Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
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Polish American fiction, likewise, engages in devising and offering strategies—intentional rebellious silence, transgressive behavior, surreptitious undermining of the power structure—to overcome powerlessness and marginalization.
Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction posits that Polish American literature offers nonethnic readers an easy point of entry into Polishness, just as other ethnic texts might invite the reader into Mexicanness, Indianness or Irishness, and serves as a site for construction of gendered and classed identity. Most ethnic writers—including Polish Americans like Suzanne Strempek Shea, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Dagmara Dominczyk, just to mention a few, as well as Mexican American Sandra Cisneros, South Asian American Bharati Mukherjee, Chinese American Amy Tan, and Korean Americans Catherine Chung and Patricia Park—rework many autobiographical elements in their fiction to normalize the ethnic milieu within the American mainstream. As Tace Hedrick suggests in her analysis of Chica Lit, they become “ethnic producers . . . exotic yet homegrown”26 because Chicana fiction selects and employs easily readable ethnic markers in constructing ethnic identity and teaches its female readers, both ethnic and nonethnic, how middle-class ethnicity can be performed successfully. The constant tension between the exoticism of ethnicity and integration into the mainstream becomes an important topic in Ellen McCracken’s discussion of texts by Ana Castillo, Cristina García, and Denise Chavez. McCracken contends that Latina writers include “ethnographic passages” in their work as evidence of insider status and a way to attract audiences to their work, since, as she writes, “sameness is not as marketable in current conditions as is difference.”27 Interestingly, some Polish American authors, such as Brigid Pasulka, Karolina Waclawiak, and Leslie Pietrzyk, move on to nonethnic fiction after their initial success with Polish or Polish American novels.
Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction argues that, contrary to many other ethnic literatures that write poverty, abuse, violence, and racism into their narratives, Polish American fiction rarely deploys these themes. Post–World War II novels and short stories invite readers into the stable middle-class milieu, testifying to the success the Polish ethnic group achieved fairly quickly after their arrival (i.e., within one or two generations). Yet, at the same time, Polish American fiction by women engages with common ethnic themes of identity, belonging, loss, guilt, powerlessness, patriarchal oppression, and objectification that are of importance for most of the ethnic women existing in a liminal space between different cultural constructs.
III
Since Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction draws its evidence from ethnic and immigrant fiction and some autobiographical immigrant writing, it enters a readily recognizable multidisciplinary field of inquiry where not only literary scholars but also historians, anthropologists, and sociologists interested in migration and ethnicity turned their critical gaze upon literary sources both fictional and autobiographical as a rich mine of information. Karen Majewski’s pioneering study, Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939, brings to light nearly forgotten voices of immigrant writers who wrote in their native language for the audience of their compatriots. In her book, Majewski considers the writing of Polish American identity in family-focused narratives told by the representatives of stara emigracja (the old emigration). An anthology, Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent, edited by Thomas S. Gladsky and Rita Holmes Gladsky, presents introductory essays and excerpts of poetry, fiction, and autobiographical writing by a heterogeneous group of women writers of Polish descent from disparate time periods and immigrant cohorts. In his introduction to the volume, Thomas S. Gladsky problematizes the contradictions within the Polish American gender discourse and identifies “women in revolt”28 rising against the immigrant conditions and ethnic prejudice they encountered in the United States. Building upon Majewski’s and Gladsky’s research, this study, for the most part, selects literary texts published during the second half of the twentieth century and the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century. Although the majority of this volume discusses narratives written in English and published in the United States, it has been enriched by the inclusion of several immigrant texts written originally in Polish, since they often give voice to new arrivals that otherwise would be rendered voiceless. Polish-language immigrant fiction, as argued by Majewski, rightly belongs to a subcategory of American literature that includes works produced in a variety of languages, a practice she traces back to the early 1920s.29 Likewise, Werner Sollors classifies “literature in languages apart from English”30 within the canon of American ethnic literature, which corresponds with the recent trend in the study of ethnic archives that must contain texts in the initial languages, without which ethnic literatures would be rendered “illiterate and unreadable.”31
The “ethnic authenticity” of the selected texts has also been tested against the definition of American ethnic fiction provided by Sollors in his seminal study, Ethnic Modernism, where he asserts that “works of American ‘ethnic’ prose literature [are] written by, about, or for persons who perceived themselves, or were perceived by others, as members of ethnic groups.”32 A strong presence of female characters and clear concepts of gendered and classed ethnicity within Polish American Roman Catholic communities constitute the key criteria for the selection of literary texts.
The texts chosen for this study have been drawn from several categories of literary texts. First, a substantial number of them represent work of Polish American women writers who are themselves descendants of Polish immigrants, often representing the third generation. Many of these ethnic33 authors take up themes from the past, mainly their own past of growing up in the quickly disappearing ethnic enclaves of the Northeast and Midwest,34 and consider what it means to be an ethnic woman in a multicultural society forced to negotiate among multiple gender constructs. The second category of texts includes English-language writing by Polish immigrant authors.35 In their largely autobiographical fiction, they set out to explore the common immigrant themes of nostalgia, guilt, anger, and alienation as they struggle to construct a new gender identity that draws from their Polish experiences but also allows them to function within their new American reality. The third and final group represents work produced by Polish immigrants, temporary migrants, émigrés, and exiles, many of whom wrote and continue to write in Polish.36 A few of them experienced the trauma of immigration and sometimes forced exile as adults and recreated it in Polish specifically for audiences of their compatriots proficient in the language. Both Polish literary studies37 and American literary studies focused on texts written in languages other than English38 acknowledge their substantial literary output.
IV
Polish immigrant women and their Polish American daughters and granddaughters represent a heterogeneous group stratified by social class, economic circumstances, level of education, and ethnic/national consciousness. Many Polish American characters in fiction trace their roots to the stara emigracja, often also referred to as the za chlebem (“for bread”) immigration, when both rural and urban poverty forced thousands of Poles to seek economic relief elsewhere in Europe as well as in North and South America.39 The most significant numbers of Poles from this immigrant cohort began arriving in the United States in the 1870s. James Pula finds that between 1875 and the outbreak of World War I, which put a stop to this mass migration, “some 9 million Poles”40 sailed across the Atlantic. A desire to escape grinding poverty motivated them but many viewed themselves as temporary migrants who fully intended to return to the Polish countryside after amassing substantial savings. They were mainly peasants who left behind a country that had no political identity between 1795, when in the Third Partition the Kingdom of Poland was dissolved and its lands and people put in control of the three neighboring powers of Russia, Prussia, and Austria—each part thereafter enduring varying degrees of economic and political hardship and anti-Polish policies—and 1918, when modern Poland began to form. For the most part, these emigrants were escaping poverty, religious and national persecution, and, in case of men, conscription into a foreign army. The majority grounded their identity in Roman Catholic faith as well as in their okolica (the village or region of their origin), and, as Michael Novak suggests about immigrants from Italy, “often it was America that taught them they were ethnic.”41
Women