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

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      INTRODUCTION

      Polish American Women

       A Cultural and Literary Construct

      The stories immigrants tell about themselves become a way of making sense of who one is, how one can be of many worlds at once, and most importantly, making sense of those experiences in light of both the homeland and the host culture.

      —Archana A. Pathak¹

      My mother ended each story the same way: “To be alive in this country is a miracle. You should thank God every day.”

      But this was the only place we knew. How could someone else’s stories make us understand?

      —Leslie Pietrzyk²

      A woman . . . called to let me know she was hoping we would be playing authentic Polish music. . . . What did I know about what they listened to over there? I only knew that this was the music we played here, and it happened to be sung in Polish, and sometimes told of Polish things.

      —Suzanne Strempek Shea³

      I

      For three-quarters of a century now, Polish American women writers have been reaching for the ancestral to write female Polishness into the narrative of America. Striving to eliminate or circumvent deeply embedded and institutionalized barriers, they find their strength and uniqueness in relational female networks that go back to the original homeland. They continuously construct and reconstruct gendered ethnicity amid tensions brought on by forces of social class, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation as well as by political and religious pressures. Their success in moving Polish American ethnic space from the nineteenth-century marginality of the “not quite white” immigrants to the normalized middle-class center of the twentieth century freed them to experiment with multiple ethno-racial constructs in the twenty-first century.

      Harriet Zabrosky serves as an apt example of a Polish American woman of the new century. She is the twenty-something protagonist of Elizabeth Dembrowsky’s experimental novel, My Monk (2009), and her self-constructed identity testifies to the malleability of gendered white ethnicity in twenty-first-century America. Dembrowsky allows Harriet to challenge the invisibility of a white ethnic, situates her amid various identity options, and empowers her to make independent choices even if they appear whimsical or irrational. Harriet’s closest friends “get annoyed with her insistence on ‘being Polish.’ Harriet is a third generation American; in fact, she is a third-generation Massachusettsian, in fact, she is a third-generation Stoughtonian. However, Harriet likes being Polish as she thinks it gives her full permission to be stubborn and prideful.”⁴ Harriet freely selects and deliberately constructs a gendered ethnic self by identifying herself fully as Polish despite her multiethnic gene pool and her American birth. She consciously ignores her strong emotional attachment to America and her “partly olive”⁵ skin, a visible link to her Spanish and French great-grandmothers. This third-generation ethnic woman approaches ethnicity as a voluntary choice, as a matter of consent rather than descent,⁶ when she decides on Polishness as her space of identification. Harriet’s contemporary, Anya, the narrator cum protagonist of Karolina Waclawiak’s debut novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms (2012), deploys a similar ethnic matrix when she engages in ethnic cross-dressing. However, Waclawiak’s character distances herself from Polishness. Dissatisfied with her Polish roots, Anya, an immigrant albeit a child immigrant, recognizes ethnicity as an artificial construct to be discarded or modified at will by employing a carefully selected set of ethnic markers⁷ that would allow her, she believes, to move seamlessly from the rejected Polish identity to the desired identification with Russian immigrants.

      Both Elizabeth Dembrowsky and Karolina Waclawiak, who write the Polish American self, rework yet again the archetypal plot of American becoming, of leaving, arriving, and staying in-between, and of constructing self from the opposite pulls of disparate cultures. Taking advantage of the privilege of whiteness, they grant their characters freedom to blend with the dominant culture, to construct a Polish American ethnic self, or even to engage in an appropriation of markers belonging to the ethnic other. These new ethnic shape-shifters may slip in and out of different identities to satisfy an immediate need or to gain a social advantage.

      Such liberty to self-create was not always an option available to Polish immigrants and ethnics. Their struggle has been both chronicled and championed by several generations of Polish American writers, especially women writers, who believed that their stories deserved to be heard and whose fiction reflected as well as shaped ethnic ideas of gendered identity. Taken together, their narratives trace the developmental trajectory of ethnic views of self, shaped internally by the Polish American communities and externally by the mainstream culture. They also offer a complex portrait of Polish immigration with its covert class system, pervasive presence of the Roman Catholic Church and patriarchy, as well as uneasy attitudes toward both the homeland and the receiving country.

      Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction opens a long-neglected conversation on the construction of the gendered white ethnic self in Polish American post–World War II literature principally by women writers raised in the Roman Catholic tradition. My focus on self-construction limits my choice of texts to ones written predominantly by Polish ethnic and (im)migrant women. For some of the (im)migrant women, their immigration status might remain fluid throughout their lives when they repeatedly change homelands. Many never decide on a permanent homeland but stay within a pattern of repeated migrations between Poland and the United States. An inclusion of a small number of texts by Polish Canadian women, male authors, and non-Poles enriches this study by allowing a comparative analysis of ethnic self-construction and the construction and representation of gendered identity. This juxtaposition delineates the internal (i.e., Polish American) and external (i.e., mainstream) cultural contexts of self-construction in addition to shedding light on barriers between women and self-actualization. It illustrates, as in Joseph S. Wnukowski’s⁸ short story, some of the struggles faced by Polish American women. Moreover, the selection of texts reflects the settlement patterns of Polish immigrants as strongly circumscribed by their religious identity. As Timothy L. Smith finds, common religious affiliation was a crucial reason for groups of immigrants to settle together. Smith believes that it was even stronger than a common language, common history, and common descent. He suggests that “the customs and beliefs of particular varieties of faith and the traditions of loyalty to them seem, then, to have been the decisive determinants of ethnic affiliation in America.”⁹ Though there is, undoubtedly, a need for more research about fiction produced by Polish writers hailing from a range of religious traditions, such work exceeds the scope of the present study, which focuses for the most part on a fairly unified group of writers hailing from Polish American Catholic communities.

      The principal purpose of this volume is to offer considered readings of a number of novels and short stories that narrate the first-, second-, and third-generation American experience of white ethnic women, present a detailed and sociologically realistic image of the Polish diaspora, and testify to the Polish American awareness of ethnic uniqueness. Moreover, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction aims at adding a literary voice that so far has not had a strong presence in the academy among numerous studies of other ethnic literatures as well as historical and sociological studies of Polish immigration to the СКАЧАТЬ