Not proud of my Polish heritage

I've asked many Polish immigrants over the years in Chicago if they would ever move back. Usually its a F*** No! Take Novi for example he never wants to go back as well. I'm telling you the vast majority of immigrants feel this way. And couple of times they almost became angry twords me.

One can only come to the conclusion the best place to live and make money is in the USA.

Only a fool would return......

But only if you make enough money to make your life better than in Poland, I presume.

Me too! Me too!! I never wanted to go back to that pathetic US. Its only advantage for me was earning a quick buck to buy property in Poland. All the rest was inferior to my Polish life style. I especially hated the water in US taps - so hard that washing soap off my skin lasted hours.

Who said we would let your broke ass in?

How come over a million Poles live in my area and never want to go back????

Keep trolling its all you can do! LOL

Novi's wife - born and raised in Poland - doesn't even want to visit. For the record, my wife is a "she".

Doesn`t matter what you would do - you won`t have a chance to do anything. :):)


Mine too! Mine too! She also doesn`t want to visit the US.

Never go back!

Just a comment. That's why I'm here in the USA. My ancestors came from Russian Poland to the USA. They NEVER, NEVER intended to stay in the USA. They were only going to make money and go back to the "Old Country".

Within one week of being in the USA they made up their minds to stay and sent for their wives, kids, girlfriends, etc. That was it. They never went back.

Many people make a conscious decision not to return to their native country out of protest!
After WWII, scores of Germans left Germany for distant shores, (mostly for the US, Jewish refugees, often choosing Israel), in a majority of cases never to return, even in extreme instances, to visit ill or impovrished relatives back home.

The parents of some friends of ours only agreed to see their parents on neutral territory but wouldn't set foot on German soil.

Many people dream of returning but never do.

Among people who came to the UK in the 1960 or 70s, many planned to go back when they were retired however in the intervening years, they'd got used to where they lived, their home country had changed a lot and wasn't the place they'd left and by then they had children and grandchildren that they didn't want to leave.

My grandparents returned from USA. Theoretically I still have relatives there.

That would make you an American/Pole then.
Welcome to the club ;-)

There's a lot of different reasons for not going back. Each one is individual. Oftentimes it's complicated. One part of the family came from a part of Russian Poland that is not even Poland today. They were going to return but their relatives wrote to them and said not to return. The political situation didn't look too good. War was going on in the Balkans. My relative brought his girl friend over and five months later Europe exploded into WW I.

The area they came from was only made up of about 8% Polish (based on the 1897 Czarist Russian Census) so there wasn't much of anything to go back to. When both sides of my family settled in America, they settled in Polish neighborhoods. Everyone from the butcher to the baker and everyone in between was Polish Catholic or Polish Jew. Even if you were illiterate you could comfortably make your way. Life was good.

@marion kanawha

Fascinating post.
Please spend some more time sharing your views and opinions on this forum.
Welcome!

@marion kanawha
We enjoy posts like you just made.
Please post more often.


Welcome ?
He has been a member here longer than you have been. :-/

I am still thinking about the OP. I'm pondering over it, so to speak. I don't know if I have a response to it.

I will say that at the moment (for the last couple of months) I have been intently reading Polish history up to 1795. I know very little about Polish history so I'm determined to know as much as possible now. There's a lot of comments that could be made based on this earlier history.

Copernicus was Polish with perhaps a German mother-unless one of his parents was Jewish, in which case (despite if even one of his parents was gentile), I'd claim Copernicus, also, for all of its flaws, Poland did have its periods of Philosemitism; and many of my ancestors as Crypto Jews in either were in Poland or claimed ties to there (e.g., A Budapest-born one with roots in the shtetl of Odesa claimed roots in Kacwin, and a Levoča-born one claimed roots in Łapsze Niżne. A relative in Wilno used Polish orthography for Yiddish.).

He lived long before the modern concept of the nation state and before today's continental European nationalities formed.

I'm talking in an ethnic sense. Also, Copernicus died just before the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was founded and would have loved to live to see it founded by all accounts.

Neither of those two ethnicities existed in its present form then.


Yes, he probably would have appreciated it providing it brought stability.

Copernicus was a woman (as Sexmission taught us)