Testaments. Danuta Mostwin
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 completed a cycle of four novels that tells the story of one extended family, based on her own, in a time frame that stretches from World War I to the aftermath of World War II. The notion to begin the project came to Mostwin during a visit to Poland in 1961, her first since she had left the country in 1945. This reunion with relatives of her parents’ generation and the powerful jolt of memories provided instant inspiration, but the stamina that the project required came, as she would often remark, from her American education in perseverance. In one of her articles on the benefits of emigration, she wrote about the American ideals and values that she tried to incorporate in her work as a Polish writer: “First, the value of the individual. Of the uniqueness and irreplaceability of every human being. The value that surpasses a group or a society. Second, the idea of creative change. Opportunity for self-enrichment with that which is new and contemporary but which doesn’t shun the past, or what is sometimes called ‘the burden of history.’ In my work, both that of the writer and that of the scholar, I have pointed to the ways of achieving such fullness.”5
In her “Polish” novels, Mostwin addressed the burden of history. There are countries, Poland and Russia among them, where literature is the primary source of knowledge about history because novels are not as easily censored as school textbooks. Historical figures appear only in the background, while the main narrative belongs to a cluster of fictional families, actors in and victims of historic events. Mostwin chose her own family, socially mobile and politically active, and began its story as far back as oral testimonies and preserved documents could pass it on to her. The first and the second books in the cycle, Cień księdza Piotra (The Shadow of Father Piotr) and Szmaragdowa zjawa (The Emerald Specter), take the reader back to the time of the re-emergence of independent Poland during and after World War I. Political matters in these novels—and no personal space there is untouched by intrusion of politics—could not be discussed openly in the People’s Republic of Poland. Mostwin knew it, of course, and did her expert best to enter the forbidden zones.
But it is the third novel of the cycle, Tajemnica zwyciężonych (The Secret of the Vanquished), published in London in 1992, that most conspicuously enters uncharted territory: the Polish family in World War II. The outbreak of the war coincided with Mostwin’s coming of age: she had turned eighteen in 1939 and therefore could rely here on her own memories, conversations with relatives, the