The most unnerving thing to Anya are Jadwiga’s war stories. The World Council of Churches has sponsored Jadwiga’s travel to the United States, where she undergoes reconstructive surgery on her legs to reverse the damage she sustained during the inhuman medical experiments performed on her in a concentration camp. With vivid details, she describes her suffering in Auschwitz: “They opened the long bones in our right legs. Zosia, Hela, and I had slivers of wood, crawling with staph germs, implanted in the marrow. . . . They injected us with germ-killing drugs and tried bone transplants.”29 She tells about the death of her first husband in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II in Poland, and about losing her unborn child after being kicked in the belly by a German soldier. These stories frighten Anya and she does not know how to react or how to comfort Jadwiga. They bring the reality of suffering, human endurance, and courage to the artificial environment of her suburban home. They also remind Anya of the past—of her family’s ethnic roots in Poland and of her old assertive self of the war years. Thus, in spite of herself, Anya is drawn to Jadwiga. However, Anya must medicalize30 Jadwiga’s behavior in order to neutralize this disquieting presence in her own “perfect” family, home, and neighborhood and to dismiss Jadwiga’s scorn of what the Polish woman sees as meaningless social success. Doubtless, Jadwiga must be mentally ill and should be admitted to a hospital where an accurate diagnosis and successful treatment can restore her feminine qualities. Thus, Jadwiga’s struggle to have her suffering acknowledged and the enormity of the crimes committed against her understood—crimes which deprived her of motherhood, her athletic abilities as a champion skier, and her physical beauty and left her to a life of pain—becomes dismissed as unfeminine and therefore an obvious symptom of mental illness. Her victimization becomes offensive to those around her because it brings ugliness and reality into a household where that ugliness of reality is denied. Until Jadwiga’s arrival, any imperfection could have been smoothed over with just a few purchases.
While Anya identifies Jadwiga’s behavior as symptomatic of disease, her diagnosis is ridiculed by Joe, her brother-in-law, and a medical doctor whose advice she seeks. According to him, Jadwiga simply lacks self-control and indulges in female hysterics instead of moving on with her life and taking responsibility for her own well-being. After all, it has been ten years since the end of the war. He even questions Jadwiga’s claims of victimhood by citing his experiences with postwar refugees: “I know these refugees, there are ten of them on the staff at the hospital. Every one of them was a hero in the underground or an escapee from a concentration camp, to hear them tell it. They come in with great big chips on their shoulders.”31 Joe attempts to characterize the whole cohort of postwar immigrants who, as Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann suggests, defined themselves as “political immigrants” even though their motives for emigration might have been more complex.32 Joe firmly believes that Jadwiga’s self-indulgent behavior has been exacerbated by a health-care grant she received from the reparations committee that leads to a further loss of her self-esteem. So, Jadwiga’s distress after a chance meeting with the American relatives of her concentration camp torturer is treated by Joe with an injection of morphine. He patronizingly dismisses both women, Jadwiga with her war trauma and Anya with her own hidden uncertainties about the value of her “perfect” middle-class existence, by predictably advising them to visit a beauty salon and spend an afternoon shopping.
Kosturbala’s story offers a strong indictment of the double assault on Anya and Jadwiga. As masculine power, represented by Anya’s husband’s familial authority and her brother-in-law’s professional authority, reasserts itself in the Krystofs’ household, Jadwiga’s suffering is called into question. She is ordered to suppress her unfeminine rage and accept the proper female role within a family, a role that she disdains. Anya’s growing dissatisfaction, the feeling soon to be analyzed by Betty Friedan and that she shares with thousands of American women, is trivialized. Kosturbala does not offer her female characters a viable solution to the problem she presents them with. At the end of the narrative, both Anya and Jadwiga still exist within the uber-domestic setting of Anya’s state-of-the art kitchen, finally calm and companionable. After their chores are completed, they might after all go shopping, but this time they will search together for beautiful antique Persian rugs. Kosturbala clearly points out that to be acceptable within a middle-class white family structure of 1950s America, Jadwiga, a foreign other, must surrender all that is deemed unfeminine, just as Anya must surrender her unfeminine independence and suppress any doubts she might have about the value of her suburban lifestyle. Yet, this temporary surrender does not provide a permanent solution to Anya’s and Jadwiga’s concerns. The unresolved quality of the story’s ending suggests Kosturbala’s awareness that many issues still remain for middle-class ethnic women.
Kosturbala’s women of the late 1950s have little in common with Krawczyk’s earlier generation of immigrant and ethnic women who existed on the margins of the American society. Their daughters, represented by Anya Krystof, have successfully pursued their American Dream of upward mobility, entered the middle class and gained ethno-racial privilege through a clear identification with all other white Americans. Yet this success was not without a cost. The white middle-class suburbs expected uniformity and not ethnic otherness, so unique ethnic markers had to be substituted with generic American class markers. And most importantly, these seemingly successful and satisfied ethnic women began to chafe under the midcentury construct of femininity. Ironically, Kosturbala’s narrative suggests that ethnic women became simultaneously fully white and oppressed.
To counteract this gender disempowerment, or at least to illuminate it, several texts included in this collection of short stories move their plots to Poland under the German occupation (1939–45), or, like Kosturbala, deploy foreign “other” characters. Maria Laskowska’s “Life Is Beautiful” and Halina Heitzman’s “Initiation” explore the immediate past in order to circumvent the tight patriarchal controls set for women. Both authors are Polish immigrants who completed university education in interwar Poland. Laskowska (born in 1899) earned a graduate degree in Polish language and literature at the University of Warsaw, while Heitzman (born in 1912) received a master’s degree in history from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Their own socioeconomic status motivates their framing of the gender discourse. Unlike many Polish American authors who, although well-educated themselves, hail from a strongly Catholic Polish peasant immigration, Laskowska and Heitzman represent a Polish interwar intelligentsia, university-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class, characterized by its anticlericalism.33 Paradoxically, both Laskowska and Heitzman set their narratives during the terror of World War II in order to offer their female characters opportunities to break patriarchal barriers and excel in nontraditional female roles.
“Life Is Beautiful” is a brief story, or rather a character sketch, presenting Kaytek, a young woman—not more than twenty—who serves with a first aid patrol during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, an armed revolt of the Polish citizens of Warsaw against their German occupiers. Kaytek’s gender is somewhat ambiguous. She has chosen a male-sounding nom de guerre; her “hair was cut like a boy’s”; like other soldiers she “wore crumpled army trousers . . . and a prodigious shirt made from parts of a German army tent and called ‘tigerskin’ because of the camouflage markings”;34 her actions have been characterized by great physical and psychological courage as well as incredible endurance. At the same time, many of her actions are motivated by the typically female traits of empathy and compassion. In addition to her everyday duties in a field hospital unceasingly under enemy fire, she spends several hours each night searching amidst the rubble for corpses of fallen soldiers and bringing them back for burial behind the Polish barricades. She risks her life in an expedition behind the enemy lines to obtain some milk for starving infants and donates her blood for transfusions to the wounded. She is the only one who does not lose her head when the hospital is hit by an incendiary device, but orders the narrator of the story to help her put out the fire with an enormous cauldron of soup. This courageous woman-soldier also finds love and marries a fellow officer during the last days of the Uprising, explaining to her friends that “If we are about to die, it is better that we be husband