"Oh, Poles!"

Artur Rubinstein struck the final chords of a Chopin Polonaise, lifted his grey-fringed head, rose to acknowledge the applause. The audience rose with him. "May he live a hundred years," they sang, and clapped and stamped until he had walked ten times with ramrod dignity from the wings and bowed misty-eyed to the packed hall. After 20 years, 69-year-old Pianist Rubinstein was back in the country of his birth and in the city--Warsaw--where he played his first concert 63 years ago.

Until World War II, Rubinstein toured Poland occasionally, and long after he became a U.S. citizen, the Poles continued to claim him as their own ("He is the best," said one writer, "so he is a Pole"). But during the war, the Germans killed the family he had left in the textile city of Lodz, and Rubinstein avoided Poland as well as Germany during his postwar European tours. When he finally decided he was ready to return to Poland, his concerts became immediate sellouts; 1,200 people turned up merely to hear him rehearse. Before he played a note at his final concert, the audience stood as he walked on the stage (the only other musician in modern memory similarly honored in Warsaw: Pianist Ignace Paderewski, who later became Prime Minister).

In his rooms, Rubinstein was besieged by young musicians, to whom he had become a legendary figure on records, and by old friends who remembered him from the old days. Repeatedly, the sight of friends or familiar landmarks reduced Rubinstein to tears. He played five concerts instead of the three he originally planned. "They asked me," he said when he left, "what I thought of Warsaw now. I said, 'Divinely impractical!' Oh, Poles!"

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