Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski

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      INTRODUCTION

      Reading the Immigrant

      THIS STUDY LOOKS at a forgotten fragment of American literature: immigrant narrative fiction written in Polish and published in the United States before World War II. The purposes of this study are several and necessarily interdisciplinary. It will admit the Polish-language writing of turn-of-the-century immigrants into the scholarly conversation by reopening its long-closed pages, outlining its dimensions, and suggesting its possible significances. It will situate these works within the larger tradition of popular literature and reading in Europe and America alongside which it emerged, and within the context of Polish literary history and American ethnic literary theory, including the newly emerging field of American literature written in languages other than English. But its primary focus will be the role of Polish immigrant, Polish-language fiction in the negotiation of a national and ethnic identity as writers argued the boundaries and obligations of Polishness. If, as Jules Chametzky observed many years later, ethnicity “ain’t what you do, or what you are but an image created by what you read,”¹ Polish-language literature, written in the United States and published by Polish-American companies, attempted to model a Polish identity for its immigrant readers at the same time that it articulated specifically Polish-American perspectives and experiences.

      Despite stereotypes suggesting otherwise, that these immigrants were reading is obvious from the great number of Polish-language newspapers they produced, particularly after 1880, when the immigrant press burgeoned and began branching into other publishing activities. Self-help books, religious tracts, installment fiction, poetry, dramas for the amateur and professional stage:² the variety and output were enormous. And so, apparently, was the demand. Nineteenth-century Polish-American newspapers reported the establishment of local reading rooms and lending libraries. As early as 1891 even small towns like Manistee, Michigan, could boast a Polish library. Emil Dunikowski reports that, of the several hundred books owned by a Buffalo Polish reading room, all but a few dozen were checked out at the time of his visit.³ And Artur Waldo recounts that “when a peddler left a Chicago bookstore carrying a heavy suitcase stuffed with books, after covering one block, not more than twenty or thirty homes, he returned to the publisher’s stockroom with his suitcase already empty.”⁴

      So how is it that, given the flurry of publishing activity and the evident hunger for books in Polonian homes,⁵ so little is known about the works written and published on American soil by immigrant Poles and their children? Why could Stanislaus Blejwas, as late as 1988, state that “there does not exist a Polish American literature,” or Karol Wachtl, while offering sketches of a score of Polonian writers, claim, “In a strict sense, one cannot yet speak of original Polish-American writing, about a true literature bred among Polish settlements here, blossoming from and maintained by its homegrown, independent talents.”⁶

      The answers are complex and lie in the juncture between ideology, history, and literary theory. Blejwas and Wachtl were both referring to Polonia’s sparsity of professional, English-language writers, who were influenced more by a Polish-American experience and upbringing than a Polish one and who were able to speak for the immigrant and ethnic community to an outside audience. What’s more, the 1980s and 1990s saw a flurry of creative fiction that is self-consciously Polish-American. But no English-language study has systematically considered Polish-language literature produced in this country for its intersection with Polonian and American literary scholarship.

      Scholars who might have wished to include immigrant texts written in Polish within a more general discussion of Polish-American writing have until now been hampered by several problems. Not only had none of these works been translated into English, but until this study no reliable bibliography of this material has appeared in either English or Polish, and even the most rudimentary scholarly consideration of these Polish-language immigrant texts was lacking.⁷ The rare discussion of diasporan literature has tended to concentrate on works by renowned nonimmigrant writers, such as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s melodramatic Za chlebem (After bread). Or it has neglected the old peasant immigration in favor of writers of the World War II emigré generation.⁸ The Polish-American chapter of the Modern Language Association’s recently СКАЧАТЬ