Testaments. Danuta Mostwin
in Poland, without proper certificates or local connections, appeared to be worthless. Coming from a military rather than an intellectual background, they did not belong to the small, struggling, but mutually supportive Polish cultural elite in New York. Instead, they found themselves among a much larger crowd of Poles and Polish Jews in circumstances similar to their own. Finally, unable to find jobs in the New York metropolitan area, they boarded a train to Baltimore. There, homeless and penniless, they turned for help to the local Polish-American community, descendants of Polish peasant immigrants from a previous era. Thus began their life in the New World, at the bottom of its socioeconomic ladder.
In those circumstances, Danuta Mostwin, now the wife of a factory worker and mother of a small child, gave up all hope of becoming a medical doctor. She did, however, take college courses in social work, graduating with honors, and eventually received a PhD in social science from Columbia University. She also began to write fiction. In 1958 her first novel, Dom starej lady (House of the Old Lady), was published in London by Katolicki Ośrodek Wydawniczy “Veritas.” It was an autobiographical account of the harrowing, humiliating experiences of Polish refugees in postwar London. Yet Mostwin perceived an element of comedy in the situation, the classic motif of the reversal of fortune. The male characters in the novel are former war heroes—men who flew RAF planes in the Battle of Britain and fought at Monte Cassino, in North Africa, and in the Warsaw Uprising—who are learning how to become bakers, plumbers, and upholsterers. The female characters are more resilient, but they too tire of exploring ever-diminishing and more elusive prospects for escaping the London slums. Mostwin narrates the story from the perspective of a participating observer, in a voice that accommodates both irony and compassion, a style that would become her artistic trademark.
Rare in Poland’s postwar fiction, this slightly detached relationship between the narrator and the other characters is also typical of Henryk Grynberg’s documentary novels about the few survivors of his Jewish community in Poland. Like Mostwin’s displaced and degraded war heroes in Dom starej lady, Grynberg’s victims appear even more tragic because of the comical aspects of their inept efforts to cope with the catastrophe, the total destruction, of their former existence. These two very different writers share another trait characteristically absent from mainstream Polish fiction in the second half of the twentieth century: their attention to the importance of family histories and emotional connections. Wartime death (for Grynberg, the death of his father and his younger brother; for Mostwin the murder of her beloved uncle and his daughter by the Gestapo) and separations resulting from deportation and exile deepened their appreciation of family bonds and the value of loss followed by return. Because the real Polish family rarely had a history that fit the prescribed norms of ideological correctness, writers in postwar Poland tended to create characters whose family backgrounds were vague or unknown: tormented, lonely runaways from their own pasts. The task of rescuing the Polish twentieth-century family from literary oblivion thus was left to the émigré writers. Some—most notably Maria Kuncewicz, Czesław Miłosz, Józef Mackiewicz, and Danuta Mostwin—met the challenge, while others, lacking the psychological and financial resources to complete larger projects, failed. It is, perhaps, not surprising that Danuta Mostwin, trained in medicine and social psychology, would insist that, in order to effectively function in their adoptive country, immigrants had to harmonize their connection to ancestral culture with a willingness to adapt to the way of life of a local society: to become at home away from home.
In her doctoral dissertation—based on numerous interviews and case studies—Mostwin developed the concept of “a third value” as a selective merger of the old and the new ways of life. She wrote: “The process of the emergence of this third value within an uprooted immigrant’s personality may thus be described as the creation of a new form of cultural identity that is neither with the country of origin nor with the receiving country, but constitutes a third value, the integration of selective cultural patterns specific for the individual and for his unique situation of uprootment.”4 That this process is often resisted by its participants and hampered by multiple external obstacles interested Danuta Mostwin, both as a writer and as a social scientist, no less than did finding prescriptions for its success. In her next two novels—the lighthearted Ameryko! Ameryko! (America! America!), published in 1961 by Polska Fundacja Kulturalna in London, and the much darker Ja za wodą, ty za wodą (Beyond the Waters, You and I), published in 1972 by Instytut Literacki in Paris—some of the characters rationalize their resistance to acculturation by way of social prejudices or generalized political resentments. They might be jarred by specific local customs or by the incomprehensible bureaucracy of American institutions, or they might invoke the ever-festering wound of Poland’s betrayal at Yalta. Again, the apparent loss of a former identity and with it the basis for high self-esteem, causes profound emotional pain, particularly in the older male members of the small circle of recent emigrants.
In Ameryko! Ameryko!, it is Colonel Józef Żuławski—the character modeled on the author’s father—who explodes into uncontrollable rage whenever teenage customers of the cheap cafeteria that he owns call him “Joe.” He is, of course, simply irritated by the American brats’ disrespect for an older man, the kind of behavior that would not have been tolerated in Poland. But beyond this cultural clash, on a deeper level, he experiences a frightful confusion about his present identity. As a military officer he had seen himself as he was regarded by others, according to his rank and uniform; now, aproned, dishrag in hand, he indeed might have become this new, arrogant world’s Joe, while knowledge of his true person has shrunk to the tiny circle of his immediate family. Mostwin approaches Żuławski’s crisis of identity with a wonderful, self-deprecating (he is, after all, her father figure) sense of humor, not unlike that of many so-called ethnic comedians in America: Irish, Jewish, and African American. She pokes fun at stereotypes on both sides of the cultural dividing lines. We laugh at the absurdity of Żuławski’s fury, yet, at the same time, we relate to his pain and humiliation because we all, the immigrant readers of her novel, had to endure similar struggles: to sell ourselves cheap, to have our identities—even our names—cut short. In Ameryko! Ameryko! Mostwin’s fictional immigrant family is cured of prejudice when their new house, in the American-American neighborhood, burns down, and dozens of the hitherto unknown neighbors rush to help.
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