Aleksander Smolar - An unwilling raconteur (1/201) скачать в хорошем качестве

Aleksander Smolar - An unwilling raconteur (1/201)

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: You know that it wasn’t an easy decision for me to make to tell this story about myself, about my life; this confession wasn’t something that came easily to me and our discussions about this lasted quite some time. That wasn’t because of narcissism on my part, just that the decision itself was a difficult one for me. Firstly, I very rarely think about my own past; if I think about the past it’s in a broader sense on account of my interests, my professional or political passions, you see, and those fragments of the past which interest me. However, I hardly ever, rarely think about my own or my family’s past, and because of this, too, this was… this is something of a problem. But this problem isn’t limited to our conversation. Over the last few years, or to be more precise, a couple of years ago, I had several – I think four – proposals to record this sort of ‘river of reminiscence’ as we call it in Poland, in other words, a book of conversations, suggestions made by publishers or specific journalists, of all political shades I might add. I refused. I considered why I refused. It was for the reasons which I’ve given, namely, my attitude towards time, the past, a certain impatience with giving up time for this. This definitely was a deciding factor here. Something else that influenced me was the fact that I knew in advance that because I’m living this part of my life which is happening in Poland, I know what part of my history fascinated, interested my interlocutors, the journalists. This formula, of course, imposes, determines the journalists’ agenda, and greatly influences the topics and the slant on everything. I knew that these are the two approximate characteristics of my history – one is the issue of my Jewishness or rather the conjoining of my Jewishness with my Polishness. In other words, how I perceive the world to say nothing of how my life evolved in this perspective. This is one aspect which fascinates as there is currently a huge fascination in Poland with all things Jewish, with life stories, histories. And the second aspect which fascinates people is the issue of, shall we say, the source of ideology, the evolution of ideology. I mean, it’s not a secret that I come from a communist family and that in my youth I was, while still at school, as a student, I was engaged in this movement so this, too, is something that people get worked up about.