Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka

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СКАЧАТЬ anniversary of Krawczyk’s death, the Polanie Club published a collection, Prize Winning Stories: Monica Krawczyk Short Story Contests 1960 and 1963, which included original texts by twenty-nine contestants and a reprint of “No Man Alone,” the best-known story by Monica Krawczyk, the contest’s spiritual patron. The nationwide contest was the brainchild of Marie Sokolowski, at the time the president of the club, who considered it a fitting tribute to Krawczyk’s literary legacy and her lifelong dedication to promoting creative writing among both Polish immigrants and Polish Americans.³ Polanie’s fiction competitions continued the endeavors of other Polish American women’s organizations, such as the Polish Women’s Alliance, which sponsored essay contests in the early 1900s.⁴ They also fit well within a common trend in the mid-twentieth century when many magazines, for example Mademoiselle, organized “annual short fiction contests for female college students [that] launched the writing careers of such authors as Joan Williams and Sylvia Plath.”⁵ Even though Polanie’s competition did not render such spectacular success, it promoted new ethnic fiction that reflected the interests and concerns of Polish immigrants and ethnics at the threshold of the American cultural revolution. The resulting publication underscored the modeling purpose of the volume as its editors expressed hope that many other fledgling writers would find inspiration there and emulate the example of Krawczyk herself. A biographical sketch characterized Krawczyk as a woman who “not only fulfilled her housewifely obligations, but . . . also worked at various times as social worker and teacher. . . . Most of all, Monica Krawczyk worked at inspiring people to stretch and reach for the ‘sparks’ that come from their imagination.”⁶

      The stories recognized in both the 1960 and 1963 contests document and respond to the changes in the patterns of ethnicity in postwar America as well as consider what impact the influx of World War II émigrés had on Polish American communities. While in all of Krawczyk’s fiction, firmly rooted in American reality, gender identity is constructed at the intersection of working-class values (both urban and rural), heterosexuality, Roman Catholicism, and (still ambiguous) race, the writers from the new generation position themselves at quite a different intersection. Their Polish American characters have already achieved social success and assimilated seamlessly into the American middle-class, thus shedding their ethno-racial ambiguity and becoming fully white. As Eric Schocket argues in his study of class in American literature, whiteness becomes a characteristic attached to the advancement of characters from working to middle class.⁷ This process of whitening of European ethnics and immigrants is accompanied, at the time, with the marginalization of ethnic cultures and expressions of ethnicity.⁸

      Some of the fledgling prize-winning authors included in the collection turn their gaze back to the original homeland and the trauma of World War II. Such historical settings allow female writers to challenge the strong ideological push to confine American women again within the domestic sphere and curb their freedom to pursue jobs and careers they enjoyed during the war years while men were fighting. As Tracy Floreani contends, during the 1950s, due to Cold War fears, anti-communist propaganda, and the rise of consumerism, gender roles became “a romanticized throwback to Victorian ideals of the public and domestic spheres.”⁹ Likewise, in her study of women’s magazines published during the 1940s and 1950s, Nancy A. Walker notes that the postwar reshaping of American values¹⁰ brought a renewed focus on domesticity, while unprecedented economic prosperity fueled a strong consumer culture. Glenda Riley posits that many women “swallowed postwar propaganda declaring it was their patriotic duty to bear children.”¹¹ Many of the depictions of Polish ethnic and immigrant characters in the prize-winning stories clearly grow out of the increasing tension between the dominant American ideology of domesticity and women’s dissatisfaction with their prescribed roles. Their problem remains nameless—they predate by a couple of years Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963)—but in many ways their perceived lack of fulfillment brings these ethnic characters very close to Friedan’s discussion of white, middle-class, college-educated women. This suggests not only that at midcentury Polish American women writers were well assimilated, or at least acculturated, into the mainstream, but also that their fiction entered into the American discussion on gender roles. This discussion was advanced by cultural events and by the 1952 US publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Alfred C. Kinsey’s study published in 1953 as Sexual Behavior of the Human Female, and numerous articles appearing at the time in popular women’s magazines.¹²

      Cover of Prize Winning Stories: Monica Krawczyk Short Story Contests 1960 and 1963 (1964)

      The collection of prize-winning stories offers a unique insight into construction of gendered ethnicity at midcentury. Out of the roster of twenty-nine narratives authored by both immigrant and ethnic writers, almost two-thirds are set in Poland and clearly fall into one of several easily identifiable categories. Some extol Polish bravery in the fight against the Nazis during World War II; others present Polish suffering under the Nazi occupation; while still another group focuses on the evils of communism. A few stories retell Polish legends or present traditions typical of a specific region in Poland. Only a handful of plot lines explore the Polish American milieu, so crucial to Krawczyk herself. My analysis of these texts suggests that Polish ethnic and immigrant women’s fiction of the period shows signs of latent feminism as it questions the prevailing American gender discourse of re-domestication and marginalization of women, and often challenges gender inequality by turning to World War II plots that prove women’s capability of achievement when gender restrictions are not enforced.

      The drastic changes in opportunities and expectations experienced by many middle-class women in post–World War II America become an important theme in “The Guest,” the winner of the 1960 first prize, by Mitzi Kosturbala. The author is identified in a very brief biographical note as a Chicago resident and a professional journalist and editor born in 1914. Kosturbala belongs to the generation of educated women described by Betty Friedan as the cohort whose prewar dreams of professional careers were shattered just as they reached middle age and could have been most productive.¹³ Kosturbala’s short story is one of the most psychologically complex texts in the collection and offers a rare combination of both American and Polish settings as it captures the tension between the perfectly sanitized, prosperous life of Anya Krystof, a Polish American suburban housewife from Chicago, and the ugly brutality of war forced upon her by the arrival from Poland of her husband’s close relative, Jadwiga. Jadwiga, a Catholic, is a traumatized survivor of medical experiments in a Nazi concentration camp. She arrives in the United States seeking medical treatment for the damage to her body caused by Nazi doctors.

      Kosturbala positions her protagonist Anya and her Polish immigrant husband, Mark, at the intersection of the middle class, whiteness, heterosexuality, and Polishness. Thus, for Anya and Mark, social class linked to white ethno-racial identification trumps their ethnicity: their Polish Americanness. The booming postwar economy of the 1950s allows families like the Krystofs to leave their ethnicity behind as they move away from old ethnic communities and to pursue upward mobility by reaching middle-class status. The couple’s move to a “white suburb” illustrates the process by which, according to David R. Roediger, the middle-class descendants of working-class European immigrants, whose race had been viewed with suspicion and who might have been labeled racially as Slavonic, Italian, or Jewish, rather than just “white,” achieve whiteness as soon as they are allowed to purchase homes in middle-class suburbs “protected by firm restrictions against non-Europeans.”¹⁴ Likewise, Tracy Floreani sees postwar suburbanization and the commercialization of culture as “major ways in which a younger generation from Eastern European and Mediterranean immigrant families became absorbed within ‘whiteness.’”¹⁵

      Kosturbala presents Anya and Mark as a typical middle-class American couple exceedingly proud of their suburban home, which, after all, testifies to their mainstream privilege and not to ethnic marginality. It is hardly surprising, then, when Kosturbala tells us that for the Krystofs, “Polishness . . . was incidental,”¹⁶ СКАЧАТЬ