Irena Grudzińska-Gross has been a professor at Princeton University since 2008. According to her profile on the website of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, she specializes in Brodsky and Miłosz, as well as issues of war, violence, and ideologies of nation states. Poets and dictators, literature and politics. We can imagine that the profile of Hannah Arendt fifty years earlier, the first woman to lecture at the forge of the “Princeton man” (since the spring semester of 1959), would have been similarly “composed.” The poets’ names would certainly be different, perhaps Rilke or Auden. More important, however, is a sensitivity (including an ear for language), a poet’s perspective, as well as excerpts of poetry that build in her texts a common tissue binding her political thought and antitotalitarian engagement.

Reading Irena Grudzińska-Gross's essays, you feel the presence of Hannah Arendt: the presence of her thoughts, but also a similar tension between her public life and private attitudes. None of the texts in her book is specifically devoted to Arendt, and even the topics of the selected essays are seemingly removed from the themes of Arendt's works. Yet this creates an even stronger feeling that the author of Honor, Horror and Classics [Honor, horror i klasycy] constantly follows in the footsteps of her great predecessor. Indeed, “to follow in the footsteps” is the phrase she herself uses to describe the mission of the people of the borderlands.

One may point to many parallels in the lives of both writers. Refugees from Europe, where the ideologies of nationalism and communism were in the service of totalitarian systems, political emigrants and American cosmopolitans rooted in the European tradition, finding a home in New York, this metropolis of exiles, at the same time (still) modern and (already) old-fashioned. Receiving American citizenship, they both memorized the constitution and adored Tocqueville, which did not prevent them from criticizing the country and taking advantage of every opportunity to “sneak out” to Europe. Their perception of war, which so fundamentally formed their biographies, was learned from childhood: Arendt as an activist of Youth Aliyah helping children who had survived the Holocaust in postwar Germany and Palestine, Grudzińska-Gross as a coeditor (with Jan T. Gross) of the collection of documents War Through Children's Eyes (in Polish in a larger version with a different introduction, W czterdziestym nas matko na Sibir zesłali).