Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - My parents go their separate ways (133/201)

105 views · Published 20 December 2018 · 2:47 · Indexed 26 September 2026

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

Watch on YouTube

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: Earlier, I'd tried to convince my father to leave. It was a paradox, I accepted their decision that my mother would stay and my father would leave because my mother was an historian of Poland. Polish was her language. She was a woman of a certain age. Her work was, so to speak, what gave her life its fundamental meaning – it was academically intellectual. She could carry on; she was a professor at the Academy of Sciences. I felt that if she left, she'd be leaving simply as a wife and that this would be degrading. Perhaps she could have written a few things in Polish about Polish history but in any case, it would have meant degradation [of her status].

For my father, however, the opposite was true. He was a writer, a Jewish journalist as well as an activist in the Jewish world and for him this Poland in which the Jewish population had been decimated, in which he'd been expelled from the various Jewish institutions that he was connected with, had become a place which was giving him the opportunity to do what he was passionate about and was used to doing. Because of this, I considered the argument as absolutely justified. In any case, it was dramatic – their decision was consensual. Besides, the bond between them wasn't very strong. We lived together but in some sense they lived alongside one another. Therefore it wasn't a dramatic decision, there was no drama. My mother stayed, my father left. My mother began to symbolically use the name 'Smolar' – she'd never used it before – a double-barrelled surname. She'd used her maiden name of Najdus. Walentyna Najdus. She began to use her double-barrelled surname which was quite a touching gesture but it was meaningless. At some point then – I don't remember when – she left the Party. That didn't have much meaning either – she'd always said that politics no longer interested her at a time when I was quite brutal in my discussions with my parents, slightly mocking their ideas, their attitudes, their choices. It's true that my father was usually silent – he rarely took decisions. Even later, when I used to visit him in Israel, there as well… But my mother, she defended herself, saying that politics no longer interested her.

More from this channel