Chatting with Chicago WTTW’s Dan Soles

Are we ready to celebrate Polish-American Heritage Month? Chicago’s PBS station WTTW is. Justine Jablonska speaks to station Chief Television Content Officer Dan Soles and reports on what we can contribute.

Nowhere Places: Mining the Polish Experience

…there’s a symmetry between the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the French-English multicultural country I’ve grown up in… and it seems fitting that Polish and Canadian troops often fought side by side in WWII. That’s a good place to start rebuilding a sense of who I am, says Andrew Borkowski.

The Winter Palace

Award-winning author Eva Stachniak’s dazzles with a tale of intrigue, ambition, spying, treachery, flattery, conflict and fear in St. Peterburg’s Winter Palace.

Starring Madame Modjeska: On Tour in Poland and America

Helena Modjeska, a great 19th century Polish actress who came to the US at age 30, learned enough English in six months to play Ophelia, except for the mad scene which was too difficult. So she played that in Polish and wowed them. Aren’t all madwomen incoherent anyway? Margaret Araneo reviews Beth Holmgren’s great book about the very talented, and very independent, Madame Modjeska.

Be Not Afraid: The Polish (R)evolution, “Solidarity”

Powerful, peaceful and quintessentially Polish: Solidarity. Canadian author Heather Kirk spotlights the many facets of a world-changing revolution that killed “precisely no one.”

Manya, The Living History of Marie Skłodowska Curie

A spellbinding performance by a master storyteller.

Quodlibet with Cardinals and A Letter to Serafin

Poetry by John Minczeski; introduced by John Guzlowski

Winter 2011-12 Bulletin Board

• Bogusław Schaeffer honored in chocolate
• Helena Modjeska in chocolate and elsewhere
• A new element named for Copernicus
• Radioactive, a biography of Marie and Pierre Curie, a National Book Award finalist
• Jan Lisiecki, pianist extraordinaire
• Wojtek the Soldier Bear is now a film
• Poland’s Prime Minister named European of the Year

Agnieszka Holland’s In Darkness – A Promise Fulfilled

Agnieszka Holland’s latest film is dedicated to Marek Edleman, the legendary leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and evokes passages of his book: “And there was love, too, in the ghetto…”

Why This Silence?

The photo was unmistakably me, in Nehru shirt and bell bottoms, a cigarette dangling rakishly in my right hand… on the front page of Czechoslovakia’s Socialist Union of Youth newspaper.

Yes, Mr. President! *

(*President Poland, of course.)

Isabelle Sokolnicka’s optimism may be contagious…
all the more reason to read on.

Children in Exile: Recollections of Children Deported to the Soviet Gulag

Chicago-based filmmaker Chris Swider discusses his award-winning documentary, and why he chose to focus on the youngest “enemies of the State.”

Lost Between Worlds

Exquisitely graceful prose and a powerful story make Edward Herzbaum’s journals read like a novel, a timeless telling of the years 1939-1945.