Look Who it Was Random video

Aleksander Smolar - My dispersed family (5/201)

296 views · Published 17 December 2018 · 3:26 · Indexed 2 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: The first is the issue of space. It is the realisation that there is something specific in this family of mine although to be honest, to some degree it’s a reflection of the general fate of the Jews. I mean that members of my family, and I mean very close members, live in a great many different countries. In Poland I have my brother and his wife, and my daughter who moved over there from France. She was born in France where I had already been living as an émigré for some time, but I’ll come back to that. That’s where she had her schooling, French was and is her language; when we spoke to her in Polish, because in the home we spoke only Polish, she would answer us in French. Paradoxically, her children are now taking ‘revenge’ on her – I say that as a joke – especially the younger one, because when she talks to them in French so that the children can learn the language, he always replies in Polish. My wife lives in France; she’s a professor of economics in the Paris School of Economics. The name is, of course, a paraphrase of the famous London School of Economics. It is the leading centre for economics, for ideas on the economy in France. She travels to Poland quite often, but she lives and works over there [in France]. My son also lives over in France. As I mentioned, he’s a journalist for 'Le Monde' so when his posting to Israel by 'Le Monde' as their correspondent there ends, he’ll come back to Paris with his wife and son. But I also have family, well, I’ve already mentioned this, in London where my daughter from my first marriage lives with her husband who’s half-French, half-English – I’ll come back to that in a moment – with their three daughters, my granddaughters.

But I also have quite an extended family in the United States, in Israel, in Russia. These are the countries in which I know that I have family, and Israel – well, I’ve mentioned Israel, I have family there as well. This you could say is quite a significant fact because it determines the psychology, how one thinks about the world and this world is broadened by the very knowledge that I have all of these people who are dear to me or at least are connected with me biologically and who live in a world with a different culture, different language, paradoxically even in a world of a different religion, although my family is mostly agnostic you could say, but culturally these are worlds of various religions.

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