The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
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polka bands are performing in non-Polish venues and blending the strains together with the sounds of big band, rock, and country music.26 Ethnicity is constructed and reconstructed over time so that what takes hold is a Polish-American culture, which at most bears only a shadow of a semblance to something from Poland.27 In fact, the polka, while certainly part of Polish-American culture, did not originate in Poland, where it is seen as something American. In 1987, I was in Poland, eating alone at a restaurant that had a dance floor and a band. A persistent middle-aged man, speaking Polish, asked me several times to dance. I refused by saying I did not know how. Waltz? No. Tango? No. American? Yes. Where? Chicago. He smiled and walked away. I figured I had convinced him that Americans did not know how to dance. The next song the band played was “Beer Barrel Polka,” and he was standing next to me insisting I knew this dance because “I came from America.”
The stuff of Polish-American culture is often named: foods (kiełbasa, gołąbki, pierogi, pączki, and chruściki), dances (polka, mazurka, oberek, krakowiak, and kujawiak), religious rituals (Advent, roraty, Wigilia, opłatek, Pasterka, the Christmas blessing of the house, the blessing of the Easter baskets, May processions for Mary and June processions for Corpus Christi), and religious icons (Our Lady of Częstochowa, the wreath of thorns around the Sacred Heart of Jesus).28 In addition, Polish-American culture is reputed to include lavish flower gardens, stable marriages, robust men and women, modest small-frame homes, and strong workers who are thrifty and resourceful. Polish-American values include family solidarity, well-disciplined children, humble acceptance of social class, hard work, well-cared-for lawns, and clean homes.29
But what does the Polishness of the Grasinski Girls look like? If I make a checklist and find that they eat three of the four basic Polish foods or celebrate five of nine religious rituals, does that make them Polish? Caroline makes all of the Polish dishes mentioned. And they have flower gardens, work hard, adore the Virgin Mary, and pray to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Does that make them Polish American?
Polishness may be a derivative of Poland, but the Grasinski Girls have no connection to Poland, neither political, nor social, nor intellectual. They carry no memories of Poland, have no understanding of Polish history, revere no Polish heroes. They know neither Sienkiewicz nor Kościuszko (though the older sisters tell me they recognize this name), nor Mickiewicz, Piłsudski, or Jaruzelski. However, the older sisters do know of the pianist Ignacy Paderewski, and they all know Karol Wojtyła as Pope John Paul.
Despite their minimal intellectual, affective, and political ties to Poland, they nonetheless posit Poland as the source of real Polishness, and in doing so they minimize their American-grown Polishness. For them, Poland creates genuine Polishness, the right way to be Polish, and they question their own ethnicity in this language of “realness”—we are not “that Polish,” my friends are “more Polish” than me. In talking about the West Side of Grand Rapids, Caroline said that, during the 1930s, the people who lived a few streets over from them “came right from the old country, you know, like the busias with the scarves and stuff like that, but the people on that side, they were like, they were the real, you know, like the Polish people, Polish-Polish people.” If that from Poland is real, then is that from America fake? One Christmas, Angel made chruściki [a pastry] for the first time and said, “They are not like the ones from Little Warsaw [a Polish restaurant on the West Side of Grand Rapids, now closed], but mine are the real chruściki like they make in Poland.”
It is when they ground Polishness in Poland that they, too, feel “there is not much that is Polish” in them. Their own Polishness is diminished when they define its constructedness as some sort of bastardization, while that which originates from Poland is blue blood. Caroline asserts, “I like my Polish ancestry, I mean I wish they would have kept Grusczynski instead of Grasinski ’cause that has no meaning, that Grasinski, that’s something they just made, you know, just made up. And the Grusczynski, that’s a good strong name. I feel really bad ’cause Grasinski, it doesn’t belong to anybody. You know, and this is what you are, and that is a pretty good name, ’cause I’ve seen in books, that one book, the Russian one, his name was Grusczynski, the captain of that boat.”
Grasinski is a Polish-American name. She is Polish-American. But to her, the name is weakened by the fact that it was “made up.” Angel agrees, and wishes they would have kept “the real name.” And yet, Grasinski is a real name.
. . .
Looking back toward Poland does not necessarily help us find the meaning of ethnic culture in the later generations. After a century of American assimilation, Polishness is a shadow, a childhood faded, a language read but not understood. The Grasinski Girls can phonetically read Polish, sing Polish Christmas carols, and pronounce Polish names, but they have no understanding of what the words mean, beyond the rudiments, like Jezu means Jesus.30 As a result, their Polishness is hidden behind a cluster of pronounceable but incomprehensible consonants that beg for a vowel. They wish they knew Polish, but no one taught them, neither their parents nor the Felician nuns at St. Stanislaus.31 Nadine recalls that
[a]t home it was the Polish church and school you attended, followed by a Polish convent. I taught at St. Stanislaus and St. Florian’s in Hamtramck and Detroit, big, huge, huge, wonderful churches, and I remember sitting there and listening to these Polish sermons and not knowing a word that they’re saying. . . . I went to the convent, and everything was in Polish. When we went there all the signs were in Polish, and they would tell us, “Go do dishes” and we didn’t understand. [laughs] So they changed the signs in a hurry. But in 1950 everything was Polish, the signs, everything.
And Angel tells me, “We never knew what we were reading. [laughs] We just had Polish readers; I never knew what they were. But that stopped in about the third or fourth grade. I just remember something about reba, r-eb-a is fish32 or something. [laughs] It’s the only word I remember out of the whole Polish book.” Neither Joe nor Helen spoke to their daughters in Polish; they used Polish only when they didn’t want the children to understand them. “She would talk to her sisters on the phone when she didn’t want us to hear.” Polish was the secret language, the cryptic code of their ancestors, the haunting melody of the Polish song their aunts and uncles sang as they lowered the coffin of their grandmother into the ground—though they don’t understand the words, they understand the feelings of sadness and connection evoked by the melody.
Their ethnicity, like their language, is present but not spoken, hidden not absent, private not public. It is housed in the words that they can sing but do not understand, it is in the daily prayers to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, it is in the icons hanging on their wall that tell the symbolic history of Poland that they do not know, the dark-faced Madonna of Częstochowa with the two slash marks on her cheek, the grieving Mother of Jesus, and the twisted thorns around the Sacred Heart.33 When their mother Helen was dying there were two icons in the room—Our Lady of Częstochowa and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These are familiar icons. I ask them if they know why Our Lady has cuts on her cheek. What they know is that this is their mother’s icon; they have seen it on the wall in every one of her houses and apartments. I explain the story of the Swedes invading and overrunning Poland in the seventeenth century, and how the tide of the war changed and the Swedes were repulsed at Częstochowa. A miracle occurred when a Swedish soldier slashed the cheek of the Madonna and real blood flowed. I tell them the story one afternoon while we are sitting around the bed of my dying grandmother. They don’t care that much. Their mother is dying. They turn to her, their mother, and to the icons on the wall, the familiar Madonna and the bleeding Sacred Heart, comforting familiar pictures from Hilliards that have nothing to do with Swedes and swords.
They are not genuine Poles, they lament, because they don’t speak Polish or belong to Polish organizations. But they are ephemeral Poles. Polishness is tucked away in their prayer cards and icons, in their laughter, cheekbones, skinny ankles, and wide hips, in what gets passed down and what gets reworked. It is in them but overlooked, like so many private and small religious shrines and crosses in fields and backyards in rural central Wisconsin that remain unknown to us because we don’t see them as part of our Polish heritage, part of the way that Poles shaped the landscape of