FRANK MOCHA (1923 - 2001)
scholar, writerFrank Mocha was born in formerly German Silesia from which the family moved after plebiscite to newly Polish Silesia, where he received his elementary and secondary education (1927-1939). A WWII veteran from Day One in Poland to V-E Day in England (including 3 years in POW camps: in Alsace, Bavaria-Stalag VIIA, and Austria-Stalag XVIIB); he reached England on the instructions of the camp's Polish elders to inform the Allies that the Germans had developed jet planes, seen in flight over Stalag XVIIB. Rejoining the Army, he was sent to an Officer School, graduating just before the war's end. He matriculated and entered the Polish College of the University of London, studying economics and history, with the help of a British Government scholarship. As an ex-serviceman, he was eligible for emigration to America.
Arriving in New York with a British wife in 1951, he entered the printing industry and started raising a family. The birth of his third child in 1957 coincided with the Soviet Sputnik, which marked a turning point for him. As America feared to be overtaken in technology and lacked specialists on East Europe, Mocha decided to return to school, at first part-time, helped by a tuition grant at Columbia University, and then with a National Defense Fellowship. He left printing and became a full-time student, graduating magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa and, while teaching at the University of Pittsburgh (1966-1971), earning a doctorate in Slavic Studies at Columbia, followed by a 10-week study at Moscow University under a grant from IREX (International Research and Exchanges Board) in 1971. Later he was active at the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York, chiefly as chairman of its Literary Section and Associate Editor of The Polish Review, and taught at NYU (New York University), publishing his M.A. and Ph.D. theses, and numerous articles.
The year 1976 was another turning point for him. While teaching at NYU, he offered a course, Poles in America: A Bicentennial View, the only one of that kind in America. It became an official Bicentennial Event in New York City and the subject of an article in The New York Times (Tom Buckley, "The Revival of a Heritage"), but also the germ for a book of essays, POLES IN AMERICA: Bicentennial Essays (1978), widely supported by all segments of American Polonia, as a summary of Polish contributions to the USA.
By then, Poland itself had begun to stir, indicating the beginning of crisis in the Soviet bloc, and his training had come full-circle. As an expert on the area and frequent traveler to Poland as director of summer programs in Lublin he was given a Mellon Grant by Loyola University of Chicago to organize an International Symposium on Solidarity (1982). This too became the germ for a book of essays, POLAND'S SOLIDARITY MOVEMENT (1984) which, smuggled into Poland, had some bearing on the fall of communism there.
The present book, AMERICAN "POLONIA" AND POLAND, also the subject of a New York Times article (David Gonzalez, "Silver Zlotys and a Dream of America"), is part, with the other two, of what he likes to call his "Trilogy," to be left behind as a testimony to his work in the last 20 years. AMERICAN "POLONIA" is more than a sequel to POLES IN AMERICA because it includes Poland now, an impossibility then. It is an apt ending of his labors during what was really a digression from his post-doctoral research (which was to have been a biography of Boris Godunov, and a study of the Time of Troubles in Russia) which he can now return to, while at the same time working on a companion volume to AMERICAN POLONIA -- ONE MAN'S SAGA, which he intends to dedicate to his three children and six grandchildren.
From: Frank Mocha, American "Polonia" and Poland, East European Monographs, Boulder, CO (1998)