Alicja Iwańska

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Alicja Iwańska
Iwańska in Mexico, c. 1955–1965
Born(1918-05-13)13 May 1918
Gardzienice estate [pl], near Lublin, Regency Kingdom of Poland
Died26 September 1996(1996-09-26) (aged 78)
London, England
Other namesAlicia Iwanska
Citizenship
  • Poland
  • United States
Occupations
  • Resistance fighter
  • academic
  • writer
Years active1940–1996
Spouses
  • ​
    ​
    (m. 1942; died 1943)​
  • Philip Wagner
    ​
    (m. 1957)​
AwardsKościelski Award (1974)

Alicja Iwańska (also known as Alicia Iwanska; 13 May 1918 – 26 September 1996) was a Polish

intelligentsia and encouraged Iwańska to pursue her literary dreams. She began publishing poetry in 1935 in various literary journals. After her high school studies, she enrolled in philosophy courses at the University of Warsaw and went on to study for a master's degree. When World War II broke out, she joined the resistance movement and served as a courier. Involved in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, at the end of the war she became part of the secret anti-communist opposition
. When arrests began involving the underground movement, Iwańska was forced to flee to the United States in 1948, where she reluctantly applied for asylum.

With little proficiency in English, Iwańska initially had difficulty in adjusting. She enrolled at

State University of New York at Albany
in 1965, where she worked until her retirement in 1985.

Having never felt at ease in the United States, that year Iwańska moved to London, where she began a period of intense literary creation. In 1989, she was honored with the knight's cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 1996, she wrote her final memoir about the British health care system. Because her scientific work was written in English and her literary output was written in Polish, her legacy suffered from compartmentalization. Recent scholarship has sought to examine both aspects of her career and recover her contributions to anthropology as well as her literature.

Early life

Manor house on the Gardzienice estate

Alicja Iwańska was born on 13 May 1918 into the landed gentry on the

Greater Poland Uprising. Iwańska was born on the estate, but when the turmoil reached them at Gardzienice, they sold the property and moved west to the village of Mikorzyna, near Poznań.[1]

Iwańska's father had previously been widowed and then divorced his second wife. His third marriage to Iwańska's mother created controversy, partly because of his reputation as a bohemian and womanizer but also because of the 19-year difference in their ages. His lavish life, which often exceeded his means, and his disputes with the local clergy forced the family to relocate to Rzetnia. That move was traumatic for Iwańska and for the remainder of her life she believed she was destined to be a wanderer. Her parents' home was a haven for intellectuals and often the meeting place for the Skamandrites, particularly as her father's cousin Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz was part of the experimental poets' group and her mother was a poet. When Iwańska began to show an interest in writing, her father consulted with poet Julian Tuwim to improve her skill.[1]

After beginning her high school education at the Gimnazjum Generałowej Zamoyskiej (General Zamoyski Gymnasium) in Poznań, Iwańska soon transferred to the Gimnazjum Posselt-Szachtmajerowej (Posselt-Szachtmajerowa Gymnasium) in

atheist. She returned to Poland just before the beginning of the war[4] and in 1938, published a volume of poems Wielokąty (Polygons).[5]

Career

Polish resistance

Jan Gralewski, circa 1943

Aware that war was coming, Iwańska went to visit her family and construct a cache for necessities that might be needed during the conflict. She then returned to Warsaw,

airplane crash, though the information was kept from Iwańska.[4] She participated in the Warsaw Uprising in 1944 and at the end of the war became part of the secret anti-communist opposition.[1] She moved to Poznan in 1945 and began working as the literary director of Głos Wielkopolski [pl] (The Voice of Greater Poland).[6][7] When arrests began to reach the underground movement, Iwańska was ordered to leave by her superiors. Thanks to the influence of an uncle, she earned a scholarship to study in the United States and left Poland in 1948.[1]

Academics

Arriving in the United States with very poor English and uncertain whether she wanted to stay, Iwańska hesitated to apply for

segregated South. Iwańska felt at home there, lecturing on similarities between political, religious, and racial persecution in Europe and the situation in the United States. When her contract expired, she was offered a post at Talladega College in Alabama. The Ku Klux Klan were active and all faculty and students at the university were barred from interacting with the community. Her atheism clashed with the religious university staff and her contract was terminated in 1954.[1]

Iwańska moved to

naturalized citizen.[1]

The pair went to Mexico and there Iwańska, whose creative voice had suffered in the United States, began writing literature again. She was charmed by the culture, finding it more compatible with her European upbringing.

State University of New York at Albany in 1965, where her work, over the next two decades, focused mostly on immigrants and emigrants in American history.[1][16]

In 1968, Iwańska published Świat przetłumaczony (The Translated World), a fictitious account which was based on her work in Mexico. In the book, she compared the

Spanish conquest of Mexico to the Nazi occupation and Soviet-backed Communist government in Poland. Her scientific treatment of the subject Purgatory and Utopia: A Mazahua Indian Village of Mexico was published in 1971.[17] The book consolidated much of her previous work, examining the Mazahua's view of themselves, the organization of their society, their value systems, and their view of the wider world.[18] It also included a statement presenting the Mazahua's outlook in their own words. Iwańska interviewed the villagers, wrote down their accounts, then read them back to the community for verification and modification.[19]

In 1973, Iwańska was one of those interviewed for the British

Solidarity Movement of Poland. She examined governments in exile in her 1981 publication, Exiled Governments. In the study, she looked at Polish and Spanish[16] diaspora communities and how the various layers — core members, proven loyalists, and people with national ties — unite to sway international policy, also covering the perception of exiles living abroad.[21] In 1985, she took early retirement and moved to London.[6]

Literary return

In London, Iwańska focused on writing fictional works and her memoirs.[6] She also worked at the Polish University Abroad, where she enjoyed teaching Polish students. Having never been able to find her creative voice in English, her literary output during this period was prolific, as she wrote in Polish. In 1987, she published Niezdemobilizowani (Non-demobilized), a fictionalized account of the post-war anti-communist underground.[1] In the book she postulated that Gralewski's death was part of an assassination plot and that he was shot, rather than killed in a plane crash.[22] The following year she published Baśń amerykańska (American Fairy Tale), a polemic commentary on the U.S. academic community.[1] She returned to Poland for the first time in 1989[6] and was honored with the knight's cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta.[23] Returning to London, she worked on Wojenne odcinki (War Episodes, 1990), presenting the letters she exchanged with Jan Gralewski from 1940 to 1943; a volume of poetry, Niektóre (Some, 1991); Właśnie tu! (Right Here, 1992), a biography of Jean-Marie Guyau and an autobiographical comparison to herself; and Potyczki i przymierza (Skirmishes and Covenants), a diary covering the period from 1918 to 1985.[1]

In 1995, she published Kobiety z firmy (Women from the Company), which followed the stories of five women who worked with her in the intelligence service during the Warsaw Uprising.[6] The following year, she published Tylko trzynaście (Only Thirteen), a volume of short stories, and received confirmation that her book Powroty (Returns) about her return to Poland in 1989 was accepted for publication by Gebethner i Ska [pl]. Experiencing health problems, Iwańska was diagnosed with lung cancer, the same genetic disease which had afflicted her mother. While she was in hospice care, she wrote her final memoir Szpitale (Hospital), a commentary on the British health care system.[1]

Death and legacy

Iwańska died on 26 September 1996 in London,[2] and her friend Danuta Hiż published Szpitale as a tribute to her memory in the journal Kultura, published by the Kultura Literary Institute Association of Paris.[1][24] Posthumously, her doctoral thesis, which included interviews conducted between 1951 and 1952 with members of the Polish intelligentsia was published as Polish Intelligentsia in Nazi Concentration Camps and American Exile: A Study of Values in Crisis Situations in 1998.[25]

There is a street named in Iwańska's honor in the "Literary Estate" section of the suburb of

New School for Social Research hosted a seminar focused on the work of Iwańska, examining not only her career trajectory as an academic, but also her work as an author.[11] In 2019, Grażyna Kubica-Heller of Jagiellonian University presented a paper Strong authorial 'I' and feminist sensitivity – two Polish women-anthropologists in British and American academia at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences Congress. The paper evaluated why Iwańska and Maria Czaplicka's contributions to anthropology were forgotten for decades and how re-imaging history in a feminist perspective has recovered their works.[29]

Selected works

Scientific works

Literature

References

Citations

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Jadowska 2011.
  2. ^ a b Warsaw Uprising Museum 2016.
  3. ^ Iwańska 2014, p. 52.
  4. ^ a b c d e f Kaczorowska 2016.
  5. ^ a b Bartelski 2000, p. 153.
  6. ^ a b c d e f Fundacja Kochania Poznania 2019.
  7. ^ The Post-Star 1984, p. 13.
  8. ^ The Pittsburgh Courier 1952, p. 18.
  9. ^ The Anderson Herald 1957, p. 21.
  10. ^ Rivers 1959, pp. 72–73.
  11. ^ a b c Harriman Institute 2015.
  12. ^ Campuzano Salazar 2019, p. 60.
  13. ^ Marusic 2013, p. 3.
  14. ^ Marusic 2013, pp. 34–35.
  15. ^ Serrano Najera 2015, p. 146.
  16. ^ a b The Times Record 1965, p. 8.
  17. ^ Rajewska 2018.
  18. ^ Young 1973, pp. 1881–1883.
  19. ^ Young 1973, pp. 1883–1884.
  20. ^ The Journal News 1973, p. 72.
  21. ^ Shain 2005, p. 52-53.
  22. ^ Szymborski 2014.
  23. ^ Dziennik Ustaw 1989, p. 99.
  24. ^ Stowarzyszenie Instytut Literacki 2015.
  25. ^ Levine 2000, p. 596.
  26. ^ University of Chicago Library 2006.
  27. ^ Wolfskill et al. 1983, p. 119.
  28. ^ Messias 2012, p. 166.
  29. ^ Kubica-Heller 2019.

Bibliography

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