Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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of several easily identifiable categories. Some extol Polish bravery in the fight against the Nazis during World War II; others present Polish suffering under the Nazi occupation; while still another group focuses on the evils of communism. A few stories retell Polish legends or present traditions typical of a specific region in Poland. Only a handful of plot lines explore the Polish American milieu, so crucial to Krawczyk herself. My analysis of these texts suggests that Polish ethnic and immigrant women’s fiction of the period shows signs of latent feminism as it questions the prevailing American gender discourse of re-domestication and marginalization of women, and often challenges gender inequality by turning to World War II plots that prove women’s capability of achievement when gender restrictions are not enforced.
The drastic changes in opportunities and expectations experienced by many middle-class women in post–World War II America become an important theme in “The Guest,” the winner of the 1960 first prize, by Mitzi Kosturbala. The author is identified in a very brief biographical note as a Chicago resident and a professional journalist and editor born in 1914. Kosturbala belongs to the generation of educated women described by Betty Friedan as the cohort whose prewar dreams of professional careers were shattered just as they reached middle age and could have been most productive.13 Kosturbala’s short story is one of the most psychologically complex texts in the collection and offers a rare combination of both American and Polish settings as it captures the tension between the perfectly sanitized, prosperous life of Anya Krystof, a Polish American suburban housewife from Chicago, and the ugly brutality of war forced upon her by the arrival from Poland of her husband’s close relative, Jadwiga. Jadwiga, a Catholic, is a traumatized survivor of medical experiments in a Nazi concentration camp. She arrives in the United States seeking medical treatment for the damage to her body caused by Nazi doctors.
Kosturbala positions her protagonist Anya and her Polish immigrant husband, Mark, at the intersection of the middle class, whiteness, heterosexuality, and Polishness. Thus, for Anya and Mark, social class linked to white ethno-racial identification trumps their ethnicity: their Polish Americanness. The booming postwar economy of the 1950s allows families like the Krystofs to leave their ethnicity behind as they move away from old ethnic communities and to pursue upward mobility by reaching middle-class status. The couple’s move to a “white suburb” illustrates the process by which, according to David R. Roediger, the middle-class descendants of working-class European immigrants, whose race had been viewed with suspicion and who might have been labeled racially as Slavonic, Italian, or Jewish, rather than just “white,” achieve whiteness as soon as they are allowed to purchase homes in middle-class suburbs “protected by firm restrictions against non-Europeans.”14 Likewise, Tracy Floreani sees postwar suburbanization and the commercialization of culture as “major ways in which a younger generation from Eastern European and Mediterranean immigrant families became absorbed within ‘whiteness.’”15
Kosturbala presents Anya and Mark as a typical middle-class American couple exceedingly proud of their suburban home, which, after all, testifies to their mainstream privilege and not to ethnic marginality. It is hardly surprising, then, when Kosturbala tells us that for the Krystofs, “Polishness . . . was incidental,”16 expressed only through a few decorative artifacts displayed in their home which allow them to claim uniqueness in their homogeneous, ethnic-less neighborhood of what William Chafe characterizes as identical “‘ticky-tacky’ houses.”17 The story’s deployment of ethnic markers is minimal, as it lacks references to any Polish or Polish American traditions, religious or family holidays, or, most importantly, the Polish language, even though several characters are identified as born and brought up in Poland. The paucity of ethnic markers, Kosturbala’s careful description of the suburban setting, as well as her character construction of Anya’s husband and her brother-in-law as professionals in positions of authority all speak to her awareness of the crucial differences between the mainstream middle and the ethnic working class. In line with Cynthia Levine-Rasky’s clear definition of class distinctions through disparity in educational levels, lifestyle choices, and the pursuit of positions of authority,18 Kosturbala’s characters are well assimilated and firmly situated within the American middle class.
As would be expected of a young middle-class wife living in a white suburb at midcentury, Anya Krystof exists only within a domestic setting, her domain, of which she is exceedingly proud. She is completely committed to and never tires of admiring her home: “Her mind responded, for the thousandth time, to the pleasure she felt when her eyes roamed around the panelled room with its beamed ceiling and gleaming parquet floor.”19 She embraces the new consumerism of the 1950s, when, in Chafe’s words, “consumer housewives outdid each other in trying to purchase the latest cookout gadgetry,”20 and translates many of her possessions into socioeconomic class markers. She treasures her Limoges china, her sterling silver, “the lovely cherry wood furniture, the smooth expanse of carpeting, the charming blend of colors, the informality and warmth.”21 Her class-conscious acquisitiveness recognizes not only the importance of quality but also of brand names for the construction of the class-appropriate lifestyle. However, it seems that Anya has paid a high price for the easy life in her “charming and comfortable home” with a loving husband and two beautiful and “well mannered” children.22 The narrative matter-of-factly lists some hardships that have left their mark on Anya: her son’s serious illness while her husband was deployed overseas during World War II, the death of her brother who was shot down over France, and, finally, the fact that “she had gone through the difficult postwar adjustment period as thousands of American wives had done.”23 Anya, like many other women pressured to abandon the public sphere after the war, has to surrender any economic independence and authority she held within the family during her husband’s absence, accept that her “aspirations were systematically circumscribed to domestic life,”24 and find “true feminine fulfillment”25 in the passive and subservient role of a housewife. She is now directed by her husband to reach self-fulfillment through her service to the family and through consumerism—her delight in acquisition of pretty objects, not so much for herself, but for the home and the family.
Anya’s tenuous hold on self-esteem is shaken by a visit from her husband’s cousin, Jadwiga, a woman scarred psychologically and physically by the horrors of war. Kosturbala employs Jadwiga’s character to provide an alternative to and a critique of the white middle-class suburban gender construct represented by Anya. Jadwiga defies the traditional expectations of feminine behavior and attitudes. She smokes like a man and shows absolutely no interest in housework or Anya’s children. Anya’s early attempts to impress Jadwiga with the wealth and comfort of her home fail as Jadwiga’s old-world aesthetic does not recognize the beauty or value of the mass-produced consumer goods. She offends Anya by finding the American décor quaint, while at the same time waxing lyrical about a pair of carved chairs and an old tattered oriental rug she and her late husband purchased at an auction before the war. Since the aesthetic appeal of antiques, actually of anything old, is beyond Anya’s understanding, she does not recognize Jadwiga’s yearning for reminders of the past destroyed by the war, nor Jadwiga’s old-world views on social class. Yet Jadwiga, like many of the Polish World War II émigrés, arrives in the United States with a firm conviction of her own middle-class status. For the Polish woman, upward class mobility cannot be achieved by moving to the suburbs and buying expensive items, because social class is something one inherits from a long line of ancestors, just as one might inherit a pair of old carved chairs or an oriental rug. Anya, brought up on the ideology of the American Dream with upward mobility at its center, resents that Jadwiga’s comments somehow diminish the desirability of her home and her life.
Kosturbala repeatedly deploys the commonly accepted gender stereotypes of midcentury America to demonstrate Anya’s total disempowerment and outline the barriers she faces in constructing her identity. This adult woman, a mother of two children who worked and supported her small family while her husband was fighting overseas, suddenly is incapable of thinking critically, and she constantly defers to her husband, who patiently explains Jadwiga’s attitude. Mark’s diagnosis is simple: Jadwiga is just overwhelmed by their wealth of consumer goods, which fills her with envy and malice born of privation. Mark’s judgment exemplifies the attitude prevailing in the 1950s that the life of an American housewife was “the envy . . . of women