Langer, Rulka
writer
(September 23, 1906 - February 26, 1993)When Rulka Langer wrote an absorbing book of her life in war torn Warsaw, Poland, in the first stages of the Second World War, Time magazine called her the Polish Mrs. Miniver. Her The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt was to Warsaw what Jan Struthers' sketches of Mrs. Miniver were to London. Her story was not turned into movies and television as was Mrs. Miniver. After the war, when the Polish community in New York was for or against the Communist regime in Poland, Rulka Langer was largely ignored. Thus, very little is known about her.
She was born September 29, 1906, in Warsaw, Poland, to Mieczyslaw and Elizabeth (nee Miazczynski) Godlewski, and was affectionately called Rulka or Rolka rather than Rose Mary. Dr. Stephen Mizwa, in the second year of his presidency of the Kosciuszko Foundation, gave her a scholarship in 1926 to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and she graduated in 1928 with a bachelor's degree in economics. She returned to Warsaw and did advertising work for a New York agency. Shortly after, she met a 34-year-old professor at Warsaw University, Olgierd Langer, who came from Lwow to lecture on commmercial advertising, and fell in love. They were married on February 19, 1930, and the union was blessed with a boy and a girl.
In the years to come, the Polish foreign ministry often sent Professor Langer on missions to the United States and he was in New York when German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. After the German forces nearly destroyed Warsaw, Rulka Langer fled with her two children to Genoa, Italy, where they boarded the SS Excalibur with diplomatic passes and, fifteen days later, arrived in New York on March 23, 1940.
As records show, Marian and Hanna Kister, who came from Poland and ran Roy Publishers in New York just as they did in Warsaw before the Gestapo closed their business in 1939, asked Rulka Langer to translate into English Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's historical novel of St. Francis of Assisi, Bez Oreza, and the title was transliterated to Blessed Are the Meek. No sooner was the book in New York bookstores than Book of the Month Club chose it for its membership in April 1944 and published 600,000 copies. It enabled Roy (Roj in Warsaw) Publishers to give more prominence to Polish writers than ever before in the United States.
In addition, after Olgierd Langer served as Polish consul in New York, the family moved to New Canaan, Connecticut, and Mrs. Langer worked from 1953 to 1971 as an advertising copy writer. She returned to New York after her husband died in 1970 and their children were married, and served as parish librarian at Good Shepherd. She moved in 1992 to Boulder, Colorado, where her son lived, and died on February 26, 1993.
From: Edward Pinkowski
Langer, Rulka
Author, writer, lecturer. Born and educated in Poland. Came to the United States on a Kosciuszko Foundation scholarship to study at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N. Y. After completing her studies in America, returned to Poland and did advertising work for the Warsaw Branch of J. Walter Thompson, Inc., a New York firm; came to the United States in 1940 and has since been lecturing and writing on the subject of Poland. Author of a book "The Mermaid and the Messerschmitt," published in New York City in 1942 by Roy Publishers.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943