what was that?

[VT] This was a meeting in Budapest?

It was a meeting in Budapest. Yes, but you could say that we agreed to meet while I was still in Italy so in this sense it was… it was also part of my life in Italy.

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