From Polonia with Love

% Prominently displayed in Chicago last week stood three 40-ft.-long containers loaded with food and medicine bound for Gdansk, Krakow and Warsaw. The desperately needed cartons of flour, baby food, pasta, antibiotics, surgical gloves and hospital linens are manifestations of one of the most profound changes brought about by Poland's dramatic opening to the West. A Polish government is at last receiving the enthusiastic support and recognition of "Polonia," as Poles who have left their homeland refer to the colonies they have established in other countries. In the week that brought Lech Walesa to the Windy City, it was evident that the heady transformations in Poland have also stirred a seemingly insular and parochial community.

With more than a million residents of Polish descent, the Chicago area is the unofficial capital of Polonia. Many of the janitors and cleaning women who vacuum and scrub the city's high-rises and the clerks who sell kielbasa and clothing in the shops along Milwaukee Avenue speak little or no English. News about the old country is broadcast in Polish on radio and television and headlined by the daily Zgoda (circ. 15,000) and at least a dozen thriving Polish-language weeklies. The reaction of leading commentators in recent months has sometimes bordered on euphoria. "Events in Poland have infected the rest of Eastern Europe," exclaims George Migala, host of the popular radio show Voice of Polonia. They have also infected Chicago.

The Poles came to Chicago in three large waves. Between 1890 and 1930, more than 350,000 Polish peasants poured into the city to labor in the steel mills and meat-packing plants. Their descendants now live in the suburbs or in neat bungalows on Chicago's northwest and southwest sides. As Stalin's Iron Curtain fell across Eastern Europe after World War II, another flood of immigrants arrived, many of them soldiers who had fought with the Allied forces.

The latest migration began in the late 1970s, accelerating after martial law was declared in Poland in 1981. Among the 30,000 new Polonians to arrive in Chicago were cosmopolitan intellectuals who found they had little in common with their predecessors. "Polka is not a Polish dance," laughs Bozena Nowicka, who teaches Polish at Loyola University. "Pirogen is not a noble dish. Polish America is an archive for a culture that no longer exists." In June, Nowicka and 4,500 other new Polonians lined up outside the Polish consulate in Chicago to cast their votes in the historic election back home that catapulted Solidarity leaders into a position of power.