Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski
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Название: Traitors and True Poles
Автор: Karen Majewski
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Документальная литература
Серия: Polish and Polish-American Studies Series
isbn: 9780821441114
isbn:
A new company did enter the field in the late 1930s, but its connection with the turn-of-the-century immigrant community was marginal. Formerly of Warsaw, New York’s Roy Publishers (Rój na Wygnaniu; Roy in Exile) printed mainly works by the Polish intellectuals scattered throughout Europe immediately before and after the Second World War, and so never filled the same niche as the earlier companies.53 It belonged, rather, to the new growth of emigré publishing houses, most of them based in Western Europe, that emerged out of the Second World War. In the 1950s the Roy Company was merged with the old Polish American Book Publishing Company, and finally both failed.
In 1935, after an extended visit to the United States, Polish writer Wacław Gąsiorowski admitted that Polonian books had their own “long history, a history now and then vexing for Polish authors, but fertile and full of confused efforts.” He speculated on the cause of their demise, blaming it on personal temperaments inadequate to the challenge; on a lack of enterprising booksellers, committed activists, and skillful publishers; on poor support from the Polish press; and on the comparative “poverty of the typographical garment.” Still, he concluded, “It’s hard to blame a group of five million across the ocean, when in the thirty-million-strong motherland the Polish book goes begging.”54
The designation of 1938 as the Year of the Polish Book in America was an admitted reaction to the deteriorating state of book production and consumption within Polonia. In addition to efforts to make books from Poland available in America and to promote reading through the establishment of book clubs and the awarding of books as premiums and prizes, Waldo proposed measures that would have given Polish-American works a wider profile and made them available to a broader audience. Besides calling for the return of the house-to-house book agent and for more extensive advertising and critical reviewing, he proposed a Polish-American library committee that would publish in book form works that were then appearing only in newspapers, and, perhaps most importantly, a translation project to introduce Polish-American works to an American market. The project, he appealed, was both patriotic and commercial. But only one Polish-American book, in Polish, was published under the project’s auspices, the Waldo-edited collection of memoirs and short stories of Haller’s Army, The Armed Effort of U.S. Polonia. Despite Waldo’s efforts and the continued operation of major publishers, as Gąsiorowski had concluded, “The fine times of Dyniewicz, Michał Kruszka, and Paryski have passed, never to return” (97).
Cover of Artur L. Waldo’s The Charm of the Town of Kosciuszko (1936), a novel celebrating the centennial of the founding of Kosciuszko, Mississippi. Courtesy Alumni Memorial Library, St. Mary’s College of Ave Maria University
3
Crime, Punishment, Atonement
A Family Plot
SURELY AMONG THE publications Paryski’s many critics had in mind when they accused him of pandering to his customer’s lowest tastes, and of degrading rather than uplifting the peasant immigrant’s spirit and intellect, were the crime novels to which we now turn. Crime and detective fiction, although not usually considered a major category of ethnic literature, is fairly well represented within Polish-American literary production. Not only were European works reprinted and serialized, but immigrant authors and publishers produced Polish-American contributions to the genre. In addition to their general appeal, these stories contained particular resonances for immigrants that help account for the genre’s popularity and longevity. Even when lacking the trappings of an immigrant social reality, the Polish-American detective narrative replays the basic tensions over group loyalty and betrayal from within that mark so much other Polonian writing. Rather than standing as an aberration in Polonia’s literary history, it restages these conflicts on the most fundamental level of common peoplehood—the family. Within the changing literary forms and styles these works demonstrate, it is possible to trace Polonia’s shifting political and social emphases, as well as changes in the Polish-American publishing business itself.
As early as the 1890s and up to World War I, Polonian newspapers were serializing and Polonian companies were publishing American and European crime and detective stories, including those of Polish author Walery Przyborowski and, in translation, Arthur Conan Doyle. But American Polonia also had its own fictional detective stories. The earliest of these is journalist Henryk Nagiel’s Kara Boża idzie przez oceany (God’s punishment crosses the ocean), first published in 1896. Before turning to the complexities of this novel, however, it may be helpful to look at a series of crime stories that were published some fifteen years later and whose appearance may have prompted the 1912 reissue of Nagiel’s novel. Although much less sophisticated than Nagiel’s work, these works exhibit in crude outline the problems of family succession and continuity that other immigrant crime and detective novels treat as explicitly ethnic issues.
These were truly “pulps,” printed on cheap newsprint in the form of five-by-seven-inch pamphlets of about fifty pages each. The adventures of Bronisław Sęp and of Zofia Jastrzębska, contained in a dozen or so short works written anonymously and appearing between 1911 and 1916, form the Polish-American counterpart to the American dime novels Michael Denning describes as “an essentially anonymous, ‘unauthored’ discourse” in which the commodity is not the author but the hero.1 They include the Sęp adventures Ofiara hypnotyzmu (A victim of hypnotism), Ograbiacze trupów (The corpse robbers),2 Spisek zbrodniarzy (The criminals’ plot), and Widmo w zbroi (The phantom in armor); and, featuring Jastrzębska, Człowiek w żelaznej klatce (The man in the iron cage), Krwawe róże (Bloody roses), Lekarka obłąkanych zbrodniarką (The criminal asylum keeper), Mężobójczyni (The husband killers), Mord w wagonie (Murder on the train), Piekielny zegar (The hellish clock), Tajemniczy mnich (The mysterious monk), Włamywacze (The burglars), and Wróg ludzi (Enemy of the people).
Bibliographical information about these works is difficult to verify and the evidence is contradictory. Not only are authors and sources of origin undocumented, but their publishing history is also difficult to trace. Like many other Polish-American imprints of this period, most of the detective novels indicate a year of publication but do not identify the publisher, which can be deduced only from other evidence, such as the company catalogues that ran in newspapers, almanacs, and in the back pages of other books. Even these sources are not completely reliable, however. Wojciech Chojnacki notes that both Dyniewicz and Paryski catalogues were sometimes misleading as to which items were their own original publications and which imported.3 There is also some evidence that more than one publisher released the same novel. For instance, The Hellish Clock, published by Chicago’s Polish American Publishing Company (without a date), is also listed in Paryski company catalogues beginning in 1911. Paryski also lists Murder on the Train, though it also appears to have been published by Dyniewicz. Similar cases exist among other types of publications as well, particularly involving the Dyniewicz and Paryski firms. The competitive motive is obvious, but it is curious that both Paryski and Dyniewicz seem to have first published this novel in the same year. A publisher might be expected to pirate another’s proven seller, but since this does not seem to have been the case it is more likely that this novel was reprinted from a European import that came into possession of both companies around the same time. No proof of this origin has surfaced, however.
Cover of A Victim of Hypnotism (1911), featuring the Polish-American detective Bronisław Sęp.