REEI student Greg Keller was a contributing editor for this publication, City Guide Polska, the first comprehensive business directory to 25 leading cities in Poland to be published in a bilingual edition. Keller spent 1996-97 on the IU-Warsaw University exchange, where he completed course work and research for his MA thesis. He continues to work in Poland, employed by the Warsaw Business Journal, where he is doing research for the expanded second edition of the city guide, which will cover 60 cities. A copy of City Guide Polska, with numerous charts, tables, illustrations, and write-ups on 25 Polish cities, can be found at the Polish Studies Center. For an account of Greg's activities in Poland last year, see article below.

An international conference directed by Bozena Shallcross (Polish Literature and Language) will be held in Bloomington on December 4-5, 1998, under the title "Home/Less: The Polish Experience." This conference will bring scholars from Poland, England, Denmark, Canada, and the U.S. to discuss the related topics of home, exile, and losing or regaining one's home from the Polish cultural perspective, hence the title "Home/Less: the Polish Experience." Professor Shallcross received a major grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for this conference, which on campus is sponsored by the Polish Studies Center.

Home/less/ness. Few concepts seem to have a similarly universal, emotional, and intellectual appeal as the notion of the home, an appeal that transcends cultures, languages and cultural settings. With its seemingly infinite power to symbolize the whole range of nostalgic desires and values, the notion of home has been extraordinarily prone to rhetorical and political exploitation--the most recent of which is the much quoted formula of the "house of Europe." Yet the subject of the home represents one of the most neglected areas of research on Eastern Europe, and Poland in particular. Therefore, the conference's goal is to explore this subject in its multi-disciplinary perspective.

At this cultural studies conference, speakers from Poland and other European nations will join American scholars to explore the topic of "home" in its modern history and in cultural manifes-tations. Different memories of home in Poland, its frequent destruction, and varying kinds of exile suffered by various ethnic groups will be discussed, including Jewish, German, and other minorities. The disruptions caused by the Holocaust and by communism weigh heavily on this topic, but so do the transformations and homogenizing tendencies being felt in the post-communist 1990s. And since "home" has an architectural and visual dimension as well as an environmental and experiential one, we will examine the visible aspects here as much as the verbal ones (from the realms of literature and cultural criticism).

The conference is open to the public and the university community. For further information contact the Polish Studies Center, 1217 E. Atwater, Bloomington, IN 47401, 812-855-1507 or email at polish@indiana.edu

PIASA Conference to Observe
The 200th Anniversary of the Birth of
Adam Mickiewicz, June 12-13, 1998

December 24, 1998 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Adam Mickiewicz, the greatest Polish poet of Romanticism. Mickiewicz's birth will be celebrated in many countries with conferences and exhibitions. UNESCO is preparing a special volume devoted to the life and work of Adam Mickiewicz. In Poland, 1998 has been designated the year of Adam Mickiewicz. In order to commemorate the poet's achievements, Professor Samuel Fiszman of Indiana University, Bloomington, and Professor Michael J. Mikos from the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee are preparing a Mickiewicz conference. It is a great honor for Indiana University to have the co-organizer for this milestone event be chosen from amongst our distinguished faculty of Slavic literatures and languages. The most important event of its kind in the United States, the conference will be held at Georgetown University in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America on June 12-13, 1998, and will be sponsored by the Kociuszko Founda-tion and the Institute. Papers will be presented by scholars from universities in the United States and the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.

Eventually, the papers will be on file at the Polish Studies Center. For information, or for information about attending the PIASA Meeting, please contact the Center.

Multi-disciplinary in nature, this conference will address a variety of topics of interest to anyone involved in the study of Eastern Europe, Central Europe, or Russia's historical and contemporary interaction in those regions. Conference participants come from a wide range of backgrounds. The international group includes academics, policy makers, diplomats, and graduate students. Conference sessions will be divided into subject areas covering the formation of alliances, the burgeoning business environment, and new developments in the study of culture.

The speakers in the session concerning alliances will offer their views on topics such as NATO enlargement and the drive to consolidate democracy in the region. Included on this panel will be Keely Stauter-Halsted (Michigan State University), Carol Skalnik Leff (University of Illinois), Maria Todorova (University of Florida), and Pauls Raudseps (IUB) A panel concerned with the advisability of NATO enlargement will include the historian Paul Schroeder (University of Illinois), Hungarian Ambassador to the United Nations Andre Erdos, Zbigniew Lewicki (Warsaw University - formerly a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs), and discussants representing various parts of the political spectrum on this issue.

The session devoted to culture will examine changing trends in the fields of oral history, ethnography, and religion since the fall of communism. Panelists from IUB include: Michaela Pohl, Katherine Metzo, Wade Danis, Henry Cooper, Alexander Rabinowitch, with a keynote talk by Jonathan Sanders, former director, CBS News Bureau, Moscow.

The conference will also feature two sessions devoted to the examination of business culture and business conditions in Central Europe. Participants in these sessions include Paul Marer (IUB, Kelley School of Business), Roger Kodat of the Chase Manhattan Bank, Prague, and Laszlo Steiner, General Manager, United Technologies Automotive, Budapest, and Halina Worecka, Production Director and Member of Management, Żywiec Hospital Equipment, Poland . In addition, IUB doctoral students Wade Danis and Art Sherwood, who have lived and worked in Hungary and Poland, will offer their insights into the changing business environment in Central Europe, as will Krzysztof Zielnicki of the School of Management, Warsaw University.

For a complete schedule and registration information, please contact the Polish Studies Center. Cost-free registration is available to members of the IU community. Contact the Polish Studies Center, 1217 E. Atwater, Bloomington, IN 47401 or phone 812-855-1507.

Mieczyslaw Rakowski was the Prime Minister of Poland during the historic 1989 Roundtable negotiations and accords that took Poland out of communism. He then moved to being the leader of the Polish United Workers Party and organized its dissolution. From the Solidarity throughout the martial law period he was deputy prime minister in charge of relations with the trade unions and the mass media as well as science, education and culture. A member of the communist party central committee from 1964 to 1990, Rakowski was one of Poland's leading journalists. From 1958 to 1981 he was editor of Polityka which was and remains Poland's leading socio-political weekly. The author of more than ten books, he is editor of the leftist monthly Dzis and is working on his memoirs.

A highlight of the Fall 1997 season was the opportunity to hear Lithuanian emigre poet Tomas Venclova read his poems, and later, to discuss politics, culture, and literary relations among the countries where he has roots--native Lithuania, Poland and Russia for literary kinship, and now, his adopted America. Venclova is Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Educated in Lithuania, he taught at the University of Vilnius until the mid-1970s, when his participation in the dissident movement led to his emigration. Since 1977, Venclova has lived in the United States. His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, and since 1991, in cultural journals in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. He has written a study of the major Polish poet Aleksander Wat, and with Czeslaw Milosz, he co-authored a memoir of their natal place Vilnius/Wilno, "Dialogue about a City." His book of poems, Winter Dialogue, was published in 1997 by Northwestern University Press.

The golem is a figure of a man-made humanoid, sometimes depicted as a monster, sometimes as a defender of the Jewish community. After surveying a wide range of folkloric and early literary sources for the golem figure Danusha Goska addressed some key questions, such as why is the Jewish-created golem usually depicted as non-Jewish itself, has the figure resurfaced in some key literary works written after the Holocaust (by Singer and Wiesel among others), and why did the Sabra (born in Israel) come to be seen as golem, in distinction to diaspora Jews who immigrated to Israel as a result of this century's cataclysms.

Bogdana Carpenter is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. Professor Carpenter's Monumenta Polonica: The First Four Centuries of Polish Poetry was awarded first prize by the American Council for Polish Culture Clubs in 1991. She is one of the most prominent translators of the poet Zbigniew Herbert, and her translations have been published by Ecco Press, The New Yorker, and Oxford University Press. For her talk at IU, Professor Carpenter surveyed some of the poets in our lifetime whose voices established the main lines of Polish verse, including Nobel laureates Wislawa Szymborska and Czeslaw Milosz, plus Zbigniew Herbert, Adam Zagajewski, and other writers who have sought a balance between the duties of the bard and the orphic singer. She also introduced some young poets from the current generation.

John Parrish-Sprowl is the Chair of the Department of Communication at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Since 1993 Professor Parrish-Sprowl has completed a number of academic projects in Poland. He has conducted a seminar in communication and transformation at the Wroclaw Polytechnic University, presented a lecture series in commun-ication at Wroclaw University, and, most notably, assisted in establishing the first two Communication degrees offered in Poland. The first group of students specializing in Commun-ication began studies this past fall, and in his talk, Parrish-Sprowl commented on the growth of Communication as an academic discipline in post-communist Poland, as well as the rapid expansion of commercial advertising. Professor Parrish-Sprowl has also contributed a chapter on the discourse of advertising in postcommunist Poland to a book being published by the Institute of Sociology at Wroclaw University.

Faculty and Staff News

Teresa Kubiak, IU School of Music Professor of Voice, and a beloved opera singer world-wide, performed at a benefit concert in her native Poland last fall. She joined dozens of other performing artists at the Grand Theater in Lódz, which was her own opera theater during her Polish career, to present "The Concert of Hearts" for the Polish flood relief fund. Over $25,000 was raised at this five-hour marathon event, which also included an art auction. The diva enchanted the audience of over one thousand with her performance of "Vissi d'arte" from Puccini's Tosca and the waltz of Caton from Rozycki's Casanova. Along with several other international stars from Poland who came home for this concert, Teresa Kubiak was hailed in the Łódz press with the headline, Welcome back Butterfly, in reference to her most noted role in opera.

Professor Kubiak is working on several projects related to Polish music at present. She is Chair of the Panel of Jurors for the national Marcella Sembrich voice competition, sponsored by the Kosciuszko Foundation, New York, with the finals to be held on March 21, 1998. This competition requires students to sing arias in both English and Polish, with one aria required from the works of Stanislaw Moniuszko, Poland's greatest composer of opera. Since judging is "blind," Professor Kubiak has been able to prepare some of her own students for future competitions. The competition is named for the great Polish-American opera and lieder singer from the turn of the century, Marcella Kochańska Sembrich, who herself was on the faculty of the Julliard School and Curtis Institute. Teresa Kubiak also looks forward to sabbatical projects scheduled for next year, including an edition and translation of Polish songs and arias, and arrangements for an exchange of singers between the Warsaw Chamber Opera and the IU School of Music.

The Polish composer and percussionist Marta Ptaszynska joined the faculty of the School of Music last fall, and it is our pleasure to introduce this artist to friends of the Polish Studies Center. A master of the full range of percussion instruments, Ptaszynska has composed numerous works and performed or conducted their performance throughout Europe and in America. Several works have been recorded, and a CD of her music is available at the Center. Her composition Spectri Sonori was performed by the IU Philharmonic Orchestra on March 4, 1998. This summer, her opera for children Pan Marimba (Mr. Marimba) will be performed at the Warsaw Opera House, with premiere on June 1. Marta Ptaszynska is preparing an English version of this work, and she is looking for a translator with a flair for lyrics in English. Please inquire.

Bozena Shallcross published articles and made presentations at several conferences last semester. She published "Fragments of a Broken Mirror': Bruno Schulz and the Retextualization of the Kabbalah" (Eastern European Politics and Societies, 1997, Vol. 11 no. 2). This article was a part of the Bruno Schulz Forum prepared for the EEPS by Professor Shallcross, was prefaced by her "Introduction: Bruno Schulz and Modernism." At the November AAASS in Seattle she also gave a talk titled "Confrontations: Art and Life in Wisława Szymborska's Verse," and chaired a panel on "Polish Poets and the Visual Arts." Later that month in Detroit, Professor Shallcross addressed the National Congress of Teacher of English at the annual talk devoted to Nobel laureates in literature, with a talk titled "An Introduction to Wislawa Szymborska."

Lois Plew, administrative secretary and program assistant of the Polish Studies Center since 1989, received a Staff Merit Award for her contributions to Indiana University last November. Everyone who works with the Polish Studies Center knows that it is Lois who keeps the place running smoothly. At her Merit Award presentation, hosted by Bloomington Chancellor Kenneth Gros Louis, just a few of her skills and attributes were mentioned, including desk top publishing (she entered the full text and more than one hundred illustrations of Samuel Fiszman's Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Poland on computer), conference arrangements, and her very competent and friendly handling of visitors' details and logistics for exchange faculty, students, and their families. She makes the Center the warm and inviting place it has become.

Recent publications

Recent publications from the Polish Studies circle: please be sure to notify the Polish Studies Center about your publications, for inclusion in this column.

Mark Brzezinski. The Struggle for Constitutionalism in Poland. St. Martin's Press, 1998, in association with the St. Antony's Series, St. Antony's College, Oxford University. Mark Brzezinski has written the first major study of the struggle to reform the Polish constitution in the post-communist period, a process which resulted in the adoption of a new constitution last year. A review of this book is scheduled for our next issue. Brzezinski spoke on this theme at a conference in Bloomington in 1993; he also taught comparative politics at the American Studies Center, Warsaw University, during 1992-93.

Daniel H. Cole (Indiana University School of Law-- Indianapolis). Instituting Environmental Protection: From Red to Green in Poland. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. With co-editor John Clark, Daniel Cole also published Environmental Protection in Transition Economic, Legal, and Socio-Political Perspectives on Poland at Ashgate in England this year.

Jacek Dalecki (Instructor, Political Science, IUB) will publish his translation of an article by Adam Michnik in a volume on human rights issues later this year. The citation is Adam Michnik, "Acumen of the Irreconciled: A Few Conjectures on Dictatorship," in Lynn Hurst, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, and Marilyn Young, eds., Human Rights and Revolutions, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, forthcoming. In 1997, Dalecki completed his doctoral requirements in the Political Science Department of Indiana University with a dissertation titled "The Political Evolution of Polish Dissident Adam Michnik." Dr. Jacek Dalecki's dissertation on Michnik has been nominated for the Leo Strauss Award of the American Political Science Association.

Recent publications from Gyles Hoyt, Associate Dean of International Programs at IUPUI include "German Business Notes: Recession, Stagnation, or What?" in Global Connection, Fall 1996.

Janusz Mucha Everyday Life and Festivities in a Local Ethnic Community--Polish-Americans in South Bend, Indiana. Eastern European Monographs, Columbia University Press. Janusz Mucha's book deals with the concept of the All-American character and how this cultural phenomenon figures into the process of the marginalization of ethnicity. Mucha analyzes two generations of Polish-Americans living in South Bend, Indiana, and examines how ceremonies and festivities within the community can help to preserve ethnicity. Included is an historical look at the settlement and ethnic composition of South Bend. Professor Mucha, a member of the faculty of the Jagiellonian University, lectured at IU South Bend in recent years.

Michael Parrish (Business/SPEA Librarian) recently published a book titled Lesser Terror: Soviet State Security 1939-1953, which is the first detailed study in English of the Katyn massacre from the side of its Soviet perpetrators.

Miroslav Ruzica (Center on Philanthropy, IUPUI) and Brunon Synak (University of Gdansk), eds. Voluntary Sector in a Changing Society, a Polish-American Dialogue. Gdansk-Indianapolis: University of Gdansk, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, and Indiana University Center on Philanthropy, 1996. Collection of essays about voluntary sector work in post-communist Poland and neighboring countries.

Bronislava Volkova (Czech Literature and Language, IUB). A Feminist's Semiotic Odyssey through Czech Literature. Lewiston, NY: The Edward Mellen Press, 1997. This study presents alternative views on major works and authors of Czech and Central European literature in a feminist and non-elitist perspective. Themes include authors' attitudes to relationships between men and women, the images of women in both older and contemporary Czech literature, nationalistic biases, issues of responsibility, active vs. passive approach to life, and new visions added to European culture by authors like Comenius, Macha, Nemcova, Hasek, Capek, Brezina, Seifert, Hrabal, Kundera, Vaculik and others.

Alumni News

Robert Silber recently completed his MA thesis at the Russian and East European Institute, on political, economic and social changes in Hungary, 1989-1997. While studying at REEI in 1992-93, Silber worked as the Graduate Assistant and Confer-ence Assistant for the Polish Studies Center's 1993 conference on transitions in society, politics, and the economy in Eastern Europe. From 1994-1997, he worked in Hungary as a consultant to several business and political organizations. Silber has recently begun studies at the School of Law, DePaul University, where he plans to specialize in international human rights. Robert will be taking part in the conference, "Central Europe and Russia: Alliances, Business, and Culture," April 5-7, 1998, organized in part by the Polish Studies Center.

Christopher Meyer - After completing his MA degree at the Russian and East European Institute in 1993, Chris Meyer spent time in Poland, Russia, and Central Asia working as a consultant for several business organizations. In 1995-96, he taught a course in entrepreneurial strategy for the American Studies Center of Warsaw University. Meyer, who initially went to Poland on the IU graduate exchange with Warsaw University, recently returned to the United States with his wife, Agnieszka, and their daughter, Aleksandra. He will also be a discussant at the April PSC conference. Chris is a student at the Kellogg School of Business, Northwestern University, enrolled in a two year MBA program in business strategy and information technology.

I arrived in Warsaw to complete a research project that I had begun in Dr. Paul Marer's courses on culture's influence in international business. The bulk of my independent work would involve translating into Polish and administering a questionnaire designed to measure culturally determined values related to work, along with extensive readings in the subjects of sociology of the Polish nation and transition of Poland's work culture from a state-socialist to a free market one. Thankfully there were rich sources of information in these fields available to me in Warsaw. Finding and collecting these sources was one thing; reading altogether another. (Several weeks earlier in 2nd year Polish my fellow students and I had been pushing our Polish to the limit reading fairy tales of the magical Jadwiga who brought coal to Poland.) I decided it best to enroll in Polish class.

During the first semester of my stay in Warsaw I took a course on Polish economic relations with the states of the former Soviet Union. The course was led by Dr. Marek Kostrzewski of the Management Department, in Polish, so it was no small challenge to keep up. Thankfully Dr. Kostrzewski was accessible and treated me kindly (referring to me in class as "Our American friend").

By this time I was confident enough in my spoken Polish to begin conducting the key stage of my thesis research project, the survey. I arranged with various professors at Warsaw University and the Higher School of Business and Management to visit their classes on certain days to explain my project to their students and administer my now translated questionnaire to the Polish students. I found the professors and students genuinely welcom-ing to me and I received generous cooperation from all concern-ed. This being the hands-on, practical stage of my project, where the most things can go wrong, I in fact was very pleased at how smoothly things went, particularly the public speaking aspects which it involved. This went against all my expectations, as even in my native English I treat public speaking as a necessary evil; how bad would it be in a foreign language? But surprisingly, I found it was easier to speak to an audience in Polishfear of saying something stupid drops away when you are concentrating on your grammar.

I spent the month of March administering the survey to as many groups of students as I could gain access to; in the end, this came to 75 surveys. Analyzing the results (unfortunately without the aid of a computer) took several more weeks. At this time I was also enrolled in two courses with Dr. Nowak: Regional Development in Poland, and Poland's Road to the European Union. These courses involved directed readings (in Polish) and a final oral exam, the traditional examination method in Poland, I learned. Both courses provided me a tremendous opportunity to study in depth subjects that have not been covered yet in English (regional development in Poland, a hot topic right now as Poland prepares for an overhaul of its local government system next Spring), or which have been covered in English but not from the Polish perspective (accession to the EU). Both courses ended in May.

I submitted my MA thesis to my committee, titled "Polish Business Culture in Transition: Legacy of the Past, Influences of the Future," and defended the thesis (pending revisions) on January 3, 1998.

The course in Polish regional development prepared me well for the next surprise twist in my stay here: a job as researcher and project coordinator for a publication on investment opportunities in Poland's 25 largest cities. The end product is a book called, City Guide Polska and by the time I return to Bloomington it should be published. The group which commissioned the work is an American business newspaper chain called New World Publishing. In January I returned to Warsaw to continue working as a journalist for the firm's flagship enterprise, the Warsaw Business Journal weekly newspaper. The work is challenging yet rewarding, and precisely what I wanted to be doing after completing my MA at the Russian and East European Institute. The newspaper is expanding throughout Poland and Eastern Europe, with branches in Budapest and Prague soon to be joined by others in Bucharest and possibly others within Poland, so the chances to grow and learn with the newspaper are attractive.

An account of my year spent in Warsaw would be incomplete without mention of the most unexpected and happy result of it all: my recent engagement to Astrid Michaux, whom I met last year in the Polish class for foreigners. She, a doctoral candidate from Paris, and I, a hopefully soon to be MA graduate from IU, plan to follow the exciting job opportunities we've found in Warsaw for a few more years before settling down, but in which city, country or continent, only time can tell. In any event, my past year in Warsaw thanks to the IU-Warsaw Graduate Exchange program has been richly rewarding--academically, professionally and personally.

News from Colleagues

Once again, Bloomington colleague Professor Marian Krajewska (St. Mary's College of the Woods) represented the Polish Studies Center at the 49th Annual Conference of the American Council, of which this center is an affiliate (as a Sponsoring Organization). The conference was held in Toronto in July 1997. We're grateful for Marian to attend on our behalf, and thank her for his contribution; as a Professor of Voice she also serves in a professional capacity at the conference, acting as co-chair for music activities. Readers of this newsletter are urged to look at issues of the ACPC Polish Heritage magazine found at the Center. Also, we are approaching the next summer ACPC conference to be held in Detroit on July 7-12, 1998, the ACPC's fiftieth anniversary, and it would be splendid if a few Hoosier Polish Studies members could attend this event. If you are interested, please contact the Polish Studies Center for information.

Book Reviews

Environmental Politics in Poland, a Social Movement between Regime and Opposition, is an examination of the development of environmental activism during communism and the movement's relations with other political actors of this period. In Barbara Hicks' account, environmental awareness arose in Poland and neighboring East bloc states during the expansionist regime of Edward Gierek in the 1970s (whose push to expand factory and coal production especially in southwest Poland contributed heavily to acid rain and deforestation in the region). However, environmental protest hardly appeared on the social radar screen until the political turmoil of Solidarity in the early 1980s. Combining political analysis and social movement theory, Hicks describes the development of environmental activism in Poland and portrays it as a social movement which existed independently between the regime and the opposition. The author's central claim is that the environmental movement in Poland offers a case study in the failure of the Jarulzelski government's policy of normalization following the 1980-1981 period of Solidarity. Hicks states that the regime's failure to control social activism, exemplified by the environmental movement, ultimately led to the downfall of Polish communism.

Environmental concerns received insufficient attention during the communist era in Poland due to a number of factors. Like their capitalist counterparts, socialist governments embraced the idea of unlimited economic growth. The Polish government's massive campaign of industrialization produced ecological threats that were effectively ignored by those in power. More concerned with domestic economic conditions, the regime sought ways to combat falling standards of living. These attempts proved fruitless, and it became increasingly difficult for the regime to adequately deflect criticism from the opposition. As social unrest reached a climax the government imposed martial law and the fledgling environmental movement fell silent.

A period of relative tolerance ensued the lifting of martial law. It was during this period that the environmental movement formed as a loosely connected assembly of groups that occupied the political space between the government and the more mainstream opposition. Although the groups within the movement developed networks and communicated regularly, they were bound more through their commitment to environmental causes than to a political agenda. As a result, Hicks states, the environmental movement was able to avoid being coopted by the regime and also retained its sense of mission, operating independently from larger, more established opposition movements. By default it also took the place of Solidarity for the Polish public of the latter 1980s, and served as the main publicly sanctioned secular dissent movement in the country during the last years of communism. The activities and affiliations of the various organizations within the movement reflected its indepen-dent nature. These efforts included educating the public, offering policy advice to the regime, and engaging in direct action, such as Polish Earth Day, demonstrations, and other tactics borrowed from ecological activists in the West. Organizational affiliation within the movement also varied. Some groups were officially recognized by the government, others were branches of the opposition, and many were strictly independent.

The environmental movement's ultimate success was in large part achieved through the failure of the communist government's attempt at normalization, a three step process through which critics of the regime are silenced, the population atomized, and the government reestablished as the sole arbiter of power in society. The government's attempt at normalization through martial law only bolstered the opposition and encouraged the growth of groups within civil society. With the failure of martial law, the government tried to preempt the opposition by addressing contentious social issues. This official shift in policy opened and actually encouraged a public dialogue on issues such as the degradation of the environment. However, as the govern-ment was not committed to actually improving environmental conditions, this dialogue only helped to undermine the founda-tions of communist power. Hicks' analysis of normalization exposes its illogical foundations. In this sense, the author's study may be useful in examining opposition movements developing under the shadow of authoritarianism in other parts of the world.

It is ironic that the environmental movement has not made significant strides forward since the fall of communism in Poland. While environmental conditions remain poor in many areas of the country, the movement must now contend with other political and social interests that gained more influence following the regime's collapse. Concern for the environment remains high in Poland. However, citizens find themselves confronted with more pressing dilemmas and the environmental movement must also adapt to the constantly changing political environment of the transition from communism. Ironically, Poland's physical environment has improved modestly, mostly due to the economic collapse and closure of some of the worst polluters in heavy industry. Despite its uncertain future, Poland's environmental movement offers an important lesson to all social movements trying to elicit change under authoritarian regimes. The move-ment remained independent from the mainstream opposition and had no central group or governing body. Thus, the movement was impervious to the government's efforts to suppress and coopt it, and in this way it eventually brought environmental issues into the fore of national politics.

Barbara Hicks (IU, Ph.D. and REEI certificate 1992) teaches Political Science at the University of North Carolina. Michael Katula is enrolled in the REEI Master's Degree program and is the Graduate Assistant at the Polish Studies Center.

The Polish Studies Center recently received a copy of a very useful handbook by Magdalena Foland-Kugler entitled Trudne Male Wyrazy and published by Wiedza Powszechna. Doctor Foland has been teaching Polish to foreigners at the Polonicum Institute of Warsaw University for over twenty years and is also well known to many at Indiana University, where she taught Polish language classes from 1984 to 1986.

Foland's new book is obviously an outgrowth of her many years of experience teaching Polish to foreigners, and especially to speakers of English. It focuses on the usages of certain particles, conjunctions, adverbs and interjections as pragmatic "operators" that subtly convey the attitude of the speaker to the statement in question and create problems for foreign students of Polish. Her book begins with nine short chapters, each of which treats two pragmatic operators which are close in meaning but function differently - byc moze vs. moze byc, tylko vs. dopiero, ostatecznie vs. ewentualnie etc. - and one chapter devoted to the interjection ba. Foland delineates the scope of usage of each item through explanations and examples and then provides exercises whereby the reader must supply the correct choice of pragmatic operator in given contexts or, in a few cases, must translate short passages from English into Polish. Keys to these exercises are provided at the end of the book. The chapters on individual lexical items are followed by ten short narrative texts containing more examples of the pragmatic operators discussed.

This book is an invaluable resource for advanced students of Polish working independently or for an upper-level Polish language class. It will be available in the Polish Studies Center Library, and I highly recommend it to all students of Polish.

A Treasury of Polish Aphorisms, recently published by Hippocrene Books, is an enrichment to the company's literary and cultural series, Polish Heritage Publications. Jacek Galazka compiled and translated this collection of aphorisms which are presented in Polish and the equivalent English translations. The book's bilingual format is one of its strengths. The collection is preceded with an introduction by Professor Jerzy R. Krzyzanowski and illustrated by Barbara Swidzińska. In his concise introduction Krzyzanowski presents the development of the aphorism as a literary genre from specific epochs of Polish literature beginning with Rej and Kochanowski in the 16th century and continuing to the present day. He emphasizes that the Polish aphorism, like aphorisms of other literatures, has its origins in the classical tradition, followed by the Renaissance.

Galaczka has dedicated the collection to Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966), known as the most original creator of aphorisms in contemporary Polish literature and whose works have been translated into many languages. The collection's first part consists of many of Lec's aphorisms, first published and translated by Galazka in the 1962 volume, Unkempt Thought. Many of the aphorisms included in the collection, written during the communist period as a protest against the regime's terror, are universal and therefore still meaningful today. Other aphorisms included in the book are of a melancholy yet humorous tone, ironic puns against the danger to the individual posed by stereotypical thinking on a societal level.

The second major section of the collection is an anthology of Polish aphorisms from the last 500 years of the genre's develop-ment. The collection is organized alphabetically according to the author's last name, so that authors from different literary periods appear next to each other, as if in a dialogue. The aphorisms are alike in their brilliance of form, terseness, universality, moral, philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic nature. Above all, they reflect the experience of generations and a code of ethics determined by specific Polish conditions.

Some aphorisms by Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1906-1966), chosen by the Newsletter editors:

Don't trust the heart--it wants your blood.
Life--a lifelong death sentence.
It's difficult to fall from a pedestal slowly.
Open Sesame. I want to get out.
What one thinks when sober, one says when drunk.
The first condition of immortality is death.
Those for whom you die on the cross are never close by.
Do not ask God for the way to heaven; He will show you the hardest way.
Create your own myths; that is how the gods got started.
When gossip gets old, it becomes a myth.
Liberty, equality, fraternity--how do we get to the verbs?
Look before you leap? Think before you think.
Proverbs contradict each other. That is the wisdom of the people.

Editor's note: I asked Emeritus Professor Samuel Fiszman (Slavic Languages and Literatures) to write a review of Galazka's Treasury of Polish Aphorisms for several reasons. His knowledge of Polish literature is wide-ranging, but he also writes concise, expressive prose which has some of the precision of the aphorism itself. More to the point, in this particular volume, Professor Fiszman is mentioned prominently by Jerzy Krzyzanowski in the book's introduction. Krzyzanowski refers to the conference that Professor Fiszman organized in 1983 on "The Polish Renaissance in its European Context," and the volume of essays under this title that Fiszman edited some years later, with a foreword by Czeslaw Milosz. Then Krzyzanowski talks about his own contribution to these essays which cover Jan Kochanowski's era and his life and works: "When asked to present a contribution I decided to focus on one of the smallest forms of his literary output, and selected one of Kochanowski's trifles, On Human Life (O zywocie ludzkim), as an example of his literary mastery . . . I have always firmly believed that such a compact, terse form of a literary expression can render the major truth in quite a few cases better and more to the point than many voluminous philosophical treatises." This reference to Fiszman's 1988 volume The Polish Renaissance in its European Context reminds me of its companion volume, published ten years later, Constitution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Poland: The Constitution of 3 May 1791 (Indiana University Press, 1997). Professor Fiszman's newest book will be reviewed in the next Polish Studies Newsletter. (Timothy Wiles, editor.)

The 56th annual meeting of PIASA will take place on June 12-13, 1998 at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Czeslaw Milosz will be the Honorary Chairman of the conference, which will celebrate the 100th anniversary of the discoveries of polonium and radium by Maria Sklodowska Curie and her husband Pierre and the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great poet, Adam Mickiewicz. Paper proposals are now being accepted for the conference. Those interested should send proposals to Dr. Thaddeus V. Gromada, Chairman, 208 E. 30th St., New York, NY 10016. Fax (212) 545-1130. For further information: tel. (212) 686-4164. Email: tgromada@compuserve.com. The deadline for the receipt of paper proposals is April 3, 1998.

The American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies presents a unique opportunity to learn more about Poland's Jewish past, present, and future. The program runs from May 30 - June 1, 1998, and is based in Kraków. Students will visit important Jewish historical and cultural sites and will take part in discussions with scholars and citizens regarding Poland's Jewish legacy. There is also an optional bus trip to Lviv from June 2-6. For more information, please contact the Polish Studies Center.

The University of Southern California has an extensive web site on Polish music that will interest Polish studies specialists and music lovers as well as music professionals. The Internet address is: http://www.usc.edu/go/polish_music/