Writing Polish
Literature and the Construction of Polishness in America
IF AMERICA HOLDS a collective portrait of the Polish immigrant landing at Ellis Island, exhausted, bewildered, clutching bundles and children, surrounded by queerly lettered trunks, what, in the popular imagination, do those trunks contain? The featherbed, embroidered linens, a treasured family photograph, flower seeds, a teakettle, practical, homemade clothing, a fistful of village soil . . . Rarely, however, do we imagine a book among the carefully packed belongings, and if we do, it is likely to be a worn prayer book or a Lives of the Saints.
Nevertheless, in America these immigrants were producers and consumers of the written word. Polish communities supported an active (and often combative) press, a lively network of amateur and professional theaters, and scores of book publishers. This study concerns itself with just one segment of Polish America’s literary output: Polish-language narrative fiction written and published in the United States before World War II. That such a literature existed at all will come as a surprise to many. Yet literature was more than just an obscure element of immigrant cultural life. It was a self-conscious agent of American Polonia’s ethnogenesis.
Like their counterparts in Europe, Polish immigrant authors wrote from a sense of national imperative. From 1795 until the end of World War I, during the period of greatest migration, Poland did not exist as a political state, having been divided in a complicated series of partitions between Prussia, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. In partitioned Poland, Norman Davies points out, “the two great themes of the age [were] the preservation of national identity, and the restoration of national independence.”1 Polish literature was enlisted in these causes, and indeed the two primary literary movements of the partition period, romanticism and positivism, are as much political as artistic strategies.
In the United States, immigrant writers persistently and passionately engaged issues of identity and peoplehood, attempting to define a sense of Polishness that would serve an idealized Poland and a developing American Polonia. But there was no consensus on just what that national identity entailed and demanded, and so the struggle for political independence and the consolidation of nationhood resulted in as much infighting as it did cooperation. Accusations of treachery and treason went hand in hand with admonitions to “support your own.”2 Rather than seeing these conflicts as no more than the self-serving and self-defeating positioning of politicians and ideologues, we might look at them as border skirmishes, meant to establish, defend, and secure territory, particularly at its most vulnerable junctures. That the question of just who should be considered a Pole became (and remains) so contentious reveals the potency of familiar historical flash points of collective identity—religion, language, social class, and political belief. And the recurring finger-pointing at accused traitors underscores the conflictedness inherent in these boundaries. One can, after all, be a traitor only to one’s own people.
The cause of Polishness, and of Polishness in America, was perceived as threatened from without and from within. But writers reserved the bitterest criticism not for outside antagonists (Prussians, Russians, Irish priests, or American nativists, for example), but for the Poles accused of aiding and abetting them. Polonian literature is full of warnings against witting or unwitting foreign agents disguised as Poles. This imagery of treason and betrayal fell in neatly with the romantic ideology of Polish messianism, which saw Poland as the Christ of nations, betrayed and sacrificed but destined to rise again for the salvation of Western civilization.3 But it is also heavily invested with Polish positivist ideology, which developed in reaction to and protest against the revolutionary impulses that had led to and fed on messianism. In the wake of the disastrous January Uprising of 1863, positivists tended to shift blame for Poland’s demise from its foreign enemies to the factionalism and private interests that made the nation vulnerable, and to formulate practical and workable ways for Polishness, if not Poland, to survive through wide-ranging educational and social development, so-called organic work. Organized efforts began, often clandestinely and under threat of arrest, to educate the peasants and instill in them a sense of national loyalty. Women were especially active in the organic work movement, which turned reading into a political act. According to Davies,
If the typical Polish “patriot” at any time up to 1864 had been a young man with a sabre or revolver in his hand, the typical patriot at the turn of the century was a young lady of good family with a textbook under her shawl. . . . They were as determined to manufacture “true Poles” as the state authorities were intent on training “real Germans” or “good Russians”; and they had an utter idealist contempt for [those] who, though intelligent, had betrayed the national culture.4
Polish positivism and particularly the organic work movement was early Polonia’s strongest literary influence. Positivist writers like Henryk Sienkiewicz, Bolesław Prus, Eliza Orzeszkowa, and Maria Konopnicka were among those most often reprinted by Polonian publishers and serialized in Polonian newspapers. In particular, the work of Orzeszkowa and Konopnicka influenced the activists of America’s Polish Women’s Alliance and prominent immigrant women writers like Helena Staś. However, not all immigrant writers, including Staś, fall neatly into the mold, and positivism went through its own permutations and produced its own offshoots, of which Polonian writers were aware and which their own work reflects. In fact, as Matthew Frye Jacobson asserts, the “strategy of cultural nation-building . . . in effect blended elements of both the positivist and the insurrectionary approaches.”5
Still, positivism, with its characteristic emphasis on social issues, often bordering on polemics, is readable in the subject, theme, and style of much early Polonian writing. What is more, positivism’s strong ties to journalism reflect those of Polish immigrant writers who, in addition to serializing their work in newspapers, contributed articles on social issues and served on editorial staffs. Polonia’s most active publishers issued products similar to (and sometimes pirated from) the literatura ludowa, people’s literature aimed at peasant and urban proletariat readers, with which immigrants were likely to be already familiar.6 These connections dovetail with Polonian literature’s preoccupation with defining and encouraging a Polish identity among readers in America, who were most easily reached through newspapers and cheap imprints. They echo in the carefully stated aims of Polish-American publishers, who were conscious of their difficult position straddling the interests of the immigrant intelligentsia and the peasant majority and who attempted to appeal to both while fending off accusations that they disseminated scandal and calumny rather than knowledge and enlightenment.
The children’s section of a 1910 Polish-American women’s magazine, Ogniwo, illustrating the connection between women and reading, a legacy of Polish positivism. Courtesy Polish Museum of America, Chicago
Under partition, the very language was weighted with symbolic meaning, as simple names, phrases, and terms like solidarity had become nuanced with layers of historical interconnections and ideological reverberations. This capacity has been noted in the later, communist-era literature of the Soviet satellite period. But Polish literature had already honed this “conspiracy of understanding”7 during the partitions. The terms of the polemics and the literary shape immigrant authors and publishers gave them reflect attempts to straddle two continents, balancing the concrete needs of an immigrant constituency with political and cultural interests in what was perceived by all factions as a fight for the very survival of everything Polish.
Within Polonia’s identity politics, the contingencies of regional identity, social class, and religion, all of which affected economic and social opportunities, reflect a kaleidoscopic puzzle of ideologies and agendas, sometimes contradictory, sometimes blended in surprising and unlikely combinations, but growing out of a European as well as an American experience. These divisions, apparent in the literature these immigrants and their children wrote and
