An American in Warsaw
Gone from America, at any rate. The emergence of Solidarity in Poland made it clear that the same desire burned brightly in other places. By 1983, which is when Dobija managed to get to Poland, that country was under martial law. She spent a year learning the language and doing research into the women of Solidarity, and she left reluctantly. She returned in 1986 and has lived in Poland since.
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Dobija reported from Poland as a National Public Radio stringer for a couple of years, but the better she understood the country the more frustrated she became with the Western media, NPR included. “When the story became subtler, no longer a revolution of sensations but a revolution of people searching their souls for a new way of doing things, I found it was very hard to find an editor who was interested in that story.”
Circulation is up to 10,000, she said. She came to Chicago to search for underwriters and subscribers, and she told us that one of the more helpful Poles she’d met here was Jaroslaw Cholodecki, president of the Polish American Economic Forum. After Dobija returned to Warsaw we got in touch with Cholodecki, and discovered that he admires Dobija but thinks she might be headed for trouble.
“I didn’t talk to her about it,” he said. “I think she’s too idealistic.”
Dobija told us she is not the only Western do-gooder in Warsaw. “It seems to me there is the beginning of an aggregation of people like myself in the Eastern bloc,” she reflected. “A few Brits but primarily Americans, and primarily my generation or much younger.”
Dreams of Field
