Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski

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СКАЧАТЬ another staunchly Roman Catholic paper, published novels by conservative activist Józef Orłowski.

      Other newspapers that published or printed literature by Polonian authors before World War II include New Britain, Connecticut’s Przewodnik katolicki; Baltimore’s Jedność-Polonia and the affiliated Markiewicz i Pula company; Bay City, Michigan’s Prawda; Pittsburgh’s Gwiazda; Winona, Minnesota’s Wiarus; New York’s Telegram codzienny; Buffalo’s Dziennik dla wszystkich, Telegram, and Polak w Ameryce; and Chicago’s Dziennik narodowy. A handful of newspapers like New York’s Nowy świat and Ognisko and Cleveland’s Jutrzenka, as well as magazines like the women’s and children’s monthly Ogniwo (Chicago) and the literary and current affairs journal Jaskółka (Stevens Point, Wisconsin) also published Polish-American works in their columns that were never released under separate imprint.

      Staff of Polak Amerykański Press, Buffalo, 1901; Stanisław Slisz is on chair in front. Courtesy State University of New York at Buffalo, University Libraries Polish Collection

      Although newspaper publishers played the greatest role in Polish-American book production, it must be added that a dozen or so publishers operated independently of the press: in Chicago and Niles, Illinois; in Detroit; in South Bend, Indiana; in Pittsburgh; and in Pulaski and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Some of these, like Bolesław Straszyński of Chicago and J. Sobierajski of Detroit, produced only a few volumes. Others, like the Sajewski Company of Chicago, were well established and long-lived.⁶ Books were published by institutions like Detroit’s Polish Seminary and its later Orchard Lake, Michigan, complex, and by ephemeral organizations like the Polski Klub Artystyczny (Polish Arts Club) and the Zjednoczenie Prasy Polskiej w Ameryce (Associated Polish Press of America). Although the difficulty of compiling a complete bibliography of post-1900 Polonian publications makes any conclusions tentative, between eighty and one hundred book publishers appear to have operated in American Polonia before World War II, some of them very short-lived and small-scale, some extraordinarily prolific.⁷ About a third of these included in their catalogs literary works by members of the immigrant community, including poetry and drama.

      Even during the most prolific years of Polonian publishing, this original writing by immigrants was only a tiny portion of its total output. But occasionally organizations or publishers sponsored literary contests to encourage local writers. One of the earliest was the 1893–94 Copernicus competition, which called for “short stories, novels, satires, plays, and scientific treatises . . . written in Polish, using Polish-American life as the background.” The need for a distinct Polish-American literature had developed because

      our general character has changed. . . . So have our habits of thought changed, our manners and customs, even our language, which has acquired new virtues and new faults. Thus, the literature of our homeland is no longer adequate, and a real need arises for the creation of our own literature, based on the lives of our countrymen here in America. Such a literature will constitute a school that will teach a greater love for drama and books, at the same time giving our brethren across the sea a better opportunity of acquainting themselves with us, thus strengthening the bonds between ourselves and our homeland.

      Immigrant authors would make similar pleas, but the publication of immigrant works continued to be constrained by ideological disagreements and political opportunism. The Copernicus contest resulted in controversy, for instance, when the first prize winner turned out to be Zygmunt Słupski, a member of the awards committee and the originator of the contest. The second prize winner wished to remain anonymous, but requested that any monetary award be made to the same Mr. Słupski.⁸

      A 1903 competition sponsored by the Polish National Alliance was plagued with similar problems: it drew just three submissions, which were promptly awarded first, second, and third places. The top prize of fifty dollars went to Stanisława Romanowska for Nad Michiganem (On Lake Michigan), a highly partisan novella about immigrant politics in Chicago.⁹ Romanowska was a music teacher with two boarders, both of them journalists. One was in fact Tomasz Siemiradzki, editor of the PNA weekly Zgoda and also a contest judge. Only one other work by Romanowska has turned up: a short story printed in the PNA almanac for 1910. The possibility has to be considered that others may have had a hand in Romanowska’s work.¹⁰

      Office of the Polish National Alliance’s Zgoda, circa 1910. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

      The most successful book publishers, however, were connected to “independent” newspapers, not aligned with any political, religious, or fraternal camp. The Worzałła company of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, was a very active publisher of books in addition to several papers, of which Gwiazda polarna, established in 1908, still survives. But the most prolific were Władysław Dyniewicz of Chicago and Antoni Paryski of Toledo, Ohio, publishers of Gazeta polska narodowa/Gazeta polska w Chicago, and Ameryka-Echo, respectively.¹¹ Despite, or because of, the partisan debates and infighting within the Polish community, the independence of Dyniewicz, Paryski, and the Worzałła brothers was the key to their success—a political act and a marketing strategy addressing the needs of the immigrant community but grounded in European philosophies. It allowed them to position themselves staunchly as Polish patriots, continuing the educational work begun among peasants in the old country among the transplanted peasants of the American colony. Dyniewicz described his pioneering role in Polonian journalism and publishing in terms of national evangelism: “For my whole life I stood faithfully by the national flag and sincerely defended the Polish emigrants. . . . I often think of it, that the pen which I put down was picked up by other hands, to work for the honor and benefit of the Polish nation.”¹²

      At the same time, Andrzej Kłossowski calls Dyniewicz “the first modern capitalist Polish publisher in the United States.”¹³ His Gazeta polska narodowa had its beginnings in 1873, and Dyniewicz began publishing books three years later. After he retired in 1913, the reorganized Polish American Publishing Company managed to continue into the 1950s. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, business was already booming for Antoni Paryski, Dyniewicz’s onetime typesetter and already a steady contributor to Polish-American and mainstream American newspapers, under various pseudonyms.¹⁴ It was Paryski who most deliberately manipulated the power of the press and of modern advertising and promotional methods to sell himself and his publications, taking his cue from American journalism and American and European models of popular book production. Using a carefully articulated populist rhetoric, Paryski took pains to situate himself as an independent voice for the common people, outside the sphere of clerical and partisan interests that fragmented the community, particularly during Paryski’s boom years, before World War I. Reviled from the pulpit for his anticlericalism, he wore proudly the claim that priests had refused the sacraments to Ameryka-Echo readers.¹⁵ In particular, Paryski exploited Polish class divisions to align himself with his largest potential audience of consumers, the mass of peasant immigrants who began arriving from Russian and Austrian Poland in the 1890s and early 1900s.

      Like many of Polonia’s founding journalists and writers, Paryski, though he came from an illiterate peasant family, had belonged to the emerging urban professional class before emigrating in 1883, allegedly when the Warsaw judge for whom he had been a clerk was arrested for revolutionary activity.¹⁶ Struggling for a living in America and educating himself (he entered the University of Michigan in the early 1880s but was forced to give up his studies for lack of funds), he became a Knights of Labor organizer among the immigrants, rising to an executive position. But at an 1887 executive meeting, in a characteristically confrontational move, Paryski reportedly resigned his post, accusing Terrence Powderly of “venality and dishonesty” СКАЧАТЬ