The Center for European and Eurasian Studies invites the public to a discussion of the book, Solidarity' s Secret - The Women Who Defeated Communism In Poland  with author, Shana Penn, Open Society Institute fellow and visiting scholar at Mills College Women's Leadership Institute.  She directs the Jewish Heritage Initiative in Poland, a philanthropic program of the Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture, based in San Francisco.

Discussant for the talk will be Professor Roman Koropeckyj, Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, who specializes in Polish and Ukrainan languages, literature and culture, Romanticism, anthropology and literary theory.

About the book (from University of Michigan Press):

Solidarity's Secret is the first book to record the crucial yet little-known role women played in the rise of an independent press in Poland and in the fall of that country's communist government.

Shana Penn pieces together a decade of interviews with the women behind the Polish pro-democracy movement -- women whose massive contributions were obscured by the more public successes of their male counterparts.

Penn reveals the story of how these brave women ran Solidarity and the main opposition newspaper, Tygodnik Mazowsze, while prominent men like Lech Walesa were underground or in jail during the 1980s martial law years. The same women then went on to play influential roles in post-communist Poland.

Solidarity's Secret gives us a richly detailed story-within-a-story -- unheard of not only in the West, but until recently even within Poland itself -- from one of the most important eras in modern history.

Cost : The lecture is free and open to the public.

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Co-sponsored with Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Los Angeles