INTRODUCTION

      Reading the Immigrant

      THIS STUDY LOOKS at a forgotten fragment of American literature: immigrant narrative fiction written in Polish and published in the United States before World War II. The purposes of this study are several and necessarily interdisciplinary. It will admit the Polish-language writing of turn-of-the-century immigrants into the scholarly conversation by reopening its long-closed pages, outlining its dimensions, and suggesting its possible significances. It will situate these works within the larger tradition of popular literature and reading in Europe and America alongside which it emerged, and within the context of Polish literary history and American ethnic literary theory, including the newly emerging field of American literature written in languages other than English. But its primary focus will be the role of Polish immigrant, Polish-language fiction in the negotiation of a national and ethnic identity as writers argued the boundaries and obligations of Polishness. If, as Jules Chametzky observed many years later, ethnicity “ain’t what you do, or what you are but an image created by what you read,”¹ Polish-language literature, written in the United States and published by Polish-American companies, attempted to model a Polish identity for its immigrant readers at the same time that it articulated specifically Polish-American perspectives and experiences.

      Despite stereotypes suggesting otherwise, that these immigrants were reading is obvious from the great number of Polish-language newspapers they produced, particularly after 1880, when the immigrant press burgeoned and began branching into other publishing activities. Self-help books, religious tracts, installment fiction, poetry, dramas for the amateur and professional stage:² the variety and output were enormous. And so, apparently, was the demand. Nineteenth-century Polish-American newspapers reported the establishment of local reading rooms and lending libraries. As early as 1891 even small towns like Manistee, Michigan, could boast a Polish library. Emil Dunikowski reports that, of the several hundred books owned by a Buffalo Polish reading room, all but a few dozen were checked out at the time of his visit.³ And Artur Waldo recounts that “when a peddler left a Chicago bookstore carrying a heavy suitcase stuffed with books, after covering one block, not more than twenty or thirty homes, he returned to the publisher’s stockroom with his suitcase already empty.”⁴

      So how is it that, given the flurry of publishing activity and the evident hunger for books in Polonian homes,⁵ so little is known about the works written and published on American soil by immigrant Poles and their children? Why could Stanislaus Blejwas, as late as 1988, state that “there does not exist a Polish American literature,” or Karol Wachtl, while offering sketches of a score of Polonian writers, claim, “In a strict sense, one cannot yet speak of original Polish-American writing, about a true literature bred among Polish settlements here, blossoming from and maintained by its homegrown, independent talents.”⁶

      The answers are complex and lie in the juncture between ideology, history, and literary theory. Blejwas and Wachtl were both referring to Polonia’s sparsity of professional, English-language writers, who were influenced more by a Polish-American experience and upbringing than a Polish one and who were able to speak for the immigrant and ethnic community to an outside audience. What’s more, the 1980s and 1990s saw a flurry of creative fiction that is self-consciously Polish-American. But no English-language study has systematically considered Polish-language literature produced in this country for its intersection with Polonian and American literary scholarship.

      Scholars who might have wished to include immigrant texts written in Polish within a more general discussion of Polish-American writing have until now been hampered by several problems. Not only had none of these works been translated into English, but until this study no reliable bibliography of this material has appeared in either English or Polish, and even the most rudimentary scholarly consideration of these Polish-language immigrant texts was lacking.⁷ The rare discussion of diasporan literature has tended to concentrate on works by renowned nonimmigrant writers, such as Henryk Sienkiewicz’s melodramatic Za chlebem (After bread). Or it has neglected the old peasant immigration in favor of writers of the World War II emigré generation.⁸ The Polish-American chapter of the Modern Language Association’s recently reprinted collection Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature notes works about America by Poles, including Sienkiewicz’s ubiquitous After Bread, and even credits a sixteenth-century political treatise with influencing the Declaration of Independence.⁹ But it makes no mention of the treatment of the American experience by Sienkiewicz’s contemporaries writing in Polish in this country. Magdalena Zaborowska’s more recent study of Polish and Russian immigrant women’s narratives is silent on works written in Polish before 1939.¹⁰ These omissions are almost certainly not the result of deliberate choice, but rather evidence of the deep obscurity into which these works have fallen.

      This examination of early Polish-American fiction begins with the publication in 1881 of the first known immigrant novel in Polish,¹¹ and ends in 1939, when the Second World War spurred a fresh wave of immigrants from Poland, necessitating a reevaluation of Polonian identity and goals, and leading to new patterns of immigrant publishing. Even the approximately three hundred novels, novellas, short stories, sketches, and anthologies of short fiction identified here comprise only a portion of the Polish-language works produced by the stara emigracja, the old emigration. The inclusion of drama and poetry would make any bibliography several times as long. This study is thus limited to fiction for partly practical reasons. But even within the sizable body of Polish prose fiction written and published in America, a focus on immigrant identity has narrowed the selection.

      A number of immigrant works were eliminated from consideration because, although published in the United States, their plots were set outside this country, drawn from exclusively Polish history or world legend. Like their counterparts among other immigrant groups, Polish-American publishers offered their readers works of classic and contemporary literature from Poland, as well as translations of Russian, French, German, English, and American works. Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identity, Brent Peterson’s study of ethnicity shaped and perpetuated by German-American newspaper fiction, argues convincingly that all literature contributed to the collective identity of its immigrant readers, that it is not “ethnic literature” but “narratives for ethnic readers” that reveal the process of ethnogenesis.¹² And “literary ethnicity” rather than “ethnic literature” is Thomas S. Gladsky’s focus in Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves, which looks not only at English-language fiction and poetry written by second- and third-generation Polish-Americans, but also at the literary images of Poles and Polish-Americans created by purely “American” authors, shifting attention to the way in which works “may be read as contributing to the literary creation of ethnic selves and American ethnicity.”¹³ However, my concern with how this literature specifically and self-consciously engaged its readers as Poles in America and later as Polish-Americans led me to restrict this study to works that attempted to position their readers, however superficially, in the context of American conditions, a phrase contained in the subtitles of so many of these novels. Thus, all works considered here contain at least one Polish character on American soil.¹⁴

      Fiction about Polonia—that is, about the Polish diaspora—but written and published in Poland is also not included here, although several such novels were reprinted by Polish-American publishers and read in immigrant households. Some authors, like journalist Stefan Barszczewski, spent considerable time in the United States before returning to Poland and writing about their experiences. Others, like Józef Watra-Przewłocki, remained in the United States but published their major works in Poland. A comparative analysis of those two