the sad family dealings with communist Poland
Communism in practice is very dysfunctional anywhere.
I don't condemn the family who was trying to get as much as possible from their US relatives (since working harder or smarter didn't guarantee you anything in communist Poland where there wasn't enough of anything.... by design) but I also understand the US relatives getting fed up with it...
the late 1950s, times were so good that they haven't really been duplicated since. Incredible prosperity!
Part of both the American High after WWII and the Great Compression (the period of American history with the least inequality created in part by strict limits on immigration....).
The US is currently is a second Gilded Age with massive inequality... an obscenely wealthy elite class and rampant homelessness and drug addiction... it's a disgrace that Americans put up with it....