My mom cooked good but she cooked very simple stuff, just like we do today, your meat and your potatoes and stuff like that and not any of the good Polish dishes you hear people talking about all the time. I know that she used to do pig’s feet—clean ’em off, and then cook ’em and put ’em in a pot, and then you’d have them Sunday morning for breakfast. They’d turn that pot over upside down and the pig’s feet were all in that gelatin setting. [laughter] They didn’t eat stuff like you read in Polish cookbooks, like the real stuff, like they did in Poland. They didn’t eat that kind of stuff. But I know they made brains [chuckles], must have been pig brains or cow brains or something, my dad would bring them and they would fry them up with egg or something like that.
Gelatin pig’s feet were Polish fare for the peasants, as were potatoes. Ladislaus is memorialized in the family history as a man who loved potatoes, heaping plates of steamed potatoes. But pig’s feet and potatoes do not get counted as Polish food because they are not in the cookbooks. High-class culture gets constituted as authentic culture, while peasant culture gets discarded from the collective memory like the birth of an illegitimate child.35
Ethnicity is also hidden in women’s work, the kinship work necessary to maintain relations between households.36 These inter-household relations include intergenerational relations, so kinship work involves “passing it down”: keeping the family photo album, telling the stories, deciding who gets Helen’s 1920s button-up shoes (Nadine) and her 1970s mod hot pink sunglasses (me).37 This kinship work provides women with a cultural power as they select what is kept, what is forgotten, and what is transformed.38 But it is also work that is less obvious to those residing only in the public sphere, less known to people who don’t do this type of work. Being an administrative secretary of a Polish organization will secure one a place in the public archives as someone involved in ethnic work, but sitting around a kitchen table telling stories of life in Sercowo gets defined, if defined at all, as kinship maintenance (women’s work) rather than ethnic work.
What did they pass down? Some may argue that they didn’t keep much. Angel says she knows she’s Polish because she laughs all the time. “Who else do you know that laughs, maybe the Italians, but we are always laughing. That’s how you know we are Polish.” And they kept a few religious pictures and phrases like Jezu kochany (often uttered in frustration, it translates as “Jesus my love”). But we need to look harder. Ethnicity remains, in phonetics without semantics and religious icons that have been converted into family history.39 And it is here, in the family, that we see their Polishness. Thomas Gladsky, referring to the short stories of Monika Krawczyk, states that the only things Polish about her characters are their names, but then he looks again and finds that, in her stories, “Polish ethnicity is in the prosperity and continuity of the family.”40 Discussing a children’s book written by Anne Pellowski, Bernard Koloski writes, “The family is living an undeclared Polishness. The people do not work at being Polish; they do not much think about themselves in a Polish context. . . . Yet the opening pages of the first volume make clear that this is a distinct community of people bound together by an intense closeness of family, a fervent attachment to the Catholic church, and an unaffected acceptance of a body of folkways that identify them as Polish Americans.”41 In the same way, the Polishness of the Grasinski Girls is present in their familial relations and religious attachment. Their ethnicity is done in the family, through the family, and for the family.
Polish culture in their private sphere embraces a set of values and routines that help them perform their gender routines and reaffirm their gender ideals.42 Polish women are valued for being hardy. Fran remembers her grandma Frances as the little woman pushing a large wheelbarrow. Caroline admires her mother Helen as someone who hung a set of curtains when she was nine months pregnant, standing alone on top of a table. They also respect emotional hardiness, women who can manage the household when the husband is not present. Polish women also value cleanliness and Polish homes are remembered as orderly and neat, and Polish women as good housekeepers.43 Talking about her mother, Fran said, “On Saturday she’d wash all the floors and the linoleum and everything, and they’d all get covered with newspaper so they wouldn’t get dirty right away. It’d come off Sunday morning then. But maybe that was a Polish [laughter], something from the Polish neighborhoods.”
In addition, Polishness supports the role of women as beautifiers. Through flowers and song and the rosary, Polish women engage the soul and humanize the world. Through rituals, lightness, tears, and laughter they transform the drudgery of the night into the lightness of the day. These gendered ethnic routines are acts of resistance against capitalism’s instrumental rationality. Thaddeus Radzilowski writes of Polish-American women: “Whatever light, beauty, love, and humanity appeared in the ugly landscapes of industrial America was in large measure their work.”44 And, as a subversion of the dominant order, Polishness celebrates their role as the matriarch of the family. Polishness in women is strength, intelligence, beauty, and responsibility. These traits become manifest in their care of the home, their children, and their husbands. Reproducing family reproduces ethnicity.
The private, gendered meanings of ethnicity are often missed by scholars who interview people like the Grasinski Girls whose ethnicity is suggestive and understated.45 Their “undeclared Polishness” is also invisible to scholars who look for ethnicity only in the public space of formal institutions (e.g., newspapers, organizational documents, phone books, government records, plat maps).46 This documentation of public Polishness overlooks the ethnic work of kinship maintenance done in the private sphere. What is important is not the “cultural stuff” of ethnicity but the shared history of the family, and it is not ethnicity that creates a shared history but the shared history that creates ethnicity.
. . .
Ethnicity for later-generation white working-class women is intermingled with religious routines. When I asked Angel what she did at home that was Polish, she said, “Probably the traditions.” What traditions? “Well”—she pauses—“Easter and, uh, going to church.”
I scrunch my forehead, breathe through my nose in frustration, and shoot back, “Well, the Dutch Christian Reformers also go to church and celebrate Easter!”
“It’s different,” she said.
“Okay, how?”
“Well, all the Lenten services, going to church a lot. I mean, we would never think of not going to the Stations of the Cross, and going to mass, and going to confession once a month, I mean, if you needed it or not. And all, like, May devotions and Corpus Christi, and, you know, during those days there was like lots of processions, and all that was so much part of your life. Christmas and Easter, probably those were like special times.”
She also described the peripheral aspects of religion, such as the joy of eating chocolate on Easter morning after six weeks of Lenten fasting. Her Polishness is part of her life unconsciously today, when she resurrects the willpower to not eat chocolate with the pleasant memory of how sumptuous chocolate tastes on Easter morning.
When I asked Fran how she knew she was Polish, she also pointed to the routines of the church—“all them processions and everything like that”—and the celebrations of the two main holidays, Christmas and Easter, at home.47 “We had our Polish food, your ham and your sausages, and you get your coffee cakes from the Valley City Bakery, and then they’d take that down to the church, and your sausages, all your sausage, take that down to church and they’d bless it for us for Easter. And then I know that we would all dress up and everybody’d get up in the morning and run and kiss Dad and Mom, one right after the other we’d go give them their Easter morning kiss. And we had our Easter candy and stuff.” At another point she exclaimed, her eyes smiling, “And Polish songs! I mean, I sang in the choir. They had only one choir and I sang in the choir when I was ten and I was singing Polish songs. I was singing down here and my dad was up there, singing up above, we were in the same choir!” When asked to talk about her Polishness, Nadine also mentioned Christmas, when “the kolędy are played, and ‘Bóg się Rodzi’ always brings back my daddy singing