Polish Spirit

...But as the tape continued—on and on, shooting, sirens, screams, more shooting, and then more shooting—the horror began to bleed through...

...He records, for example, the kindhearted gesture of Jozef Cardinal Glemp, who opened Solidarity's First National Congress with a solemn mass...

...If Weschler is willing to stifle his own cries of indignation to gain as much insight as possible in all aspects of the uprising, perhaps it is because he believes Poland's recent history cannot be isolated from the tradition of other working-class movements...

...Soon he became an eager follower of Solidarity and its "self-limiting revolution" and returned for two more visits before the end of 1982...

...Because he sounds so dispassionate in this discussion, one might mistake Weschler's investigation as an apology for Jaruzelski's regime...

...On an international level, he recognized the opportunity Solidarity afforded to activists who wanted to learn some practical lessons about the process of restoring human dignity to a system that had fallen into moral bankruptcy...

...For instance, in 1982, after Solidarity had been officially outlawed, Weschler noted that the ubiquitous lines of 1980 and 1981 had almost disappeared ("There is simply nothing in the stores...

...From scraps of information meted out to the official press, he measures the relative influence of Polish and Soviet Party hardliners on the general's decision...

...But he takes note, as well, of Glemp's less supportive call for "calm, social harmony, and work," on the eve of a crucial national strike...

...Perhaps it is because he understands that, for all the passion it breathed into the meaning of "solidarity" for sixteen months, Poland will finally count most for the larger political lessons its protracted struggle will yield...

...Eva Wiosna (Eva Wiosna is the pseudonym of a freelance writer who spent several months in Poland last summer...

...In Warsaw and Gdansk, Weschler recalls, people talked "as if talking mattered—and their talk would seem to rise from some deep, clear core of truth and value...

...Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for The New Yorker, first went to Poland as a tourist in the spring of 1981, when the country's closed culture was opening up at a breathless pace...

...Because he was intellectually and emotionally attuned to Solidarity's struggle, Weschler was able to capture, perhaps better than any other reporter, the images and sounds of Poland's uprising...

...Besides documenting the violations of human rights that gradually eroded Poland's capacity for tolerance, he records as well some light-hearted absurdities that have plagued this chaotic land...

...By the time he had completed four long magazine articles, now collected in book form in The Passion of Poland, it had become difficult to tell whether the "passion" in the book's title belonged to Poland or to Weschler himself...

...He recognized in the movement the workers' opportunity to break the bonds of Polish oppression...

...As nearly as a foreign journalist could be, Weschler was committed to Solidarity's struggle...

...He quotes a Warsaw acquaintance: "You can't even get a simple aspirin____Everybody in this city is walking around with a headache...

...Weschler also tries to appraise Wojciech Jaruzelski's motives for declaring a state of war...

...In one early report he describes an audio recording of Gdansk's 1970 strikes which was played for him at the union's national headquarters: "The impact of the sounds on the tape," he writes, "was dulled for me by my Western familiarity with the aural vocabulary of violence...

...Although Weschler is especially adept at recreating the mood of Poland's revolution, The Passion of Poland should not be discounted as merely an impressionistic account...

...But to reach such a conclusion would be to miss the larger political perspective Weschler clearly establishes earlier in his report...

...He skillfully pinpoints the contradictions that frequently developed in the Polish conflict...