and its literature, it will be necessary to keep in mind not only the circumstances of the life in America that the immigrants faced, but the political and cultural conditions they had left behind in Europe. These European conditions supplied Polonia its terms of struggle and negotiation and shaped its creative impulse. And so we cannot make much sense of Polish immigrant fiction in the face of America’s literary trends, historical movements, or mythic self-representations without recognizing the heavy backdrop of Polish history.
David Fine connects ethnic literature with an American cultural tradition.22 For well-educated writers fluent in English, this may have been so, but for the majority of Polish-language writers in this country, the literary model was doubtless a European one. And for the readers, many of them first-generation literates, literary history for all practical purposes may not have existed. The context into which many readers would have fit these Polish-American works may have been primarily an oral one, alongside songs, folktales, poetry, sermons, declamations, and letters. Even the written word was often oral and communal within peasant and immigrant communities, as newspapers were shared, husbands read books aloud to their families, and letters were community property.23 Reading was not the solitary, individual act we think of today, but rather a shared activity that brought one into active communication with others. Polonia’s early writers, most of them activists for the Polish cause, also employed tactics and meanings developed through a century of cultural oppression in which literature was a major avenue of tacit protest. The “conspiracy of understanding between the author and the reader”24 that this experience necessitated also provides early Polonian literature with many of its patterns, tropes, and symbols.
Drawing from different historical precedents and expectations of the reading experience, we have to ask the extent to which this literature fits into common paradigms of American ethnic cultural production. Robert Spiller’s developmental model—in which ethnic literature advances from personal writing such as letters, autobiographies, and diaries; to the public forum of journalism and other nonfictional forms; to “imitative” literature; and finally to the creation of a new literature out of the community’s unique experiences25—overlooks ways that the literature of out-groups like working class immigrants can reshape “less mature” forms for sophisticated purposes. It ignores the internal conditions and influences not coming from the mainstream, which were necessarily most relevant to the day-to-day life out of which culture is created. By not considering trends in Poland’s own centuries-long literary and cultural history, it misses the very terms in which immigrant authors formed their aesthetics and envisioned their role as writers. What is needed, then, is a more elaborate picture that takes into consideration the diversity of American Polonia and its influences, the internal complexities of its community life, and its essentially transnational political concerns and social and cultural patterns. These provided the literary and linguistic strategies from which Polonian literature derived its forms and upon which it relied for its meaning. Part of our purpose must be, then, to establish the relationship of Polish-language Polish-American literature to established theories of literary ethnicity.
In this literature intended for a Polonian audience, some of the themes and subjects we have come to expect in ethnic, and particularly immigrant, literature seem much less prominent or, more precisely, take forms that express the situation within the Polish-American community. The Polish-language texts, for instance, force us to reconfigure the common immigrant motif of rebirth resulting from confrontation with the host culture, since this host culture is more often American Polonia (or, at its most alien, Irish America) than it is America at large. In Polish-language fiction for Polonian audiences, the role of Anglo-America is often minimal, the debates originating within the Polish community itself, not in its intersection with mainstream American culture. Antagonists are more likely to be Prussian than American, particularly in the period leading up to and during World War I, and Americans less the objects of admiration than of suspicion. Language issues may center around not only the use of English but also the intelligibility of the varied levels and dialects of Polish spoken by a diverse group of immigrants that outsiders perceived as undifferentiatedly Polish.
Given the focus on these apparently European issues, we might even ask whether this literature is ethnic at all, or whether it should be classified as simply a footnote to Polish literature. But while the problems confronted in this literature are often intra-Polonian, the fact remains that Polonia was never Poland, however authors might have attempted to configure it. So although the symbols that Polish writers in Europe used to mobilize and consolidate Polish patriotism were manipulated by Polish-American authors, it was in order to articulate very specific issues of identity and power within an emerging, increasingly distinct American Polonia. In fact, the Polish consciousness and sense of history that immigrant writers attempted to create and manipulate were largely possible because of the American conditions that threw together immigrants from various regions and social strata and gave them relative freedom to speak, at least to each other. These conditions created a distinct American Polonia (or rather, several), which in turn could take its own literary path, while still serving a Polish cause. The inadequacy of European Polish literature, even great Polish literature, to speak for these immigrants is argued in Helena Staś’s 1910 novel Na ludzkim targu (In the human market): “They don’t understand Mickiewicz or Słowacki. . . . But they would understand a literature created for them, based on their lives. That’s the only way the national spirit will survive in a foreign land.”26
Implicit in the argument of Symonolewicz-Symmons and others is the suggestion that the Polish-language works that early Polonia had produced were not worthy of serious consideration as literature. Andrzej Brożek, for instance, writes that “Even Polonian authors . . . realize the low standard of Polish literary work in America.”27 The sometimes dubious business procedures of some publishers, as well as their cheap production methods, certainly contributed to this perception. But more important, it was the literature itself, usually aimed toward a newly literate audience and serving a polemical purpose, that was dismissed as an artistic failure, despite the general concession that it met and fueled a desire to read within the immigrant community. Not only do these judgments fail to recognize many skillfully composed works, implying that authors resorted to polemics because they were incapable of art, they also delegitimate the experience and consciousness from which these works derived their meaning and expression, and the historical imperatives that guided authorial strategies. A 1918 editorial in Chicago’s Dziennik związkowy pleads the case for polemics:
The novel stimulates the mind, it awakens patriotic feeling. It reaches the poorest peasant hut, and if it’s a good novel it educates and ennobles its peasant readers. Because of this, novelists have a great responsibility. They must be apostles, high priests of our Polish faith. . . . They must steel the nation to struggles and difficulties, and work tirelessly toward one sacred end—the freedom of our homeland. . . . The novelists of free nations can permit themselves to write “for art’s sake” . . . ; we, in threefold slavery, our enemies seeking constantly to inject into our nation the poison that will disintegrate it, cannot permit ourselves such “art.”28
For the serious consideration of immigrant writing, then, one has had to turn to the Polish-language work of immigrant historians. Wacław Kruszka, Stanisław Osada, Karol Wachtl, and Artur Waldo all devote attention to Polonian literature, not surprisingly, since Osada was the author of two novels; Wachtl was a short-story writer, poet, and playwright; and Waldo a playwright, novelist, and short-story writer. Even the cleric Kruszka included in his voluminous memoirs a sketch set in a future America in which Polish culture dominates.29 Kruszka’s recently translated A History of the Poles in America devotes sections to immigrant literature and the press. The future must have looked promising to Kruszka, writing in 1905. In his brief overview of Polish-American writers and their works, he claims the existence of a nascent Polish-American literature, disagreeing with Osada’s assertion (before the appearance of his own novels) that Polish-American writing “cannot be considered literature.”30
Almost forty years later, Wachtl’s Polonia w Ameryce (Polonia in America) pleaded the need for an English-language Polish-American
