Selected Polish Immigrant Authors and Publishers
Bibliographic Essay: Strategies in Recovering Polish Immigrant Writings
Illustrations
CHAPTER 1
The children’s section of a 1910 Polish-American women’s magazine, Ogniwo (The link)
Editorial staff of Chicago’s Głos ludowy
Immigrant socialists in Canada, with author Alfons Staniewski (“Ajotes”)
Felicja Romanowska, singer, musician, and author
Editor and author Hieronim Jabłoński
CHAPTER 2
Printery of Robotnik polski, Chicago, circa 1900
Staff of Polak Amerykański Press, Buffalo, 1901
Office of the Polish National Alliance’s Zgoda, circa 1910
Antoni Paryski, not long after his arrival in the United States
Cover of Sen na jawie (The daydream) (1911)
Toledo printing plant of Ameryka-Echo and the Paryski company
Zalewski bookstore in Chicago, circa 1910
CHAPTER 3
Cover of Rabusie grobów (The grave robbers), pirated from an English-language original (1912)
Cover of Wróg ludzi (Enemy of the people), one of the Zofia Jastrzębska novels (1911)
Cover of W źelaznych kleszczach (In iron pincers) (1915)
CHAPTER 4
Cover of Z pennsylwańskiego piekła (From a Pennsylvania hell), a novel about immigrant miners (1909)
Cover of Ciekawe gawędy Macieja Grzędy (The interesting tales of Matt Seedbed): A “doctor of enlightenment” instructs an immigrant on the importance of reading
Title page of Jak się zemścił borowy Zielonka (How Greenie the gamekeeper got revenge), the first known Polish immigrant novel published in the United States
Julian Czupka, journalist and author of immigrant short stories
Cover of Fat Hanka Dumpling and Her Seven Boarders
Cover of Mój pierwszy “Thanksgiving Day” (My first Thanksgiving Day) (1908)
Cover of Anioł stróż i djabel stróż (Guardian angel and guardian devil) (1932)
CHAPTER 5
Cover of Zakonny welon (The nun’s veil), one of a series of satirical, anticlerical novels (1925 reprint of 1920 edition)
Stefania Laudyn, before emigrating to the United States
Cover of Baczność! Jenerał Tabaka ma głos! (Attention! General Tobacco has the floor!), a collection of sketches satirizing Polonia’s patriotic-military organizations (1913)
Cover of Na ludzkim targu (In the human market) (1911)
Helena Staś, frontispiece to American edition of In the Human Market
CHAPTER 6
Pan redaktor w zalotach (The editor’s courtship), title page
Changing roles in the Polish-American family, as shown on the cover of Djabełek, a humor magazine published in Detroit (1933)
Stanisław Osada, journalist, novelist, and immigrant activist
Cover of W dniach nędzy i zbrodni (In days of misery and crime) (1908)
Cover of Porwana w noc poślubną (Kidnapped on her wedding night), reprinted in 1988 from a 1936 original
Cover of Sprzedawaczka z Broadwayu (The salesgirl from Broadway) (1937)
Series Editor’s Preface
WHILE THE LITERATURES of a few immigrant communities already have entered the contemporary American literary canon, literary life within Polonia—the Polish immigrant and ethnic community—remains to date largely terra incognito. Heavily peasant in composition, the Polish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often have been portrayed as an inarticulate, undifferentiated mass, silent and rough like the coal many of them dug in the mining towns of industrial America.
In Traitors and True Poles Karen Majewski gives us a truly pathbreaking work that decisively dispels the image of the voiceless Polish peasant. A singular expert on the ethnic literary genre, Majewski here reconstructs an entire ethnic literary tradition,
