Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski
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originating within the Polish community itself, not in its intersection with mainstream American culture. Antagonists are more likely to be Prussian than American, particularly in the period leading up to and during World War I, and Americans less the objects of admiration than of suspicion. Language issues may center around not only the use of English but also the intelligibility of the varied levels and dialects of Polish spoken by a diverse group of immigrants that outsiders perceived as undifferentiatedly Polish.
Given the focus on these apparently European issues, we might even ask whether this literature is ethnic at all, or whether it should be classified as simply a footnote to Polish literature. But while the problems confronted in this literature are often intra-Polonian, the fact remains that Polonia was never Poland, however authors might have attempted to configure it. So although the symbols that Polish writers in Europe used to mobilize and consolidate Polish patriotism were manipulated by Polish-American authors, it was in order to articulate very specific issues of identity and power within an emerging, increasingly distinct American Polonia. In fact, the Polish consciousness and sense of history that immigrant writers attempted to create and manipulate were largely possible because of the American conditions that threw together immigrants from various regions and social strata and gave them relative freedom to speak, at least to each other. These conditions created a distinct American Polonia (or rather, several), which in turn could take its own literary path, while still serving a Polish cause. The inadequacy of European Polish literature, even great Polish literature, to speak for these immigrants is argued in Helena Staś’s 1910 novel Na ludzkim targu (In the human market): “They don’t understand Mickiewicz or Słowacki. . . . But they would understand a literature created for them, based on their lives. That’s the only way the national spirit will survive in a foreign land.”26
Implicit in the argument of Symonolewicz-Symmons and others is the suggestion that the Polish-language works that early Polonia had produced were not worthy of serious consideration as literature. Andrzej Brożek, for instance, writes that “Even Polonian authors . . . realize the low standard of Polish literary work in America.”27 The sometimes dubious business procedures of some publishers, as well as their cheap production methods, certainly contributed to this perception. But more important, it was the literature itself, usually aimed toward a newly literate audience and serving a polemical purpose, that was dismissed as an artistic failure, despite the general concession that it met and fueled a desire to read within the immigrant community. Not only do these judgments fail to recognize many skillfully composed works, implying that authors resorted to polemics because they were incapable of art, they also delegitimate the experience and consciousness from which these works derived their meaning and expression, and the historical imperatives that guided authorial strategies. A 1918 editorial in Chicago’s Dziennik związkowy pleads the case for polemics:
The novel stimulates the mind, it awakens patriotic feeling. It reaches the poorest peasant hut, and if it’s a good novel it educates and ennobles its peasant readers. Because of this, novelists have a great responsibility. They must be apostles, high priests of our Polish faith. . . . They must steel the nation to struggles and difficulties, and work tirelessly toward one sacred end—the freedom of our homeland. . . . The novelists of free nations can permit themselves to write “for art’s sake” . . . ; we, in threefold slavery, our enemies seeking constantly to inject into our nation the poison that will disintegrate it, cannot permit ourselves such “art.”28
For the serious consideration of immigrant writing, then, one has had to turn to the Polish-language work of immigrant historians. Wacław Kruszka, Stanisław Osada, Karol Wachtl, and Artur Waldo all devote attention to Polonian literature, not surprisingly, since Osada was the author of two novels; Wachtl was a short-story writer, poet, and playwright; and Waldo a playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. Even the cleric Kruszka included in his voluminous memoirs a sketch set in a future America in which Polish culture dominates.29 Kruszka’s recently translated A History of the Poles in America devotes sections to immigrant literature and the press. The future must have looked promising to Kruszka, writing in 1905. In his brief overview of Polish-American writers and their works, he claims the existence of a nascent Polish-American literature, disagreeing with Osada’s assertion (before the appearance of his own novels) that Polish-American writing “cannot be considered literature.”30
Almost forty years later, Wachtl’s Polonia w Ameryce (Polonia in America) pleaded the need for an English-language Polish-American literature. Wachtl considered the writers of the stara emigracja to be Polish writers merely influenced by their American experiences, and his evaluation of these writers, like Kruszka’s, is highly partisan. However, this also makes it useful in understanding Polonia’s points of ideological contention. Although disapproving of playwright-novelist Telesfor Chełchowski’s sarcastic edge, for instance, Wachtl grants his works a higher purpose: “Often the literary value of these works was not great, but they faithfully render the spirit of Polonia—sincere, self-sacrificing, fiercely patriotic.”31 The patriotism Wachtl was referring to, of course, was directed toward Poland, not America.
Wachtl reserves his sharpest criticism for writers whom he accuses of betraying the Polish-American community by creating divisions within it. He calls anticlericalist Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, for example, “a talent—undeniably brilliant, but unfortunately warped and wasted through his unscrupulous and unjust derision and mockery of everything that was elevated” (230). And he charges Łukaszkiewicz’s publisher and colleague, Antoni Paryski, with selling books that were “completely without worth, even harmful, because they sowed the seeds of discontent and set the Polonian community at odds” (227). Paryski’s publishing company, early Polonia’s most successful, will be discussed in chapter 2. However, it is important to note that Wachtl’s highly politicized analysis reflects precisely the value of internal unity that dominated Polonian thought, if not its practice. Although Polonia’s own literary scholarship is sketchy and heavily tainted, it does reflect what could be called the received image of Polonian history, full of contradictions and defensive strategies, but shared by its various ideological camps, valuing group cohesiveness but disagreeing about group identity, and linking Polonian to Polish as well as American historical developments.
While Artur Waldo’s Zarys historii literatury polskiej w Ameryce (Outline history of Polish literature in America) attempts to systematically describe the development and growth of Polish-American literature, it promises more than it delivers. But despite the murkiness of its categories and its somewhat arbitrary divisions, the second project of Waldo’s Outline, to periodize Polish-American literary production, at least treats its subject as a serious cultural indicator. What is more, Waldo stresses the unfolding relationship between Polonia, Poland, and the United States evident in this literature. Recognizing Polonia and its cultural expression as legitimately part of both the American and Polish panoramas, and conscious of American stereotypes of Polish immigrants, Waldo encourages the translation of Polish-language Polonian texts into English, as well as the creation of new works in the English language: “We have to give America Polish-American writing, Polish-American literature” in order “to establish a foundation for the power of the Polish spirit in the United States.”32
The purpose of my own study is not to prove, to Polonia itself or to American readers, that Polish immigrant communities created a “great literature.” Nor is it to develop any monolithic definition of Polish-American literature itself. Certainly, equally valid but oppositional definitions may suit specific purposes and highlight particular qualities, not crossing each other out but rather expanding the matrices by which ethnicity is perceived and expressed. Rather, I intend to reopen the pages of these long-forgotten early works in order to consider the uses to which literature was put within Polonia and the possibilities it offered the community for reading itself as Polish in an American context.
This study will consider the diversity of ethnic identities circulated among readers in the Polish immigrant community, in a Polish and Polish-American cultural and historical context. It will attempt to describe a cultural history reconstructed out of the works that Polish America wrote and read, and that reveal the continuing conversation over values, interests, and identity through which the immigrant community