Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski
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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