The first chapter will argue the primacy of literature in the creation of a Polish national and Polish-American ethnic consciousness. Chapter 2 takes a detailed look at the history of Polonian literature and publishing. Chapter 3 will investigate the controlling theme of ethnic and family loyalty and betrayal through the prism of popular Polish-American crime and detective narratives, arguing that the threats to inheritance and family continuity that these stories enact can be read as ethnic and national allegories. Chapter 4 considers the same theme of the creation and maintenance of group identity by looking at the ways sagas of immigration and adjustment encourage immigrant readers to interpret their own emigration in the context of Poland’s political oppression, and to see themselves as linked to other Poles by a national identity reinforced by shared suffering and exploitation. By showing emigration as a process that leads back to Europe, these works situate their immigrant characters in a continuing relationship to the homeland. Chapter 5 investigates the literary treatment of political direction and institutional corruption, demonstrating the ways opposing factions utilized the same morally charged rhetoric of treason and betrayal to articulate competing ideologies of group identity and strategies for national survival. Chapter 6 shows how immigrant authors explored and resolved questions of collective identity through the drama of sexual attraction and marital alliance, conflating family and nation and investing personal patterns of action with political meaning, in order to model proper ways of reproducing Polishness. The final chapter turns to the question of why this literature did not survive and suggests its relation to the writing and publishing efforts of later immigrants, those from World War II and, particularly, the Solidarity era. It argues that, despite their surface differences, similarities between the stara emigracja and the newest immigrant cohort account for some commonalities of literary form, style, subject, and theme.
In 1938 Artur L. Waldo dedicated his Outline History of Polish Literature in America “to the forgotten writers of American Polonia” (4). That he was referring to authors whose works had appeared only within the last several decades, some of whom were still writing and publishing, testifies to the unstable relationship between Polish immigrant writing and the community of immigrant readers these works addressed. If memory of these publications was already fading within Polonia even while, as Waldo asserts, they lay piled by the score in thousands of Polish-American attics, it is small wonder that later ethnic scholars have either remained ignorant of their existence or neglected their study. Waldo himself balked at the enormity of his task, leaving it to future scholars to flesh out the bones of his research. This study is a partial fulfillment of that hope, so long unfulfilled.
Without looking at writing in Polish, one can obtain only a distorted view of the cultural life of American Polonia, which included scores of Polish newspapers, Polish radio programs, active theater companies, and a lively output of various publications, including fiction. With a growing willingness to accept not simply alternative forms of literature such as letters and autobiography, but to acknowledge as American that literature written in languages other than English, a vast field of study is opened that will enable us to gain a much deeper understanding of how immigrant ethnicity was shaped and experienced. It also establishes a counterpoint to the common image of Polish-Americans in native literature, written by those outside the community for an American audience. Even the most sympathetic of these often portray the Polish immigrant as inarticulate, passive, almost primeval, as faceless symbols of a primitive life force and as voiceless victims of social injustice and economic exploitation. Naturally, they may have appeared so to outsiders, with whom they could not easily communicate. But the view from within Polonia was of an active, vibrant, and complex community, and most relevantly the sound from within was not silence but conversation, argument, laughter. The only way to hear these voices is by eavesdropping on the literature these communities produced by and for themselves, with no intention of cultural mediation with America at large, but with very particular agendas relevant to the immigrants themselves, their institutions, and even to the shape of the world map. All this is lost unless we hear them in their own language.
1
Writing Polish
Literature and the Construction of Polishness in America
IF AMERICA HOLDS a collective portrait of the Polish immigrant landing at Ellis Island, exhausted, bewildered, clutching bundles and children, surrounded by queerly lettered trunks, what, in the popular imagination, do those trunks contain? The featherbed, embroidered linens, a treasured family photograph, flower seeds, a teakettle, practical, homemade clothing, a fistful of village soil . . . Rarely, however, do we imagine a book among the carefully packed belongings, and if we do, it is likely to be a worn prayer book or a Lives of the Saints.
Nevertheless, in America these immigrants were producers and consumers of the written word. Polish communities supported an active (and often combative) press, a lively network of amateur and professional theaters, and scores of book publishers. This study concerns itself with just one segment of Polish America’s literary output: Polish-language narrative fiction written and published in the United States before World War II. That such a literature existed at all will come as a surprise to many. Yet literature was more than just an obscure element of immigrant cultural life. It was a self-conscious agent of American Polonia’s ethnogenesis.
Like their counterparts in Europe, Polish immigrant authors wrote from a sense of national imperative. From 1795 until the end of World War I, during the period of greatest migration, Poland did not exist as a political state, having been divided in a complicated series of partitions between Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. In partitioned Poland, Norman Davies points out, “the two great themes of the age [were] the preservation of national identity, and the restoration of national independence.”1 Polish literature was enlisted in these causes, and indeed the two primary literary movements of the partition period, romanticism and positivism, are as much political as artistic strategies.
In the United States, immigrant writers persistently and passionately engaged issues of identity and peoplehood, attempting to define a sense of Polishness that would serve an idealized Poland and a developing American Polonia. But there was no consensus on just what that national identity entailed and demanded, and so the struggle for political independence and the consolidation of nationhood resulted in as much infighting as it did cooperation. Accusations of treachery and treason went hand in hand with admonitions to “support your own.”2 Rather than seeing these conflicts as no more than the self-serving and self-defeating positioning of politicians and ideologues, we might look at them as border skirmishes, meant to establish, defend, and secure territory, particularly at its most vulnerable junctures. That the question of just who should be considered a Pole became (and remains) so contentious reveals the potency of familiar historical flash points of collective identity—religion, language, social class, and political belief. And the recurring finger-pointing at accused traitors underscores the conflictedness inherent in these boundaries. One can, after all, be a traitor only to one’s own people.
The cause of Polishness, and of Polishness in America, was perceived as threatened from without and from within. But writers reserved the bitterest criticism not for outside antagonists (Prussians, Russians, Irish priests, or American nativists, for example), but for the Poles accused of aiding and abetting them. Polonian literature is full of warnings against witting or unwitting foreign agents disguised as Poles. This imagery of treason and betrayal fell in neatly with the romantic ideology of Polish messianism, which saw Poland as the Christ of nations, betrayed and sacrificed but destined to rise again for the salvation of Western civilization.3 But it is also heavily invested with Polish positivist ideology, which developed in reaction to and protest against the revolutionary impulses that had led to and fed on messianism. In the wake of the disastrous January Uprising of 1863, positivists tended to shift blame for Poland’s demise from its foreign enemies to the factionalism and private interests that made the nation vulnerable, and to formulate practical and workable