Both Elizabeth Dembrowsky and Karolina Waclawiak, who write the Polish American self, rework yet again the archetypal plot of American becoming, of leaving, arriving, and staying in-between, and of constructing self from the opposite pulls of disparate cultures. Taking advantage of the privilege of whiteness, they grant their characters freedom to blend with the dominant culture, to construct a Polish American ethnic self, or even to engage in an appropriation of markers belonging to the ethnic other. These new ethnic shape-shifters may slip in and out of different identities to satisfy an immediate need or to gain a social advantage.
Such liberty to self-create was not always an option available to Polish immigrants and ethnics. Their struggle has been both chronicled and championed by several generations of Polish American writers, especially women writers, who believed that their stories deserved to be heard and whose fiction reflected as well as shaped ethnic ideas of gendered identity. Taken together, their narratives trace the developmental trajectory of ethnic views of self, shaped internally by the Polish American communities and externally by the mainstream culture. They also offer a complex portrait of Polish immigration with its covert class system, pervasive presence of the Roman Catholic Church and patriarchy, as well as uneasy attitudes toward both the homeland and the receiving country.
Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction opens a long-neglected conversation on the construction of the gendered white ethnic self in Polish American post–World War II literature principally by women writers raised in the Roman Catholic tradition. My focus on self-construction limits my choice of texts to ones written predominantly by Polish ethnic and (im)migrant women. For some of the (im)migrant women, their immigration status might remain fluid throughout their lives when they repeatedly change homelands. Many never decide on a permanent homeland but stay within a pattern of repeated migrations between Poland and the United States. An inclusion of a small number of texts by Polish Canadian women, male authors, and non-Poles enriches this study by allowing a comparative analysis of ethnic self-construction and the construction and representation of gendered identity. This juxtaposition delineates the internal (i.e., Polish American) and external (i.e., mainstream) cultural contexts of self-construction in addition to shedding light on barriers between women and self-actualization. It illustrates, as in Joseph S. Wnukowski’s8 short story, some of the struggles faced by Polish American women. Moreover, the selection of texts reflects the settlement patterns of Polish immigrants as strongly circumscribed by their religious identity. As Timothy L. Smith finds, common religious affiliation was a crucial reason for groups of immigrants to settle together. Smith believes that it was even stronger than a common language, common history, and common descent. He suggests that “the customs and beliefs of particular varieties of faith and the traditions of loyalty to them seem, then, to have been the decisive determinants of ethnic affiliation in America.”9 Though there is, undoubtedly, a need for more research about fiction produced by Polish writers hailing from a range of religious traditions, such work exceeds the scope of the present study, which focuses for the most part on a fairly unified group of writers hailing from Polish American Catholic communities.
The principal purpose of this volume is to offer considered readings of a number of novels and short stories that narrate the first-, second-, and third-generation American experience of white ethnic women, present a detailed and sociologically realistic image of the Polish diaspora, and testify to the Polish American awareness of ethnic uniqueness. Moreover, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction aims at adding a literary voice that so far has not had a strong presence in the academy among numerous studies of other ethnic literatures as well as historical and sociological studies of Polish immigration to the United States. As sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans suggests, “We know a lot about why people migrate, but less about how people make sense of migration. . . . One way we can understand how people make sense of their worlds is to listen to their stories.”10 Erdmans clearly points to narratives as agents of identity construction and to literature as an important forum for groups marginalized due to their ethnicity, gender, social class, or race. In addition, the present study shifts the current discussion of diasporic literature in a new direction away from research conducted by scholars of Polish literature and centered on the literary output of World War II émigrés. Its historical and artistic values notwithstanding, émigré writing, published almost exclusively in Polish, has had little impact on the American reading public. The popular ethnic literature at the center of this study allows readers to witness the construction process of gendered ethnicity within an easily assimilable and largely invisible white ethnic group over the last three-quarters of a century.
The chronological as well as thematic organization of this study traces evolutionary changes in identity construction of ethnic women. The narrative trajectory presented here begins with the short stories of Monica Krawczyk, whose immigrant women are firmly rooted in the homogeneous working-class ethnic communities of the 1930s and 1940s. It follows with the narratives developed by her disciples in the 1950s and early 1960s, where female protagonists move away from the ethnic neighborhoods to the fast-growing white American suburbs as they gain middle-class status. Yet, their literary daughters choose to return to the Polish American centers in fiction by the next generation of women. Writers such as Suzanne Strempek Shea and Leslie Pietrzyk return to strong working-class ethnic roots in their stories set in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, the turn-of-the-century texts, and especially narratives from the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, propose a new “on demand” model of ethnicity for young well-educated women who are perfectly assimilated into American society. Such characters populate novels by Elizabeth Dembrowsky, Dagmara Dominczyk, and Karolina Waclawiak. Benefiting from their white invisibility, they can blend in with the mainstream, they can identify themselves as Polish American if they so choose, or they can engage in ethno-racial cross-dressing.
The organization of Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction underscores one of this book’s assertions about the direction of assimilatory moves. As evidenced by Krawczyk’s short fiction, being consigned to the position of a racial subaltern by the mainstream motivates immigrants to engage in a series of assimilatory actions to prove Americanness. However, once they claimed Americanness, left the position of the foreign other, and obtained an undisputed place within the “white” mainstream, Polish characters felt liberated from all ethno-racial considerations. Secure in their whiteness, they allow experimentation within their ethnic spaces while they construct and reconstruct Polishness to claim ancestral heritage and retain unique cultural identity.
Just as race is consigned to silences in Polish American literature of the last decades, so, too, for the most part, is the memory of the original homeland and its victimization: during the partitions when Poland ceased to exist as an independent country (1795–1918), during World War II, and during the years of the communist regime. With the original homeland growing increasingly distant, many second- and third-generation writers of the second half of the twentieth century