Shortly after returning from our Eighth World Congress in Białystok, I began to look at the first draft of a commemorative album devoted to PIASA’s first eighty years. Most readers of this newsletter are broadly familiar with PIASA’s founding “in America,” but documents retrieved from our archives to illustrate this album reveal some interesting details, as well as a few parallels with PIASA’s present condition. PIASA’s origins in the darkest days of the Second World War as the Polish Academy of Sciences in exile and the personal challenges its founders as immigrants had to overcome to establish themselves as well as an institute of Polish science and culture on American soil, frame a genuinely inspiring story. The outstanding academic credentials of those founders—Bronisław Malinowski, Oskar Halecki, Jan Kucharzewski, Wacław Lednicki, Rafał Taubenschlag and Wojciech Świętosławski—no doubt assisted in securing the confirmation of PIASA’s statutes and leadership by the wartime Polish government in London, the news relayed in a telegram to Halecki by Ambassador Jan Ciechanowski. The day after his presidential address at PIASA’s inauguration at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York on May 15, 1942, Bronisław Malinowski suddenly passed away. One can only imagine the shock experienced by those who had so recently celebrated with him the moment of PIASA’s birth.

Flash forward to 2022. PIASA’s Eighth World Congress had to overcome challenges of its own—an unrelenting pandemic, border insecurity created by a troublesome Belarusian neighbor, and a Russian invasion of Ukraine that brought artillery and rocket fire to Poland’s doorstep and millions of refugees through it. Yet we persevered in our determination to renew our academic meetings after a two-year hiatus, we adapted to the un1 Polish Institute of Arts & Sciences of America Vol. 2, No. 3 July 2022 certain conditions by providing a hybrid format, and we renewed our valued contacts with Polish academicians, scholars, and friends. We received congratulatory messages on our 80th anniversary from the Minister of Culture, Piotr Gliński, and the US Ambassador to Poland, Mark Brzezinski. And as PIASA’s 11th president, I am pleased to report that I safely returned to the United States, genuinely proud to be a small part of the illustrious and on-going history of a Polish Institute no longer in exile, but “of America” and at home in Poland.

― Robert Blobaum, PIASA President