Aleksander Smolar - My children's diverse identities (14/201) скачать в хорошем качестве

Aleksander Smolar - My children's diverse identities (14/201)

To listen to more of Aleksander Smolar’s stories, go to the playlist:    • Aleksander Smolar (Political scientist)   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: Monika, my eldest daughter whose mother, my former wife – we were already divorced, or maybe not formally, no – she moved to Sweden with my brother and then later to England when she was four years old. Sweden made a big impression on her – to this day she has friends in Sweden to whom she writes, and she speaks Swedish. After that there was England which is her actual country, but she also has a strong interest in Poland and in Israel – this is her world which is much more a part of her than all of these other countries I speak about as having been my experience. This is her world – she attaches a lot of importance, as I said, to tradition, the Jewish culture in order that her daughters might have this heritage. Well my French children, because my daughter as well as my son, Piotr, were born in France and they are perfectly assimilated and have a prefect command of the language. My son, even when he was still a very young child, wanted to be a journalist and that is what he is, although he wanted to be a sports journalist and I was afraid that that’s what he would be, that he would choose such a narrow field of expertise, but no. My daughter also when she was still very young and at school had a passion for directing and acting although later, when she reached adulthood, she came to the conclusion that her future did not lie in acting and concentrated on directing instead. France was her world; in my son’s case it still is. This is his world, I mean, I don’t know, I’ve never asked him these kinds of questions, but if I asked him, ‘Who are you?’ in terms of his nationality, I have no doubt that he would answer, ‘A Frenchman’, that he is a Frenchman. He’s an agnostic but he had a period when he was strongly Catholic, he wore a cross, he had a passion. Even his wife was the godmother to a child of our friends who was being baptised and my son rushed up to the priest who was conducting the baptism and was the secretary of the French episcopate, and asked the priest to baptise him. The priest replied, ‘My son, go to your nearest priest’, because he was from Lyon. I remember that I tried to discuss with him to show him his family history so that he could know something about his family. My children’s interest in the family history is relatively recent. And then he… I began to say to him: your grandmother, my mother, lived in Poland, your grandfather in Israel, my brother and his wife with your half-sister in England. I began to tell him a little – well, we were in France – I began to tell him a little about Polishness and Jewishness. He interrupted me quite quickly saying, ‘Listen, I don’t want to hear about this. I have enough problems being a Catholic in my French school’, because the other children made fun of him. I mean it’s a completely secularised country and his Catholicism, this period when he was a practising Catholic, was a very intense time for him. I never imposed anything on him, I never said...