Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski

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СКАЧАТЬ . . I don’t like reading,” she tells the woman book agent. But driven by desperation at her husband’s nightly retreat to the saloon, the wife finally agrees to subscribe to Ameryka-Echo and to buy a copy of Lives of the Saints. “Will the day come when darkness and evil will yield, and husband and wife in the golden rays of consciousness will join hands and be one desire, one love, one soul?” the agent wonders. Returning several weeks later to find the husband reading aloud to his wife, she steals away from the door rather than disturb them. Then, finding a rare extra nickel in her purse, she wonders what to do with it: “If I had been a man, I certainly would have had a drink.” Instead, she goes to a five-cent show, where the presentation is a living tableau of Jesus, bearing “Love and Light.” Her joy will not allow her to sleep, and as day breaks she rejoices, “Blessed are the Light Bearers! Blessed!”⁴⁶

      For Wójcik, the secrets of the marriage bed are community concerns. But for Staś, even a glimpse of the reading couple is indiscreet. Her narrator is isolated, although she moves through public spaces and participates in communal events. She is not invited to the marriage feast. Part of the difference lies no doubt in Staś’s own bitter experience as a struggling writer. But the sphere of activity for a woman book agent, of which there were very few, along with her ability to make a living, must have been especially limited and precarious.⁴⁷ It is unlikely that she would have been able, for instance, to read Sienkiewicz to miners in their rented rooms, or sell books over a Sunday beer in the local tavern. Even visiting strangers’ homes must have been cause for some suspicion. And the life experiences that would have propelled an immigrant woman into this profession—widowhood, separation, divorce, even higher education or intellectual ambition not directed toward church or fraternal activity—are likely to have also set her apart within the community, though not necessarily to have removed her from it. It is no surprise, then, that Staś’s narrator moves about alone, even through her own territory. She and other immigrant women authors and journalists struggled against institutional barriers that their male colleagues not only did not face, but sometimes deliberately placed in their paths.

      Since most Polish-American authors maneuvered within a relatively limited network of other journalist-authors who often circulated from paper to paper, intra-Polonian prejudices and rivalries could play an important part in their careers and reflect the ideological stances toward proper Polishness that they attempted to model in their fiction. Stefania Laudyn’s short story “Biały murzyn” (The white Negro) concerns a newspaper editor fired from his position and forced into accepting a rival paper’s offer, even though he has been a vocal opponent of the paper’s politics. In the anti-Semitic Trzech pachciarzy (Three Jewish tenants), by “Stary Związkowiec,” to be discussed in more detail in chapter 5, an insurrectionist-turned-journalist is betrayed by a political opponent. But shaky economics and simple opportunism may also have contributed to the peripatetic careers of many journalist-authors: in the seven years he spent in this country, novelist Henryk Nagiel worked on eight newspapers of widely varying persuasions. Stanisław Osada, whose prolific output includes two important novels, went from Sztandar and Zgoda (Chicago) to Reforma (Buffalo), to Kuryer polski, Dziennik milwaucki, and Tygodnik milwaucki (Milwaukee), to Dziennik polski and Free Poland (Chicago), and finally to Sokół polski (Pittsburgh)—papers ranging from the socialist to the staunchly conservative—all the while contributing to other Polonian and European newspapers and publishing several lengthy historical studies. But despite the instability and infighting, for most authors it was these newspapers and their publishing arms that made up the social and professional networks that enabled them to appear in print in America.

      Melania Nesterowicz. Courtesy Basia Kocyan McCoy

      It was probably in response to political factionalism and social strictures that many writers published their works under pseudonyms, or even anonymously. While the significance of some of these authorial disguises is not always certain, they occasionally locate their holders in deliberate relation to the touchstones of Polishness in America. Kazimierz Neuman wrote under code names from his revolutionary days. Paryski, whose original name was Panek, sometimes wrote under the name Łowiczanin, which highlighted his origin in the area around the Polish town of Łowicz. Melania Nesterowicz began her journalistic career writing under a male pseudonym and even as a well-established editor often serialized her novels anonymously. Detroit’s Dziennik polski suggested an explanation: “Maybe it was a female inferiority complex. Maybe she lacked the manly courage to look the cruel demands of life bravely in the eye.”⁴⁸ Considering the range of social issues that Nesterowicz confronted in her writing, it is far more likely that she believed her work would be taken more seriously if it were thought to be written by a man. Committed to speaking out on issues she considered important to her readers, Nesterowicz also submitted anonymous articles to rival papers when she disagreed with the editorial stance of her own.⁴⁹

      The heyday for Paryski and for Polish-American publishing, particularly of fiction, occurred before World War I. A series of factors led to its swift decline in the 1920s and 1930s. Most important, Poland’s rebirth at the end of the war brought the immigrant community to a crisis of commitment over its relationship to the reborn homeland that had repercussions for all Polonia, including the publishing industry. But with a restored Polish state, Polonia’s intellectuals, many of whom had claimed political oppression as their motivation for immigrating, now had an open road to return. Some of Polonia’s most prominent writers did return to Poland in the 1920s, but the expected mass repatriation from America failed to materialize—the “fourth partition” was establishing its own independence. After peaking in 1921 at a little over forty-two thousand, the number of returnees dwindled to fewer than five hundred persons a year after 1934.⁵⁰ And like the soldiers from Haller’s Army who had resettled in the old country after the war, only to return in disillusionment, some of the repatriated writers reemigrated to America as well. Although emotional ties and an active and vocal sense of Polish advocacy survived, for Polonia the restoration of Polish nationhood led to a general stocktaking of loyalties that, combined with the changing demographics of a maturing immigrant community, resulted in a shift toward American concerns and a more gradual tendency toward English as a literary language.

      Polonia’s ideological transformations and aging immigrant population, as well as economic hardship in the United States, produced a new literary profile as well. Not only were fewer titles published, but the nature of those publications, particularly the fiction, was changing. Gone were the days of wholesale book pirating and massive printings of thousands of titles. Though Polish classics were still being reprinted, the medieval legends and tales from The Thousand and One Nights had perhaps outlived their usefulness for turn-of-the-century immigrants and for their children educated in American and Polish-American (parochial) schools. Gone too were the cheaply printed satires, exposés, and instructional tales by a large number of Polonian authors. Fewer new works of fiction were appearing, and the field of authors was narrowing. Generally speaking, those authors still active were producing longer and more sustained works, and producing them regularly. As publishing outlets diminished, however, many of these new works were never released in book form but appeared only in extended serialization. Melania Nesterowicz serialized all her postwar novels in the Buffalo newspaper she edited. Likewise, Bronisław Wrotnowski printed his novels in the monthly literary magazine that he edited.⁵¹

      Immigrant communities supported their own bookstores. This one, run by a Mr. Zalewski, was one of several in Chicago circa 1910. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

      During the 1920s and 1930s, the Paryski company appears to have published the works of only one Polonian novelist, Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, whose anticlerical and anti-institutional satires were evidently very popular.⁵² When СКАЧАТЬ