Ja za wodą, ty za wodą tells the story of an encounter between the immigrant Polish community and two visitors from the People’s Republic of Poland, who come to Baltimore on research grants from the U.S. government during a brief thaw in the Cold War, after 1956. Mostwin employs here another classic comic device: the disruption of stability by the arrival of a stranger. But the comedy in this meeting of two worlds—oddly close and oddly distant—is much darker and more complex than that in Mostwin’s previous two novels; its tensions remain unresolved, and the ending lacks the upbeat promise of “the third value.” Set, like Ameryko! Ameryko!, in a fictionalized Baltimore, the novel’s cast of characters does not include anyone resembling members of the author’s family, a circumstance that frees her from the inhibitions inherent in using autobiographical material. We meet a familiar group of recent immigrants who, a decade into their lives in the United States, have somewhat reluctantly integrated with the old Polonia but remain unconnected to American society at large. They cling to symbols of patriotism but shield themselves from the reality of Poland, and their resolve to return there at some politically favorable point in the future is clearly diminished. Caught in such a web of identity anxiety, they are half-disapproving and half-proud of one member of the group, Hanka Sanocka, a successful medical doctor who has come to terms with the cultural transition and is determined to make the best of her new American citizenship, both for herself and for her two daughters. Her wholehearted acceptance of the American way of life is not shared by her husband, who still clings to patriotic ideals and would like to take his family back to Poland, communist or not. Their marital discord comes forth when Hanka finds herself attracted to Doctor Kettler, one of two Polish beneficiaries of a grant for a one-year residence at Johns Hopkins. The attraction is as mutual as it is unsettling for both of these unsentimental careerists. A car accident, in which Hanka is critically injured on the way to their first date, prevents the development of the affair and solves Kettler’s dilemma: to stay, or to return. A similar dilemma is experienced by the other doctor-scholar from Poland, a shy, married woman named Joasia, who becomes involved romantically with an American colleague at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. But she, too, decides to return to her husband and son in Warsaw, leaving behind her American admirer.
Although some reviewers in prestigious émigré literary magazines recognized the overall artistic strength of the novel and welcomed Mostwin as a truly original voice from the Polish diaspora in America, others balked at her depressing portrait of the immigrant ghetto, underscored by the decision of the two visitors to go back to their blighted homeland, rather than to “choose freedom.” Mostwin’s honesty and her realist talent might have brought her a more resounding success with the truth-starved readers in Poland, but again this chance could not but be lost. The reception of both novels by émigré critics was muted. They praised Mostwin’s talent of observation and her realism, but seemed uncomfortable with her unorthodox approach to dealing with the tragedy of Poland and with the cruel fate of Polish war heroes. Ameryko! Ameryko! was published in Poland in 1981, in a tiny edition, and with little notice at the time of yet another national trauma—the brutal suppression of the Solidarity movement. Ja za wodą, ty za wodą had to wait until the fall of communism in Poland.
A different confrontation between two worlds occurs in Mostwin’s non-immigrant (so to speak) novel, Olivia, published by Instytut Kulturalny in Paris in 1965. One world is represented by a Polish-American therapist, who narrates the story—the other, by her patient, or “case,” a troubled young American woman named Olivia. Olivia is a runaway from her adoptive, un-loving, and unloved, parents. She has a severe drug problem and, consequently, is incapable of maintaining any relationship, including the one with her therapist. There is a masterfully explored parallel between the successful “adoption” of the therapist into her new country and the failed adoption of Olivia into her new family, a failure that sets the young protagonist on a course of self-destruction. The therapist’s efforts to unravel the tangle of external and internal causes of Olivia’s misery bring no answers; at the end she loses the case. Olivia, true to the mysterious nature of her malady, disappears. That failure forces the therapist to turn the mirror on herself: was she unable to make the meaningful contact with Olivia because of or in spite of her own “otherness”? Did Olivia “punish” her as yet another substitute parental figure, or did she, the overcurious therapist, invite the punishment by straying from strictly professional interest in the case? We can also interpret Olivia as a record of the turning point in one immigrant’s journey from the “outside” to the “inside” of her adoptive/adopted country. For now, not only is she entitled to deal with the suffering of a native-born American, but she can afford either to pass or to fail the test. In writing Olivia, Mostwin graduated from one school of pain, that of her fellow exiles, to the all-inclusive class of universal ills.
Mostwin continued both to counsel and to write. Her caseload, mostly elderly and poor inhabitants of Baltimore’s immigrant district, grew into a portfolio of short stories, and the collection Asteroidy (Asteroids) came out in 1968 from Polska Fundacja Kulturalna in London. Dignified in their suffering, accepting of lifelong hardship as uneducated laborers, these men and women of distant Slavic roots had a different effect on Mostwin’s craft than had her own milieu of postwar refugees. Absent are her tendency toward satire, her often bitter irony, and the intricate play of multimirrored reflections of the observer and the observed. The Asteroids stories, like their protagonists, are stark and deceptively simple. While the American social worker in Mostwin filed her case paperwork in English, the Polish writer peered beyond the routine questions and hesitant answers into the scarcely articulable, but always distinct, mystery of human fate—a mystery all the more compelling for the poverty of the subjects’ vocabulary of self-knowledge.
In the first of the two novellas selected for this volume, Błażej Twardowski is an old, ailing immigrant, a Polish peasant who came to America as a teenage boy. He never married and now, knowing that his end is near, he wonders to whom should he will his life’s savings. He never spent any money on himself, so the sum is not negligible—but he has no immediate relatives. There is a distant cousin in Pennsylvania, whom he meets, and the families of his sister and his stepbrother in Poland, none of whose many members he had ever seen. He asks a local Polish travel agent for help, and this not unkind intermediary writes and translates letters between the contending parties. The letters from Poland are, of course, outrageously solicitous and full of invented woes and make-believe disasters. Although the translator alerts Błażej to these deceptions, the old man is transfixed by the language of the letters, by their flamboyant phraseology and descriptions of farm life—a life that seems all the more enticing, the nearer its presumed extinction without an instant infusion of cash from “Beloved Uncle.” Błażej is not fooled—but he pretends that he is and sends the cash. What he really pays for is not a new barn, a replaced roof, and cures for every sick pig or child, but the flowery, greed-inspired prose of these letters and the childhood memories they evoke. Besides, he understands greed and thrift, and he doesn’t really mind contributing to the enrichment of those who are, after all, his kinfolk. The cousin from Pennsylvania, on the other hand—although equally greedy—can no longer produce a properly embellished Polish sentence, and she also fails to visit him more than once in the hospital during his final illness. Alone all his life, the laborer Błażej will, however, have a true friend at his deathbed: an educated man, the Polish translator.
The second novella, Jocasta, explores a more pathological landscape of the human soul in a mutually destructive relationship between mother and son. The mother’s love is sick: it ruins the son’s marriage and literally drives him insane. But as in Olivia, the reader never gets to the bottom of what caused the misery: war, separation after the son’s emigration, and the mother’s long stay in Warsaw until she could come to the United States? Or was it all triggered by the son’s marriage to a German woman? The story represents Mostwin’s deepening interest in the corrosive effects of conflicts of identity, in ways that are as incomprehensible to participants in the drama as they are to outside observers.
Before returning in her most recent fiction to the theme of the fragmented and increasingly bleak—few of the old soldiers age well, and many die—émigré experience, Mostwin
