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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Danuta Mostwin’s Puzzles of Identity
“EXILE IS IN FASHION,” writes Ian Buruma, himself an exile from several countries and cultures, in his essay “The Romance of Exile.” “Today,” he goes on to quote the Polish-Jewish writer Eva Hoffman, “‘at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demands—uncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting.’”1 And, of course, an exile is an ultimate other, but in ways more complex and, for the majority of exiles and emigrants, far less glamorous than their image in postmodern theories.
To begin with, few exiles today are called by this romantic name. They are much more likely to fall into the crowded category of “refugees” and soon thereafter to merge into the even less significant mass of “immigrants.” Even now, despite enormous progress in the Western democracies toward cultural open-mindedness, some exiles are more acceptable—and more fashionable—than others. After World War II, refugees from Poland came to the United States with at least somewhat justified expectations of an appreciative welcome, if only because they had fought the Nazis for the longest period of time and on all fronts. If not glamorous, they were certainly—most of them—heroic. Yet they came to a world whose knowledge of what they had done and experienced was very limited. The Americans knew next to nothing about the near extermination of European Jewish communities (the term “Holocaust” did not appear until the late 1950s), and they had but a vague notion of the horrors that had been inflicted on Poland by both her totalitarian neighbors, Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union. Few had heard about the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1943 or the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, and practically no information existed in the West about Soviet wartime crimes against non-Russian populations in the occupied territories stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea. When such information did emerge—as in the case of the Katyń Forest Massacre, in which fourteen thousand Polish military officers were executed—it was vigorously suppressed for reasons of realpolitik and pro-Russian sentiment: the Soviet Union was then, if only for a short time, a deservedly celebrated ally.
In his speech accepting the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature, Czesław Miłosz said that “those who come from the ‘other Europe,’ wherever they find themselves, notice to what extent their experience isolates them from their new milieu—and this may become the source of a new obsession.” The effects of this isolation on the majority of post–World War II Polish (and not only Polish) émigré writers were quite predictable: severe depression, suicide, and a creative output limited to themes of recent national traumas, which, one should add, could not be explored freely in Soviet-controlled postwar Poland. Gradually, though, some of the younger or emotionally stronger writers and poets began to involve their art with the immediate reality of the immigrant condition and, therefore, with the reality of America. The most remarkable voice in this small group belongs to Danuta Mostwin, a former Warsaw medical student who began her writing career in this country in the city of Baltimore—away from the Polish émigré enclaves of New York and Washington and, therefore, away from any semblance of exile’s glamour.
Born in 1921 in Lublin, Danuta Mostwin came of age in wartime Warsaw, where, after graduating from the prestigious Emilia Plater Gymnasium, she enrolled in the clandestine medical academy.2 Her father, a professional military officer, fought in the 1939 campaign and during the remaining years of World War II participated in Allied war efforts on the western front. Danuta’s mother, from her Warsaw apartment in the Saska Kępa district, joined the Armia Krajowa (Home Army) network of underground resistance operations. Her address became a haven for military emissaries of the Polish government in exile. One of them, a young captain named Stanisław Bask-Mostwin, parachuted into Poland in the spring of 1944 to deliver two hundred thousand dollars to Żegota,3 but stayed on and married Danuta. After the war, fearing arrest by the new communist authorities, the couple and Danuta’s mother illegally crossed the border into Czechoslovakia and then trekked to Western Europe, where they were reunited with Danuta’s father.
They had intended to settle in London but, like hundreds of other demobilized Polish soldiers, they felt stranded in England, where, after an abrupt transition from military to civilian status, they were regarded with a mixture of guilt and xenophobia. Their military pensions running out, they were left to their own pitiable devices. In 1951 the entire family, which by then included the young couple’s son, left for the United States. Although they no longer expected a hero’s welcome, they were not prepared for the air of general indifference manifested, above all, in a total lack of assistance in their efforts to find employment. As foreigners, the two former officers could not benefit from the G.I. Bill, and Danuta’s medical training in Poland, without proper certificates or local connections, appeared to be worthless. Coming from a military rather than an intellectual background, they did not belong to the small, struggling, but mutually supportive Polish cultural elite in New York. Instead, they found themselves among a much larger crowd of Poles and Polish Jews in circumstances similar to their own. Finally, unable to find jobs in the New York metropolitan area, they boarded a train to Baltimore. There, homeless and penniless, they turned for help to the local Polish-American community, descendants of Polish peasant immigrants from a previous era. Thus began their life in the New World, at the bottom of its socioeconomic ladder.
In those circumstances, Danuta Mostwin, now the wife of a factory worker and mother of a small child, gave up all hope of becoming a medical doctor. She did, however, take college courses in social work, graduating with honors, and eventually received a PhD in social science from Columbia University. She also began to write fiction. In 1958 her first novel, Dom starej lady (House of the Old Lady), was published in London by Katolicki Ośrodek Wydawniczy “Veritas.” It was an autobiographical account of the harrowing, humiliating experiences of Polish refugees in postwar London. Yet Mostwin perceived an element of comedy in the situation, the classic motif of the reversal of fortune. The male characters in the novel are former war heroes—men who flew RAF planes in the Battle of Britain and fought at Monte Cassino, in North Africa, and in the Warsaw Uprising—who are learning how to become bakers, plumbers, and upholsterers. The female characters are more resilient, but they too tire of exploring ever-diminishing and more elusive prospects for escaping the London slums. Mostwin narrates the story from the perspective of a participating observer, in a voice that accommodates both irony and compassion, a style that would become her artistic trademark.
Rare in Poland’s postwar fiction, this slightly detached relationship between the narrator and the other characters is also typical of Henryk Grynberg’s documentary novels about the few survivors of his Jewish community in Poland. Like Mostwin’s displaced and degraded war heroes in Dom starej lady, Grynberg’s victims appear even more tragic because of the comical aspects of their inept efforts to cope with the catastrophe, the total destruction, of their former existence. These two very different writers share another trait characteristically absent from mainstream Polish fiction in the second half of the twentieth century: their attention to the importance of family histories and emotional connections. Wartime death (for Grynberg, the death of his father and his younger brother; for Mostwin the murder of her beloved uncle and his daughter by the Gestapo) and separations resulting from deportation and exile deepened their appreciation of family bonds and the value of loss followed by return. Because the real Polish family rarely had a history that fit the prescribed norms of ideological correctness, writers in postwar Poland tended to create characters whose family backgrounds were vague or unknown: tormented, lonely runaways from their own pasts. The task of rescuing the Polish twentieth-century family from literary oblivion thus was left to the émigré writers. Some—most notably Maria Kuncewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Józef Mackiewicz, and Danuta Mostwin—met the challenge, while others, lacking the psychological and financial resources to complete larger projects, failed. It is, perhaps, not surprising that Danuta Mostwin, trained in medicine and social psychology, would insist that, in order to effectively function in their adoptive country, immigrants had to harmonize their connection to ancestral culture with a willingness to adapt to the way of life of a local society: to become at home away from home.
In her doctoral dissertation—based on numerous interviews and case studies—Mostwin developed the concept of “a third value” as a selective merger of the old and the new ways of life. She wrote: “The process of the emergence of this third value within an uprooted immigrant’s personality may thus be described as the creation of a new form of cultural identity that is neither with the country of origin nor with the receiving country, but constitutes a third value, the integration of selective cultural patterns specific for the individual and for his unique situation of uprootment.”4 That this process is often resisted by its participants and hampered by multiple external obstacles interested Danuta Mostwin, both as a writer and as a social scientist, no less than did finding prescriptions for its success. In her next two novels—the lighthearted Ameryko! Ameryko! (America! America!), published in 1961 by Polska Fundacja Kulturalna in London, and the much darker Ja za wodą, ty za wodą (Beyond the Waters, You and I), published in 1972 by Instytut Literacki in Paris—some of the characters rationalize their resistance to acculturation by way of social prejudices or generalized political resentments. They might be jarred by specific local customs or by the incomprehensible bureaucracy of American institutions, or they might invoke the ever-festering wound of Poland’s betrayal at Yalta. Again, the apparent loss of a former identity and with it the basis for high self-esteem, causes profound emotional pain, particularly in the older male members of the small circle of recent emigrants.
In Ameryko! Ameryko!, it is Colonel Józef Żuławski—the character modeled on the author’s father—who explodes into uncontrollable rage whenever teenage customers of the cheap cafeteria that he owns call him “Joe.” He is, of course, simply irritated by the American brats’ disrespect for an older man, the kind of behavior that would not have been tolerated in Poland. But beyond this cultural clash, on a deeper level, he experiences a frightful confusion about his present identity. As a military officer he had seen himself as he was regarded by others, according to his rank and uniform; now, aproned, dishrag in hand, he indeed might have become this new, arrogant world’s Joe, while knowledge of his true person has shrunk to the tiny circle of his immediate family. Mostwin approaches Żuławski’s crisis of identity with a wonderful, self-deprecating (he is, after all, her father figure) sense of humor, not unlike that of many so-called ethnic comedians in America: Irish, Jewish, and African American. She pokes fun at stereotypes on both sides of the cultural dividing lines. We laugh at the absurdity of Żuławski’s fury, yet, at the same time, we relate to his pain and humiliation because we all, the immigrant readers of her novel, had to endure similar struggles: to sell ourselves cheap, to have our identities—even our names—cut short. In Ameryko! Ameryko! Mostwin’s fictional immigrant family is cured of prejudice when their new house, in the American-American neighborhood, burns down, and dozens of the hitherto unknown neighbors rush to help.
Ja za wodą, ty za wodą tells the story of an encounter between the immigrant Polish community and two visitors from the People’s Republic of Poland, who come to Baltimore on research grants from the U.S. government during a brief thaw in the Cold War, after 1956. Mostwin employs here another classic comic device: the disruption of stability by the arrival of a stranger. But the comedy in this meeting of two worlds—oddly close and oddly distant—is much darker and more complex than that in Mostwin’s previous two novels; its tensions remain unresolved, and the ending lacks the upbeat promise of “the third value.” Set, like Ameryko! Ameryko!, in a fictionalized Baltimore, the novel’s cast of characters does not include anyone resembling members of the author’s family, a circumstance that frees her from the inhibitions inherent in using autobiographical material. We meet a familiar group of recent immigrants who, a decade into their lives in the United States, have somewhat reluctantly integrated with the old Polonia but remain unconnected to American society at large. They cling to symbols of patriotism but shield themselves from the reality of Poland, and their resolve to return there at some politically favorable point in the future is clearly diminished. Caught in such a web of identity anxiety, they are half-disapproving and half-proud of one member of the group, Hanka Sanocka, a successful medical doctor who has come to terms with the cultural transition and is determined to make the best of her new American citizenship, both for herself and for her two daughters. Her wholehearted acceptance of the American way of life is not shared by her husband, who still clings to patriotic ideals and would like to take his family back to Poland, communist or not. Their marital discord comes forth when Hanka finds herself attracted to Doctor Kettler, one of two Polish beneficiaries of a grant for a one-year residence at Johns Hopkins. The attraction is as mutual as it is unsettling for both of these unsentimental careerists. A car accident, in which Hanka is critically injured on the way to their first date, prevents the development of the affair and solves Kettler’s dilemma: to stay, or to return. A similar dilemma is experienced by the other doctor-scholar from Poland, a shy, married woman named Joasia, who becomes involved romantically with an American colleague at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. But she, too, decides to return to her husband and son in Warsaw, leaving behind her American admirer.
Although some reviewers in prestigious émigré literary magazines recognized the overall artistic strength of the novel and welcomed Mostwin as a truly original voice from the Polish diaspora in America, others balked at her depressing portrait of the immigrant ghetto, underscored by the decision of the two visitors to go back to their blighted homeland, rather than to “choose freedom.” Mostwin’s honesty and her realist talent might have brought her a more resounding success with the truth-starved readers in Poland, but again this chance could not but be lost. The reception of both novels by émigré critics was muted. They praised Mostwin’s talent of observation and her realism, but seemed uncomfortable with her unorthodox approach to dealing with the tragedy of Poland and with the cruel fate of Polish war heroes. Ameryko! Ameryko! was published in Poland in 1981, in a tiny edition, and with little notice at the time of yet another national trauma—the brutal suppression of the Solidarity movement. Ja za wodą, ty za wodą had to wait until the fall of communism in Poland.
A different confrontation between two worlds occurs in Mostwin’s non-immigrant (so to speak) novel, Olivia, published by Instytut Kulturalny in Paris in 1965. One world is represented by a Polish-American therapist, who narrates the story—the other, by her patient, or “case,” a troubled young American woman named Olivia. Olivia is a runaway from her adoptive, un-loving, and unloved, parents. She has a severe drug problem and, consequently, is incapable of maintaining any relationship, including the one with her therapist. There is a masterfully explored parallel between the successful “adoption” of the therapist into her new country and the failed adoption of Olivia into her new family, a failure that sets the young protagonist on a course of self-destruction. The therapist’s efforts to unravel the tangle of external and internal causes of Olivia’s misery bring no answers; at the end she loses the case. Olivia, true to the mysterious nature of her malady, disappears. That failure forces the therapist to turn the mirror on herself: was she unable to make the meaningful contact with Olivia because of or in spite of her own “otherness”? Did Olivia “punish” her as yet another substitute parental figure, or did she, the overcurious therapist, invite the punishment by straying from strictly professional interest in the case? We can also interpret Olivia as a record of the turning point in one immigrant’s journey from the “outside” to the “inside” of her adoptive/adopted country. For now, not only is she entitled to deal with the suffering of a native-born American, but she can afford either to pass or to fail the test. In writing Olivia, Mostwin graduated from one school of pain, that of her fellow exiles, to the all-inclusive class of universal ills.
Mostwin continued both to counsel and to write. Her caseload, mostly elderly and poor inhabitants of Baltimore’s immigrant district, grew into a portfolio of short stories, and the collection Asteroidy (Asteroids) came out in 1968 from Polska Fundacja Kulturalna in London. Dignified in their suffering, accepting of lifelong hardship as uneducated laborers, these men and women of distant Slavic roots had a different effect on Mostwin’s craft than had her own milieu of postwar refugees. Absent are her tendency toward satire, her often bitter irony, and the intricate play of multimirrored reflections of the observer and the observed. The Asteroids stories, like their protagonists, are stark and deceptively simple. While the American social worker in Mostwin filed her case paperwork in English, the Polish writer peered beyond the routine questions and hesitant answers into the scarcely articulable, but always distinct, mystery of human fate—a mystery all the more compelling for the poverty of the subjects’ vocabulary of self-knowledge.
In the first of the two novellas selected for this volume, Błażej Twardowski is an old, ailing immigrant, a Polish peasant who came to America as a teenage boy. He never married and now, knowing that his end is near, he wonders to whom should he will his life’s savings. He never spent any money on himself, so the sum is not negligible—but he has no immediate relatives. There is a distant cousin in Pennsylvania, whom he meets, and the families of his sister and his stepbrother in Poland, none of whose many members he had ever seen. He asks a local Polish travel agent for help, and this not unkind intermediary writes and translates letters between the contending parties. The letters from Poland are, of course, outrageously solicitous and full of invented woes and make-believe disasters. Although the translator alerts Błażej to these deceptions, the old man is transfixed by the language of the letters, by their flamboyant phraseology and descriptions of farm life—a life that seems all the more enticing, the nearer its presumed extinction without an instant infusion of cash from “Beloved Uncle.” Błażej is not fooled—but he pretends that he is and sends the cash. What he really pays for is not a new barn, a replaced roof, and cures for every sick pig or child, but the flowery, greed-inspired prose of these letters and the childhood memories they evoke. Besides, he understands greed and thrift, and he doesn’t really mind contributing to the enrichment of those who are, after all, his kinfolk. The cousin from Pennsylvania, on the other hand—although equally greedy—can no longer produce a properly embellished Polish sentence, and she also fails to visit him more than once in the hospital during his final illness. Alone all his life, the laborer Błażej will, however, have a true friend at his deathbed: an educated man, the Polish translator.
The second novella, Jocasta, explores a more pathological landscape of the human soul in a mutually destructive relationship between mother and son. The mother’s love is sick: it ruins the son’s marriage and literally drives him insane. But as in Olivia, the reader never gets to the bottom of what caused the misery: war, separation after the son’s emigration, and the mother’s long stay in Warsaw until she could come to the United States? Or was it all triggered by the son’s marriage to a German woman? The story represents Mostwin’s deepening interest in the corrosive effects of conflicts of identity, in ways that are as incomprehensible to participants in the drama as they are to outside observers.
Before returning in her most recent fiction to the theme of the fragmented and increasingly bleak—few of the old soldiers age well, and many die—émigré experience, Mostwin completed a cycle of four novels that tells the story of one extended family, based on her own, in a time frame that stretches from World War I to the aftermath of World War II. The notion to begin the project came to Mostwin during a visit to Poland in 1961, her first since she had left the country in 1945. This reunion with relatives of her parents’ generation and the powerful jolt of memories provided instant inspiration, but the stamina that the project required came, as she would often remark, from her American education in perseverance. In one of her articles on the benefits of emigration, she wrote about the American ideals and values that she tried to incorporate in her work as a Polish writer: “First, the value of the individual. Of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every human being. The value that surpasses a group or a society. Second, the idea of creative change. Opportunity for self-enrichment with that which is new and contemporary but which doesn’t shun the past, or what is sometimes called ‘the burden of history.’ In my work, both that of the writer and that of the scholar, I have pointed to the ways of achieving such fullness.”5
In her “Polish” novels, Mostwin addressed the burden of history. There are countries, Poland and Russia among them, where literature is the primary source of knowledge about history because novels are not as easily censored as school textbooks. Historical figures appear only in the background, while the main narrative belongs to a cluster of fictional families, actors in and victims of historic events. Mostwin chose her own family, socially mobile and politically active, and began its story as far back as oral testimonies and preserved documents could pass it on to her. The first and the second books in the cycle, Cień księdza Piotra (The Shadow of Father Piotr) and Szmaragdowa zjawa (The Emerald Specter), take the reader back to the time of the re-emergence of independent Poland during and after World War I. Political matters in these novels—and no personal space there is untouched by intrusion of politics—could not be discussed openly in the People’s Republic of Poland. Mostwin knew it, of course, and did her expert best to enter the forbidden zones.
But it is the third novel of the cycle, Tajemnica zwyciężonych (The Secret of the Vanquished), published in London in 1992, that most conspicuously enters uncharted territory: the Polish family in World War II. The outbreak of the war coincided with Mostwin’s coming of age: she had turned eighteen in 1939 and therefore could rely here on her own memories, conversations with relatives, the recollections of her husband (who provided her with detailed descriptions of several World War II battles), and a variety of preserved documents. The military history parallels that of Mostwin’s extended family: the German occupation of Warsaw and Lublin, the underground activities of practically every relative and friend, the Jewish ghetto in Lublin, heroes, martyrs, traitors. What distinguishes the novel from most other fictionalized accounts of the period in Polish literature is its bracing disregard for political and artistic trends—the latter often serving as strategies to circumvent the former. One may say that here Mostwin rolled up her sleeves and stepped into a locked-up house to recover its unclaimed contents. And this time she went after truth that had been kept secret not because of personal denials and self-deceptions but because of a grand denial by a punitive political system. The denial—which at first had been total, but then gradually weakened and allowed trickles of veracity—concerned all Polish World War II military efforts other than those approved by the Kremlin; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact to collaborate in the destruction of Poland; the Soviet policy of standing idly by during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising; the persecution of military personnel and of vast categories of the civilian population of the territories annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939 and under the communist regime in “liberated” Poland. There were also some secrets and distortions of truth on the Western side of the postwar political landscape which, in most general terms, related to the betrayal of Poland by the Allies. Where choice was possible, however, between the bitter and the poisoned cup, Polish freedom fighters opted for emigration to Western Europe, Israel, and the Americas. The escape of the three main protagonists in Tajemnica is the subject of the short final volume of Mostwin’s family saga, Nie ma domu (There Is No Home), published in Poland in 1996.
Home and house, dwellings that need to be fixed or that are beyond repair, austere rented rooms, flower-filled villas, and dreary hospital rooms—these are Mostwin’s signature topoi, and they owe their function and appearance both to the individual traits of their inhabitants and to verdicts of history. The home-centeredness of Mostwin’s imagination may be attributed to her being a woman writer, perhaps in the same way that her interest in fractured identities is a mark of an émigré writer. When one reviewer praised the “masculine maturity” of her later novels, Mostwin promptly identified his remark as symptomatic of male chauvinism, Polish style. It is true that her female characters are seldom weak or meek and that they may be more adaptable to traumatic reversals of fortune than their male companions. Yet men and women in Mostwin’s fiction are equally capable of great courage and integrity in the face of mortal threat and they are equally, if differently, susceptible to the pain of permanent displacement.
One area in which Mostwin’s gender has mattered is that of the reception of her work in Poland. When her novels The Shadow of Father Piotr and The Emerald Specter were published in Poland in 1985 and 1988—both in very small editions—her name was familiar to only a handful of well-informed readers, and, partly because the entire country was deeply preoccupied with the current political situation (the crushing of the Solidarity movement), the books received scant notice. But male émigré writers, whose works were then beginning to be published or circulated in smuggled copies—some of long-established fame, like Witold Gombrowicz and Czesław Miłosz, others younger and less known—fared much better, preceded by an esteem that traditionally glorified the male exile artist, the émigré poet who, in an old Polish expression, had fought with the pen for the fatherland’s freedom. For forty (yes!) years, Danuta Mostwin had done just that at her home-away-from-home in Baltimore. But in addition to patriotic lore, her typewriter also produced works of broader significance—studies in the contemporary condition of uprootment that are universal and do not require explanatory notes about Polish history. As she examined the fates of the protagonists of her stories, as she transformed living men, women, and children into fictional characters, she continued to discover that external forces in human experience—exile, war, poverty, participation in collective catastrophes or victories—account for only some answers about the trajectory of a life and may reveal as often as conceal the essence of individual existence. In getting close to the point of fusion of the historical and the personal elements of identity, Mostwin attained her very own artistic “third value.”
Danuta Mostwin’s collected works are at last coming out in Poland, issued by Oficyna Wydawnicza Kucharski in Toruń. That this event coincides with the publication of the present book, the first rendering of her fiction into English, signifies a belated turning point in this outstanding writer’s voyage between the old and the new worlds and in time zones that she continues to expand.
Joanna Rostropowicz Clark
Notes
1. Ian Buruma, “The Romance of Exile: Real Wounds, Unreal Wounds,” New Republic, February 12, 2001, 33.
2. Under German occupation, Poles were not allowed to attend secondary or college-level schools.
3. An underground organization that assisted Polish Jews.
4. Danuta Mostwin, “Uprootment and Anxiety,” International Journal of Mental Health 5, no. 2 (1976): 113.
5. Danuta Mostwin, “Podróż w dwóch czasach: O emigracji i literaturze emigracyjnej” [A Voyage in Two Time Zones: On Emigration and Émigré Literature] in Słyszę jak śpiewa Ameryka [I Hear America Singing] (London: Polska Fundacja Kulturalna, 1998), 271.
