Big Welcome Begins to Wear on Walesa : Poland: Solidarity’s champion is finding that being America’s hero can be a bit much. How many times can you say thanks?

NEW YORK —  The full weight of a New York welcome descended Friday upon a travel-weary Lech Walesa.

Labor leaders and politicians at a Manhattan breakfast bestowed upon him caps, pins, cliches--(“. . . You scrapped the Iron Curtain and forged it into a train of freedom,” one steelworker told him)--and even a set of electrician’s tools in tribute to his workingman’s roots.

And yet it is all growing a bit taxing on Walesa, who’s been on a whirlwind debut tour of America since Monday and is to appear at a City Hall rally in Chicago today.

You can hear it in his voice, the way his grammar slips, say Poles who watch him. You can also see the way he wipes his face with his hand, trying to bring it to life, as he sits and listens to others praise him. He jokes half-seriously that it was a lot easier being a worker. How many times can he say thanks? How many ways?

Standing Ovations

In Washington and New York, Walesa protests through his translator that he is not sure he deserves the accolades, the standing ovations, the visible crush of love that awaits him at each stop.

“I wonder if this is owed to me,” he said Friday morning to a small New York state labor audience in a hotel banquet room before rushing a few blocks over to meet with leaders of New York’s Jewish community, and then later to a Polish newspaper. “Really, it is not. In all those achievements you are 99 cents. I am only the last cent that creates a dollar.”

The night before, he had found another way of saying it to the International Rescue Committee, which aids political refugees. I only drive the winning race car, he said. Many others build it.

Sitting a few feet away as Walesa spoke was New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, who stood to tell a story that captivated Walesa and shattered any celebrity ennui that might have begun to plague him.

It seems that last June, two teachers from the education section of Walesa’s Solidarity movement met Cuomo in New York and asked him to recommend American writings on democracy for use in Polish classrooms.

Easy, said the governor. Read Abraham Lincoln.

But there are no books about Lincoln in Poland, the teachers said.

Simple, said the governor. We’ll have an English anthology on Lincoln’s statements about democracy translated into Polish and ship it to you.

Not so simple.

For all the writings on Lincoln, his words on democracy had never been collected in one place.

Cuomo, making use of a state “international partnership” program and corporate donations, appointed a widely published Lincoln scholar, Harold Holzer, to collate Lincoln’s words. Seven historians were contacted to write essays for the book, and another 33 historians recommended which works should be chosen. So far they have recommended 139 speeches, letters and conversations. The book will be published--in English as well as in Polish--next fall.

The book, “Lincoln on Democracy,” which may be published in Hungarian, German and Czechoslovak, “is our small tribute to Lech Walesa,” Cuomo said. “To the idea of not quitting . . . for reminding us that democracy has to be worked for . . . for reminding us that we still must aspire.”

Walesa rose again. “This makes me feel even more warm,” he said, an expression he frequently uses to express gratitude.

“I don’t know if you will be able to keep pace with the other (East European) languages,” Walesa said, “because the line is forming already.”