The first chapter will argue the primacy of literature in the creation of a Polish national and Polish-American ethnic consciousness. Chapter 2 takes a detailed look at the history of Polonian literature and publishing. Chapter 3 will investigate the controlling theme of ethnic and family loyalty and betrayal through the prism of popular Polish-American crime and detective narratives, arguing that the threats to inheritance and family continuity that these stories enact can be read as ethnic and national allegories. Chapter 4 considers the same theme of the creation and maintenance of group identity by looking at the ways sagas of immigration and adjustment encourage immigrant readers to interpret their own emigration in the context of Poland’s political oppression, and to see themselves as linked to other Poles by a national identity reinforced by shared suffering and exploitation. By showing emigration as a process that leads back to Europe, these works situate their immigrant characters in a continuing relationship to the homeland. Chapter 5 investigates the literary treatment of political direction and institutional corruption, demonstrating the ways opposing factions utilized the same morally charged rhetoric of treason and betrayal to articulate competing ideologies of group identity and strategies for national survival. Chapter 6 shows how immigrant authors explored and resolved questions of collective identity through the drama of sexual attraction and marital alliance, conflating family and nation and investing personal patterns of action with political meaning, in order to model proper ways of reproducing Polishness. The final chapter turns to the question of why this literature did not survive and suggests its relation to the writing and publishing efforts of later immigrants, those from World War II and, particularly, the Solidarity era. It argues that, despite their surface differences, similarities between the stara emigracja and the newest immigrant cohort account for some commonalities of literary form, style, subject, and theme.

      In 1938 Artur L. Waldo dedicated his Outline History of Polish Literature in America “to the forgotten writers of American Polonia” (4). That he was referring to authors whose works had appeared only within the last several decades, some of whom were still writing and publishing, testifies to the unstable relationship between Polish immigrant writing and the community of immigrant readers these works addressed. If memory of these publications was already fading within Polonia even while, as Waldo asserts, they lay piled by the score in thousands of Polish-American attics, it is small wonder that later ethnic scholars have either remained ignorant of their existence or neglected their study. Waldo himself balked at the enormity of his task, leaving it to future scholars to flesh out the bones of his research. This study is a partial fulfillment of that hope, so long unfulfilled.

      Without looking at writing in Polish, one can obtain only a distorted view of the cultural life of American Polonia, which included scores of Polish newspapers, Polish radio programs, active theater companies, and a lively output of various publications, including fiction. With a growing willingness to accept not simply alternative forms of literature such as letters and autobiography, but to acknowledge as American that literature written in languages other than English, a vast field of study is opened that will enable us to gain a much deeper understanding of how immigrant ethnicity was shaped and experienced. It also establishes a counterpoint to the common image of Polish-Americans in native literature, written by those outside the community for an American audience. Even the most sympathetic of these often portray the Polish immigrant as inarticulate, passive, almost primeval, as faceless symbols of a primitive life force and as voiceless victims of social injustice and economic exploitation. Naturally, they may have appeared so to outsiders, with whom they could not easily communicate. But the view from within Polonia was of an active, vibrant, and complex community, and most relevantly the sound from within was not silence but conversation, argument, laughter. The only way to hear these voices is by eavesdropping on the literature these communities produced by and for themselves, with no intention of cultural mediation with America at large, but with very particular agendas relevant to the immigrants themselves, their institutions, and even to the shape of the world map. All this is lost unless we hear them in their own language.