The carefully articulated parameters of this study suggest the complicated nature of ethnic literature and ethnicity in general, as well as the particularities of Polish and Polish-American history. Konstanty Symonolewicz-Symmons raises issues central to the formulation of this study, and indeed to the definition of ethnic literature itself, when he asks, “Who exactly can be considered a Polonian writer”:
Native Poles writing in English, whether Polish subjects play any kind of role in their works or not? Or American literati of Polish extraction, although their works have nothing in common either with Poland or with Polonia? Or authors of Polish nationality who write in English but on Polish subjects? Or writers of Polish nationality or Polish extraction who write in English but on subjects from Polonian life? Or, finally, writers and poets who write in both languages?17
Symonolewicz-Symmons problematizes the author’s place of birth, choice of subject matter, and ethnic consciousness, all matters of consideration in possible definitions of ethnic literature. But he leaves unchallenged the fundamental assumption, as expressed by Mary Dearborn in 1986, that “the ethnic literary tradition implies, of course, the acquisition of the English language.”18
Nevertheless, the consideration of non-English-language texts in American literary studies is hardly a new phenomenon, going back to at least 1921, when the Cambridge History of American Literature included sections on German, French, Yiddish, and aboriginal language works. Henry Pochmann’s classic 1946 essay, “The Mingling of Tongues,” acknowledges the “rich and diverse . . . writing by Americans who use tongues other than English.”19 Until recently, however, this inclusive view had been largely forgotten, despite occasional reminders that the function of the scholar of ethnic literature “is to locate, describe, and interpret all the ethnic components in creative works produced by Americans, regardless of the language employed and of the genres employed.”20 Efforts like the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and those of Harvard University’s Longfellow Institute, devoted to the study of American literatures in languages other than English, demonstrate renewed efforts to define a place in American literary studies for works that do not attempt to fit themselves into an exclusively anglophone cultural network.
It is not surprising, given America’s dizzying linguistic diversity and the insularity of many ethnic communities, that non-English texts remain largely unknown. Obviously, a literature written in Polish excluded most non-Poles not only from active participation in the highly charged dialogue through which Polonia voiced itself, but also from the most basic awareness that a dialogue was taking place. This may have been considered fortuitous, since ethnic communities often try to present a unified front to outsiders. Another result, however, is not just the marginalization of this fundamentally transnational literature, but its complete invisibility, since it seems to fit neatly into neither the American nor the Polish literary establishment. Though the plots are set for the most part in the immigrant enclave, Poland and its troubles are just over the horizon. Though the literary patterns are essentially Polish, they are influenced by American models of popular fiction and the needs and experiences of largely urban immigrant readers. The Polish language itself is stretched and adapted to new needs and inflected by English, the language of the dominant culture. Because these conditions are not exclusive to Polonia, but are part of the history of perhaps all non-English-speaking immigrant groups, reconstructing their individual literary histories can also help us piece together a general framework for the study of American literature in languages other than English.
At the same time, we should not lose sight of the particularities of each group’s experience. Immigrants brought with them their own specific economic, social, and migratory histories, which they called upon in devising strategies by which to advance their goals in America. Because these histories were reflected in their cultural production as well, any literary analysis that relies primarily on “critical paradigms created by the dominant culture,” as Fred Gardaphé points out in his study of Italian-American literature, is bound to end in a “monologistic, methodological trap.”21 To understand the elements that formed the Polish-American community and its literature, it will be necessary to keep in mind not only the circumstances of the life in America that the immigrants faced, but the political and cultural conditions they had left behind in Europe. These European conditions supplied Polonia its terms of struggle and negotiation and shaped its creative impulse. And so we cannot make much sense of Polish immigrant fiction in the face of America’s literary trends, historical movements, or mythic self-representations without recognizing the heavy backdrop of Polish history.
David Fine connects ethnic literature with an American cultural tradition.22 For well-educated writers fluent in English, this may have been so, but for the majority of Polish-language writers in this country, the literary model was doubtless a European one. And for the readers, many of them first-generation literates, literary history for all practical purposes may not have existed. The context into which many readers would have fit these Polish-American works may have been primarily an oral one, alongside songs, folktales, poetry, sermons, declamations, and letters. Even the written word was often oral and communal within peasant and immigrant communities, as newspapers were shared, husbands read books aloud to their families, and letters were community property.23 Reading was not the solitary, individual act we think of today, but rather a shared activity that brought one into active communication with others. Polonia’s early writers, most of them activists for the Polish cause, also employed tactics and meanings developed through a century of cultural oppression in which literature was a major avenue of tacit protest. The “conspiracy of understanding between the author and the reader”24 that this experience necessitated also provides early Polonian literature with many of its patterns, tropes, and symbols.
Drawing from different historical precedents and expectations of the reading experience, we have to ask the extent to which this literature fits into common paradigms of American ethnic cultural production. Robert Spiller’s developmental model—in which ethnic literature advances from personal writing such as letters, autobiographies, and diaries; to the public forum of journalism and other nonfictional forms; to “imitative” literature; and finally to the creation of a new literature out of the community’s unique experiences25—overlooks ways that the literature of out-groups like working class immigrants can reshape “less mature” forms for sophisticated purposes. It ignores the internal conditions and influences not coming from the mainstream, which were necessarily most relevant to the day-to-day life out of which culture is created. By not considering trends in Poland’s own centuries-long literary and cultural history, it misses the very terms in which immigrant authors formed their aesthetics and envisioned their role as writers. What is needed, then, is a more elaborate picture that takes into consideration the diversity of American Polonia and its influences, the internal complexities of its community life, and its essentially transnational political concerns and social and cultural patterns. These provided the literary and linguistic strategies from which Polonian literature derived its forms and upon which it relied for its meaning. Part of our purpose must be, then, to establish the relationship of Polish-language Polish-American literature to established theories of literary ethnicity.
In this literature intended for a Polonian audience, some of the themes and subjects we have come to expect in ethnic, and particularly immigrant, literature seem much less prominent or, more precisely, take forms that express the situation within the Polish-American community. The Polish-language texts, for instance, force us to reconfigure the common immigrant motif of rebirth resulting from confrontation with the host culture, since this host culture is more often American Polonia (or, at its most alien, Irish America) than it is America at large. In Polish-language