⦾ Chapter
6. The Third Republic, 1989-1998 — 216
President Witold Czajkowski (1989-1994) — 216
President Zofia Czajkowska (1994-1996) — 230
President Edward Piłatowicz (1996-1998) — 235
⦾ Chapter
7. The Years of Status Quo, 1998-2010 — 252
President
Jolanta Zych (1998-2006) — 252
Modjeska
Club – A Tax-Exempt Corporation — 279
President Dorota Czajka-Olszewska (2006-2008) — 286
President Andrzej Maleski (2008-2010) — 296
⦾ Chapter
8. New People, New Ideas, 2010-2018 — 304
President Maja Trochimczyk (2010-2012) — 304
President Elżbieta Kański (2012-2013) — 329
President Andrew Z. Dowen (2013-2018) — 332
⦾ Chapter
9. Surviving Challenges, 2018-2023 — 350
President
Maja Trochimczyk (2018-2022) — 350
President
Maja Trochimczyk (2022-2023) — 370
⦾ Chapter
10. Conclusion — 380
⦾ About
Helena Modjeska Art & Culture Club — 403
⦾ About
the Author — 403
⦾ Index
— 405
⦾
PREFACE ⦾
All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women
merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances,/ And one man in
his time plays many parts,/ His acts being seven ages.
~ William
Shakespeare (As You Like It)
This quote from Shakespeare, the
favorite playwright of actress Helena Modjeska, appeared in 2012 on the
Modjeska Club’s 40th anniversary poster by Polish artist Lech
Majewski. It fits the history of a Polonian organization that reached its
maturity after having been active in Southern California since 1971. Helena
Modjeska Art & Culture Club in Los Angeles has outlived many similar
organizations. Its achievements and challenges are presented here in the broad
context of its predecessors and contemporaries. This project was initially
designed as an English version of the Album 50-lecia Klubu Kultury im Heleny
Modrzejewskiej that I edited, together with Elżbieta Kański and Elżbieta
Trybuś, for the 50th anniversary of our organization in 2021. The Album
contains an assortment of materials produced by Club activists and guests
during the past five decades. Since online translation engines are widely available
and constantly improving, creating an English translation of all these source
materials would have been counterproductive. Instead, the wealth of documentary
and archival material that I collected for the Album needed analysis,
interpretation, and contextualization.
Three
chapters that I wrote for the Album 50-lecia Klubu have been revised and
expanded here. The first translated and updated Chapter is about the Club’s
patron, Helena Modjeska (stage pseudonym in the U.S.), or Modrzejewska (stage
pseudonym in Poland), or Countess Bozenta (a name used in the U.S.), or Jadwiga
Helena Misiel (the name from her baptismal certificate.) Born in 1840 in
Kraków, the ancient capital of Poland, when it was a part of Austrian-ruled
Galicia, Modjeska came to California for the first time in 1876 and died here
in 1909. She was an actress, director, producer, writer, and illustrator. An
émigré, she learned English and became an American theater star, specializing
in her beloved Shakespeare plays. Modjeska was the first celebrity of Orange
County and a model for immigrant success. A section of the first chapter summarizes
the efforts that Polish Californians made to commemorate and promote this lasting
model of émigré achievement and patriotism.
Modjeska Club website design by Ewa Chodkiewicz-Swider, 1996
The
second, entirely new, Chapter is about the cultural context for the emergence
of the Modjeska Club in the 1970s: an overview of Polish immigration to
California, its different cohorts, and ways of structuring its societal and
cultural life in a multitude of organizations. It
builds on prior research by immigration scholars and documents gathered by
Polonian activists in California. The third, translated and expanded Chapter is
about the initiator and the founder of the Modjeska Club, Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetyński
(1910-1989). An actor, director, journalist, acting coach, producer,
translator, art dealer, and cultural activist, he made an enormous impact on
the development of Polonian communities throughout his life. Writing his
biography was possible thanks to the resources, research support, and
encouragement of his daughter Valerie Hunken, who provided numerous, hitherto
unpublished photographs and documents, and clarified complex issues. Chapter
Four, (the third section translated and expanded from the Polish Album
50-lecia Klubu) presents the tenure of Ossetyński as the Modjeska Club’s President
in 1971-1978. Here, we encounter an array of fascinating large-scale projects that
promoted the work of fellow émigrés from the Displaced Person generation—artist
Stanisław Szukalski (1893-1987), composer Roman Maciejewski (1910-1998), and
writer Aleksander Janta-Połczyński (1908-1974), among them.
From Chapter Five to Ten, the connection to the previously published Album of Club documents becomes tangential, as these source materials are instead analyzed and interpreted. The narrative benefits from the juxtaposition of texts from Club Archives with other documents that came to my attention since then, including files in Poland’s Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Institute of National Remembrance), documents maintained by the State of California, and recent research publications. Additionally, I found in the Modjeska Club Archives certain documents that were earlier not examined. These six chapters are organized by the periods in recent Polish political-cultural history. Chapter 5 covers the crises and restructuring of the Club during the Solidarity-era to 1989 (with Club Presidents Andrzej Mikulski, Jerzy Gąssowski and Tadeusz Bociański). Chapter 6 is dedicated to the first decade of the Third Polish Republic, finally free of the yoke of Soviet oppression (1989-1998), with Club Presidents Witold Czajkowski, Zofia Czajkowska and Edward Piłatowicz. In this period, the Club’s history was dramatically rewritten during its 25th anniversary celebrations in 1996.
.png)
Cover of 50th anniversary album, 2021
Chapter 7 tackles the years of stabilization and expansion, 1998-2010,
with Club Presidents Jolanta Zych, Dorota Czajka-Olszewska, and Andrzej
Maleski. During this time, the Club held some of its most significant events
and hosted the most eminent guests from Poland. Simultaneously, it underwent a
“multiple-personality” crisis, as it struggled to maintain its character of an
exclusive social club, while obtaining the official status of a public-benefit,
California non-profit corporation. Chapter 8 (2010-2018) switches gears, as I
direct the focus on my first two terms as President in the
first person including the Club’s 40th anniversary celebrations. The
second of “my” terms was not finished; my resignation in December 2012 was followed
by a brief presidency of Elżbieta Kański. Six years with Andrew Z. Dowen at the
helm (2013-2018) marked a period of continued close collaboration with the
Polish consulate and selected cultural groups, such as Polish Film Festival in
Los Angeles. Chapter 9 (2018-2023) deals with more recent challenges associated
with the pandemic and its aftermath, especially visible in the political
bifurcation and increasingly confrontational manner of public discourse. A
summary and my recommendations for the future of the Club are outlined in
Chapter 10: Conclusions.
Why
would anyone read the history of a small Polonian organization active on the
shores of the Pacific? Would its audience be limited to the Modjeska Club’s
members and activists? It is this group that might be the most surprised and
even challenged by the content of my history of “their” Club. I think that the Modjeska
Club’s history is a unique “case study” of the challenges, crises, and
achievements of Polonian organizations, promoting Polish culture thousands of
miles away from the “old country” and struggling to maintain a balance between
their American present and the Polish past. Having a first-person knowledge of
the interior workings of this group as its President since 2010, a lecturer and
interviewer since 2001, and co-organizer of several of its programs since 1997,
soon after my arrival in California in 1996, I am uniquely positioned to
narrate this history.
As a trained historian and
self-taught English-language poet, I’ve authored many books of cultural history
and poetry, writing mostly in English. However, I’m functionally bilingual and
bi-cultural, having learned English in Poland and having made a conscious
decision to become a first-generation Polish American, not a Pole living in
America. This book benefits from my personal experience as an émigré. As I am
not an exile, I was not forced to leave, but I shared the trauma of the loss of
the “ground under my feet” and I felt a sense of displacement and alienation in
a bewildering new space, new culture, new language. This aligned my experience with
the exiled generation of Displaced Persons of WWII and the political refugees
of the Solidarity era.
This book is dedicated to them, as
it tells their story.
Maja
Trochimczyk
Los
Angeles,11 November 2023
⦾ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
⦾
The project is financed by the
Chancellery of the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland as part of the Competition
“Polonia and Poles Abroad 2023.” The publication expresses only the views of
the author and cannot be identified with an official position of the
Chancellery of the Prime Minister.
The work is part of the project entitled
"I will show you Poland —stimulating the Polish community and Poles abroad
to act in the Polish national interest."
Projekt
finansowany ze środków Kancelarii Prezesa Rady Ministrów Rzeczpospolitej
Polskiej w ramach konkursu „Polonia i Polacy za Granicą 2023”. Publikacja
wyraża jedynie poglądy autora i nie może być utożsamiana z oficjalnym
stanowiskiem Kancelarii Prezesa Rady Ministrów.
Praca
jest częścią projektu pt. „Pokażę Ci Polskę – stymulowanie środowisk Polonii i
Polaków poza granicami kraju do działania w polskim interesie narodowym”.
⦾ ⦾ ⦾
Celebrating Modjeska in California is based on research conducted in
the archives of the following institutions and persons: Helena Modjeska Art
& Culture Club in Los Angeles; Polish Museum of America in Chicago, The
Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens in San Marino; University of California,
Irvine – Special Collections; as well as
archives of the American Council of Polish Culture in Chicago (formerly
American Council of Polish Cultural Clubs) and the Instytut Pamięci Narodowej (Institute
of National Remembrance) in Warsaw, Poland; Archives of Valerie Dudarew-Ossetyńska-Hunken, and the
author’s personal archives. Their permission to conduct
research and to publish the results (including photographs from the archives of the Modjeska Club, PMA, ACPC, and Valerie Hunken) is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
⦾ ⦾ ⦾
I am deeply grateful for the
generous assistance and support of Valerie Dudarew-Ossetyńska-Hunken, daughter
of the Founder of the Modjeska Club, Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetyński. Thanks to her
dedication to the memory of her father, ongoing research support, providing
many valuable resources, and correcting errors, I was able to write the first
biography of Ossetyński, an eminent actor, director, journalist, and Polonian
activist. I also relied on copies of letters, writings and photographs from
Leonidas Dudarew-Ossetyński’s Papers that she donated to the Polish Museum of
America in Chicago. It is a treasure-trove of Polish American history,
especially as pertains to California.
I am thankful for valuable research
assistance on-site and providing materials by email to Director Małgorzata Kot
and Archivist Halina Misterka of the Polish Museum of America. I thank scholars
Patryk Pleskot of the Institute of National Remembrance in Warsaw, Poland and
Peter J. Obst of the American Council of Polish Culture in Chicago for their
support as well as identifying and providing access to vital documents. I am
grateful to members of Polish American Historical Association and historians: John
Bukowczyk, Stanislaus Blejwas, Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, Mary Patrice
Erdmans, and Joanna Wojdon, for their insights and research into diverse
aspects of the Polish diaspora.
I would like to express my
gratitude to all members and activists of the Helena Modjeska Art & Culture
Club who contributed to the Club’s projects during over 50 years of its
existence, ensured the survival of this organization, while other groups
dissolved, and made this book possible.
Special thanks to archivist and art
historian Isabella Zuralski-Yeager, Ph.D. and to Nicholas Skaldetvind for
proofreading and copy-editing of the manuscript.
All statements, errors, and
omissions are mine; I have described the history of Polish Americans in
California and the Modjeska Club based on the knowledge I have gained from
documents available to me in 2023. These statements may be corrected in the
future, when more information becomes available.
Maja
Trochimczyk, Ph.D.
Los Angeles, 11 November 2023
.png)
.JPG)
.JPG)
