once the war ended. Kazimierz Wierzyński, one of the greatest Polish poets and essayists, described that state of isolation in the following way:
For the first five years I lived in the United States absent in this country. My thoughts were in Poland. I wrote things related to the war, I had lectures, I started “Tygodnik Polski” with my friends, and we began publishing books under the name “The Polish Library.” I circulated only among Poles and watched America through the window. When after the war it turned out that a return to Poland would be a return to a country deprived of its own will, I awoke in America as if within an unknown, overlooked reality.54
Kazimierz Wierzyński belonged to the generation of Polish poets who gained fame in the interwar period. He was a member of the “Skamander” group connected with the popular literary monthly of the same name. The Skamandrites (Skamandryci) celebrated poetic freedom in the independent Polish state and consciously broke with the older tradition of nineteenth-century Romantic poetry, which had focused on national issues and demanded that Polish poets be spiritual leaders of a suffering nation striving for independence. Before the war, the Skamandryci published together in literary magazines, such as Skamander and Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) and often met during poetry evenings in Warsaw’s salons and bohemian cafés (such as the legendary café Ziemiańska) to recite their newest poems and discuss literature. Among them were Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński, Jan Lechoń (Leszek Serafinowicz), Antoni Słonimski, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Kazimiera Iłłakowiczówna, and Stanisław Baliński. In September 1939 almost all members of the group found themselves outside of Poland. Most of them came together in Paris, where the editor of Wiadomości Literackie, Mieczysław Grydzewski, reestablished his magazine until the fall of France in June 1940. On Christmas Eve, 1939, Wierzyński, Słonimski, Tuwim, Lechoń, Baliński, Grydzewski, and their families spent an evening together celebrating the holiday with a traditional Polish meal, their last meeting before the war dispersed them all over the world. After the German occupation of Paris, the poets succeeded in obtaining visas to Portugal. From there, Słonimski, Baliński, and Grydzewski sailed to London; Lechoń, Tuwim, and Wierzyński traveled to Brazil, and then in the spring of 1941, to the United States, where they soon met up with another Polish exile writer, Józef Wittlin.55
In Paris, the Polish poets and writers had tried to define their mission as émigré artists. Similarities abounded between their situation and that of the Great Emigration to the West after the November Uprising of 1830; but in the first issue of Wiadomości Polskie (Polish News), poet and writer Ksawery Pruszyński distanced the new exiles from the nineteenth-century tradition:
That previous emigration was the emigration of the defeated. This new one is an emigration of fighters [emigracja walczących]. That old emigration lost its army, this one is just creating it. Finally, the former emigration was the emigration of mature persons, who were never to return to their country. This new emigration is an emigration of young and very young people, who are forming the army and who, with the army, will return to the homeland.56
Pruszyński called on his fellow writers to respond to the tragedy of September 1939 and to provide artistic expression of Polish volunteers’ experiences in the military forces in the West. The literature of the new emigration, Pruszyński wrote, had to “enter the soldiers’ ranks . . . , learn the art of war, fight—when they fight, perish—when they are to perish. Had we remained in the country, we should have suffered with the country, but since we crossed the border with the army—we need to fight in the army.”57
Polish exile literature during World War II accepted this challenge. As Kazimierz Wierzyński concluded in his literary review in 1943, the Polish pen was again in the service of the Polish cause.58 Wherever the war led Polish soldiers and refugees, they produced new writing. A large group of poets and writers joined the Second Corps and followed its route from Siberia to Iran, the Middle East, Italy, and Great Britain. Polish poets and writers followed the legacy of the Great Emigration: they, too, became spiritual leaders of the nation in exile. They, together with other intellectuals, scientists, and politicians, laid the foundation for the formulation of the exile mission, constructing bridges to the nineteenth-century Polish Romantic tradition and making struggle for Poland the most important cause of all.59 In the United States, it was these wartime refugees and later arrivals who formed the basis of the postwar Polish intellectual diaspora.60
In New York, Tygodnik Polski (Polish Weekly) dominated the literary scene of the exile community since January 1943. It superseded Zenon Kosidowski’s Tygodniowy Przegląd Literacki Koła Pisarzy z Polski (Weekly Literary Review of the Polish Writers’ Circle), which had been published on a duplicating machine between 1941 and 1942. The very first issue of Tygodnik exemplified its orientation. Jan Lechoń’s front-page editorial was accompanied by a large drawing of Poland in its prewar borders, identifying the journal with the London government’s political position on the issue. A short story by Kazimierz Wierzyński recalled the bravery of Haller’s Army and intertwined the tradition of military sacrifice in World War I and the events of September 1939. A poem by Lechoń focused on the exile’s longing for his country, and another by Józef Wittlin related the experiences of Polish Jews under the Nazi regime. Ewa Curie, daughter of Nobel Prize winner Maria Skłodowska-Curie, described her encounters with the Polish army created in the Soviet Union. Anatol Muhlstein and Stanisław Strzetelski presented essays on international politics and the Polish question. Finally, the last page featured a review of the newly published book by Arkady Fiedler, Squadron 303, about Polish pilots’ contribution to the victory in the Battle of Britain. The issue closed with a score of announcements of lectures organized by the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.61
Almost all refugee intellectuals in the United States and many from the larger Polish war diaspora authored articles for Tygodnik, making it—next to Grydzewski’s Wiadomości Literackie in London—the best wartime publication by Polish intellectuals in exile. Among those who contributed their work was a sizable group of women. Irena Piotrowska, Felicja Lilpop-Krancowa, and Maria Werten published on art and architecture, reviewing exhibitions and books on those topics. Irena Lorentowicz and Maria Modzelewska wrote about art and theater. Wanda Landowska, a renowned Polish harpsichord player whose concerts in the United States received rave reviews, contributed material on music. Marta Wańkowicz-Erdman wrote essays and reports from her journalistic travels. Beata Obertyńska, a soldier of the Anders Army, and Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, who sent her poetry from exile in Algiers, and the Polish-American poet Wiktoria Janda reflected women’s contribution to poetry. Tygodnik Polski featured articles on women, for example, female deportees to Siberia and Pestki,62 and advertised Rój, a publishing house headed by Hanna Kister in the New York City.63 For a few months in the winter of 1944, Tygodnik Polski experimented with a separate section for women under the editorship of Pani Wanda (Ms. Wanda). The page discussed the same topics that one could find in any other women’s journal: recipes, beauty and fashion advice, sewing patterns, and savings in the domestic budget. Soon, however, Pani Wanda had to answer a letter from a female reader, who asked about the significance of such trivial concerns in times of war and suffering. After a run of just over two months, the women’s section quietly disappeared from Tygodnik’s pages.64
Exiles to the United States were among the founders of many cultural institutions: the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, the Polish American Historical Association, and the Józef Piłsudski Institute for Research in the Modern History of Poland. These cultural organizations were designed to support and facilitate the further development of Polish culture and scholarship in exile and to represent them to the larger American society.
The Józef Piłsudski Institute was established in July 1943. Its founders included new arrivals who before the war had been closely connected to the Polish government: Ignacy Matuszewski, former minister of the treasury; Wacław Jędrzejewicz, former vice-minister of education; and Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, former minister of industry and
