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

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СКАЧАТЬ of her self-esteem. So, Jadwiga’s distress after a chance meeting with the American relatives of her concentration camp torturer is treated by Joe with an injection of morphine. He patronizingly dismisses both women, Jadwiga with her war trauma and Anya with her own hidden uncertainties about the value of her “perfect” middle-class existence, by predictably advising them to visit a beauty salon and spend an afternoon shopping.

      Kosturbala’s story offers a strong indictment of the double assault on Anya and Jadwiga. As masculine power, represented by Anya’s husband’s familial authority and her brother-in-law’s professional authority, reasserts itself in the Krystofs’ household, Jadwiga’s suffering is called into question. She is ordered to suppress her unfeminine rage and accept the proper female role within a family, a role that she disdains. Anya’s growing dissatisfaction, the feeling soon to be analyzed by Betty Friedan and that she shares with thousands of American women, is trivialized. Kosturbala does not offer her female characters a viable solution to the problem she presents them with. At the end of the narrative, both Anya and Jadwiga still exist within the uber-domestic setting of Anya’s state-of-the art kitchen, finally calm and companionable. After their chores are completed, they might after all go shopping, but this time they will search together for beautiful antique Persian rugs. Kosturbala clearly points out that to be acceptable within a middle-class white family structure of 1950s America, Jadwiga, a foreign other, must surrender all that is deemed unfeminine, just as Anya must surrender her unfeminine independence and suppress any doubts she might have about the value of her suburban lifestyle. Yet, this temporary surrender does not provide a permanent solution to Anya’s and Jadwiga’s concerns. The unresolved quality of the story’s ending suggests Kosturbala’s awareness that many issues still remain for middle-class ethnic women.

      Kosturbala’s women of the late 1950s have little in common with Krawczyk’s earlier generation of immigrant and ethnic women who existed on the margins of the American society. Their daughters, represented by Anya Krystof, have successfully pursued their American Dream of upward mobility, entered the middle class and gained ethno-racial privilege through a clear identification with all other white Americans. Yet this success was not without a cost. The white middle-class suburbs expected uniformity and not ethnic otherness, so unique ethnic markers had to be substituted with generic American class markers. And most importantly, these seemingly successful and satisfied ethnic women began to chafe under the midcentury construct of femininity. Ironically, Kosturbala’s narrative suggests that ethnic women became simultaneously fully white and oppressed.

      To counteract this gender disempowerment, or at least to illuminate it, several texts included in this collection of short stories move their plots to Poland under the German occupation (1939–45), or, like Kosturbala, deploy foreign “other” characters. Maria Laskowska’s “Life Is Beautiful” and Halina Heitzman’s “Initiation” explore the immediate past in order to circumvent the tight patriarchal controls set for women. Both authors are Polish immigrants who completed university education in interwar Poland. Laskowska (born in 1899) earned a graduate degree in Polish language and literature at the University of Warsaw, while Heitzman (born in 1912) received a master’s degree in history from the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Their own socioeconomic status motivates their framing of the gender discourse. Unlike many Polish American authors who, although well-educated themselves, hail from a strongly Catholic Polish peasant immigration, Laskowska and Heitzman represent a Polish interwar intelligentsia, university-educated, middle- and upper-middle-class, characterized by its anticlericalism.³³ Paradoxically, both Laskowska and Heitzman set their narratives during the terror of World War II in order to offer their female characters opportunities to break patriarchal barriers and excel in nontraditional female roles.

      “Life Is Beautiful” is a brief story, or rather a character sketch, presenting Kaytek, a young woman—not more than twenty—who serves with a first aid patrol during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, an armed revolt of the Polish citizens of Warsaw against their German occupiers. Kaytek’s gender is somewhat ambiguous. She has chosen a male-sounding nom de guerre; her “hair was cut like a boy’s”; like other soldiers she “wore crumpled army trousers . . . and a prodigious shirt made from parts of a German army tent and called ‘tigerskin’ because of the camouflage markings”;³⁴ her actions have been characterized by great physical and psychological courage as well as incredible endurance. At the same time, many of her actions are motivated by the typically female traits of empathy and compassion. In addition to her everyday duties in a field hospital unceasingly under enemy fire, she spends several hours each night searching amidst the rubble for corpses of fallen soldiers and bringing them back for burial behind the Polish barricades. She risks her life in an expedition behind the enemy lines to obtain some milk for starving infants and donates her blood for transfusions to the wounded. She is the only one who does not lose her head when the hospital is hit by an incendiary device, but orders the narrator of the story to help her put out the fire with an enormous cauldron of soup. This courageous woman-soldier also finds love and marries a fellow officer during the last days of the Uprising, explaining to her friends that “If we are about to die, it is better that we be husband and wife.”³⁵ In “Life Is Beautiful,” Laskowska places no limits on Kaytek. During a national emergency, women easily free themselves from the restrictions of the domestic sphere. In a war zone they are capable of actions expected until recently of males only. Through Kaytek’s story, Laskowska escapes the oppressive reality of the 1950s and argues eloquently against gender inequality, as does Halina Heitzman in “Initiation.”

      Heitzman situates the plot of “Initiation” in Kraków in September 1939. German troops have just entered this ancient Polish city and the citizens are quickly learning about the Nazi terror. The story’s protagonist and narrator is sixteen-year-old Anka, whose idealistic patriotism rebels against her parents’ resignation to the Nazi occupation and what she sees as their mundane concerns about food and safety. Anka feels ready to take up arms in defense of the homeland. She does not consider her gender to be an obstacle and joins a neighborhood group of teenagers, both boys and girls, who begin to plot clandestine actions against the occupiers. They consider plans for bomb making, smuggling information and messages, or “carrying on an armed resistance somewhere in the woods.”³⁶ However, they lack both the expertise and necessary connections to the Polish underground army. Anka spends her days walking the city streets, observing troop movements and thinking of killing Germans, until Stephen, a friend’s brother, approaches her with a plan. He quickly enlists her help in a clandestine operation. German authorities have turned the courtyard of the town hall into a temporary prison for Polish POWs. An underground organization prepares an escape plan that hinges upon the delivery of civilian clothes to the prisoners. Anka can serve as a courier. Armed only with a fake pass as her security, Anka has to walk through the heavily guarded entrance to the town hall and unobtrusively drop a package of clothes in the courtyard. The young woman overcomes her fears, successfully completes her mission, and returns home elated. As a seasoned conspirator now, she keeps her accomplishment a secret but is deeply satisfied in her knowledge that her parcel has meant “freedom for one of them.”³⁷

      Both “Life is Beautiful” and “Initiation” use the war setting to open new possibilities in gender constructs by taking young women out of their traditional domestic settings and pushing back at the restrictions binding them during peacetime. It is of prime importance to the authors that these women-soldiers are no different from their male co-conspirators in their devotion to the homeland, their desire for freedom, and their courage in carrying out orders. In addition, their empathic abilities make them even more effective than their male comrades. While these wartime heroines share some admirable qualities with Monica Krawczyk’s self-aware Polish American women of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, they also remind readers in the early 1960s that in times of war women proved their equality to men both on the home front and on the battlefield. They rely on their own judgment, believe themselves equal to male comrades at arms, and do not feel the need to defer to male authority. For both Laskowska and Heitzman, the tragedy of war, which seriously disrupts or even obliterates restrictive domesticity, offers women a measure of gender equality. In such extreme conditions, these heroic characters demonstrate resiliency, determination, loyalty, courage, and СКАЧАТЬ