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INTRODUCTION

Reading the Immigrant

THIS STUDY LOOKS at a forgotten fragment of American literature: immigrant narrative fiction written in Polish and published in the United States before World War II. The purposes of this study are several and necessarily interdisciplinary. It will admit the Polish-language writing of turn-of-the-century immigrants into the scholarly conversation by reopening its long-closed pages, outlining its dimensions, and suggesting its possible significances. It will situate these works within the larger tradition of popular literature and reading in Europe and America alongside which it emerged, and within the context of Polish literary history and American ethnic literary theory, including the newly emerging field of American literature written in languages other than English. But its primary focus will be the role of Polish immigrant, Polish-language fiction in the negotiation of a national and ethnic identity as writers argued the boundaries and obligations of Polishness. If, as Jules Chametzky observed many years later, ethnicity “ain’t what you do, or what you are but an image created by what you read,”¹ Polish-language literature, written in the United States and published by Polish-American companies, attempted to model a Polish identity for its immigrant readers at the same time that it articulated specifically Polish-American perspectives and experiences.

Despite stereotypes suggesting otherwise, that these immigrants were reading is obvious from the great number of Polish-language newspapers they produced, particularly after 1880, when the immigrant press burgeoned and began branching into other publishing activities. Self-help books, religious tracts, installment fiction, poetry, dramas for the amateur and professional stage:² the variety and output were enormous. And so, apparently, was the demand. Nineteenth-century Polish-American newspapers reported the establishment of local reading rooms and lending libraries. As early as 1891 even small towns like Manistee, Michigan, could boast a Polish library. Emil Dunikowski reports that, of the several hundred books owned by a Buffalo Polish reading room, all but a few dozen were checked out at the time of his visit.³ And Artur Waldo recounts that “when a peddler left a Chicago bookstore carrying a heavy suitcase stuffed with books, after covering one block, not more than twenty or thirty homes, he returned to the publisher’s stockroom with his suitcase already empty.”⁴

So how is it that, given the flurry of publishing activity and the evident hunger for books in Polonian homes,⁵ so little is known about the works written and published on American soil by immigrant Poles and their children? Why could Stanislaus Blejwas, as late as 1988, state that “there does not exist a Polish American literature,” or Karol Wachtl, while offering sketches of a score of Polonian writers, claim, “In a strict sense, one cannot yet speak of original Polish-American writing, about a true literature bred among Polish settlements here, blossoming from and maintained by its homegrown, independent talents.”⁶

The answers are complex and lie in the juncture between ideology, history, and literary theory. Blejwas and Wachtl were both referring to Polonia’s sparsity of professional, English-language writers, who were influenced more by a Polish-American experience and upbringing than a Polish one and who were able to speak for the immigrant and ethnic community to an outside audience. What’s more, the 1980s and 1990s saw a flurry of creative fiction that is self-consciously Polish-American. But no English-language study has systematically considered Polish-language literature produced in this country for its intersection with Polonian and American literary scholarship.

Scholars who might have wished to include immigrant texts written in Polish within a more general discussion of Polish-American writing have until now been hampered by several problems. Not only had none of these works been translated into English, but until this study no reliable bibliography of this material has appeared in either English or Polish, and even the most rudimentary scholarly consideration of these Polish-language immigrant texts was lacking.⁷ The rare discussion of diasporan literature has tended to concentrate on works by renowned nonimmigrant writers, such as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s melodramatic Za chlebem (After bread). Or it has neglected the old peasant immigration in favor of writers of the World War II emigré generation.⁸ The Polish-American chapter of the Modern Language Association’s recently reprinted collection Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature notes works about America by Poles, including Sienkiewicz’s ubiquitous After Bread, and even credits a sixteenth-century political treatise with influencing the Declaration of Independence.⁹ But it makes no mention of the treatment of the American experience by Sienkiewicz’s contemporaries writing in Polish in this country. Magdalena Zaborowska’s more recent study of Polish and Russian immigrant women’s narratives is silent on works written in Polish before 1939.¹⁰ These omissions are almost certainly not the result of deliberate choice, but rather evidence of the deep obscurity into which these works have fallen.

This examination of early Polish-American fiction begins with the publication in 1881 of the first known immigrant novel in Polish,¹¹ and ends in 1939, when the Second World War spurred a fresh wave of immigrants from Poland, necessitating a reevaluation of Polonian identity and goals, and leading to new patterns of immigrant publishing. Even the approximately three hundred novels, novellas, short stories, sketches, and anthologies of short fiction identified here comprise only a portion of the Polish-language works produced by the stara emigracja, the old emigration. The inclusion of drama and poetry would make any bibliography several times as long. This study is thus limited to fiction for partly practical reasons. But even within the sizable body of Polish prose fiction written and published in America, a focus on immigrant identity has narrowed the selection.

A number of immigrant works were eliminated from consideration because, although published in the United States, their plots were set outside this country, drawn from exclusively Polish history or world legend. Like their counterparts among other immigrant groups, Polish-American publishers offered their readers works of classic and contemporary literature from Poland, as well as translations of Russian, French, German, English, and American works. Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identity, Brent Peterson’s study of ethnicity shaped and perpetuated by German-American newspaper fiction, argues convincingly that all literature contributed to the collective identity of its immigrant readers, that it is not “ethnic literature” but “narratives for ethnic readers” that reveal the process of ethnogenesis.¹² And “literary ethnicity” rather than “ethnic literature” is Thomas S. Gladsky’s focus in Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves, which looks not only at English-language fiction and poetry written by second- and third-generation Polish-Americans, but also at the literary images of Poles and Polish-Americans created by purely “American” authors, shifting attention to the way in which works “may be read as contributing to the literary creation of ethnic selves and American ethnicity.”¹³ However, my concern with how this literature specifically and self-consciously engaged its readers as Poles in America and later as Polish-Americans led me to restrict this study to works that attempted to position their readers, however superficially, in the context of American conditions, a phrase contained in the subtitles of so many of these novels. Thus, all works considered here contain at least one Polish character on American soil.¹⁴

Fiction about Polonia—that is, about the Polish diaspora—but written and published in Poland is also not included here, although several such novels were reprinted by Polish-American publishers and read in immigrant households. Some authors, like journalist Stefan Barszczewski, spent considerable time in the United States before returning to Poland and writing about their experiences. Others, like Józef Watra-Przewłocki, remained in the United States but published their major works in Poland. A comparative analysis of those two bodies of literature has been begun by Bolesław Klimaszewski.¹⁵ But while the works published overseas have already received scholarly attention, at least in Poland, before comparison can be meaningful it will be necessary to know something more about the work that was produced on American soil, work that not only grew out of community concerns but that utilized local publishing resources and networks. On that subject scholarship is still negligible. The works of several immigrant authors who eventually returned to Poland are included, however, when those works were published in the United States before the author’s repatriation. Included also are works that were published in both America and Poland, either under joint agreement or in separate editions.¹⁶

The carefully articulated parameters of this study suggest the complicated nature of ethnic literature and ethnicity in general, as well as the particularities of Polish and Polish-American history. Konstanty Symonolewicz-Symmons raises issues central to the formulation of this study, and indeed to the definition of ethnic literature itself, when he asks, “Who exactly can be considered a Polonian writer”:

Native Poles writing in English, whether Polish subjects play any kind of role in their works or not? Or American literati of Polish extraction, although their works have nothing in common either with Poland or with Polonia? Or authors of Polish nationality who write in English but on Polish subjects? Or writers of Polish nationality or Polish extraction who write in English but on subjects from Polonian life? Or, finally, writers and poets who write in both languages?¹⁷

Symonolewicz-Symmons problematizes the author’s place of birth, choice of subject matter, and ethnic consciousness, all matters of consideration in possible definitions of ethnic literature. But he leaves unchallenged the fundamental assumption, as expressed by Mary Dearborn in 1986, that “the ethnic literary tradition implies, of course, the acquisition of the English language.”¹⁸

Nevertheless, the consideration of non-English-language texts in American literary studies is hardly a new phenomenon, going back to at least 1921, when the Cambridge History of American Literature included sections on German, French, Yiddish, and aboriginal language works. Henry Pochmann’s classic 1946 essay, “The Mingling of Tongues,” acknowledges the “rich and diverse . . . writing by Americans who use tongues other than English.”¹⁹ Until recently, however, this inclusive view had been largely forgotten, despite occasional reminders that the function of the scholar of ethnic literature “is to locate, describe, and interpret all the ethnic components in creative works produced by Americans, regardless of the language employed and of the genres employed.”²⁰ Efforts like the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project, and those of Harvard University’s Longfellow Institute, devoted to the study of American literatures in languages other than English, demonstrate renewed efforts to define a place in American literary studies for works that do not attempt to fit themselves into an exclusively anglophone cultural network.

It is not surprising, given America’s dizzying linguistic diversity and the insularity of many ethnic communities, that non-English texts remain largely unknown. Obviously, a literature written in Polish excluded most non-Poles not only from active participation in the highly charged dialogue through which Polonia voiced itself, but also from the most basic awareness that a dialogue was taking place. This may have been considered fortuitous, since ethnic communities often try to present a unified front to outsiders. Another result, however, is not just the marginalization of this fundamentally transnational literature, but its complete invisibility, since it seems to fit neatly into neither the American nor the Polish literary establishment. Though the plots are set for the most part in the immigrant enclave, Poland and its troubles are just over the horizon. Though the literary patterns are essentially Polish, they are influenced by American models of popular fiction and the needs and experiences of largely urban immigrant readers. The Polish language itself is stretched and adapted to new needs and inflected by English, the language of the dominant culture. Because these conditions are not exclusive to Polonia, but are part of the history of perhaps all non-English-speaking immigrant groups, reconstructing their individual literary histories can also help us piece together a general framework for the study of American literature in languages other than English.

At the same time, we should not lose sight of the particularities of each group’s experience. Immigrants brought with them their own specific economic, social, and migratory histories, which they called upon in devising strategies by which to advance their goals in America. Because these histories were reflected in their cultural production as well, any literary analysis that relies primarily on “critical paradigms created by the dominant culture,” as Fred Gardaphé points out in his study of Italian-American literature, is bound to end in a “monologistic, methodological trap.”²¹ To understand the elements that formed the Polish-American community and its literature, it will be necessary to keep in mind not only the circumstances of the life in America that the immigrants faced, but the political and cultural conditions they had left behind in Europe. These European conditions supplied Polonia its terms of struggle and negotiation and shaped its creative impulse. And so we cannot make much sense of Polish immigrant fiction in the face of America’s literary trends, historical movements, or mythic self-representations without recognizing the heavy backdrop of Polish history.

David Fine connects ethnic literature with an American cultural tradition.²² For well-educated writers fluent in English, this may have been so, but for the majority of Polish-language writers in this country, the literary model was doubtless a European one. And for the readers, many of them first-generation literates, literary history for all practical purposes may not have existed. The context into which many readers would have fit these Polish-American works may have been primarily an oral one, alongside songs, folktales, poetry, sermons, declamations, and letters. Even the written word was often oral and communal within peasant and immigrant communities, as newspapers were shared, husbands read books aloud to their families, and letters were community property.²³ Reading was not the solitary, individual act we think of today, but rather a shared activity that brought one into active communication with others. Polonia’s early writers, most of them activists for the Polish cause, also employed tactics and meanings developed through a century of cultural oppression in which literature was a major avenue of tacit protest. The “conspiracy of understanding between the author and the reader”²⁴ that this experience necessitated also provides early Polonian literature with many of its patterns, tropes, and symbols.

Drawing from different historical precedents and expectations of the reading experience, we have to ask the extent to which this literature fits into common paradigms of American ethnic cultural production. Robert Spiller’s developmental model—in which ethnic literature advances from personal writing such as letters, autobiographies, and diaries; to the public forum of journalism and other nonfictional forms; to “imitative” literature; and finally to the creation of a new literature out of the community’s unique experiences²⁵—overlooks ways that the literature of out-groups like working class immigrants can reshape “less mature” forms for sophisticated purposes. It ignores the internal conditions and influences not coming from the mainstream, which were necessarily most relevant to the day-to-day life out of which culture is created. By not considering trends in Poland’s own centuries-long literary and cultural history, it misses the very terms in which immigrant authors formed their aesthetics and envisioned their role as writers. What is needed, then, is a more elaborate picture that takes into consideration the diversity of American Polonia and its influences, the internal complexities of its community life, and its essentially transnational political concerns and social and cultural patterns. These provided the literary and linguistic strategies from which Polonian literature derived its forms and upon which it relied for its meaning. Part of our purpose must be, then, to establish the relationship of Polish-language Polish-American literature to established theories of literary ethnicity.

In this literature intended for a Polonian audience, some of the themes and subjects we have come to expect in ethnic, and particularly immigrant, literature seem much less prominent or, more precisely, take forms that express the situation within the Polish-American community. The Polish-language texts, for instance, force us to reconfigure the common immigrant motif of rebirth resulting from confrontation with the host culture, since this host culture is more often American Polonia (or, at its most alien, Irish America) than it is America at large. In Polish-language fiction for Polonian audiences, the role of Anglo-America is often minimal, the debates originating within the Polish community itself, not in its intersection with mainstream American culture. Antagonists are more likely to be Prussian than American, particularly in the period leading up to and during World War I, and Americans less the objects of admiration than of suspicion. Language issues may center around not only the use of English but also the intelligibility of the varied levels and dialects of Polish spoken by a diverse group of immigrants that outsiders perceived as undifferentiatedly Polish.

Given the focus on these apparently European issues, we might even ask whether this literature is ethnic at all, or whether it should be classified as simply a footnote to Polish literature. But while the problems confronted in this literature are often intra-Polonian, the fact remains that Polonia was never Poland, however authors might have attempted to configure it. So although the symbols that Polish writers in Europe used to mobilize and consolidate Polish patriotism were manipulated by Polish-American authors, it was in order to articulate very specific issues of identity and power within an emerging, increasingly distinct American Polonia. In fact, the Polish consciousness and sense of history that immigrant writers attempted to create and manipulate were largely possible because of the American conditions that threw together immigrants from various regions and social strata and gave them relative freedom to speak, at least to each other. These conditions created a distinct American Polonia (or rather, several), which in turn could take its own literary path, while still serving a Polish cause. The inadequacy of European Polish literature, even great Polish literature, to speak for these immigrants is argued in Helena Staś’s 1910 novel Na ludzkim targu (In the human market): “They don’t understand Mickiewicz or Słowacki. . . . But they would understand a literature created for them, based on their lives. That’s the only way the national spirit will survive in a foreign land.”²⁶

Implicit in the argument of Symonolewicz-Symmons and others is the suggestion that the Polish-language works that early Polonia had produced were not worthy of serious consideration as literature. Andrzej Brożek, for instance, writes that “Even Polonian authors . . . realize the low standard of Polish literary work in America.”²⁷ The sometimes dubious business procedures of some publishers, as well as their cheap production methods, certainly contributed to this perception. But more important, it was the literature itself, usually aimed toward a newly literate audience and serving a polemical purpose, that was dismissed as an artistic failure, despite the general concession that it met and fueled a desire to read within the immigrant community. Not only do these judgments fail to recognize many skillfully composed works, implying that authors resorted to polemics because they were incapable of art, they also delegitimate the experience and consciousness from which these works derived their meaning and expression, and the historical imperatives that guided authorial strategies. A 1918 editorial in Chicago’s Dziennik związkowy pleads the case for polemics:

The novel stimulates the mind, it awakens patriotic feeling. It reaches the poorest peasant hut, and if it’s a good novel it educates and ennobles its peasant readers. Because of this, novelists have a great responsibility. They must be apostles, high priests of our Polish faith. . . . They must steel the nation to struggles and difficulties, and work tirelessly toward one sacred end—the freedom of our homeland. . . . The novelists of free nations can permit themselves to write “for art’s sake” . . . ; we, in threefold slavery, our enemies seeking constantly to inject into our nation the poison that will disintegrate it, cannot permit ourselves such “art.”²⁸

For the serious consideration of immigrant writing, then, one has had to turn to the Polish-language work of immigrant historians. Wacław Kruszka, Stanisław Osada, Karol Wachtl, and Artur Waldo all devote attention to Polonian literature, not surprisingly, since Osada was the author of two novels; Wachtl was a short-story writer, poet, and playwright; and Waldo a playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. Even the cleric Kruszka included in his voluminous memoirs a sketch set in a future America in which Polish culture dominates.²⁹ Kruszka’s recently translated A History of the Poles in America devotes sections to immigrant literature and the press. The future must have looked promising to Kruszka, writing in 1905. In his brief overview of Polish-American writers and their works, he claims the existence of a nascent Polish-American literature, disagreeing with Osada’s assertion (before the appearance of his own novels) that Polish-American writing “cannot be considered literature.”³⁰

Almost forty years later, Wachtl’s Polonia w Ameryce (Polonia in America) pleaded the need for an English-language Polish-American literature. Wachtl considered the writers of the stara emigracja to be Polish writers merely influenced by their American experiences, and his evaluation of these writers, like Kruszka’s, is highly partisan. However, this also makes it useful in understanding Polonia’s points of ideological contention. Although disapproving of playwright-novelist Telesfor Chełchowski’s sarcastic edge, for instance, Wachtl grants his works a higher purpose: “Often the literary value of these works was not great, but they faithfully render the spirit of Polonia—sincere, self-sacrificing, fiercely patriotic.”³¹ The patriotism Wachtl was referring to, of course, was directed toward Poland, not America.

Wachtl reserves his sharpest criticism for writers whom he accuses of betraying the Polish-American community by creating divisions within it. He calls anticlericalist Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, for example, “a talent—undeniably brilliant, but unfortunately warped and wasted through his unscrupulous and unjust derision and mockery of everything that was elevated” (230). And he charges Łukaszkiewicz’s publisher and colleague, Antoni Paryski, with selling books that were “completely without worth, even harmful, because they sowed the seeds of discontent and set the Polonian community at odds” (227). Paryski’s publishing company, early Polonia’s most successful, will be discussed in chapter 2. However, it is important to note that Wachtl’s highly politicized analysis reflects precisely the value of internal unity that dominated Polonian thought, if not its practice. Although Polonia’s own literary scholarship is sketchy and heavily tainted, it does reflect what could be called the received image of Polonian history, full of contradictions and defensive strategies, but shared by its various ideological camps, valuing group cohesiveness but disagreeing about group identity, and linking Polonian to Polish as well as American historical developments.

While Artur Waldo’s Zarys historii literatury polskiej w Ameryce (Outline history of Polish literature in America) attempts to systematically describe the development and growth of Polish-American literature, it promises more than it delivers. But despite the murkiness of its categories and its somewhat arbitrary divisions, the second project of Waldo’s Outline, to periodize Polish-American literary production, at least treats its subject as a serious cultural indicator. What is more, Waldo stresses the unfolding relationship between Polonia, Poland, and the United States evident in this literature. Recognizing Polonia and its cultural expression as legitimately part of both the American and Polish panoramas, and conscious of American stereotypes of Polish immigrants, Waldo encourages the translation of Polish-language Polonian texts into English, as well as the creation of new works in the English language: “We have to give America Polish-American writing, Polish-American literature” in order “to establish a foundation for the power of the Polish spirit in the United States.”³²

The purpose of my own study is not to prove, to Polonia itself or to American readers, that Polish immigrant communities created a “great literature.” Nor is it to develop any monolithic definition of Polish-American literature itself. Certainly, equally valid but oppositional definitions may suit specific purposes and highlight particular qualities, not crossing each other out but rather expanding the matrices by which ethnicity is perceived and expressed. Rather, I intend to reopen the pages of these long-forgotten early works in order to consider the uses to which literature was put within Polonia and the possibilities it offered the community for reading itself as Polish in an American context.

This study will consider the diversity of ethnic identities circulated among readers in the Polish immigrant community, in a Polish and Polish-American cultural and historical context. It will attempt to describe a cultural history reconstructed out of the works that Polish America wrote and read, and that reveal the continuing conversation over values, interests, and identity through which the immigrant community shaped itself.

The first chapter will argue the primacy of literature in the creation of a Polish national and Polish-American ethnic consciousness. Chapter 2 takes a detailed look at the history of Polonian literature and publishing. Chapter 3 will investigate the controlling theme of ethnic and family loyalty and betrayal through the prism of popular Polish-American crime and detective narratives, arguing that the threats to inheritance and family continuity that these stories enact can be read as ethnic and national allegories. Chapter 4 considers the same theme of the creation and maintenance of group identity by looking at the ways sagas of immigration and adjustment encourage immigrant readers to interpret their own emigration in the context of Poland’s political oppression, and to see themselves as linked to other Poles by a national identity reinforced by shared suffering and exploitation. By showing emigration as a process that leads back to Europe, these works situate their immigrant characters in a continuing relationship to the homeland. Chapter 5 investigates the literary treatment of political direction and institutional corruption, demonstrating the ways opposing factions utilized the same morally charged rhetoric of treason and betrayal to articulate competing ideologies of group identity and strategies for national survival. Chapter 6 shows how immigrant authors explored and resolved questions of collective identity through the drama of sexual attraction and marital alliance, conflating family and nation and investing personal patterns of action with political meaning, in order to model proper ways of reproducing Polishness. The final chapter turns to the question of why this literature did not survive and suggests its relation to the writing and publishing efforts of later immigrants, those from World War II and, particularly, the Solidarity era. It argues that, despite their surface differences, similarities between the stara emigracja and the newest immigrant cohort account for some commonalities of literary form, style, subject, and theme.

In 1938 Artur L. Waldo dedicated his Outline History of Polish Literature in America “to the forgotten writers of American Polonia” (4). That he was referring to authors whose works had appeared only within the last several decades, some of whom were still writing and publishing, testifies to the unstable relationship between Polish immigrant writing and the community of immigrant readers these works addressed. If memory of these publications was already fading within Polonia even while, as Waldo asserts, they lay piled by the score in thousands of Polish-American attics, it is small wonder that later ethnic scholars have either remained ignorant of their existence or neglected their study. Waldo himself balked at the enormity of his task, leaving it to future scholars to flesh out the bones of his research. This study is a partial fulfillment of that hope, so long unfulfilled.

Without looking at writing in Polish, one can obtain only a distorted view of the cultural life of American Polonia, which included scores of Polish newspapers, Polish radio programs, active theater companies, and a lively output of various publications, including fiction. With a growing willingness to accept not simply alternative forms of literature such as letters and autobiography, but to acknowledge as American that literature written in languages other than English, a vast field of study is opened that will enable us to gain a much deeper understanding of how immigrant ethnicity was shaped and experienced. It also establishes a counterpoint to the common image of Polish-Americans in native literature, written by those outside the community for an American audience. Even the most sympathetic of these often portray the Polish immigrant as inarticulate, passive, almost primeval, as faceless symbols of a primitive life force and as voiceless victims of social injustice and economic exploitation. Naturally, they may have appeared so to outsiders, with whom they could not easily communicate. But the view from within Polonia was of an active, vibrant, and complex community, and most relevantly the sound from within was not silence but conversation, argument, laughter. The only way to hear these voices is by eavesdropping on the literature these communities produced by and for themselves, with no intention of cultural mediation with America at large, but with very particular agendas relevant to the immigrants themselves, their institutions, and even to the shape of the world map. All this is lost unless we hear them in their own language.