Antoni Paryski, not long after his arrival in the United States. Source: [Rosiński], Antoni A. Paryski: Życie, prace, i czyny. Courtesy Paryski family
Whatever his origins, Paryski carefully and deliberately positioned himself on the side of the immigrant masses, warning his readers against exploitation and betrayal by those who claimed to serve their interests, and calling attention to the power relationships that wound through Polonia’s attempts to create and control a unified community. Czesław Łukaszkiewicz, whose novels Paryski published, eulogized his colleague as “The Teacher of the [Polish] Emigration” and “The Champion of the People.”18 Others called him an agent of discontent and dissension. Paryski’s career is a complicated, carefully measured mix of opportunism and idealism that made his the success story of Polish-American publishing. Writing in the 1930s, a factory worker claimed, “Everything I know today I owe to the publisher A. A. Paryski, because I read his books by the stack.”19
Mindful that most of his customers had only a minimal education and little or no acquaintance with Polish high culture, Paryski worked meticulously to maneuver even the most questionable of his publications into the category of educational material, addressing his argument at two audiences: peasant immigrants, who would contrast Paryski’s sanctioning—however patronizing—of their choice of simple reading material with the sanctimonious disdain of the intelligentsia, and Polonia’s intellectual leadership, who would have to grant Paryski’s nobility of purpose and utility of strategy. Paryski journalist Stefan Nesterowicz characterizes his employer in the language of positivism:
Long years of experience have taught him that one must first teach the people to read, then put the simplest books, even childish ones, into their hands, and then gradually encourage them to read things more and more serious, more and more worthwhile. . . . The man who today bought himself the tales of The Thousand and One Nights will tomorrow require a crime novel, the day after tomorrow a novel of manners, then a historical novel; later he will buy himself a history text. This book will encourage him to study geography, then physics, and in this way his hunger for knowledge will awaken.20
Paryski walked a careful line between educator and businessman, and the works he published sometimes blurred the boundaries between literature, polemics, and advertising. The newly arrived immigrant in Sen na jawie (The daydream) is promised “Salvation, Prosperity, Equality, the Homeland, [and] Absolute Freedom,”21 but he must first align himself with one of Polonia’s ideological factions. He is disillusioned by each in turn: by a debauched clergy, by cynically faithless socialists, and by German and Irish union leaders in the pay of the bosses.22 The self-styled Patriots are so contentious, the immigrant decides, that their newspaper, Concordia, should be called Discordia—a clear reference to the Polish National Alliance weekly Zgoda, or Harmony.23 Only Ameryka-Echo speaks with an honest voice: “Paryski teaches people to follow their own mind, walk under their own power, and not be led like children” (42).
Paryski’s assessment of his own importance may have been more than self-promotion. Numerous immigrant memoirs solicited by the restored Polish government in the 1930s cite his influence. A factory worker writes: “I got the paper Ameryka-Echo and went home and read while my wife listened. I have to admit that at that time the paper was rather progressive. I once read an article from the pen of the now departed Mr. Paryski that people arrive at knowledge and prosperity through reading, that it doesn’t matter what they read as long as they read and read and read some more. I listened to that advice.”24
Cover of Alfons J. Staniewski’s The Daydream (1911). An immigrant is pulled by competing representatives of Polishness: the socialist, the religionist, and the revolutionary.
Another laborer recalls the new ideas reading inspired as the source of an awakened national consciousness (and, no doubt, conflict):
When I got to America I went to church every Sunday and holy day for a year, during which time I wasn’t interested in papers and books. After meeting the fellows who were living with me at my sister’s, who owned several dozen books and got the papers every day, I started to read Ameryka-Echo and Gwiazda Polarna. . . . I liked reading [Ameryka-Echo] so much, and reading in general, that I couldn’t wait to get home from work to see what was new in the paper. I borrowed books from the fellows and in the factory I read on the sly. There was [Sienkiewicz’s] Potop, Ogniem i mieczem, Krzyżacy, Pan Wołodyjowski, and other little brochures. Those books and newspapers opened my eyes, so that from then on I felt what I was and what Poland was, what a series of battles she went through for her national unity, about the heroes and traitors. I wanted to know everything at once, so I didn’t have time to go to church because I preferred to finish reading my book or start a new one.25
Paryski, Dyniewicz, and other journalist-publishers were able to operate so successfully in part because the business of journalism facilitated book production. First, it was expedited and made less expensive by the use of technologies and distribution networks already in place for the production of newspapers. Not only did Paryski, for example, offer subscribers book premiums (along with silverware, razors, and curative “electro-chemical” jewelry), but he and other publishers often issued in book form novels and short stories that they also serialized in their papers.26
A high-volume newspaper business (Chojnacki reports a circulation of more than one hundred thousand for the daily Ameryka-Echo by World War I) also made possible the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment and the employment of a specialized workforce.27 While other newspaper editors might be writing (or, as critics charged, clipping) copy, setting type, running presses, and sweeping floors, in 1911 Paryski employed seventy men and women in his printery alone.28 In conjunction with newspaper publishing, book production could be very cheap, and very profitable.
Toledo printing plant of Ameryka-Echo and the Paryski company. Source: [Rosiński], Antoni A. Paryski: Życie, prace, i czyny. Courtesy Paryski family
That these works were so often produced by newspaper publishers also accounts in part for their ephemerality, and perhaps for a perception of their artistic inferiority. Most books appeared on cheap newsprint in chapbook editions, many fewer than one hundred pages long. Relatively few books, rarely works of immigrant fiction, were published in hardcover. But it was these low production values that made literature available to an enormous number of Polish immigrants on very limited incomes, facilitating the emergence of a populace of reader-consumers. Of three hundred forty items in Paryski’s 1911 catalog, nearly half were priced at from five to ten cents. Dyniewicz’s 1913 prices averaged only slightly higher. Given that Ameryka-Echo offered readers one dollar’s worth of books for each newspaper subscription, these books must have been distributed in large numbers. Paryski alone, it is estimated, was responsible for twenty-five hundred separate titles, amounting to up to eight million pieces.29 Distrust of the clergy did not prevent him from publishing religious volumes, either, including Roman Catholic prayer books. The market-conscious Paryski, like Dyniewicz, priced these popular items higher than his other publications. His Lives of the Saints, for instance, sold for five dollars, and his fanciest Bible for an astounding twenty-five dollars.30
Whatever the success of certain publishers, journalism could be a precarious profession. Julian Czupka, in “W jaki sposób zostałem literatem” (How I became a writer), describes the precarious existence of a Polish literary magazine in 1890s New York. For his
