Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka

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СКАЧАТЬ family straight along gender lines. While she and her two daughters are delighted with the books, her husband and both sons are scornful or dismissive. The boys never have enough time to read and the husband rages, “‘Are you crazy? Books are not bread. They cost money. . . . The children have books at school. I already pay taxes for them. What craziness got into your head? Remember,’ he shouted, ‘I do not pay a cent!’ He walked out slamming the door.”⁴⁸ Thus the husband’s domination is again asserted through the economic pressure of the breadwinner. When unexpectedly the bill for the full, not the discounted price of the encyclopedias comes in the mail, Milewski explodes again, angrily chastising his wife for her extravagance and naïveté in trusting a salesman. Milewski joins several other husbands in Krawczyk’s stories who control their wives’ behavior or punish them by withholding financial support. For example, in “My Man,” Mrs. Sobota tells a tale of her husband’s insane jealousy, which leads him not only to abusive behavior toward her but also to his pressuring her through stopping her grocery or fuel credit. Yet, she does not allow herself to be victimized and seeks help from her son’s teacher in finding a lawyer and pursuing a divorce: “Now I got to fight! I got to fight for my rights!”⁴⁹ Mrs. Sobota does not divorce her husband and the spouses make up at the end of the story, but Krawczyk still refuses to construct a female character who meekly accepts abuse and victimization. In considering a divorce, Mrs. Sobota is willing to endure the censure of her community and its religious leaders rather than stay in an unhealthy relationship that harms not only her but also her young son, Edvard.

      Antosia Milewski possesses a similar defiant streak. Her husband’s anger over the purchase of the encyclopedia set notwithstanding, she blissfully devotes herself to perusing different volumes while her daily chores remain unattended to. The books have the power to transport her back to the country of her youth when her daughter reads to her the encyclopedia entry on Poland, and the pictures of the Polish countryside bring Antosia to tears. Even though Antosia manages to convince all her four children of the value of education hidden within the encyclopedia, the husband remains in opposition. If it were not for the help of Miss Cook and the children, Antosia would lose her battle and would have to return all thirty-six volumes. But she does triumph, and “the books would remain in her house.”⁵⁰ Undoubtedly, Antosia’s story pays tribute to Krawczyk’s own Polish immigrant mother, Anastasia Fortunska Kowalewska, who not only mothered eleven children of whom Monica was the firstborn, but also “taught herself English and bought books for herself and her children,”⁵¹ and endured her neighbors’ censure for sending Monica to school instead of forcing her to work, as was the practice of most Polish immigrant families at the time.⁵²

      In both “For Dimes and Quarters” and in “Quilts,” Monica Krawczyk deploys a symbolic object—an encyclopedia and a quilt—the value of which, even though universally recognized by the dominant culture, escapes the Polish immigrant men and is appreciated only by the women. Krawczyk’s women are certainly better at understanding the new environment and “reading” the value system of modern America. In her short stories, Krawczyk repeatedly suggests that women face a difficult struggle to convince the men to adapt to the new-world values in order for their families to thrive.

      Undoubtedly with her mainstream American readers in mind, Monica Krawczyk offers subtle patterns of ethnicity in her stories. Only “If the Branch Blossoms,” the title story of her collection, is set in Poland, on a prosperous farm where a family practices the traditions which also find their way to America with thousands of Polish peasant immigrants. In her ethnic stories, set in both urban and rural settings, Krawczyk, like many other writers after her, conflates ethnicity with social class: her Polish immigrant characters are mostly farmers or represent the urban working class. She uses typical ethnic markers such as a few Polish expressions, descriptions of Polish holiday customs or traditional foods, and stories about life and family left behind in Poland. Such ethnic elements notwithstanding, her characters are mostly immigrants who seek assimilation and success in their new environment. Using an ethnic milieu, Krawczyk constructs her female characters within a domestic sphere, which turns into a space where the triumvirate of gender, socioeconomic class, and race come together. This domestic immigrant sphere is only rarely invaded by American white middle-class women, and then Krawczyk underscores ethnic and class differences rather than racial solidarity. Her characters perform the traditional tasks expected of wives and mothers, but she also endows them with the ability to understand that they, alone or with the support of other women, have to seek a self-fulfillment impossible to achieve just through repetitive housekeeping tasks in an oppressive environment. Motherhood also falls short of providing exultation and self-satisfaction, since Krawczyk’s women seem to be consumed by the drudgery of the continuous care for their numerous offspring. Many of them attempt to express themselves through art, albeit in forms traditionally accepted as female, or seek learning and new experiences in their new immigrant reality. Krawczyk identifies the economic control exerted on women by the traditional family structure, where the housewife’s work is not valued equally with the work of a husband outside the home, as the main cause of the women’s subjugation and inequality. But she offers a glimmer of hope for the future when the new generation enters into more equal relationships, with both partners empowered economically, like Antek and Edith Kowalek in “No Man Alone.”

      Monica Krawczyk consciously chose the role of a writer who normalized her ethnic subjects for the mainstream readers of American popular magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. She, like other ethnic writers of her time discussed by Cyrus R. K. Patell in a study on emergent US literatures, understood that she was “writing from the margins,”⁵³ yet she strove to enrich the center of US culture by adding her ethnic voice. Krawczyk subtly embedded many radical and progressive ideas in her narratives as she wrote to reveal a process of double othering by which Polish American women were defined and excluded both by the American mainstream and by Polish patriarchy. She advocated strongly for women to engage in pushing back at the restrictive forces. To that purpose, she imparted to her female characters an awareness of the economic, social, and familial barriers they encountered at the intersection of social class, ethnicity, and gender that impacted their self-actualization. She led them through countless acts of rebellion and assertiveness: learning and buying books against the wishes of their husbands, finishing their quilts instead of doing housework, refusing marital sex, or finding lawyers to fight abusive husbands. And even if her women had to capitulate under economic pressure and continue in the domestic subservience of wives and mothers, they did so with the self-respect they had gained from their subversive activities. Overall, Krawczyk’s celebration of resilient immigrant women can be classified as gently liberatory.

      Krawczyk’s stories not only assert that the immigrant women construct ethnicity by combining old Polish traditions with new American ways, but also that they are the engines of success for their families in America. They read and understand the new environment better than their men, are more flexible in constructing their ethnic lives, and are able to find a balance between assimilatory moves that allow the family to succeed within the American mainstream and maintaining connections to the Polish past, which is represented as providing a healthy rootedness for the entire family. They write Polishness into the new American identity of their families and, even more so than male immigrants, build Polish American communities.

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      At Midcentury

       Polish Americans Writing Their Identity

      MONICA KRAWCZYK’S COMMITMENT TO the empowerment of women was not limited to her fiction. She devoted herself to many Polish American causes, especially those that supported education and artistic expression. She was one of the charter members of the Polanie Club of Minneapolis–St. Paul, Minnesota, founded by a small group of women in 1927 “to preserve and promote Polish culture.”¹ From its inception, the club, under the influence of Krawczyk, became involved in publishing, especially as she “recognized the dearth of creative writing about the Polish people and their richly emotional and historical ancestry.”² Even after her death, her ideas were preserved through the club’s activities.

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