Читать книгу The Grasinski Girls - Mary Patrice Erdmans - Страница 15

2

Ethnicity in the Belly of the Family

It’s not something I think about, but it’s with me every day of my life.

Mari

AT ONE POINT in the middle of this project, one of my aunts pulled me aside and confided, “You know, there’s not much that’s Polish about us except the name Grasinski, and that isn’t really Polish, it’s Russian.” Other family members pointed out that our bloodlines are predominantly German. Johann Fifelski, rumored to have been born out of wedlock, would have been a Von Wagonner had his father the lord married his mother the peasant. Instead, the single mother’s surname got passed down, and with it, Polishness. Or so the story is told. Johann’s great-granddaughter and granddaughter-inlaw wrote a detailed Fifelski history that never mentions this bloodline slippage. But my aunts and my own sisters have all heard this. The story that we come from aristocracy through illegitimacy is a rewarding fantasy of origin that helps us to accept our class position while at the same time reminding us that class and status do matter. In this case, status was linked to ethnicity because the lord was German and the peasant Polish.

Not only are we German, but we’re supposedly Russian as well. Mari believes she is mostly Russian; Nadine acknowledges Russian bloodlines (she sells her crafts under the label “Vineyard Couture, made by Nadja,” using a Russian spelling of her name); and Caroline, the most “practicing” Polish American of the sisters, laments, “I’m not even sure they were Polish. That Grusczynski, he could have been Russian, ’cause you see that name a lot on the Russian side, and could even have been Russian Jewish or something a little bit in there, I mean. And then my dad is German, too, because his mother was pure German, you know, Grandma Anna was pure German. And then on the Fifelski side, they say there was a lot of German and then Polish [laugh].” The older sisters support their claims to Russian ancestry (and perhaps even that they were Russian Jews) by noting that the priest wrote their father’s name with a “y” (“Grushinsky”) on his baptismal certificate (evidence of his Jewishness is found in a Catholic ceremony?), that their father spoke some Yiddish words (they remember the word shiksa), that their brother “looked Russian,” and that their mother Helen told them that their grandma and grandpa Grusczynski had Russian blood (yet, in the same breath, they tell me that their grandma Anna Tice Grusczynski was “pure German”).

The confusion in part relates to the political morass of history: because Poland was annexed in the 1790s by its more powerful neighbors Prussia, Russia, and Austria, the emigrants who left before Poland regained its independence in 1918 were not Polish nationals. The Grasinski sisters vaguely understand this. This ambiguity of borders allows them more freedom to construct their myth of origin, though they would never think of themselves as actively constructing their ethnicity. They confess to blood-mixing and lineage confusion because they understand ethnicity as a descent identity—something that is passed down the generations, that is “given” to them.¹ Polishness is in the blood; they feel its primordial pulse in their toes tapping to the accordion and their fingertips moving over the shiny amber beads of the rosary. Mari finds her Polishness “in my face, my legs, and my mannerisms.” Nadine says the Grasinski Girls may be more Russian and German, but they “still got that Polish blood.”²

Their reputedly thin Polish bloodline is more than offset by their thick Polish heritage. They were raised by ethnic Poles. All records indicate the Fifelskis, Chylewskas, Zulawskis, and Grusczynskis were Polish Roman Catholics. They came from the Prussian partition of Poland and spoke Polish; their gravestones were written in Polish; they moved to a Polish rural community in the United States, were part of a Polish Roman Catholic parish, and taught their children that they were Polish.

Leaving aside bloodlines, Fran makes a more sociological argument for why “we are not Polish!” The Grasinski Girls don’t “do” Polish things, she says: they don’t follow many Polish traditions, cook or eat much Polish food, speak Polish, belong to Polish organizations, or visit Poland. Compared to her friends who are actively Polish, she and her sisters fall short.

Do you keep Polish traditions? I ask Nadine. “Not that much. I guess Polish traditions to me would be having the opłatki, getting blessed food for Holy Saturday.” Do you do those things? “No, not really. Sometimes.” But she “loves Polish food,” especially “the sauerkraut and gołąbki and some of the Polish things.” Yet even though she edits the first draft, insisting I include that she “enjoys cooking this way,” she seldom does—in fact, only on Christmas, and then not every year. Nadine finally concedes, “Aaah, not that many Polish customs.”

And yet, she said, “I love being Polish, I love Polishness.” All the Grasinski Girls expressed a similar affection for being Polish. While they may not “be” or “do” Polish in terms of bloodlines and behavior, Polishness still gives them something. So, what does it give them? What does ethnicity mean to third- and fourth-generation women of European ancestry?³

. . .

ME: Once you got married, you had the Erdmans name, so no one really knows that you’re Polish.

ANGEL: No, but I tell everyone I’m Polish, because I don’t want them to think I’m a Hollander. So, I say, “Now, my name is really Grasinski, that means I’m Polish. I’m not Dutch.”

While working in the Grand Rapids library collecting data for this book, I wrote out a check for photocopying one day, and the librarian who had been helping me smiled and said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were an Eerdmans.” In Grand Rapids, home of Eerdmans Publishing Company, the name identifies me. It places me both in an elite circle of prominent names and in the Dutch ethnic community—and class and ethnicity overlap. I smiled at the comment, ego-pleased to be identified, but self-conscious of the fact that my class and ethnic heritage were both mislabeled. While distant bloodlines connect me to the publishing company (my great-grandfather was the cousin of William B. Eerdmans), my lived experiences do not. I tell him, “Yeah, I’m an Erdmans, but I come from the Polish side of the family that no one mentions.” He didn’t laugh.

In the early twentieth century, the Yankee Protestants and Dutch Calvinists were the industrial, political, and moral leaders of Grand Rapids. Poles and other new immigrants (e.g., Lithuanians and Italians) occupied the lower class rungs.⁴ The Poles were paid less than their Dutch co-workers, they were politically underrepresented, and they were morally criticized for their more unrestrained leisure activities.⁵

This all changed, however, by midcentury. With immigration sharply curtailed, the community became mostly second- and third-generation Americans of Polish descent. That descent was often hidden, as in the case of the first Polish-American mayor, Stanley (Dyszkiewicz) Davis, elected in 1953. Class mobility accompanied cultural assimilation and the practices and homes of the professional middle class outgrew the Polish West Side. Moreover, with the strong post–World War II economy and the presence of the automobile industry and its labor union, the United Automobile Workers, many Polish Americans occupied secure working-class positions. While the Dutch remained the cultural, religious, and intellectual leaders (Calvin College and Hope College, both Calvinist institutions, are the most prominent local schools), Polish Americans were moving on up.

The only discrimination the Grasinski Girls identified occurred more than forty years ago and was linked to their religious identity. In Grand Rapids, this identity is bundled with ethnic identity, so that we speak of Polish Catholics and Dutch Calvinists. Fran recalls that, during the Depression years, “We had a hard time finding [a place to] rent because, uh, because we were Catholic. I mean, there were a lot of people against the Catholics at that time.” Angel had the most explicit examples of discrimination. One of the reasons she was conscious of them was because she moved through Grand Rapids under the cover of her husband’s Dutch surname. She could then see people treat her differently when they found out she wasn’t Christian Reform or Dutch, and, as she said earlier, she made it clear she was not.

We were discriminated against twice. The first place was when we got married. We wanted to rent a home from a lady, and it said, “Christian couple wanted.” And we are Christian, we’re Catholic. And everything was fine and dandy, she was going to rent it to us, and then Dad asked her where the nearest Catholic Church was. And just like that, she looked at us and said, “You’re not Christian, you’re Catholic. I would never rent to you.” I said, “Okay.” I guess I didn’t want to live in a place where somebody didn’t want me.

A second, similar instance occurred when they tried to buy a home in a predominantly Dutch suburb.

Forty years ago, ethnic identity was still a basis for ranking in Grand Rapids, but it was linked to religious identity. Even so, the discrimination they experienced was mild and infrequent; those were the only examples that any of the five sisters reported. By the time they married and bought houses in the suburbs, the Grasinski Girls were structurally and culturally assimilated, as were most third- and fourth-generation European Americans. This assimilation, along with the increased presence of blacks and Latinos in the city, made race the more salient basis for delineation of neighborhoods, friendships, and jobs.

While Poles were subject to prejudice, discrimination, and racist beliefs of inferiority in the early part of the twentieth century, by midcentury they had been racialized into the dominant white category.⁶ As early as the 1960s, census reports show that on measures of median school years completed and family income, Polish Americans were doing as well as other ethnic groups of European ancestry and better than nonwhite groups. Polish Americans were still more likely to be found in working-class positions, however, and their aggregate income levels were influenced more by unionized high-wage blue-collar positions than by a significant movement into the white-collar middle class. While there has always been a Polish-American middle class, the occupational mobility of Polish Americans was stunted until the 1970s, when the sons and daughters of the blue-collar aristocracy began graduating from college.⁷ By the 1980s, however, Polish Americans were as similar to other European descendants on indicators of income, occupation, and education as they were distinguishable from the descendants of African slaves and Latin American immigrants.⁸

Despite these indicators of parity, some scholars continue to argue that Polish Americans are a discriminated group, underrepresented in corporate, political, academic, and ecclesiastical hierarchies.⁹ And, in fact, there is evidence that Polish Americans are still negatively stereotyped as dumb, racist, and uncultured.¹⁰ Antidefamation groups continue to fight the stereotypes perpetuated in joke books, television sitcoms, advertisements, and documentaries.¹¹ While there is some evidence that Polish Americans experience discrimination, this was not the case for the Grasinski Girls.

The Grasinski Girls did hear Polish jokes, which they brushed aside with self-confidence. Angel said, “Once in a while, somebody’d say a Polish joke, but you can make it Polish or Dutch; I don’t get offended by that. Wherever I’ve worked, I’ve always managed to convince them that I was much smarter than they were.” I laughed when she said this. “No! I’m not kidding you!” she responded. I found this somewhat incredible. Polish-American antidefamation organizations actively fight the Polish joke, scholars write about the problems of the Polish joke, and this Polish-American woman hears Polish jokes and it does not bother her because she believes she is smarter than the joke tellers. She sees no need to repeat Stanley Kowalski’s defensive moan, “I am not a Polack . . . I am a hundred percent American!” Angel’s American status is not threatened by her Polish ancestry because, despite the lingering jokes, her family and most Polish Americans have become secure in their identity as Americans. Their acceptance as Americans gives them the confidence to more openly embrace their Polish heritage. Since the 1970s, the stigma of Polishness has given way to a “Kiss-me-I’m-Polish” attitude. Some of the factors accounting for this overt ethnic pride include the government-supported policy of multiculturalism, the identity movements of the 1960s, as well as the election of a Polish pope in 1978 and the international attention on the Solidarity movement in Poland in the 1980s.¹²

The valuation of their ethnic heritage comes in part from their reference group, their co-ethnics. Except for Mari, each of the Grasinski Girls, while she was a “Grasinski,” lived in Polish-American communities where their ethnicity was valued. As Angel explains, “Growing up in this community of Polish Catholic people, you have gotten all your self-esteem, so by the time you’re grown up, I mean, if somebody wants to say something about Polish, you don’t care, because your self-esteem, it’s already high. Like I said, when we went to high school, we were always looked up to because we were the Polish girls, you know, the pretty girls and smart and respectful. So that sort of validated it.” When they left the safe haven of the Polish neighborhoods they also left the mark of their stigma, their Polish names, behind. The two sisters who kept their Polish identifiers, Caroline Matecki and Nadine Grasinski, also remained within Polish communities—Caroline in Hilliards and Nadine with the Polish Felician Order of nuns. The others, as they moved into non-Polish neighborhoods, did so with non-Polish married names, which gave them the choice of whether and when to reveal their ethnic identity. For European Americans, the surname is a patent ethnic marker which becomes the lightning rod for prejudice and discrimination. Without their Polish maiden names (and by marrying men without Polish surnames), they decreased their chances of experiencing discrimination.¹³

For the Grasinski Girls, ethnicity is not a structural identity; that is, it does not determine social ranking, it does not determine resources and opportunities. For them, race is the structural identity. While their whiteness was seldom articulated in their narratives (they never talked about being white, but they did identify others as being black or Hispanic), they also did not use their ethnic identity to hide their race. That is, they did not claim to be Americans of Polish descent as a substitution for being “white.” Scholars such as Mary Waters have argued that European ethnicity persists into the latter generations because it helps whites to hide the privileges of their whiteness and gain access to multicultural resources.¹⁴ But I did not see this to be the case. The Grasinski Girls never pretended that their ethnicity was a structural identity. They never even hinted that being Polish was similar to being a racial minority. They do not claim the status of victims—that is, that Polish Americans are an oppressed people and therefore deserving of affirmative-action preferences.

While vestiges of historical discrimination may produce disproportionate underrepresentation in government, education, and religious institutions, while negative labels may still accompany Polish names, and while working-class Polish Americans do not have the economic power and status of the professional middle class, Polish Americans are nonetheless white.¹⁵ And, in a racist society, that matters. In order to understand ethnicity in the third and fourth generations, we need to separate it from whiteness.

For the Grasinski Girls, whiteness is an identity, while ethnicity is a culture. Identities locate us in the social structure, determining who is above and below us. It is in the presence of the other (e.g., the Dutch, or African Americans) that we see our relative position. In contrast, culture is a set of routines and values and as such it requires in-group members to teach these values and participate in the routines.¹⁶ Identities are salient because they order resources, opportunities, and networks, as well as determine privilege, define power relations, and differentiate positions of subordination and domination. But culture is meaningful because it patterns the routines of our lives, and it is those routines that challenge or reproduce the social structures. It is in culture that we find agency. So, what does Polish-American culture look like in later generations at the end of the twentieth century?

. . .

Today, the parish priest at St. Stanislaus in Hilliards is Father Vinh Le, an immigrant from Vietnam. They buy Polish rye bread in old Sercowo from the American Bakery, owned by Asian Indians. Polish is no longer spoken on the streets of the West Side, the dance halls are vacant, and today it is not the Poles who are being arrested for public drunkenness. The Polish Catholic Cemetery was renamed Holy Cross Cemetery in 1947, and the last issue of the Polish-language newspaper was printed in 1957. A few meat markets selling kiełbasa and herring remain open, enough so that we can still refer to the West Side as the place to buy Polish food. But Highway 131, built in the 1950s, slashed through Wojciechowo and Cegielnia. The houses left standing under the belly of the highway are unkempt and board-ragged. Suburbanization pulled many Polish Americans away from the city; urban renewal pushed out others. Declining property prices and wasted interiors lowered rents and brought in the poorer populations, which, as in other U.S. cities, have darker skin than the descendants of Europeans.¹⁷ Banks contributed to the destruction by redlining the highway-ravaged, racially torn neighborhoods.¹⁸

This transformation of the Polish neighborhood is recapitulated in Polish-American individuals. The Polish community no longer stands as a community apart from the city, and Polish-American culture no longer uniquely defines the self. By the later generations, these Americans claim some Polish (or German and Russian) ancestry, but they are not Poles, or even Polish Americans. Commenting on the draft of the manuscript, Fran was annoyed that I kept referring to them as Polish Americans: “I am an American first before I am Polish.” I asked her if she preferred the term “American of Polish descent” and she nodded in agreement.¹⁹ Caroline agreed.

Polishness for later-generation Americans of Polish descent is a consent identity—it is a choice. Like purchasing kiełbasa on the West Side, they can buy into their Polish heritage if they want. John Bukowczyk writes of the third generation, “Homogenized—or, for the upwardly mobile, assimilated—they were Polish-Americans only when they wanted to be.”²⁰ And this homogenization was also partly a choice. The same assimilation processes affecting other white ethnic groups—intermarriage, suburbanization, mass consumer culture, and religious ties—took them away from co-ethnics and led them to forget and discontinue many of the cultural routines of Polishness.²¹ While some of the attrition was forced, assimilation also represented a conscious desire, and ability, to join the dominant group.²² They changed their surnames to avoid discrimination, but also so that their neighbors could more easily pronounce them.²³ Thus, Grusczynski became Grasinski became Grayson (the name Joe Jr. used when performing as a country singer). And the Grasinski Girls married into Hrouda, Erdmans, and Hillary surnames.

Assimilation is linked to social mobility. Moving up the social ladder usually means moving away from the ethnic community.²⁴ Yet, members of the middle class do not necessarily lose their ethnicity when they move to the suburbs, because they can keep ties to the community through participation in ethnic organizations, and keep an affinity to the culture through the reproduction of ethnic rituals.²⁵ But the Grasinski Girls without the Grasinski name did not belong to ethnic organizations, did not share their everyday routines with co-ethnics, and did not consciously practice many Polish rituals. So, what does it mean when Mari says that her Polishness is “not something I think about, but it’s something that’s with me every single day of my life”?

. . .

A few years ago I visited Pittsburgh. I was living in North Carolina at the time, and I was looking forward to going “north” to an “ethnic” city with a history of Polish and Italian immigration. I could find only one Polish restaurant listed in the telephone directory and I convinced my non-Polish-American colleagues to go there for dinner. From the highway, we could see a large Polish eagle painted on the brick wall of the building, with an inscription written in Polish. When we arrived at six-thirty, a white-haired Polish-American matron gave us a menu that included pierogi, gołąbki, and kiełbasa. They served Budweiser. By eight, the mood of the place began to change. The waitresses were counting their tips and getting ready to cash out and go home, while young twenty-something kids in spiked blue hair and pierced body parts started arriving and a rave band set up on stage. A Polish restaurant by day was one of the best venues for new music at night. They had newspaper clippings framed on the wall to attest to both sources of fame—winner of the prize for best pierogi in town eight years in a row, and a glowing write-up on the music scene by a local critic. Polishness in a postmodern America.

We assume, perhaps too quickly, that Polishness derives from Poland. While it is certainly true that many routines within the ethnic culture originate in the home country and are carried over to the United States with the immigrant group, they always get transformed within the sociohistorical, class, and race culture of the new country. For example, the polka, traditionally working-class music, has changed over time as it was adapted to changes in class structures, musical tastes, and residential patterns. Today, polka bands are performing in non-Polish venues and blending the strains together with the sounds of big band, rock, and country music.²⁶ Ethnicity is constructed and reconstructed over time so that what takes hold is a Polish-American culture, which at most bears only a shadow of a semblance to something from Poland.²⁷ In fact, the polka, while certainly part of Polish-American culture, did not originate in Poland, where it is seen as something American. In 1987, I was in Poland, eating alone at a restaurant that had a dance floor and a band. A persistent middle-aged man, speaking Polish, asked me several times to dance. I refused by saying I did not know how. Waltz? No. Tango? No. American? Yes. Where? Chicago. He smiled and walked away. I figured I had convinced him that Americans did not know how to dance. The next song the band played was “Beer Barrel Polka,” and he was standing next to me insisting I knew this dance because “I came from America.”

The stuff of Polish-American culture is often named: foods (kiełbasa, gołąbki, pierogi, pączki, and chruściki), dances (polka, mazurka, oberek, krakowiak, and kujawiak), religious rituals (Advent, roraty, Wigilia, opłatek, Pasterka, the Christmas blessing of the house, the blessing of the Easter baskets, May processions for Mary and June processions for Corpus Christi), and religious icons (Our Lady of Częstochowa, the wreath of thorns around the Sacred Heart of Jesus).²⁸ In addition, Polish-American culture is reputed to include lavish flower gardens, stable marriages, robust men and women, modest small-frame homes, and strong workers who are thrifty and resourceful. Polish-American values include family solidarity, well-disciplined children, humble acceptance of social class, hard work, well-cared-for lawns, and clean homes.²⁹

But what does the Polishness of the Grasinski Girls look like? If I make a checklist and find that they eat three of the four basic Polish foods or celebrate five of nine religious rituals, does that make them Polish? Caroline makes all of the Polish dishes mentioned. And they have flower gardens, work hard, adore the Virgin Mary, and pray to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Does that make them Polish American?

Polishness may be a derivative of Poland, but the Grasinski Girls have no connection to Poland, neither political, nor social, nor intellectual. They carry no memories of Poland, have no understanding of Polish history, revere no Polish heroes. They know neither Sienkiewicz nor Kościuszko (though the older sisters tell me they recognize this name), nor Mickiewicz, Piłsudski, or Jaruzelski. However, the older sisters do know of the pianist Ignacy Paderewski, and they all know Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul.

Despite their minimal intellectual, affective, and political ties to Poland, they nonetheless posit Poland as the source of real Polishness, and in doing so they minimize their American-grown Polishness. For them, Poland creates genuine Polishness, the right way to be Polish, and they question their own ethnicity in this language of “realness”—we are not “that Polish,” my friends are “more Polish” than me. In talking about the West Side of Grand Rapids, Caroline said that, during the 1930s, the people who lived a few streets over from them “came right from the old country, you know, like the busias with the scarves and stuff like that, but the people on that side, they were like, they were the real, you know, like the Polish people, Polish-Polish people.” If that from Poland is real, then is that from America fake? One Christmas, Angel made chruściki [a pastry] for the first time and said, “They are not like the ones from Little Warsaw [a Polish restaurant on the West Side of Grand Rapids, now closed], but mine are the real chruściki like they make in Poland.”

It is when they ground Polishness in Poland that they, too, feel “there is not much that is Polish” in them. Their own Polishness is diminished when they define its constructedness as some sort of bastardization, while that which originates from Poland is blue blood. Caroline asserts, “I like my Polish ancestry, I mean I wish they would have kept Grusczynski instead of Grasinski ’cause that has no meaning, that Grasinski, that’s something they just made, you know, just made up. And the Grusczynski, that’s a good strong name. I feel really bad ’cause Grasinski, it doesn’t belong to anybody. You know, and this is what you are, and that is a pretty good name, ’cause I’ve seen in books, that one book, the Russian one, his name was Grusczynski, the captain of that boat.”

Grasinski is a Polish-American name. She is Polish-American. But to her, the name is weakened by the fact that it was “made up.” Angel agrees, and wishes they would have kept “the real name.” And yet, Grasinski is a real name.

. . .

Looking back toward Poland does not necessarily help us find the meaning of ethnic culture in the later generations. After a century of American assimilation, Polishness is a shadow, a childhood faded, a language read but not understood. The Grasinski Girls can phonetically read Polish, sing Polish Christmas carols, and pronounce Polish names, but they have no understanding of what the words mean, beyond the rudiments, like Jezu means Jesus.³⁰ As a result, their Polishness is hidden behind a cluster of pronounceable but incomprehensible consonants that beg for a vowel. They wish they knew Polish, but no one taught them, neither their parents nor the Felician nuns at St. Stanislaus.³¹ Nadine recalls that

[a]t home it was the Polish church and school you attended, followed by a Polish convent. I taught at St. Stanislaus and St. Florian’s in Hamtramck and Detroit, big, huge, huge, wonderful churches, and I remember sitting there and listening to these Polish sermons and not knowing a word that they’re saying. . . . I went to the convent, and everything was in Polish. When we went there all the signs were in Polish, and they would tell us, “Go do dishes” and we didn’t understand. [laughs] So they changed the signs in a hurry. But in 1950 everything was Polish, the signs, everything.

And Angel tells me, “We never knew what we were reading. [laughs] We just had Polish readers; I never knew what they were. But that stopped in about the third or fourth grade. I just remember something about reba, r-eb-a is fish³² or something. [laughs] It’s the only word I remember out of the whole Polish book.” Neither Joe nor Helen spoke to their daughters in Polish; they used Polish only when they didn’t want the children to understand them. “She would talk to her sisters on the phone when she didn’t want us to hear.” Polish was the secret language, the cryptic code of their ancestors, the haunting melody of the Polish song their aunts and uncles sang as they lowered the coffin of their grandmother into the ground—though they don’t understand the words, they understand the feelings of sadness and connection evoked by the melody.

Their ethnicity, like their language, is present but not spoken, hidden not absent, private not public. It is housed in the words that they can sing but do not understand, it is in the daily prayers to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, it is in the icons hanging on their wall that tell the symbolic history of Poland that they do not know, the dark-faced Madonna of Częstochowa with the two slash marks on her cheek, the grieving Mother of Jesus, and the twisted thorns around the Sacred Heart.³³ When their mother Helen was dying there were two icons in the room—Our Lady of Częstochowa and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These are familiar icons. I ask them if they know why Our Lady has cuts on her cheek. What they know is that this is their mother’s icon; they have seen it on the wall in every one of her houses and apartments. I explain the story of the Swedes invading and overrunning Poland in the seventeenth century, and how the tide of the war changed and the Swedes were repulsed at Częstochowa. A miracle occurred when a Swedish soldier slashed the cheek of the Madonna and real blood flowed. I tell them the story one afternoon while we are sitting around the bed of my dying grandmother. They don’t care that much. Their mother is dying. They turn to her, their mother, and to the icons on the wall, the familiar Madonna and the bleeding Sacred Heart, comforting familiar pictures from Hilliards that have nothing to do with Swedes and swords.

They are not genuine Poles, they lament, because they don’t speak Polish or belong to Polish organizations. But they are ephemeral Poles. Polishness is tucked away in their prayer cards and icons, in their laughter, cheekbones, skinny ankles, and wide hips, in what gets passed down and what gets reworked. It is in them but overlooked, like so many private and small religious shrines and crosses in fields and backyards in rural central Wisconsin that remain unknown to us because we don’t see them as part of our Polish heritage, part of the way that Poles shaped the landscape of America.³⁴

Some of their Polishness is hidden in the class-biased nature of defined ethnic artifacts. For example, Polish peasant fare, like potatoes and boiled beef, is not considered Polish. As Caroline puts it:

My mom cooked good but she cooked very simple stuff, just like we do today, your meat and your potatoes and stuff like that and not any of the good Polish dishes you hear people talking about all the time. I know that she used to do pig’s feet—clean ’em off, and then cook ’em and put ’em in a pot, and then you’d have them Sunday morning for breakfast. They’d turn that pot over upside down and the pig’s feet were all in that gelatin setting. [laughter] They didn’t eat stuff like you read in Polish cookbooks, like the real stuff, like they did in Poland. They didn’t eat that kind of stuff. But I know they made brains [chuckles], must have been pig brains or cow brains or something, my dad would bring them and they would fry them up with egg or something like that.

Gelatin pig’s feet were Polish fare for the peasants, as were potatoes. Ladislaus is memorialized in the family history as a man who loved potatoes, heaping plates of steamed potatoes. But pig’s feet and potatoes do not get counted as Polish food because they are not in the cookbooks. High-class culture gets constituted as authentic culture, while peasant culture gets discarded from the collective memory like the birth of an illegitimate child.³⁵

Ethnicity is also hidden in women’s work, the kinship work necessary to maintain relations between households.³⁶ These inter-household relations include intergenerational relations, so kinship work involves “passing it down”: keeping the family photo album, telling the stories, deciding who gets Helen’s 1920s button-up shoes (Nadine) and her 1970s mod hot pink sunglasses (me).³⁷ This kinship work provides women with a cultural power as they select what is kept, what is forgotten, and what is transformed.³⁸ But it is also work that is less obvious to those residing only in the public sphere, less known to people who don’t do this type of work. Being an administrative secretary of a Polish organization will secure one a place in the public archives as someone involved in ethnic work, but sitting around a kitchen table telling stories of life in Sercowo gets defined, if defined at all, as kinship maintenance (women’s work) rather than ethnic work.

What did they pass down? Some may argue that they didn’t keep much. Angel says she knows she’s Polish because she laughs all the time. “Who else do you know that laughs, maybe the Italians, but we are always laughing. That’s how you know we are Polish.” And they kept a few religious pictures and phrases like Jezu kochany (often uttered in frustration, it translates as “Jesus my love”). But we need to look harder. Ethnicity remains, in phonetics without semantics and religious icons that have been converted into family history.³⁹ And it is here, in the family, that we see their Polishness. Thomas Gladsky, referring to the short stories of Monika Krawczyk, states that the only things Polish about her characters are their names, but then he looks again and finds that, in her stories, “Polish ethnicity is in the prosperity and continuity of the family.”⁴⁰ Discussing a children’s book written by Anne Pellowski, Bernard Koloski writes, “The family is living an undeclared Polishness. The people do not work at being Polish; they do not much think about themselves in a Polish context. . . . Yet the opening pages of the first volume make clear that this is a distinct community of people bound together by an intense closeness of family, a fervent attachment to the Catholic church, and an unaffected acceptance of a body of folkways that identify them as Polish Americans.”⁴¹ In the same way, the Polishness of the Grasinski Girls is present in their familial relations and religious attachment. Their ethnicity is done in the family, through the family, and for the family.

Polish culture in their private sphere embraces a set of values and routines that help them perform their gender routines and reaffirm their gender ideals.⁴² Polish women are valued for being hardy. Fran remembers her grandma Frances as the little woman pushing a large wheelbarrow. Caroline admires her mother Helen as someone who hung a set of curtains when she was nine months pregnant, standing alone on top of a table. They also respect emotional hardiness, women who can manage the household when the husband is not present. Polish women also value cleanliness and Polish homes are remembered as orderly and neat, and Polish women as good housekeepers.⁴³ Talking about her mother, Fran said, “On Saturday she’d wash all the floors and the linoleum and everything, and they’d all get covered with newspaper so they wouldn’t get dirty right away. It’d come off Sunday morning then. But maybe that was a Polish [laughter], something from the Polish neighborhoods.”

In addition, Polishness supports the role of women as beautifiers. Through flowers and song and the rosary, Polish women engage the soul and humanize the world. Through rituals, lightness, tears, and laughter they transform the drudgery of the night into the lightness of the day. These gendered ethnic routines are acts of resistance against capitalism’s instrumental rationality. Thaddeus Radzilowski writes of Polish-American women: “Whatever light, beauty, love, and humanity appeared in the ugly landscapes of industrial America was in large measure their work.”⁴⁴ And, as a subversion of the dominant order, Polishness celebrates their role as the matriarch of the family. Polishness in women is strength, intelligence, beauty, and responsibility. These traits become manifest in their care of the home, their children, and their husbands. Reproducing family reproduces ethnicity.

The private, gendered meanings of ethnicity are often missed by scholars who interview people like the Grasinski Girls whose ethnicity is suggestive and understated.⁴⁵ Their “undeclared Polishness” is also invisible to scholars who look for ethnicity only in the public space of formal institutions (e.g., newspapers, organizational documents, phone books, government records, plat maps).⁴⁶ This documentation of public Polishness overlooks the ethnic work of kinship maintenance done in the private sphere. What is important is not the “cultural stuff” of ethnicity but the shared history of the family, and it is not ethnicity that creates a shared history but the shared history that creates ethnicity.

. . .

Ethnicity for later-generation white working-class women is intermingled with religious routines. When I asked Angel what she did at home that was Polish, she said, “Probably the traditions.” What traditions? “Well”—she pauses—“Easter and, uh, going to church.”

I scrunch my forehead, breathe through my nose in frustration, and shoot back, “Well, the Dutch Christian Reformers also go to church and celebrate Easter!”

“It’s different,” she said.

“Okay, how?”

“Well, all the Lenten services, going to church a lot. I mean, we would never think of not going to the Stations of the Cross, and going to mass, and going to confession once a month, I mean, if you needed it or not. And all, like, May devotions and Corpus Christi, and, you know, during those days there was like lots of processions, and all that was so much part of your life. Christmas and Easter, probably those were like special times.”

She also described the peripheral aspects of religion, such as the joy of eating chocolate on Easter morning after six weeks of Lenten fasting. Her Polishness is part of her life unconsciously today, when she resurrects the willpower to not eat chocolate with the pleasant memory of how sumptuous chocolate tastes on Easter morning.

When I asked Fran how she knew she was Polish, she also pointed to the routines of the church—“all them processions and everything like that”—and the celebrations of the two main holidays, Christmas and Easter, at home.⁴⁷ “We had our Polish food, your ham and your sausages, and you get your coffee cakes from the Valley City Bakery, and then they’d take that down to the church, and your sausages, all your sausage, take that down to church and they’d bless it for us for Easter. And then I know that we would all dress up and everybody’d get up in the morning and run and kiss Dad and Mom, one right after the other we’d go give them their Easter morning kiss. And we had our Easter candy and stuff.” At another point she exclaimed, her eyes smiling, “And Polish songs! I mean, I sang in the choir. They had only one choir and I sang in the choir when I was ten and I was singing Polish songs. I was singing down here and my dad was up there, singing up above, we were in the same choir!” When asked to talk about her Polishness, Nadine also mentioned Christmas, when “the kolędy are played, and ‘Bóg się Rodzi’ always brings back my daddy singing in the choir.” Ethnicity is performed both at church and at home, both in the public processions and the morning kisses.

. . .