Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski

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СКАЧАТЬ office.”³¹ The workers live off handouts from their advertisers, and every week their manager has to win the money for newsprint at the card table: “When he won, the paper came out; when he lost, the world was deprived of that week’s pearl of literature.”³²

      Almost no evidence exists of how much authors were paid for their work, as company records are rare, but the financial possibilities for immigrant writers were certainly limited.³³ Although Paryski claimed, in 1891, to have paid Alfons Chrostowski $150 for his novel Uwiedziona (copies of which sold for thirty-five cents), other writers complained that they weren’t paid at all. Stanisław Osada admitted, “It is indeed rare to hear of a case in which the author received some money for his work. As a rule, he would be presented with a few copies. Very often the author himself would cover the cost of publishing his book.”³⁴

      In 1907 Helena Staś blamed the Polish-American press and publishers for undermining the development of Polonian literature, and of national consciousness, by refusing to compensate contributors: “I’m sure that more than one youth in America has tried his literary powers in the Polish papers, but when his work was exploited, and other papers repeatedly criticized it, he transferred his efforts to a foreign field, because there they value it and pay for it. If in these circumstances the youth is denationalized, whose fault is it?” It is no wonder, given publishers’ economic exigencies, ideological requirements, or simple power plays, that many Polish-language authors who were determined to see their work in print were forced to publish it themselves.³⁵

      Staś claimed to have no choice but to “turn away from my countrymen. . . . Rather than my own, I have to learn a foreign language; rather than by my own, I must be moved by a foreign spirit.”³⁶ She was to repeat charges like these, and worse, in her self-published 1910 novel In the Human Market, bitter with criticism of institutional leadership in general, and of the immigrant press and publishing industry in particular. In this and other works, Staś pleads for a distinctly Polish-American literature that addresses readers’ experiences and concerns while serving national and community ideals.

      But struggling immigrant authors were at a disadvantage, because publishers had a steady supply of literary material for which they did not have to pay at all. Book pirating was widespread among Polish-American publishing houses. In fact, even after the 1891 enactment of copyright laws, Russian Poland was still not under copyright agreement with the United States.³⁷ Again, Dyniewicz and Paryski were the most blatant offenders. Paryski, for instance, issued Polish-language editions of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (without crediting an author), along with works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Upton Sinclair, and Leo Tolstoy, as well as by contemporary and classic Polish authors. The matter seems to have given immigrant publishers very little concern, as evidenced by Paryski’s reprint of a Warsaw newspaper’s description of his company, in which the correspondent reveals that

      [Polish-]American publishers reprint without paying the European authors for their works, unless the author takes out a copyright in Washington for a given work. . . . T[adeusz] Korzon didn’t get any material benefit at all from the fact that ten thousand copies of his general history were distributed in America. [Kazimierz] Gorzycki was suffering dire poverty while tens of thousands of copies of his “Social History of Poland” were being reprinted. [Yet] neither of these authors would be one jot richer if those reprints did not exist; as for the distribution of their books in America, they have a certain moral satisfaction that their works are entering the consciousness of the nation.³⁸

      Publishers were probably convinced that they would not be prosecuted by Polish authors and copyright holders across the ocean, and that non-Polish authors would not even be aware that their works were being released in Polish-language editions. Still, occasional attempts were made to protect authors. In his Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, Hieronim Derdowski alerted writers in Poland that their works were being reprinted in America and advised them that they had legal recourse. He even offered an English-language sample letter enabling them to request a copy of American copyright laws from the Library of Congress.³⁹ Gwiazda polarna was threatened with a lawsuit when Polish Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont, on a trip to the United States, discovered his novel Chłopi being serialized in its pages. When the publishers were forced to pay him a settlement, spiteful critics reportedly rejoiced that “at least one writer made something off them.”⁴⁰ But piracy was so lucrative, and the efforts to stop it so haphazard, that it continued unabated until World War I.

      If unpaid immigrant writers and pirated European ones were to take comfort in the knowledge that they were contributing to Polonia’s enlightenment, the same blend of business strategy and national mission is discernible in publishers’ promotional techniques. Besides offering their publications in bookstores (in Dyniewicz’s case, one he himself owned) and through newspaper mail order advertisements, large publishers used networks of newspaper subscription canvassers to publicize and sell books as well. These “education agents,” combining organic work with traveling salesmanship, traversed Polish settlements, visiting immigrants in their homes and suggesting reading material in addition to the newspapers they were promoting. Wiktor Rosiński, one of Ameryka-Echo’s editors after Paryski’s death in 1935, described the work of the company’s twenty-five hundred agents: “More than one of them, working hard for the cause and sometimes hungry, read selections aloud from [Sienkiewicz’s] Trylogia, or [Prus’s] Faraon to workers gathered in a boardinghouse room in the remote hamlets of Pennsylvania or Massachusetts.”⁴¹ A 1911 report describes how “an agent meets workers coming out of the factory or sitting in the tavern on Sunday, spreads out his brochures and books, pushes a five-cent booklet, and gets a promise that the customer will read through it; . . . if an interest in reading is awakened, he has another purchaser and a subscriber to Ameryka-Echo.” The approximately one hundred fifty agents in Paryski’s employ, the report continues, earned 50 percent of the price of their sales, averaging salaries of around $15 a week, or $780 a year, though some agents earned even more by hiring their own hawkers.⁴² According to Paryski, however, agents earned from one to five thousand dollars a year.⁴³ At any rate, the incentive to sell Paryski’s books was surely made more urgent by the fact that the agents purchased up front the merchandise they carried.

      These traveling agents are also narrators in some of the advertising fiction through which Paryski promoted his newspaper and books, and which sell the very act of reading, often by linking it to family and community cohesiveness. In these tales, reading is a social force for bringing together divided families. Rather than an individual act isolating each reader within a private experience, reading is communal, reinforcing a shared cultural framework and mutual responsibilities and expectations. Whether the readers are weary miners in a boardinghouse or husband and wife in their bedroom, they are participating in a shared act of mutual consciousness that was an important mechanism of community formation and regeneration. One humorous story, Wójcik’s “Przygody agenta” (The adventures of an agent), relates how a clever book agent is able to get a reluctant wife to sleep with her simpleminded husband by selling him a subscription to Ameryka-Echo. Finally convinced of her husband’s worthiness, the wife reads to him in bed from Paryski’s edition of The Thousand and One Nights. Next, with a Paryski cookbook, she plans a feast for her neighbors and family, for the priest who married them, and for the book agent who brought them together.⁴⁴

      Polish literary critic Julian Krzyżanowski calls the positivists “worshippers of light,”⁴⁵ and Helena Staś’s promotional tale, “Wspomnienia z agentury Ameryki-Echa: Błogosławieni” (Reminiscences of an Ameryka-Echo agent: The blessed) makes particular use of this positivist imagery. It also offers a poignantly ambiguous portrait of the Polish-American counterpart to Davies’s “young lady of good family with a textbook under her shawl.” Like Wójcik’s tale, it argues for reading as the catalyst for domestic accord, but it is also marked by the isolation that independent women face in many Polonian narratives. In a miserable tenement household a wife would rather her СКАЧАТЬ