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“Blessed Are the Light Bearers”

Polish-American Publishing before World War II

“ONE CANNOT TALK about Polishness,” wrote Artur Waldo in 1938, “without the POLISH BOOK.” Waldo was referring not to books imported from Europe, but to ones supplied by American Polonia’s own publishers.¹ Common perceptions of low rates of literacy and lack of interest in or leisure for reading notwithstanding, the immigrant publishing industry, from its tentative beginnings in the 1870s, had mushroomed by the early twentieth century to include scores of companies producing tens of thousands of titles, including many written by immigrants themselves.

Who were these publishers of Polish-language books in America, and what sorts of materials did they offer their immigrant readers? What political, ideological, and economic factors guided their choice of titles, and how did these decisions shape American Polonia’s ethnic consciousness and national loyalties? Finally why, by the mid-1920s, were companies forced to consolidate already diminishing energies and resources, leaving by 1938, Waldo’s “Year of the Polish Book,” only a handful of struggling publishers? Polish-American publishing followed the growth and decline of immigration itself, but numbers of new arrivals alone fail to account for the changes in book production. Implicated in patterns of reading, writing, and publishing are Polonia’s varied but interacting ideological positions and purposes, as well as fluctuating political, social, and historical circumstances in Europe and America.

Polish-American publishing, situated within the general movement toward the popularization and commodification of cultural production, developed along patterns common to the American and European popular book industry. Like the American cheap fiction Michael Denning describes, and the work of Polish positivists of the same era, immigrant publishing, including that by Poles, had strong ties to journalism, sharing the same technologies, distribution methods, writers, and readers. According to Werner Sollors, these ties are so universal that it is “appropriate to focus an account of America’s polyethnic literature not merely on the development of books but on the centrality of journalism in the literature of practically all ethnic groups.”²

This connection to the press helped shape the physical forms, literary styles, and thematic content of the literature offered to and created by the immigrant communities, taking on particular coloring within each ethnic context. In the Polish case, it encouraged an emphasis on polemics and partisanship that reflected the divisions within Poland and Polonia even as the literature argued for proper avenues of unification.³ If literature and journalism were intertwined, so were journalism and politics, and so the literature reflects these affiliations and rivalries, as well as the inevitable intraorganizational struggles for power and focus.

Printery of Robotnik polski, published by the Polish Socialist Party, Chicago, circa 1900. The paper, which also printed immigrant fiction, later moved to New York. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

Immigrant literary efforts were not only published in book or pamphlet format by publishers who were often affiliated with newspapers, but also printed in the columns of these same, sometimes highly partisan, papers. Just as every major Polonian organization was represented by its own newspaper, the journalistic arm of a fraternal or other community organization might also take up book publishing: for instance, Dziennik zjednoczony, the PRCU’s official paper, published several of Artur Waldo’s works, including the novel Czar miasta Kościuszko (The charm of the town of Kosciuszko) and the collection of short stories about Gen. Józef Haller’s Blue Army, which Waldo edited, Czyn zbrojny Polonii Stanów Zjednoczonych w nowelkach, gawędach, i opowiadaniach wojskowych (The armed effort of U.S. Polonia in novellas, tales, and short stories).⁴ The paper put out by the Resurrectionist Order of Catholic priests, Dziennik chicagoski, besides printing Polish-American fiction in its columns, published works by Karol Wachtl and popular playwright Szczęsny Zahajkiewicz. In addition, its affiliate, the Polish Publishing Company (Spółka Wydawnictwa Polskiego), issued works under its own imprint.

Among other institutions and their affiliate newspapers that branched into publishing was the Polish National Catholic Church. Its newspapers, Rola Boża and Straż, and the Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Polskiej Narodowej Szkoły (Society of Friends of the Polish National School) issued works supporting the National Church and its fraternal, Spójna. One of these was PNCC founder Franciszek Hodur’s apocalyptic novella Faryzeusze i Saduceusze (The Pharisees and the Sadduccees). Another newspaper that branched into book publishing was the socialist Dziennik ludowy, along with its satirical supplement, Bicz Boży, and its affiliate bookstore, Księgarnia Ludowa.⁵ The Smulski Company published not only Gazeta katolicka and parochial school textbooks, but works by Karol Wachtl, Stanisław Osada, Iza Pobóg, and Stefania Laudyn, long-standing editor of the PWA’s Głos Polek. Milwaukee’s Nowiny polskie, another staunchly Roman Catholic paper, published novels by conservative activist Józef Orłowski.

Other newspapers that published or printed literature by Polonian authors before World War II include New Britain, Connecticut’s Przewodnik katolicki; Baltimore’s Jedność-Polonia and the affiliated Markiewicz i Pula company; Bay City, Michigan’s Prawda; Pittsburgh’s Gwiazda; Winona, Minnesota’s Wiarus; New York’s Telegram codzienny; Buffalo’s Dziennik dla wszystkich, Telegram, and Polak w Ameryce; and Chicago’s Dziennik narodowy. A handful of newspapers like New York’s Nowy świat and Ognisko and Cleveland’s Jutrzenka, as well as magazines like the women’s and children’s monthly Ogniwo (Chicago) and the literary and current affairs journal Jaskółka (Stevens Point, Wisconsin) also published Polish-American works in their columns that were never released under separate imprint.

Staff of Polak Amerykański Press, Buffalo, 1901; Stanisław Slisz is on chair in front. Courtesy State University of New York at Buffalo, University Libraries Polish Collection

Although newspaper publishers played the greatest role in Polish-American book production, it must be added that a dozen or so publishers operated independently of the press: in Chicago and Niles, Illinois; in Detroit; in South Bend, Indiana; in Pittsburgh; and in Pulaski and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Some of these, like Bolesław Straszyński of Chicago and J. Sobierajski of Detroit, produced only a few volumes. Others, like the Sajewski Company of Chicago, were well established and long-lived.⁶ Books were published by institutions like Detroit’s Polish Seminary and its later Orchard Lake, Michigan, complex, and by ephemeral organizations like the Polski Klub Artystyczny (Polish Arts Club) and the Zjednoczenie Prasy Polskiej w Ameryce (Associated Polish Press of America). Although the difficulty of compiling a complete bibliography of post-1900 Polonian publications makes any conclusions tentative, between eighty and one hundred book publishers appear to have operated in American Polonia before World War II, some of them very short-lived and small-scale, some extraordinarily prolific.⁷ About a third of these included in their catalogs literary works by members of the immigrant community, including poetry and drama.

Even during the most prolific years of Polonian publishing, this original writing by immigrants was only a tiny portion of its total output. But occasionally organizations or publishers sponsored literary contests to encourage local writers. One of the earliest was the 1893–94 Copernicus competition, which called for “short stories, novels, satires, plays, and scientific treatises . . . written in Polish, using Polish-American life as the background.” The need for a distinct Polish-American literature had developed because

our general character has changed. . . . So have our habits of thought changed, our manners and customs, even our language, which has acquired new virtues and new faults. Thus, the literature of our homeland is no longer adequate, and a real need arises for the creation of our own literature, based on the lives of our countrymen here in America. Such a literature will constitute a school that will teach a greater love for drama and books, at the same time giving our brethren across the sea a better opportunity of acquainting themselves with us, thus strengthening the bonds between ourselves and our homeland.

Immigrant authors would make similar pleas, but the publication of immigrant works continued to be constrained by ideological disagreements and political opportunism. The Copernicus contest resulted in controversy, for instance, when the first prize winner turned out to be Zygmunt Słupski, a member of the awards committee and the originator of the contest. The second prize winner wished to remain anonymous, but requested that any monetary award be made to the same Mr. Słupski.⁸

A 1903 competition sponsored by the Polish National Alliance was plagued with similar problems: it drew just three submissions, which were promptly awarded first, second, and third places. The top prize of fifty dollars went to Stanisława Romanowska for Nad Michiganem (On Lake Michigan), a highly partisan novella about immigrant politics in Chicago.⁹ Romanowska was a music teacher with two boarders, both of them journalists. One was in fact Tomasz Siemiradzki, editor of the PNA weekly Zgoda and also a contest judge. Only one other work by Romanowska has turned up: a short story printed in the PNA almanac for 1910. The possibility has to be considered that others may have had a hand in Romanowska’s work.¹⁰

Office of the Polish National Alliance’s Zgoda, circa 1910. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

The most successful book publishers, however, were connected to “independent” newspapers, not aligned with any political, religious, or fraternal camp. The Worzałła company of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, was a very active publisher of books in addition to several papers, of which Gwiazda polarna, established in 1908, still survives. But the most prolific were Władysław Dyniewicz of Chicago and Antoni Paryski of Toledo, Ohio, publishers of Gazeta polska narodowa/Gazeta polska w Chicago, and Ameryka-Echo, respectively.¹¹ Despite, or because of, the partisan debates and infighting within the Polish community, the independence of Dyniewicz, Paryski, and the Worzałła brothers was the key to their success—a political act and a marketing strategy addressing the needs of the immigrant community but grounded in European philosophies. It allowed them to position themselves staunchly as Polish patriots, continuing the educational work begun among peasants in the old country among the transplanted peasants of the American colony. Dyniewicz described his pioneering role in Polonian journalism and publishing in terms of national evangelism: “For my whole life I stood faithfully by the national flag and sincerely defended the Polish emigrants. . . . I often think of it, that the pen which I put down was picked up by other hands, to work for the honor and benefit of the Polish nation.”¹²

At the same time, Andrzej Kłossowski calls Dyniewicz “the first modern capitalist Polish publisher in the United States.”¹³ His Gazeta polska narodowa had its beginnings in 1873, and Dyniewicz began publishing books three years later. After he retired in 1913, the reorganized Polish American Publishing Company managed to continue into the 1950s. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, business was already booming for Antoni Paryski, Dyniewicz’s onetime typesetter and already a steady contributor to Polish-American and mainstream American newspapers, under various pseudonyms.¹⁴ It was Paryski who most deliberately manipulated the power of the press and of modern advertising and promotional methods to sell himself and his publications, taking his cue from American journalism and American and European models of popular book production. Using a carefully articulated populist rhetoric, Paryski took pains to situate himself as an independent voice for the common people, outside the sphere of clerical and partisan interests that fragmented the community, particularly during Paryski’s boom years, before World War I. Reviled from the pulpit for his anticlericalism, he wore proudly the claim that priests had refused the sacraments to Ameryka-Echo readers.¹⁵ In particular, Paryski exploited Polish class divisions to align himself with his largest potential audience of consumers, the mass of peasant immigrants who began arriving from Russian and Austrian Poland in the 1890s and early 1900s.

Like many of Polonia’s founding journalists and writers, Paryski, though he came from an illiterate peasant family, had belonged to the emerging urban professional class before emigrating in 1883, allegedly when the Warsaw judge for whom he had been a clerk was arrested for revolutionary activity.¹⁶ Struggling for a living in America and educating himself (he entered the University of Michigan in the early 1880s but was forced to give up his studies for lack of funds), he became a Knights of Labor organizer among the immigrants, rising to an executive position. But at an 1887 executive meeting, in a characteristically confrontational move, Paryski reportedly resigned his post, accusing Terrence Powderly of “venality and dishonesty” in a Chicago stockyards strike.¹⁷

Antoni Paryski, not long after his arrival in the United States. Source: [Rosiński], Antoni A. Paryski: Życie, prace, i czyny. Courtesy Paryski family

Whatever his origins, Paryski carefully and deliberately positioned himself on the side of the immigrant masses, warning his readers against exploitation and betrayal by those who claimed to serve their interests, and calling attention to the power relationships that wound through Polonia’s attempts to create and control a unified community. Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, whose novels Paryski published, eulogized his colleague as “The Teacher of the [Polish] Emigration” and “The Champion of the People.”¹⁸ Others called him an agent of discontent and dissension. Paryski’s career is a complicated, carefully measured mix of opportunism and idealism that made his the success story of Polish-American publishing. Writing in the 1930s, a factory worker claimed, “Everything I know today I owe to the publisher A. A. Paryski, because I read his books by the stack.”¹⁹

Mindful that most of his customers had only a minimal education and little or no acquaintance with Polish high culture, Paryski worked meticulously to maneuver even the most questionable of his publications into the category of educational material, addressing his argument at two audiences: peasant immigrants, who would contrast Paryski’s sanctioning—however patronizing—of their choice of simple reading material with the sanctimonious disdain of the intelligentsia, and Polonia’s intellectual leadership, who would have to grant Paryski’s nobility of purpose and utility of strategy. Paryski journalist Stefan Nesterowicz characterizes his employer in the language of positivism:

Long years of experience have taught him that one must first teach the people to read, then put the simplest books, even childish ones, into their hands, and then gradually encourage them to read things more and more serious, more and more worthwhile. . . . The man who today bought himself the tales of The Thousand and One Nights will tomorrow require a crime novel, the day after tomorrow a novel of manners, then a historical novel; later he will buy himself a history text. This book will encourage him to study geography, then physics, and in this way his hunger for knowledge will awaken.²⁰

Paryski walked a careful line between educator and businessman, and the works he published sometimes blurred the boundaries between literature, polemics, and advertising. The newly arrived immigrant in Sen na jawie (The daydream) is promised “Salvation, Prosperity, Equality, the Homeland, [and] Absolute Freedom,”²¹ but he must first align himself with one of Polonia’s ideological factions. He is disillusioned by each in turn: by a debauched clergy, by cynically faithless socialists, and by German and Irish union leaders in the pay of the bosses.²² The self-styled Patriots are so contentious, the immigrant decides, that their newspaper, Concordia, should be called Discordia—a clear reference to the Polish National Alliance weekly Zgoda, or Harmony.²³ Only Ameryka-Echo speaks with an honest voice: “Paryski teaches people to follow their own mind, walk under their own power, and not be led like children” (42).

Paryski’s assessment of his own importance may have been more than self-promotion. Numerous immigrant memoirs solicited by the restored Polish government in the 1930s cite his influence. A factory worker writes: “I got the paper Ameryka-Echo and went home and read while my wife listened. I have to admit that at that time the paper was rather progressive. I once read an article from the pen of the now departed Mr. Paryski that people arrive at knowledge and prosperity through reading, that it doesn’t matter what they read as long as they read and read and read some more. I listened to that advice.”²⁴

Cover of Alfons J. Staniewski’s The Daydream (1911). An immigrant is pulled by competing representatives of Polishness: the socialist, the religionist, and the revolutionary.

Another laborer recalls the new ideas reading inspired as the source of an awakened national consciousness (and, no doubt, conflict):

When I got to America I went to church every Sunday and holy day for a year, during which time I wasn’t interested in papers and books. After meeting the fellows who were living with me at my sister’s, who owned several dozen books and got the papers every day, I started to read Ameryka-Echo and Gwiazda Polarna. . . . I liked reading [Ameryka-Echo] so much, and reading in general, that I couldn’t wait to get home from work to see what was new in the paper. I borrowed books from the fellows and in the factory I read on the sly. There was [Sienkiewicz’s] Potop, Ogniem i mieczem, Krzyżacy, Pan Wołodyjowski, and other little brochures. Those books and newspapers opened my eyes, so that from then on I felt what I was and what Poland was, what a series of battles she went through for her national unity, about the heroes and traitors. I wanted to know everything at once, so I didn’t have time to go to church because I preferred to finish reading my book or start a new one.²⁵

Paryski, Dyniewicz, and other journalist-publishers were able to operate so successfully in part because the business of journalism facilitated book production. First, it was expedited and made less expensive by the use of technologies and distribution networks already in place for the production of newspapers. Not only did Paryski, for example, offer subscribers book premiums (along with silverware, razors, and curative “electro-chemical” jewelry), but he and other publishers often issued in book form novels and short stories that they also serialized in their papers.²⁶

A high-volume newspaper business (Chojnacki reports a circulation of more than one hundred thousand for the daily Ameryka-Echo by World War I) also made possible the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment and the employment of a specialized workforce.²⁷ While other newspaper editors might be writing (or, as critics charged, clipping) copy, setting type, running presses, and sweeping floors, in 1911 Paryski employed seventy men and women in his printery alone.²⁸ In conjunction with newspaper publishing, book production could be very cheap, and very profitable.

Toledo printing plant of Ameryka-Echo and the Paryski company. Source: [Rosiński], Antoni A. Paryski: Życie, prace, i czyny. Courtesy Paryski family

That these works were so often produced by newspaper publishers also accounts in part for their ephemerality, and perhaps for a perception of their artistic inferiority. Most books appeared on cheap newsprint in chapbook editions, many fewer than one hundred pages long. Relatively few books, rarely works of immigrant fiction, were published in hardcover. But it was these low production values that made literature available to an enormous number of Polish immigrants on very limited incomes, facilitating the emergence of a populace of reader-consumers. Of three hundred forty items in Paryski’s 1911 catalog, nearly half were priced at from five to ten cents. Dyniewicz’s 1913 prices averaged only slightly higher. Given that Ameryka-Echo offered readers one dollar’s worth of books for each newspaper subscription, these books must have been distributed in large numbers. Paryski alone, it is estimated, was responsible for twenty-five hundred separate titles, amounting to up to eight million pieces.²⁹ Distrust of the clergy did not prevent him from publishing religious volumes, either, including Roman Catholic prayer books. The market-conscious Paryski, like Dyniewicz, priced these popular items higher than his other publications. His Lives of the Saints, for instance, sold for five dollars, and his fanciest Bible for an astounding twenty-five dollars.³⁰

Whatever the success of certain publishers, journalism could be a precarious profession. Julian Czupka, in “W jaki sposób zostałem literatem” (How I became a writer), describes the precarious existence of a Polish literary magazine in 1890s New York. For his investment in the enterprise, Czupka is paid four dollars a week “with the right to sleep on a table in the editorial office.”³¹ The workers live off handouts from their advertisers, and every week their manager has to win the money for newsprint at the card table: “When he won, the paper came out; when he lost, the world was deprived of that week’s pearl of literature.”³²

Almost no evidence exists of how much authors were paid for their work, as company records are rare, but the financial possibilities for immigrant writers were certainly limited.³³ Although Paryski claimed, in 1891, to have paid Alfons Chrostowski $150 for his novel Uwiedziona (copies of which sold for thirty-five cents), other writers complained that they weren’t paid at all. Stanisław Osada admitted, “It is indeed rare to hear of a case in which the author received some money for his work. As a rule, he would be presented with a few copies. Very often the author himself would cover the cost of publishing his book.”³⁴

In 1907 Helena Staś blamed the Polish-American press and publishers for undermining the development of Polonian literature, and of national consciousness, by refusing to compensate contributors: “I’m sure that more than one youth in America has tried his literary powers in the Polish papers, but when his work was exploited, and other papers repeatedly criticized it, he transferred his efforts to a foreign field, because there they value it and pay for it. If in these circumstances the youth is denationalized, whose fault is it?” It is no wonder, given publishers’ economic exigencies, ideological requirements, or simple power plays, that many Polish-language authors who were determined to see their work in print were forced to publish it themselves.³⁵

Staś claimed to have no choice but to “turn away from my countrymen. . . . Rather than my own, I have to learn a foreign language; rather than by my own, I must be moved by a foreign spirit.”³⁶ She was to repeat charges like these, and worse, in her self-published 1910 novel In the Human Market, bitter with criticism of institutional leadership in general, and of the immigrant press and publishing industry in particular. In this and other works, Staś pleads for a distinctly Polish-American literature that addresses readers’ experiences and concerns while serving national and community ideals.

But struggling immigrant authors were at a disadvantage, because publishers had a steady supply of literary material for which they did not have to pay at all. Book pirating was widespread among Polish-American publishing houses. In fact, even after the 1891 enactment of copyright laws, Russian Poland was still not under copyright agreement with the United States.³⁷ Again, Dyniewicz and Paryski were the most blatant offenders. Paryski, for instance, issued Polish-language editions of The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (without crediting an author), along with works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Upton Sinclair, and Leo Tolstoy, as well as by contemporary and classic Polish authors. The matter seems to have given immigrant publishers very little concern, as evidenced by Paryski’s reprint of a Warsaw newspaper’s description of his company, in which the correspondent reveals that

[Polish-]American publishers reprint without paying the European authors for their works, unless the author takes out a copyright in Washington for a given work. . . . T[adeusz] Korzon didn’t get any material benefit at all from the fact that ten thousand copies of his general history were distributed in America. [Kazimierz] Gorzycki was suffering dire poverty while tens of thousands of copies of his “Social History of Poland” were being reprinted. [Yet] neither of these authors would be one jot richer if those reprints did not exist; as for the distribution of their books in America, they have a certain moral satisfaction that their works are entering the consciousness of the nation.³⁸

Publishers were probably convinced that they would not be prosecuted by Polish authors and copyright holders across the ocean, and that non-Polish authors would not even be aware that their works were being released in Polish-language editions. Still, occasional attempts were made to protect authors. In his Winona, Minnesota, newspaper, Hieronim Derdowski alerted writers in Poland that their works were being reprinted in America and advised them that they had legal recourse. He even offered an English-language sample letter enabling them to request a copy of American copyright laws from the Library of Congress.³⁹ Gwiazda polarna was threatened with a lawsuit when Polish Nobel Prize winner Władysław Reymont, on a trip to the United States, discovered his novel Chłopi being serialized in its pages. When the publishers were forced to pay him a settlement, spiteful critics reportedly rejoiced that “at least one writer made something off them.”⁴⁰ But piracy was so lucrative, and the efforts to stop it so haphazard, that it continued unabated until World War I.

If unpaid immigrant writers and pirated European ones were to take comfort in the knowledge that they were contributing to Polonia’s enlightenment, the same blend of business strategy and national mission is discernible in publishers’ promotional techniques. Besides offering their publications in bookstores (in Dyniewicz’s case, one he himself owned) and through newspaper mail order advertisements, large publishers used networks of newspaper subscription canvassers to publicize and sell books as well. These “education agents,” combining organic work with traveling salesmanship, traversed Polish settlements, visiting immigrants in their homes and suggesting reading material in addition to the newspapers they were promoting. Wiktor Rosiński, one of Ameryka-Echo’s editors after Paryski’s death in 1935, described the work of the company’s twenty-five hundred agents: “More than one of them, working hard for the cause and sometimes hungry, read selections aloud from [Sienkiewicz’s] Trylogia, or [Prus’s] Faraon to workers gathered in a boardinghouse room in the remote hamlets of Pennsylvania or Massachusetts.”⁴¹ A 1911 report describes how “an agent meets workers coming out of the factory or sitting in the tavern on Sunday, spreads out his brochures and books, pushes a five-cent booklet, and gets a promise that the customer will read through it; . . . if an interest in reading is awakened, he has another purchaser and a subscriber to Ameryka-Echo.” The approximately one hundred fifty agents in Paryski’s employ, the report continues, earned 50 percent of the price of their sales, averaging salaries of around $15 a week, or $780 a year, though some agents earned even more by hiring their own hawkers.⁴² According to Paryski, however, agents earned from one to five thousand dollars a year.⁴³ At any rate, the incentive to sell Paryski’s books was surely made more urgent by the fact that the agents purchased up front the merchandise they carried.

These traveling agents are also narrators in some of the advertising fiction through which Paryski promoted his newspaper and books, and which sell the very act of reading, often by linking it to family and community cohesiveness. In these tales, reading is a social force for bringing together divided families. Rather than an individual act isolating each reader within a private experience, reading is communal, reinforcing a shared cultural framework and mutual responsibilities and expectations. Whether the readers are weary miners in a boardinghouse or husband and wife in their bedroom, they are participating in a shared act of mutual consciousness that was an important mechanism of community formation and regeneration. One humorous story, Wójcik’s “Przygody agenta” (The adventures of an agent), relates how a clever book agent is able to get a reluctant wife to sleep with her simpleminded husband by selling him a subscription to Ameryka-Echo. Finally convinced of her husband’s worthiness, the wife reads to him in bed from Paryski’s edition of The Thousand and One Nights. Next, with a Paryski cookbook, she plans a feast for her neighbors and family, for the priest who married them, and for the book agent who brought them together.⁴⁴

Polish literary critic Julian Krzyżanowski calls the positivists “worshippers of light,”⁴⁵ and Helena Staś’s promotional tale, “Wspomnienia z agentury Ameryki-Echa: Błogosławieni” (Reminiscences of an Ameryka-Echo agent: The blessed) makes particular use of this positivist imagery. It also offers a poignantly ambiguous portrait of the Polish-American counterpart to Davies’s “young lady of good family with a textbook under her shawl.” Like Wójcik’s tale, it argues for reading as the catalyst for domestic accord, but it is also marked by the isolation that independent women face in many Polonian narratives. In a miserable tenement household a wife would rather her husband drink his money away than spend it on a newspaper. “I don’t want him to read. . . . I don’t like reading,” she tells the woman book agent. But driven by desperation at her husband’s nightly retreat to the saloon, the wife finally agrees to subscribe to Ameryka-Echo and to buy a copy of Lives of the Saints. “Will the day come when darkness and evil will yield, and husband and wife in the golden rays of consciousness will join hands and be one desire, one love, one soul?” the agent wonders. Returning several weeks later to find the husband reading aloud to his wife, she steals away from the door rather than disturb them. Then, finding a rare extra nickel in her purse, she wonders what to do with it: “If I had been a man, I certainly would have had a drink.” Instead, she goes to a five-cent show, where the presentation is a living tableau of Jesus, bearing “Love and Light.” Her joy will not allow her to sleep, and as day breaks she rejoices, “Blessed are the Light Bearers! Blessed!”⁴⁶

For Wójcik, the secrets of the marriage bed are community concerns. But for Staś, even a glimpse of the reading couple is indiscreet. Her narrator is isolated, although she moves through public spaces and participates in communal events. She is not invited to the marriage feast. Part of the difference lies no doubt in Staś’s own bitter experience as a struggling writer. But the sphere of activity for a woman book agent, of which there were very few, along with her ability to make a living, must have been especially limited and precarious.⁴⁷ It is unlikely that she would have been able, for instance, to read Sienkiewicz to miners in their rented rooms, or sell books over a Sunday beer in the local tavern. Even visiting strangers’ homes must have been cause for some suspicion. And the life experiences that would have propelled an immigrant woman into this profession—widowhood, separation, divorce, even higher education or intellectual ambition not directed toward church or fraternal activity—are likely to have also set her apart within the community, though not necessarily to have removed her from it. It is no surprise, then, that Staś’s narrator moves about alone, even through her own territory. She and other immigrant women authors and journalists struggled against institutional barriers that their male colleagues not only did not face, but sometimes deliberately placed in their paths.

Since most Polish-American authors maneuvered within a relatively limited network of other journalist-authors who often circulated from paper to paper, intra-Polonian prejudices and rivalries could play an important part in their careers and reflect the ideological stances toward proper Polishness that they attempted to model in their fiction. Stefania Laudyn’s short story “Biały murzyn” (The white Negro) concerns a newspaper editor fired from his position and forced into accepting a rival paper’s offer, even though he has been a vocal opponent of the paper’s politics. In the anti-Semitic Trzech pachciarzy (Three Jewish tenants), by “Stary Związkowiec,” to be discussed in more detail in chapter 5, an insurrectionist-turned-journalist is betrayed by a political opponent. But shaky economics and simple opportunism may also have contributed to the peripatetic careers of many journalist-authors: in the seven years he spent in this country, novelist Henryk Nagiel worked on eight newspapers of widely varying persuasions. Stanisław Osada, whose prolific output includes two important novels, went from Sztandar and Zgoda (Chicago) to Reforma (Buffalo), to Kuryer polski, Dziennik milwaucki, and Tygodnik milwaucki (Milwaukee), to Dziennik polski and Free Poland (Chicago), and finally to Sokół polski (Pittsburgh)—papers ranging from the socialist to the staunchly conservative—all the while contributing to other Polonian and European newspapers and publishing several lengthy historical studies. But despite the instability and infighting, for most authors it was these newspapers and their publishing arms that made up the social and professional networks that enabled them to appear in print in America.

Melania Nesterowicz. Courtesy Basia Kocyan McCoy

It was probably in response to political factionalism and social strictures that many writers published their works under pseudonyms, or even anonymously. While the significance of some of these authorial disguises is not always certain, they occasionally locate their holders in deliberate relation to the touchstones of Polishness in America. Kazimierz Neuman wrote under code names from his revolutionary days. Paryski, whose original name was Panek, sometimes wrote under the name Łowiczanin, which highlighted his origin in the area around the Polish town of Łowicz. Melania Nesterowicz began her journalistic career writing under a male pseudonym and even as a well-established editor often serialized her novels anonymously. Detroit’s Dziennik polski suggested an explanation: “Maybe it was a female inferiority complex. Maybe she lacked the manly courage to look the cruel demands of life bravely in the eye.”⁴⁸ Considering the range of social issues that Nesterowicz confronted in her writing, it is far more likely that she believed her work would be taken more seriously if it were thought to be written by a man. Committed to speaking out on issues she considered important to her readers, Nesterowicz also submitted anonymous articles to rival papers when she disagreed with the editorial stance of her own.⁴⁹

The heyday for Paryski and for Polish-American publishing, particularly of fiction, occurred before World War I. A series of factors led to its swift decline in the 1920s and 1930s. Most important, Poland’s rebirth at the end of the war brought the immigrant community to a crisis of commitment over its relationship to the reborn homeland that had repercussions for all Polonia, including the publishing industry. But with a restored Polish state, Polonia’s intellectuals, many of whom had claimed political oppression as their motivation for immigrating, now had an open road to return. Some of Polonia’s most prominent writers did return to Poland in the 1920s, but the expected mass repatriation from America failed to materialize—the “fourth partition” was establishing its own independence. After peaking in 1921 at a little over forty-two thousand, the number of returnees dwindled to fewer than five hundred persons a year after 1934.⁵⁰ And like the soldiers from Haller’s Army who had resettled in the old country after the war, only to return in disillusionment, some of the repatriated writers reemigrated to America as well. Although emotional ties and an active and vocal sense of Polish advocacy survived, for Polonia the restoration of Polish nationhood led to a general stocktaking of loyalties that, combined with the changing demographics of a maturing immigrant community, resulted in a shift toward American concerns and a more gradual tendency toward English as a literary language.

Polonia’s ideological transformations and aging immigrant population, as well as economic hardship in the United States, produced a new literary profile as well. Not only were fewer titles published, but the nature of those publications, particularly the fiction, was changing. Gone were the days of wholesale book pirating and massive printings of thousands of titles. Though Polish classics were still being reprinted, the medieval legends and tales from The Thousand and One Nights had perhaps outlived their usefulness for turn-of-the-century immigrants and for their children educated in American and Polish-American (parochial) schools. Gone too were the cheaply printed satires, exposés, and instructional tales by a large number of Polonian authors. Fewer new works of fiction were appearing, and the field of authors was narrowing. Generally speaking, those authors still active were producing longer and more sustained works, and producing them regularly. As publishing outlets diminished, however, many of these new works were never released in book form but appeared only in extended serialization. Melania Nesterowicz serialized all her postwar novels in the Buffalo newspaper she edited. Likewise, Bronisław Wrotnowski printed his novels in the monthly literary magazine that he edited.⁵¹

Immigrant communities supported their own bookstores. This one, run by a Mr. Zalewski, was one of several in Chicago circa 1910. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Paryski company appears to have published the works of only one Polonian novelist, Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, whose anticlerical and anti-institutional satires were evidently very popular.⁵² When Antoni Paryski died in 1935, his children and sons-in-law took over the company, but although Ameryka-Echo continued as a weekly into the 1970s, with the printing-house operating as an independent jobber until it closed in 1973, the company’s greatest success was already in the past.

A new company did enter the field in the late 1930s, but its connection with the turn-of-the-century immigrant community was marginal. Formerly of Warsaw, New York’s Roy Publishers (Rój na Wygnaniu; Roy in Exile) printed mainly works by the Polish intellectuals scattered throughout Europe immediately before and after the Second World War, and so never filled the same niche as the earlier companies.⁵³ It belonged, rather, to the new growth of emigré publishing houses, most of them based in Western Europe, that emerged out of the Second World War. In the 1950s the Roy Company was merged with the old Polish American Book Publishing Company, and finally both failed.

In 1935, after an extended visit to the United States, Polish writer Wacław Gąsiorowski admitted that Polonian books had their own “long history, a history now and then vexing for Polish authors, but fertile and full of confused efforts.” He speculated on the cause of their demise, blaming it on personal temperaments inadequate to the challenge; on a lack of enterprising booksellers, committed activists, and skillful publishers; on poor support from the Polish press; and on the comparative “poverty of the typographical garment.” Still, he concluded, “It’s hard to blame a group of five million across the ocean, when in the thirty-million-strong motherland the Polish book goes begging.”⁵⁴

The designation of 1938 as the Year of the Polish Book in America was an admitted reaction to the deteriorating state of book production and consumption within Polonia. In addition to efforts to make books from Poland available in America and to promote reading through the establishment of book clubs and the awarding of books as premiums and prizes, Waldo proposed measures that would have given Polish-American works a wider profile and made them available to a broader audience. Besides calling for the return of the house-to-house book agent and for more extensive advertising and critical reviewing, he proposed a Polish-American library committee that would publish in book form works that were then appearing only in newspapers, and, perhaps most importantly, a translation project to introduce Polish-American works to an American market. The project, he appealed, was both patriotic and commercial. But only one Polish-American book, in Polish, was published under the project’s auspices, the Waldo-edited collection of memoirs and short stories of Haller’s Army, The Armed Effort of U.S. Polonia. Despite Waldo’s efforts and the continued operation of major publishers, as Gąsiorowski had concluded, “The fine times of Dyniewicz, Michał Kruszka, and Paryski have passed, never to return” (97).

Cover of Artur L. Waldo’s The Charm of the Town of Kosciuszko (1936), a novel celebrating the centennial of the founding of Kosciuszko, Mississippi. Courtesy Alumni Memorial Library, St. Mary’s College of Ave Maria University