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Preface and Acknowledgments

The origins of this book go back to the place inhabited by many immigrants to the United States, a place often demarcated by conflicting notions of otherness, familiarity, acceptance, marginalization, approval, exclusion, and stereotyping. Being an immigrant from Poland myself, I have observed the contradictions embedded in the existences of Polish immigrants who are privileged through their racial identity, yet are restricted by mainstream assumptions about their immigrant social-class position. Upon learning that I was born in Poland, a new acquaintance at a professional dinner gushed with praise over a Polish housekeeper whose efficiency and devotion had once impressed her. A well-meaning colleague once advised me that I could supplement my income by baking my signature Polish cookies and selling them at the college where I teach. Processing such comments is at times uncomfortable, yet the self-consciousness I feel might itself be a product of the everyday contradictions that constantly inform immigrant identity. I have pondered the decision of an ICE officer who stopped our car on a lonely road near El Paso, Texas, only to wave us through the roadblock after a cursory glance in. Obviously, my blond hair and my very fair skin did not conform to his image of an immigrant. To him, I was not other, but one of us who must be protected rather than challenged. I still smile, remembering the genuine shock expressed by a close friend when she heard me label myself as an immigrant. After all, she knows me as an English-speaking white woman who teaches American literature at an American college. How could I ever fit her image of an immigrant?

The anecdotes I briefly sketched are less dramatic than they are intimate: they outline a space within which the narrative of my life unfolds, right at the intersection of powerful forces of race, social class, and gender as well as Polish, Polish American, and American mainstream cultures. It is where I construct my identity as a woman, an immigrant from Poland, and an academic. Moving frequently between my own insider/outsider constructs, between the subjective and the objective, my scholarship strives to reach for what John J. Bukowczyk calls the “subterranean insights of personal and therefore political value” when he points to the particular importance of historical inquiry conducted by “the scholars who research and write about a subject so inextricably linked to their own formation.”¹ In this first-ever study devoted entirely to literary images of immigrant and ethnic women in Polish American post–World War II fiction, I consider how these texts negotiate discourses of belonging and identity as well as how often-invisible Polish ethnic characters exist within spaces of identification or alienation outlined in this little-known fiction.

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This study would not have been possible without the help, support, and inspiration from many colleagues, friends, and family members both in the United States and in Poland. I am thankful to all who have given so generously of their time and expertise. First of all, I owe a debt of gratitude to all the immigrant and ethnic writers who told stories about the Polish American experience. I particularly appreciate the friendship of Suzanne Strempek Shea, whose novels introduced me to the world of Polish American fiction; the encouragement from Czesław Karkowski; the unpublished manuscript of a Polish American novel sent by Leslie Pietrzyk; as well as long discussions about exilic identity with the late W. S. Kuniczak, whose facility with the English language was inspiring.

I am thankful to my colleagues from the Polish American Historical Association, especially to Mary Patrice Erdmans for her insightful commentary and suggestions on improving my manuscript, and to Mary Cygan for telling me about Melissa Kwasny’s novel. I would like to express my appreciation for the professional expertise of Stanley J. Kozaczka, library director at Cazenovia College, and Judith Azzato, a reference librarian at the same library, who both worked on locating difficult-to-obtain sources. I cannot forget the mentorship of Professor Irena Przemecka at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, who with her valuable advice guided my first steps as a researcher, nor the friendship of the late Ewa Michalek, a talented and dedicated English teacher who inspired my choice of a career.

I am very grateful to the Ohio University Press for supporting the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series and especially to Series Editor John J. Bukowczyk for his patience and good advice, to Director and Editor-in-Chief Gillian Berchowitz and Acquisitions Editor Ricky Huard for their gentle encouragement and reassurance, and to Managing Editor Nancy Basmajian and Ed Vesneske, Jr., for their careful attention to the manuscript.

My work has also been inspired by strong women I am lucky to call friends, such as Sharon Dettmer, Karen Steen, Eleanora Kupencow-Alper, Daniela Klesmith, Halina Bystrowska, Natalia Noga, Agnieszka Sobejko, Susan Goodier, Allyn Stewart, Susan Morgan, Joan Brandt, and the late Maryla Nadratowski. I am very grateful for what I learned about being a Polish woman from my grandmother Julia Urych, my mother Maria Knapczyk, and my aunt Antonina Knapczyk. I only wish that my late father Tadeusz Knapczyk could see this book. Finally, I want to extend my love and gratitude to my son Adam Kozaczka for his friendship and long literary discussions and to my husband Stanley J. Kozaczka, who has always been my first and most enthusiastic reader and whose love, generosity, and sense of humor sustain me every day.

This book is for Stan.

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Some chapters include revised portions of previously published articles. I am grateful to the following journals and their editors for granting permission to use selections from my published work.

“Cultural, Class and Ethnic Conflicts in Contemporary Polish American Fiction.” Polish Review 49, no. 4 (2004): 1045–64.

“The Invention of Ethnicity and Gender in Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Fiction.” Polish Review 48, no. 3 (2003): 327–45.

“‘The Silent One’: The (Absent) Voiceless Mother in Recent Narratives by Leslie Pietrzyk and Ellen Slezak. Polish American Studies 66, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 43–54.

All translations from the Polish language, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.