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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 anchor ethnic identity in largely homogeneous neighborhoods built by immigrant ancestors. Yet, they all acknowledge that the hold on Polish communal ethnicity has grown more tenuous as white ethnic urban communities gradually disappear. Interestingly, the demise of ethnic neighborhoods combined with the disintegration of the communist system in Europe reestablishes connections in Poland. Young, well-educated, and prosperous Polish American characters turn their gaze back on the ancestral homeland as they reconstruct gendered ethnicity in the twenty-first century. The evolution of identity constructs in Polish American fiction since World War II illustrates significant changes in ethnic patterns among Polish Americans: a gradual movement away from strong homogeneous ethnic communities toward individualistic neighborhoods of one. It also follows the parallel trend in contemporary literature with its continuing change of focus from large historical processes and events to a total concentration on the fate of an individual.¹¹

      In Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, I argue that over the last three-quarters of a century, Polish American popular literature by women writers challenges the Polish American woman’s invisibility by offering a consistent image of her. My readings show that she is a woman well aware of being positioned at an intersection of several often-hostile forces where gendered ethnicity is inextricable from classed ethnicity. She contends with social-class restrictions and damaging expectations that often go back to the distant Polish past. She may have to cope with nationalistically inflected expectations of the intelligentsia class or struggle with the working-class patriarchal oppression supported by the Catholic Church under the guise of elevating her status in the image of the Virgin Mary. Her awareness of these restrictions, her refusal to internalize them, and her rejection of victimhood become acts of rebellion as she resists the need to please and constructs a gendered ethnic identity in pursuit of self-fulfillment. Ethnic, immigrant, and also in some cases migrant fiction¹² becomes liberatory as it advocates empowerment against oppression and charts the deployment of female-centric patterns of resistance while showing how Polish American women successfully perform gendered, ethnicized, and classed Americanness.

      Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction considers the ways women negotiate discourses of belonging as well as posits that it is women who, by writing their gendered ethnic identity, tell the story of Polish Americans and join other ethnic women in telling the story of America. In their narratives, Polish American homes become the sites where, through the efforts of women, ethnic consciousness has been forged and transmitted from generation to generation within female clans. Women have always been the force behind constructing Polish American identity, not only in the home but also in neighborhoods, where their tireless work in Polish American parishes and secular organizations sustained the larger ethnic community. Capturing their vision of themselves, Polish American women authors over the past seven or eight decades created an entry point into the ethnic story of Poles in America.

      II

      The period immediately following World War II marked the particularly vigorous growth of ethnic fiction, since it was the time when Americans were taking a fresh look at ethnicity and race and were beginning a discussion of their place in American culture. Tracy Floreani argues convincingly that all ethnic narratives deepen our understanding of American culture.¹³ Polish American texts by women authors make an important contribution to the field of writing by ethnic women in the United States as they join in creating a space of self-expression for those who were often silenced and as they document women’s attempts to reclaim power and visibility. Even a brief comparison of Polish American texts with narratives by women from other immigrant groups uncovers interethnic commonalities in treatment of gendered, classed, and often raced ethnicity. Within such an environment, Polish American women writers take on an active role in contributing to the American multiethnic social environment through their focus on ethnic performance, advocacy of women’s empowerment, and development of gender-aware themes.

      Many critical studies that focus on literary output of women from a wide range of ethnic groups such as Chinese American, South Asian American, Irish American, Italian American, Hispanic/Latina/Chicana American, etc., draw attention to the value of ethnic literature by women in ushering doubly marginalized groups, both ethnic and female, into the mainstream. Lucia Guerra-Cunningham, writing about Latina American women, sees their stories as a way to freedom from “the oppressive dungeon of silence.” She credits narratives with identifying the processes that led to relegating women to the position of the silent Other.¹⁴ Likewise, Karen M. Cardozo in her analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s South Asian American fiction praises Lahiri as well as Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston for introducing two formerly ostracized ethnic groups into the cultural mainstream.¹⁵ The crucial role of fiction in bringing attention to ethnic women and in recognizing the value of their stories has also been presented by Sally Barr Ebest in her book, The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers, and by Mary Jo Bona in Women Writing СКАЧАТЬ