Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski

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      Wachtl reserves his sharpest criticism for writers whom he accuses of betraying the Polish-American community by creating divisions within it. He calls anticlericalist Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, for example, “a talent—undeniably brilliant, but unfortunately warped and wasted through his unscrupulous and unjust derision and mockery of everything that was elevated” (230). And he charges Łukaszkiewicz’s publisher and colleague, Antoni Paryski, with selling books that were “completely without worth, even harmful, because they sowed the seeds of discontent and set the Polonian community at odds” (227). Paryski’s publishing company, early Polonia’s most successful, will be discussed in chapter 2. However, it is important to note that Wachtl’s highly politicized analysis reflects precisely the value of internal unity that dominated Polonian thought, if not its practice. Although Polonia’s own literary scholarship is sketchy and heavily tainted, it does reflect what could be called the received image of Polonian history, full of contradictions and defensive strategies, but shared by its various ideological camps, valuing group cohesiveness but disagreeing about group identity, and linking Polonian to Polish as well as American historical developments.

      While Artur Waldo’s Zarys historii literatury polskiej w Ameryce (Outline history of Polish literature in America) attempts to systematically describe the development and growth of Polish-American literature, it promises more than it delivers. But despite the murkiness of its categories and its somewhat arbitrary divisions, the second project of Waldo’s Outline, to periodize Polish-American literary production, at least treats its subject as a serious cultural indicator. What is more, Waldo stresses the unfolding relationship between Polonia, Poland, and the United States evident in this literature. Recognizing Polonia and its cultural expression as legitimately part of both the American and Polish panoramas, and conscious of American stereotypes of Polish immigrants, Waldo encourages the translation of Polish-language Polonian texts into English, as well as the creation of new works in the English language: “We have to give America Polish-American writing, Polish-American literature” in order “to establish a foundation for the power of the Polish spirit in the United States.”³²

      The purpose of my own study is not to prove, to Polonia itself or to American readers, that Polish immigrant communities created a “great literature.” Nor is it to develop any monolithic definition of Polish-American literature itself. Certainly, equally valid but oppositional definitions may suit specific purposes and highlight particular qualities, not crossing each other out but rather expanding the matrices by which ethnicity is perceived and expressed. Rather, I intend to reopen the pages of these long-forgotten early works in order to consider the uses to which literature was put within Polonia and the possibilities it offered the community for reading itself as Polish in an American context.

      This study will consider the diversity of ethnic identities circulated among readers in the Polish immigrant community, in a Polish and Polish-American cultural and historical context. It will attempt to describe a cultural history reconstructed out of the works that Polish America wrote and read, and that reveal the continuing conversation over values, interests, and identity through which the immigrant community shaped itself.

      The first chapter will argue the primacy of literature in the creation of a Polish national and Polish-American ethnic consciousness. Chapter 2 takes a detailed look at the history of Polonian literature and publishing. Chapter 3 will investigate the controlling theme of ethnic and family loyalty and betrayal through the prism of popular Polish-American crime and detective narratives, arguing that the threats to inheritance and family continuity that these stories enact can be read as ethnic and national allegories. Chapter 4 considers the same theme of the creation and maintenance of group identity by looking at the ways sagas of immigration and adjustment encourage immigrant readers to interpret their own emigration in the context of Poland’s political oppression, and to see themselves as linked to other Poles by a national identity reinforced by shared suffering and exploitation. By showing emigration as a process that leads back to Europe, these works situate their immigrant characters in a continuing relationship to the homeland. Chapter 5 investigates the literary treatment of political direction and institutional corruption, demonstrating the ways opposing factions utilized the same morally charged rhetoric of treason and betrayal to articulate competing ideologies of group identity and strategies for national survival. Chapter 6 shows how immigrant authors explored and resolved questions of collective identity through the drama of sexual attraction and marital alliance, conflating family and nation and investing personal patterns of action with political meaning, in order to model proper ways of reproducing Polishness. The final chapter turns to the question of why this literature did not survive and suggests its relation to the writing and publishing efforts of later immigrants, those from World War II and, particularly, the Solidarity era. It argues that, despite their surface differences, similarities between the stara emigracja and the newest immigrant cohort account for some commonalities of literary form, style, subject, and theme.

      In 1938 Artur L. Waldo dedicated his Outline History of Polish Literature in America “to the forgotten writers of American Polonia” (4). That he was referring to authors whose works had appeared only within the last several decades, some of whom were still writing and publishing, testifies to the unstable relationship between Polish immigrant writing and the community of immigrant readers these works addressed. If memory of these publications was already fading within Polonia even while, as Waldo asserts, they lay piled by the score in thousands of Polish-American attics, it is small wonder that later ethnic scholars have either remained ignorant of their existence or neglected their study. Waldo himself balked at the enormity of his task, leaving it to future scholars to flesh out the bones of his research. This study is a partial fulfillment of that hope, so long unfulfilled.

      Without looking at writing in Polish, one can obtain only a distorted view of the cultural life of American Polonia, which included scores of Polish newspapers, Polish radio programs, active theater companies, and a lively output of various publications, including fiction. With a growing willingness to accept not simply alternative forms of literature such as letters and autobiography, but to acknowledge as American that literature written in languages other than English, a vast field of study is opened that will enable us to gain a much deeper understanding of how immigrant ethnicity was shaped and experienced. It also establishes a counterpoint to the common image of Polish-Americans in native literature, written by those outside the community for an American audience. Even the most sympathetic of these often portray the Polish immigrant as inarticulate, passive, almost primeval, as faceless symbols of a primitive life force and as voiceless victims of social injustice and economic exploitation. Naturally, they may have appeared so to outsiders, with whom they could not easily communicate. But the view from within Polonia was of an active, vibrant, and complex community, and most relevantly the sound from within was not silence but conversation, argument, laughter. The only way to hear these voices is by eavesdropping on the literature these communities produced by and for themselves, with no intention of cultural mediation with America at large, but with very particular agendas relevant to the immigrants themselves, their institutions, and even to the shape of the world map. All this is lost unless we hear them in their own language.

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