A Polish Notebook – on the eve of martial law

Letters

Vol. 4 No. 5 · 18 March 1982

From Matthew Tagney

SIR: David Lodge writes (LRB, Vol. 4, No 2) that the Church is ‘the main focus of spiritual and ideological resistance to Soviet Communism in Poland’. But just as Warsaw Radio censored any mention of the Independence Day demonstration organised by Solidarity, so too the Church censors demonstrations of independence, since its influence prevents the publication in Poland of Lodge’s Church-criticising novel. Such censorship does not encourage me to see the Church’s role as ‘steadying and inspiring’.

Matthew Tagney
London W2

From Roland Morgan

SIR: With regard to David Lodge’s remark about Poland, ‘It seems incredible that anti-semitism could survive in a country in which the camps are preserved as monuments,’ may I offer a passage from Nicholas Bethell’s The Palestine Triangle, which is certainly not an anti-semitic record? In explaining the 1946 pogrom at Kielce, Bethell writes: ‘There was resentment against Jews who returned from deportation and reclaimed their property. There was even greater resentment against the Jews who formed a large part of Poland’s new communist administration.’ He cites US Embassy official Gerald Keith: ‘When the Jews in government have by their being there linked themselves with the Russian influence, which is unquestionably not desired by at least 85 per cent of the Poles, it is not surprising that feeling against the Jews is extremely strong in many quarters.’ The fact that, as Mr Lodge reports, Jews are now blamed for Solidarity extremism in this most anti-semitic of nations simply forces one to wonder whether another chain of preserved monuments might not be a more potent influence on Polish feeling on this matter – namely, the Catholic cathedrals.

Roland Morgan
Uzes

David Lodge writes: I would not wish to exonerate the Church in Poland from some responsibility for the tradition of anti-semitism in that country, but there is plenty of evidence that recent manifestations of anti-semitism – in 1968, and during the period of Solidarity’s success – were deliberately generated from within the Party for political purposes (see, for example, Neal Ascherson’s The Polish August, and Maxine Pollack’s article ‘Anti-Semitism in Poland’ the Tablet, 30 January 1982). Similarly it was not the ‘censorship’ of the Church, but the political and ideological climate that made an ironic novel about Catholicism ‘unpublishable’ in Poland between August 1980 and December 1981. One might compare the difficulty George Orwell experienced in getting Animal Farm published in this country at a time when Soviet Russia was still our ‘friendly ally’.

Vol. 4 No. 6 · 1 April 1982

From Nicolas Walter

SIR: David Lodge should know better than anyone that simple statements about Catholics are generally misleading, yet there is one in his ‘Polish Notebook’ (LRB, Vol. 4, No 2). He reports that ‘practising Polish Catholics resort to abortion as a means of birth control on a large scale,’ and comments that, ‘whereas British Catholics active in the anti-abortion campaign see themselves as trying to persuade secular society to renounce abortion, in Poland it is a moral issue for Catholics themselves.’ In fact, abortion is a moral issue for Catholics themselves not just in Poland but in Britain and many other countries. Despite the traditional condemnation of the Church and the official disapproval of both clerical and lay leaders, surveys of British public opinion show that a majority of Catholics favour a liberal abortion law, and surveys of British women who have legal abortions show that the proportion of Catholics is larger than in the general population, while a high proportion of the foreign women who have legal abortions here come from Catholic countries. So it seems that a large number of Catholics on both sides of the Iron Curtain resort to contraception when they can and to abortion when they must. How far can you go, indeed!

Nicolas Walter
Rationalist Press Association, London Nl