Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski

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СКАЧАТЬ America by Poles, including Sienkiewicz’s ubiquitous After Bread, and even credits a sixteenth-century political treatise with influencing the Declaration of Independence.⁹ But it makes no mention of the treatment of the American experience by Sienkiewicz’s contemporaries writing in Polish in this country. Magdalena Zaborowska’s more recent study of Polish and Russian immigrant women’s narratives is silent on works written in Polish before 1939.¹⁰ These omissions are almost certainly not the result of deliberate choice, but rather evidence of the deep obscurity into which these works have fallen.

      This examination of early Polish-American fiction begins with the publication in 1881 of the first known immigrant novel in Polish,¹¹ and ends in 1939, when the Second World War spurred a fresh wave of immigrants from Poland, necessitating a reevaluation of Polonian identity and goals, and leading to new patterns of immigrant publishing. Even the approximately three hundred novels, novellas, short stories, sketches, and anthologies of short fiction identified here comprise only a portion of the Polish-language works produced by the stara emigracja, the old emigration. The inclusion of drama and poetry would make any bibliography several times as long. This study is thus limited to fiction for partly practical reasons. But even within the sizable body of Polish prose fiction written and published in America, a focus on immigrant identity has narrowed the selection.

      A number of immigrant works were eliminated from consideration because, although published in the United States, their plots were set outside this country, drawn from exclusively Polish history or world legend. Like their counterparts among other immigrant groups, Polish-American publishers offered their readers works of classic and contemporary literature from Poland, as well as translations of Russian, French, German, English, and American works. Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identity, Brent Peterson’s study of ethnicity shaped and perpetuated by German-American newspaper fiction, argues convincingly that all literature contributed to the collective identity of its immigrant readers, that it is not “ethnic literature” but “narratives for ethnic readers” that reveal the process of ethnogenesis.¹² And “literary ethnicity” rather than “ethnic literature” is Thomas S. Gladsky’s focus in Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves, which looks not only at English-language fiction and poetry written by second- and third-generation Polish-Americans, but also at the literary images of Poles and Polish-Americans created by purely “American” authors, shifting attention to the way in which works “may be read as contributing to the literary creation of ethnic selves and American ethnicity.”¹³ However, my concern with how this literature specifically and self-consciously engaged its readers as Poles in America and later as Polish-Americans led me to restrict this study to works that attempted to position their readers, however superficially, in the context of American conditions, a phrase contained in the subtitles of so many of these novels. Thus, all works considered here contain at least one Polish character on American soil.¹⁴

      Fiction about Polonia—that is, about the Polish diaspora—but written and published in Poland is also not included here, although several such novels were reprinted by Polish-American publishers and read in immigrant households. Some authors, like journalist Stefan Barszczewski, spent considerable time in the United States before returning to Poland and writing about their experiences. Others, like Józef Watra-Przewłocki, remained in the United States but published their major works in Poland. A comparative analysis of those two bodies of literature has been begun by Bolesław Klimaszewski.¹⁵ But while the works published overseas have already received scholarly attention, at least in Poland, before comparison can be meaningful it will be necessary to know something more about the work that was produced on American soil, work that not only grew out of community concerns but that utilized local publishing resources and networks. On that subject scholarship is still negligible. The works of several immigrant authors who eventually returned to Poland are included, however, when those works were published in the United States before the author’s repatriation. Included also are works that were published in both America and Poland, either under joint agreement or in separate editions.¹⁶

      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 СКАЧАТЬ