Polish daily newspapers from the 1920s and the 1930s were inundated with information about the United States. On a daily basis they published articles, short and longer notes, stories, and pictures presenting all areas of American life to the Polish public: politics, economy, education, culture, and sports. It seems that a “slice” of American daily life was a necessary component of a Polish breakfast and that a modern Polish engineer, accountant, or office worker could not go to work without knowing what was happening in his or her “neighbor’s” home on the other side of the Atlantic. Reading all these papers we often have an impression that New York or Chicago was just next door to Warsaw or Poznań.

Why was that so? Why was the information about America so vital for the generation of Poles after World War I? Why did the United States come to be such a frequent point of reference and to some extent a cultural qualifier in the Polish popular press? What was the reason for the fascination with that country? In the present volume the question of Polish identity is investigated from a variety of historical and cultural perspectives highlighting specific models subtending Polish identity formation such as Christianity/religion, gentryoriented values, peasant culture, colonialism in the form of partitions (i.e., the lack of sovereignty for 123 years), cultural belatedness, geographical position and east-or-west orientation, and many others. The present chapter highlights one important perspective that shows how constructing the modern image of Poland resulted from the ways the Poles viewed the United States and how that country became the often-overlooked point of reference for the construction of modern Polish identity. This chapter points to how the United States functioned not only as a traditional democratic ideal but also how almost every aspect of life including sports, home life, architecture, education, and jazz became in Polish eyes a denomination of modernity modeled on the American example.

Referring to the newspaper coverage of everyday American life, this chapter shows how the media narrowed the divide between Poland and the United States and more or less presented the Poles as America's close neighbors and friends, brothers and sisters, and members of the same family.