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Writing Polish

Literature and the Construction of Polishness in America

IF AMERICA HOLDS a collective portrait of the Polish immigrant landing at Ellis Island, exhausted, bewildered, clutching bundles and children, surrounded by queerly lettered trunks, what, in the popular imagination, do those trunks contain? The featherbed, embroidered linens, a treasured family photograph, flower seeds, a teakettle, practical, homemade clothing, a fistful of village soil . . . Rarely, however, do we imagine a book among the carefully packed belongings, and if we do, it is likely to be a worn prayer book or a Lives of the Saints.

Nevertheless, in America these immigrants were producers and consumers of the written word. Polish communities supported an active (and often combative) press, a lively network of amateur and professional theaters, and scores of book publishers. This study concerns itself with just one segment of Polish America’s literary output: Polish-language narrative fiction written and published in the United States before World War II. That such a literature existed at all will come as a surprise to many. Yet literature was more than just an obscure element of immigrant cultural life. It was a self-conscious agent of American Polonia’s ethnogenesis.

Like their counterparts in Europe, Polish immigrant authors wrote from a sense of national imperative. From 1795 until the end of World War I, during the period of greatest migration, Poland did not exist as a political state, having been divided in a complicated series of partitions between Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. In partitioned Poland, Norman Davies points out, “the two great themes of the age [were] the preservation of national identity, and the restoration of national independence.”¹ Polish literature was enlisted in these causes, and indeed the two primary literary movements of the partition period, romanticism and positivism, are as much political as artistic strategies.

In the United States, immigrant writers persistently and passionately engaged issues of identity and peoplehood, attempting to define a sense of Polishness that would serve an idealized Poland and a developing American Polonia. But there was no consensus on just what that national identity entailed and demanded, and so the struggle for political independence and the consolidation of nationhood resulted in as much infighting as it did cooperation. Accusations of treachery and treason went hand in hand with admonitions to “support your own.”² Rather than seeing these conflicts as no more than the self-serving and self-defeating positioning of politicians and ideologues, we might look at them as border skirmishes, meant to establish, defend, and secure territory, particularly at its most vulnerable junctures. That the question of just who should be considered a Pole became (and remains) so contentious reveals the potency of familiar historical flash points of collective identity—religion, language, social class, and political belief. And the recurring finger-pointing at accused traitors underscores the conflictedness inherent in these boundaries. One can, after all, be a traitor only to one’s own people.

The cause of Polishness, and of Polishness in America, was perceived as threatened from without and from within. But writers reserved the bitterest criticism not for outside antagonists (Prussians, Russians, Irish priests, or American nativists, for example), but for the Poles accused of aiding and abetting them. Polonian literature is full of warnings against witting or unwitting foreign agents disguised as Poles. This imagery of treason and betrayal fell in neatly with the romantic ideology of Polish messianism, which saw Poland as the Christ of nations, betrayed and sacrificed but destined to rise again for the salvation of Western civilization.³ But it is also heavily invested with Polish positivist ideology, which developed in reaction to and protest against the revolutionary impulses that had led to and fed on messianism. In the wake of the disastrous January Uprising of 1863, positivists tended to shift blame for Poland’s demise from its foreign enemies to the factionalism and private interests that made the nation vulnerable, and to formulate practical and workable ways for Polishness, if not Poland, to survive through wide-ranging educational and social development, so-called organic work. Organized efforts began, often clandestinely and under threat of arrest, to educate the peasants and instill in them a sense of national loyalty. Women were especially active in the organic work movement, which turned reading into a political act. According to Davies,

If the typical Polish “patriot” at any time up to 1864 had been a young man with a sabre or revolver in his hand, the typical patriot at the turn of the century was a young lady of good family with a textbook under her shawl. . . . They were as determined to manufacture “true Poles” as the state authorities were intent on training “real Germans” or “good Russians”; and they had an utter idealist contempt for [those] who, though intelligent, had betrayed the national culture.⁴

Polish positivism and particularly the organic work movement was early Polonia’s strongest literary influence. Positivist writers like Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bolesław Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa, and Maria Konopnicka were among those most often reprinted by Polonian publishers and serialized in Polonian newspapers. In particular, the work of Orzeszkowa and Konopnicka influenced the activists of America’s Polish Women’s Alliance and prominent immigrant women writers like Helena Staś. However, not all immigrant writers, including Staś, fall neatly into the mold, and positivism went through its own permutations and produced its own offshoots, of which Polonian writers were aware and which their own work reflects. In fact, as Matthew Frye Jacobson asserts, the “strategy of cultural nation-building . . . in effect blended elements of both the positivist and the insurrectionary approaches.”⁵

Still, positivism, with its characteristic emphasis on social issues, often bordering on polemics, is readable in the subject, theme, and style of much early Polonian writing. What is more, positivism’s strong ties to journalism reflect those of Polish immigrant writers who, in addition to serializing their work in newspapers, contributed articles on social issues and served on editorial staffs. Polonia’s most active publishers issued products similar to (and sometimes pirated from) the literatura ludowa, people’s literature aimed at peasant and urban proletariat readers, with which immigrants were likely to be already familiar.⁶ These connections dovetail with Polonian literature’s preoccupation with defining and encouraging a Polish identity among readers in America, who were most easily reached through newspapers and cheap imprints. They echo in the carefully stated aims of Polish-American publishers, who were conscious of their difficult position straddling the interests of the immigrant intelligentsia and the peasant majority and who attempted to appeal to both while fending off accusations that they disseminated scandal and calumny rather than knowledge and enlightenment.

The children’s section of a 1910 Polish-American women’s magazine, Ogniwo, illustrating the connection between women and reading, a legacy of Polish positivism. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

Under partition, the very language was weighted with symbolic meaning, as simple names, phrases, and terms like solidarity had become nuanced with layers of historical interconnections and ideological reverberations. This capacity has been noted in the later, communist-era literature of the Soviet satellite period. But Polish literature had already honed this “conspiracy of understanding”⁷ during the partitions. The terms of the polemics and the literary shape immigrant authors and publishers gave them reflect attempts to straddle two continents, balancing the concrete needs of an immigrant constituency with political and cultural interests in what was perceived by all factions as a fight for the very survival of everything Polish.

Within Polonia’s identity politics, the contingencies of regional identity, social class, and religion, all of which affected economic and social opportunities, reflect a kaleidoscopic puzzle of ideologies and agendas, sometimes contradictory, sometimes blended in surprising and unlikely combinations, but growing out of a European as well as an American experience. These divisions, apparent in the literature these immigrants and their children wrote and read, underscore the difficulties of any monolithic, static conception of American Polonia; and the intracommunity power struggles that are a subtext in much of this literature quickly dispel the commonly held perception of a cohesive and conservative immigrant community.

Editorial staff of Chicago’s Głos ludowy. Telesfor Chełchowski, who wrote under the pseudonym Szczypawka, is third from the left. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

At the same time, because of political freedom and the intermingling of Polish immigrants from various areas of partitioned Poland and from different social levels, the consolidation of a Polish consciousness seemed possible in this country to a greater degree than it had in Europe, and many writers took advantage of this opportunity to try to instill in their readers a sense of peoplehood and national unity. Milwaukee publisher and politician Michał Kruszka wrote that “in the New World we have the best opportunity to exist as Poles, . . . to feel Polish, . . . to establish Polish societies, to pray in Polish.” Kruszka and others saw no contradiction between simultaneously held American and Polish identities. “I am an enthusiastic Pole,” he wrote, “and at the same time a [loyal] American.”⁸

Ethnic identities were being shaped and formed in a continuing personal and collective dialogue within the immigrant settlements, between the immigrants and their native lands, between the host country and the immigrant communities, and among immigrant groups themselves. But the strands of Polishness and Polish-Americanness are often difficult to differentiate and never remained static. Polish-language immigrant literature reveals these changing concerns and aspirations, as well as the varied and permeable meanings of Polishness influenced by shifting conditions on both sides of the ocean. And because of the commercial opportunism of Polish-American publishers, these works also reveal how the immigrants voted with their nickels and dimes for the community values and identities expressed in the literature they bought.

Although Poles have been settling in the United States since the days of Jamestown, their numbers did not become significant until late in the nineteenth century. Before then, isolated pioneer families like the Zaborowskis (later, Zabriskie) and the Sądowskis (Sandusky), had contributed to American settlement, and it is likely that over one hundred Polish-Americans and Poles, including the celebrated generals Tadeusz Kościuszko and Kazimierz Pułaski, fought in the American War of Independence.⁹ But the first noticeable wave of immigration from Poland consisted of 234 emigrés from the 1830 insurrection (the November Uprising), followed by smaller groups after the failed insurrections of 1846, 1848, and 1863. It was the November Uprising exiles, in fact, for whom the first Polish-language book in the United States appeared, as well as the first periodical devoted to Polish issues.¹⁰

However, it was only with the 1854 arrival in Galveston harbor of a group of immigrants from Upper Silesia, in the Prussian area of partitioned Poland, that visibly Polish communities began to take shape in America. The town they founded, Panna Maria, Texas,¹¹ is generally acknowledged as the first permanent Polish settlement in the New World, followed by settlements in Michigan (1857) and Wisconsin (1858).¹² These first communities and ones that followed in the 1860s and early 1870s were primarily rural. But by 1867 a Polish parish was forming in Chicago, and in 1871 the first Polish parish in Detroit was established. The last quarter of the nineteenth century would see the transformation of American Polonia from a loose collection of scattered farm towns to a highly organized network of mostly urban neighborhoods.

The first wave of Polish immigrants in what America would call the Great Migration came from Prussian Poland in the 1870s and 1880s, propelled by land consolidation and Kulturkampf hostility to Polish language and culture.¹³ In America, these immigrants, many with a Polish national consciousness developed in response to oppression, formed the advance guard of Polonia’s emerging leadership. They, along with intellectuals and former insurrectionists who were beginning to arrive from Russian Poland after the January Uprising of 1863, established Polonia’s early parishes, businesses, and community organizations.¹⁴ As conditions in Prussia improved, the number of new arrivals dropped considerably, and although they tended to hold positions of power in American Polish communities, Prussian Poles would make up the smallest percentage of Polish immigrants.

In Russian Poland, which constituted the largest remnant of Polish lands, shifting social categories, economic pressures, and political and cultural oppression had by the 1880s fueled an immigration that continued to grow until World War I. Overlapping that wave was immigration from the Austrian-held territory of Galicia, which began in earnest in the mid-1890s and continued unabated until it too was cut off by the outbreak of the war. Polish culture had been freest to develop under Austrian authorities, who after the mid-nineteenth century did not suppress the Polish language or artistic expression, or close Polish universities. But Galician misery had become a byword in the impoverished countryside. Although Poles from all three partitions entered the same urban immigrant enclaves, the newly arrived were at a disadvantage economically and socially, and tensions between them led to conflict:

The saddest thing was that [the Prussians] called their brothers from the Austrian partition, “You Galician,” and those from the Russian partition, “You Russki,” taking them for something less than desirable. Those from the Austrian and Russian partitions, taking revenge, called their brothers from under Prussia, “You Prussian!” There wasn’t really anything serious about it, but you could notice the aversion and bias of one partition for another. The most wronged was the Austrian partition. For them there was no other name but Galician, maybe because they were the poorest.¹⁵

While the great wave of turn-of-the-century immigration to America tends to be perceived as a distinctly peasant movement prompted by financial necessity, in actuality economic, social, and political factors combined, often indistinguishably, to propel immigration not only from the peasantry but also, although in much smaller numbers, from the petty nobility, the intelligentsia, and the professional middle class. (The landless nobility, in fact, might very well have been poorer than their peasant neighbors.) Still, the enormous Russian and Galician immigrations, making up over 90 percent of the estimated 1.5 million Polish immigrants who arrived between 1891 and 1914, consisted largely of poor peasants.¹⁶

This presented special problems for patriotic author-activists in American Polonia, Poland’s “fourth partition.”¹⁷ Not only did Poles arrive in this country as citizens of three autonomous nations, with immigration experiences shaped by distinct historical circumstances that were often sources of rivalry and suspicion, but those from the rural peasantry were unlikely to conceive of themselves as Polish at all. Back in Europe, a highly parochial worldview focused peasant interests within the family, or at most the okolica or parafia, the immediate neighborhood or parish, rather than within larger collectivities.¹⁸ They might also identify with a geographic and cultural region: regional identities were particularly dominant among, for instance, the Kashubians of northwestern Poland, the Silesians of the southwest, and the Górale of south central and southeastern Poland, where dialect and cultural connections with non-Polish-speaking neighbors further differentiated them from other Poles. In 1892 Milwaukee’s Kuryer polski complained that

Poles in many Polish colonies are dividing themselves not only into “Prussians,” “Austrians,” and “Russian Poles,” but even into “Varsovians,” “Poznanians,” “Galicians,” “Silesians,” “Kashubians,” “Mazurians,” and so on. Even the papers call them such. We in Milwaukee have not yet reached this “height of civilization.” . . . Here one is called nothing but, in the old style, a Pole!¹⁹

However, it was a new phenomenon that these mostly peasant immigrants might be perceived as Poles. Not only did peasants tend to identify themselves with much less abstract collectivities, but until the mid-nineteenth century the identity of Pole had been reserved for the nobility.²⁰ The distrustful and often adversarial relationship between the Polish gentry and peasantry reflected past exploitations and betrayals and the mutual conviction that their interests were essentially in opposition. And these tensions had been manipulated by the partitioning powers to help defeat Polish independence movements. The insurrections, it was charged, had failed in part because of lack of cooperation—and at times open warfare—between peasants and the gentry, from which the revolutionary movements originated. But while class distinctions, deeply etched in Polish society, continued to be sources of power and influence within Polonia, new opportunities for dialogue and understanding (as well as new reasons for resentment) also became possible as American conditions cast Polish social strata together in closer proximity than ever before.²¹ The results would be important not just for the position of the Polish community in America, but would have implications for the status of any future Polish state.

Since most Polish peasant immigrants arrived in this country, like other newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe, as temporary sojourners, the national ideals and loyalties that immigrant authors encouraged among their readers not only would shape an American-Polonian consciousness, but could be expected to reach their European villages as well. Franciszek Bujak notes the importance of Polish publications from Chicago brought back by returning Galician migrants: “As more and more of such cases appeared in the village, the entire structural organization of the countryside was altered.”²² One of the earliest immigrant works of fiction concerns a peasant who was hanged by Polish insurrectionists for supporting the czar. When a new insurrection against Russia erupts, his sons return from America to redeem the family name by joining the fight for independence. It is in America that the sons have come to perceive their father as a traitor, in America that the family has been transformed from peasants into Poles, prepared to rescue the Polish homeland.²³

Among all the factors in debates over Polish national identity, however, the thorniest was religion. As a multiethnic state, Poland had been the home of Roman Catholics, Jews, Russian orthodox, Muslims, Lutherans, Calvinists, Baptists, and others. And so while Polishness is now associated almost universally with Roman Catholicism (the result of later historical developments and political positioning), the significance of religion to ethnic and national identity has at times in Polish and Polish-American history been a matter for heated debate, a disputed claim rather than a clearly designated border. In particular, opinions on the position of the Jew shifted and varied, with neither Jews nor Christians agreeing even among themselves on the Jewish place in national social, cultural, and economic life. Polish positivists largely favored assimilation. But they were opposed by conservative Catholics and Zionists alike, in a debate that became increasingly vitriolic after World War I. In the United States as well there were Jewish Poles active in Polonian institutional and public life and many others who, though they might think of Polish Christians and Polish Jews as distinct peoples, nevertheless relied on a continuing relationship between them.

Immigrant socialists in Canada, with author Alfons Staniewski (“Ajotes”) at front center. The shield at upper left reads, Knowledge Is Power. Source: Casimir J. Mazurkiewicz and Victor Turek, Alfons J. Staniewski (1879–1941): A Chapter in the History of the Polish-Language Press in Canada (Toronto: Polish Alliance Press, 1961). Courtesy Polish Alliance Press

Immigrant authors themselves represented a range of these positions and backgrounds, as far as can be determined from sometimes inadequate biographical and bibliographical information. For instance, they seem to have come in comparable numbers from all three partitions, with Galicia slightly overrepresented, perhaps because of Austria-Hungary’s laissez-faire treatment of Polish culture. Although most authors were probably Roman Catholic, they represent a spectrum of attitudes toward the role of religion in national life, and some of the most prolific had placed themselves outside the Catholic mainstream. Writers emerged from the National Catholic Church, from the Polish Baptist Church, from the Episcopalian faith, and from theosophical circles. Some rejected organized religion altogether. Jews are frequent characters in Polish-American works, and Jewish immigrants wrote prolifically in Yiddish, but only one identifiably Jewish author wrote in Polish for Polish-American publishers. In Poland, Jewish writers tended to write in Yiddish or Hebrew until the interwar period, when a visibly Jewish Polish-language literature began to emerge.²⁴ No comparable body of literature exists in America, however. With the exception of Piotr Yolles, Jewish immigrant writers seem to have chosen Yiddish or English as their creative language, perhaps because most arrived in the United States too early, and identified too strongly with a multinational Jewish immigrant collectivity, to be significantly influenced by social and cultural trends developing in the new Poland.

As far as it has been possible to determine, most Polish immigrant authors came from Poland’s intelligentsia or its emerging professional class. Many were college educated, though a few, like Stanisław Osada and Helena Staś, were largely self-taught.²⁵ But by the beginning of World War I it was no longer true, as Lwów’s Ruch literacki had claimed in 1876, that Polonia’s authors were simply writers of opportunity rather than vocation.²⁶ A handful of writers, including Henryk Nagiel, Wojciech Mórawski, Józef Orłowski, Stefania Laudyn, and Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, had begun their literary careers in Europe, while others had at least contributed to European newspapers.

Immigrant writers also represented a range of political positions, from socialists to right-wing “Endeks,” followers of Roman Dmowski’s National Democratic Movement. Wiktor Karłowski and Kazimierz Neuman had fought in the 1863 uprising. An American right- and left-wing dichotomy sheds little light on the tangle of Polish-American political strategies, however, which sought to balance Polish issues in three rival European empires with immigrant interests in the United States. To understand the rival stances taken by Polonian activists, one must look to European ideological trends, to the varied conceptions of Polishness and strategies for Polish cultural and political survival that competed for followers in partitioned Poland and its diaspora communities.

Felicja Romanowska, singer, musician, and author. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

The debate over who could be called a Pole, far from being a side issue of concern only to immigrant ideologues, was a controlling and shaping element in Polonia’s development. It would play a part in settlement patterns, in the establishment of the parishes that would become the dominant feature of Polish-American neighborhoods, and in the creation of Polonia’s highly structured organizational life. These matrices of Polishness are reflected in Polonia’s earliest institutional rivalries, the most fundamental of which, between the Nationalists, whose first loyalty was to a restored Poland, and the Religionists, who emphasized the Polish Catholic’s relationship to America and the Church, was personified in two powerful ethnic fraternals, the Polish National Alliance (PNA) and the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America (PRCU). The PNA (in Polish, Związek Narodowy Polski), founded in 1880, and the PRCU (Zjednoczenie Rzymsko-Katolickie w Ameryce), established in 1873, were sharp competitors in their early years, not just for subscribers to their insurance funds, but for the ideological loyalties of larger Polonia, which both organizations claimed to represent. Although tensions lessened over the years, leading rather to differences in degree than in kind, the PNA and PRCU disagreed in essence over the definition of a Pole. For the PRCU, Catholicism was fundamental to Polishness. Like some activists in Europe, however, the early PNA organizers developed an inclusive ideology of Polishness that was meant to unite all inhabitants of the former multiethnic Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, regardless of religion, class, political orientation, language, or ethnicity. (To some of those inhabitants, experiencing their own awakening national consciousness, this would come to sound more like Polish hegemony than national unity.)²⁷ And so the PNA accepted members regardless of religious conviction, resulting in charges of atheist, socialist, and Jewish influence.

Editor and author Hieronim Jabłoński. Courtesy Polish National Alliance

The PNA and PRCU were not the only organizational embodiments of Polonia’s competing self-conceptions, however. Other political and religious factions formed, with varying and shifting degrees of intercooperation. Eighteen eighty-seven marked the establishment of Polonia’s Falcon (Sokół) movement, based on the Czech model of physical fitness and military exercise but with a specifically Polish agenda that emphasized readiness to fight for the Polish cause. In 1898 the Polish Women’s Alliance (Związek Polek w Ameryce) was founded, partially in reaction to the PNA’s refusal to grant women full membership rights. (This policy changed in 1900, after which the PNA and PWA often cooperated closely.) In its formative years, the PWA was heavily influenced by European feminism and Polish positivism, and most immigrant women writers came from its ranks. Polish-American socialist, communist, and labor organizations also emerged early on and remained significant until the 1950s.²⁸ And in the late 1890s, but with roots in earlier “church wars” over financial and liturgical control of ethnic parishes, an independent Polish National Catholic Church (PNCC) was taking shape around a populist ideology that combined uncompromising Polishness with an American insistence on autonomy.²⁹

These organizations and others grew out of just some of the varying models of Polishness that were developing through dialogue and diatribe taking place on both sides of the ocean, particularly in the years before World War I. Polish immigrant literature, like its European models heavily invested in the national cause, gave voice to these internal debates as it attempted to shape and consolidate a Polish identity among readers from all corners of the former Poland, readers who in all likelihood had never thought of themselves as Polish before arriving in America. Crafting a strategy of national survival did not stop after Poland’s resurrection in 1919, however. Rather, it shifted to considerations of Polonia’s obligations toward and relationship to the new state, as well as increasingly pressing issues of second-generation ethnicity in America. The imagery of treason continued, even as the belief in an expansive Polishness found new, hopeful expression.

Emil Dunikowski, describing American Polonia in a series of letters originally published in the Galician press, quotes a public speech made by Lithuanian-born PNA activist Julian Andrzejkowicz, in Hazleton, Pennsylvania: “The fact of our homeland’s partition, the infamous treaties that divided us up, have been effaced by the Polish people in America. Lithuanians, Rusyns, those from Great Poland, from Mazury, Krakowians, and even Silesians, feel ourselves brothers, and children of one mother—Poland.”³⁰ Andrzejkowicz’s optimistic rhetoric reflects not only one of early Polonia’s major constellations of national self-representation, but the conviction that in America an idealized Poland was being created, one that admitted internal diversity but emphasized and essentialized an overriding collective loyalty grounded in the imagery of common blood. The work of immigrant writers is evidence of this belief, that the Polish community in America could indeed form the foundation of a Polish national spirit, whatever shape it might take.