This article presents a case study of the Polish American Economic Forum as an example of public transnational behavior in intertwining economic and political spheres. The organization was formed in 1989, primarily by Solidarity refugees and other contemporary migrants, along with a small number of Polish Americans and WWII émigrés who played salient roles. The migrants utilized cross-national networks and bi-cultural knowledge to create a nonprofi t organization to promote investment in Poland’s emerging private sector economy, which they also defi ned as political support for the new government. The transnational networks of these contemporary Polish migrants in the U.S. were simultaneously embedded in both the home and host countries. 

Dagmara Dominczyk’s The Lullaby of Polish Girls mirrors her own experience as a Polish émigré of the early 1980s and touches upon the myriad stages of exile. Similarly to other American writers of Polish descent (e.g. Leslie Pietrzyk, Karolina Waclawiak or Anthony Bukoski), the writer’s debut novel explores the problematic questions of immigrant’s assimilation, desire for acceptance or one’s ties to the home country. But above all, Grażyna Kozaczka notices that “[the literary work] offers an additional option opened to Polish American fi ction writers”, because the main character of the book, Anna Baran, is able to embrace both: Polish and American culture and claims two homelands as her own. Whether the protagonist is completely free from immigrant-homelessness or not, seems to be a thought-provoking matter as it seems that Dominczyk’s protagonist is engrossed in the yearning desire to return to the country of her forefathers; i.e. to Poland in general and Kielce in particular. However, the city of her birth and simultaneously the place where she spent her summer holidays, which is aptly described by the author of the novel in the moment of transition (as communist Poland of the late 1980s alters into a democratic country) belongs to the sphere of her memory and a real return to the past time is not possible. Therefore, the aim of the present paper is to shed some light upon the issues of identity, questions of belonging and nostalgic allegiance in Dominczyk’s novel The Lullaby of Polish Girls.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Canada accepted more than 115,000 Polish immigrants. Some of them went through refugee camps in Western Europe, some arrived in Canada from the U.S., and there were also those who came directly from Poland. This great infl ux of Poles to Canada was caused by a confl uence of factors. The most vital was obviously the economic and political situation in Poland, but Canada’s immigration policy also played a signifi cant role, particularly the new regulations enacted in 1978. They gave temporary preferences for East-European Self-Exiled Persons – those who left the Communist bloc and could not or did not want to return to their home countries. It is worth emphasizing that the Self-Exiled class formally existed in Canada until as late as 1990. Moreover, the new Canadian regulations enabled admitting immigrants who were sponsored by Canadian residents. This allowed the Canadian Polish Congress (CPC), following the1981 agreement with the Minister of Employment and Immigration, to act as a guarantor to persons and institutions bringing in immigrants. With the cooperation of the CPC, ethnic organizations, and Roman Catholic Church institutions, a network of Polish information and aid centers was established in Canada. They were actively supporting the Canadian system of assistance for new immigrants, helping the newly arrived to adapt to life in a new country.

The aim of this paper is to present support rendered by Polish veterans in Canada for the “Polish cause” in 1980s – i.e. during the brief “carnival of Solidarity” and subsequent period of martial law which resulted in massive wave of emigrants leaving the country between 1981–1987. The scope of engagement of Polish WWII veterans settled in Canada into various forms of assistance for the Solidarity movement in Poland (demonstrations, petitions, fundraising) and combatants’ attitude towards the new wave of political and economic immigrants arriving from Poland to the Country of Maple Leaf in 1980s. is presented on the basis of archival documents (by-laws, regulations, financial reports, internal correspondence) and press releases (“SPK w Kanadzie” – quarterly magazine of the Polish Combatants Association in Canada).

The article offers an analysis of an important aspect of trans-national politics: the electoral participation of Polish citizens abroad in the national elections in Poland. The author presents a comparative analysis of the data regarding the elections (both parliamentary and presidential) that took place in Poland in the last two decades (1990–2015), together with major trends, distribution of votes and their possible impact on general election results. The analysis reveals interesting dynamics of electoral mobilization of Polish emigrants, points out possible factors contributing to the level of electoral participation and shows political preferences of Polish voters in the US and Canada in comparative perspective.

Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850–1917) was a Catholic nun of Italian origin, one of the first women missionaries who decided to leave for the United States in order to offer assistance to Italian Americans at the peak of their mass scale migration (1889–1917). Following an unprecedented success of her Missionary Institute of the Sacred Heart, she obtained American citizenship and was proclaimed the first U.S. Catholic saint in history, a global patron of immigrants. Until quite recently her work had been studied almost exclusively within a purely ecclesiastical context. However, nowadays her crucial intercultural experience is being revised by U.S. gender scholars who perceive her as a strong and independent woman of her time, founding and running a charity enterprise on three continents, little short of a Catholic feminist avant la lettre, but also an education innovator, pioneer of bilingual schooling as well as of an inclusive model of integrating immigrants into a modern society.