Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski
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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
3
Crime, Punishment, Atonement
A Family Plot
SURELY AMONG THE publications Paryski’s many critics had in mind when they accused him of pandering to his customer’s lowest tastes, and of degrading rather than uplifting the peasant immigrant’s spirit and intellect, were the crime novels to which we now turn. Crime and detective fiction, although not usually considered a major category of ethnic literature, is fairly well represented within Polish-American literary production. Not only were European works reprinted and serialized, but immigrant authors and publishers produced Polish-American contributions to the genre. In addition to their general appeal, these stories contained particular resonances for immigrants that help account for the genre’s popularity and longevity. Even when lacking the trappings of an immigrant social reality, the Polish-American detective narrative replays the basic tensions over group loyalty and betrayal from within that mark so much other Polonian writing. Rather than standing as an aberration in Polonia’s literary history, it restages these conflicts on the most fundamental level of common peoplehood—the family. Within the changing literary forms and styles these works demonstrate, it is possible to trace Polonia’s shifting political and social emphases, as well as changes in the Polish-American publishing business itself.
As early as the 1890s and up to World War I, Polonian newspapers were serializing and Polonian companies were publishing American and European crime and detective stories, including those of Polish author Walery Przyborowski and, in translation, Arthur Conan Doyle. But American Polonia also had its own fictional detective stories. The earliest of these is journalist Henryk Nagiel’s Kara Boża idzie przez oceany (God’s punishment crosses the ocean), first published in 1896. Before turning to the complexities of this novel, however, it may be helpful to look at a series of crime stories that were published some fifteen years later and whose appearance may have prompted the 1912 reissue of Nagiel’s novel. Although much less sophisticated than Nagiel’s work, these works exhibit in crude outline the problems of family succession and continuity that other immigrant crime and detective novels treat as explicitly ethnic issues.
These were truly “pulps,” printed on cheap newsprint in the form of five-by-seven-inch pamphlets of about fifty pages each. The adventures of Bronisław Sęp and of Zofia Jastrzębska, contained in a dozen or so short works written anonymously and appearing between 1911 and 1916, form the Polish-American counterpart to the American dime novels Michael Denning describes as “an essentially anonymous, ‘unauthored’ discourse” in which the commodity is not the author but the hero.1 They include the Sęp adventures Ofiara