Iwanska, Alicja

About the author: The late Dr. Iwanska received her PhD from the Sociology Department at Columbia University. She taught at several universities, including NYU, Sacramento State College, and SUNY Albany. She was an honorary professor of the Polish University in London. She was born in Poland and received her secondary and university education there, graduating from Warsaw University Philosophy Department. Throughout WWII she served in the Polish underground army (AK), leaving Poland to emigrate to the US in 1946. She is the author of many books, including British American Loyalists in Canada and US Southern Confederates in Brazil (Mellen, 1993).

British American Loyalists in Canada and U.S. Southern Confederates in Brazil. Exiles From the United States

1993 0-7734-9384-0
The first sociological study (using social anthropology techniques) of the descendants of British American Loyalists in Canada (Fredericton, Montreal, Toronto, et al.), and of the Southern Confederates in their capital Americana in Brazil. It examines the way political exiles who left their country (persuaded that their political causes were lost) decided to concentrate their efforts in the host countries on the survival of their cultures only. It documents the techniques through which the two groups (original exiles and their descendants) achieved that cultural survival and prominent places in their host-countries.

Polish Intelligentsia in Nazi Concentration Camps and American Exile a Study of Values in Crisis Situations

1998 0-7734-8388-8
Based on interviews carried out in Chicago in 1955 with Polish intellectuals who survived wartime internment in Nazi concentration camps and later emigrated for political reasons to the US. Contributes to the study of life in the camps, emigration and assimilation studies, and theoretical studies of values. It begins with a brilliant exegesis of the social origins and occupations of the pre-war Polish intelligentsia, and of their aspirations and way of life analyzed under the headings of personalism, patriotism, spiritual leadership, liberal education, social refinement, and lifestyle. It emerges that pre-war intellectual values proved stronger in the camps (where her informants managed to maintain their roles as spiritual leaders) than in the seemingly lesser ordeal of exile. In Chicago, where they found only factory or low-level clerical jobs, had no access to higher intellectual and cultural milieux, and were distrusted or ignored by the Poles of an earlier emigration, the old values were often irrelevant.