Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction. Grażyna J. Kozaczka
as a woman, an immigrant from Poland, and an academic. Moving frequently between my own insider/outsider constructs, between the subjective and the objective, my scholarship strives to reach for what John J. Bukowczyk calls the “subterranean insights of personal and therefore political value” when he points to the particular importance of historical inquiry conducted by “the scholars who research and write about a subject so inextricably linked to their own formation.”1 In this first-ever study devoted entirely to literary images of immigrant and ethnic women in Polish American post–World War II fiction, I consider how these texts negotiate discourses of belonging and identity as well as how often-invisible Polish ethnic characters exist within spaces of identification or alienation outlined in this little-known fiction.
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This study would not have been possible without the help, support, and inspiration from many colleagues, friends, and family members both in the United States and in Poland. I am thankful to all who have given so generously of their time and expertise. First of all, I owe a debt of gratitude to all the immigrant and ethnic writers who told stories about the Polish American experience. I particularly appreciate the friendship of Suzanne Strempek Shea, whose novels introduced me to the world of Polish American fiction; the encouragement from Czesław Karkowski; the unpublished manuscript of a Polish American novel sent by Leslie Pietrzyk; as well as long discussions about exilic identity with the late W. S. Kuniczak, whose facility with the English language was inspiring.
I am thankful to my colleagues from the Polish American Historical Association, especially to Mary Patrice Erdmans for her insightful commentary and suggestions on improving my manuscript, and to Mary Cygan for telling me about Melissa Kwasny’s novel. I would like to express my appreciation for the professional expertise of Stanley J. Kozaczka, library director at Cazenovia College, and Judith Azzato, a reference librarian at the same library, who both worked on locating difficult-to-obtain sources. I cannot forget the mentorship of Professor Irena Przemecka at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, who with her valuable advice guided my first steps as a researcher, nor the friendship of the late Ewa Michalek, a talented and dedicated English teacher who inspired my choice of a career.
I am very grateful to the Ohio University Press for supporting the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series and especially to Series Editor John J. Bukowczyk for his patience and good advice, to Director and Editor-in-Chief Gillian Berchowitz and Acquisitions Editor Ricky Huard for their gentle encouragement and reassurance, and to Managing Editor Nancy Basmajian and Ed Vesneske, Jr., for their careful attention to the manuscript.
My work has also been inspired by strong women I am lucky to call friends, such as Sharon Dettmer, Karen Steen, Eleanora Kupencow-Alper, Daniela Klesmith, Halina Bystrowska, Natalia Noga, Agnieszka Sobejko, Susan Goodier, Allyn Stewart, Susan Morgan, Joan Brandt, and the late Maryla Nadratowski. I am very grateful for what I learned about being a Polish woman from my grandmother Julia Urych, my mother Maria Knapczyk, and my aunt Antonina Knapczyk. I only wish that my late father Tadeusz Knapczyk could see this book. Finally, I want to extend my love and gratitude to my son Adam Kozaczka for his friendship and long literary discussions and to my husband Stanley J. Kozaczka, who has always been my first and most enthusiastic reader and whose love, generosity, and sense of humor sustain me every day.
This book is for Stan.
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Some chapters include revised portions of previously published articles. I am grateful to the following journals and their editors for granting permission to use selections from my published work.
“Cultural, Class and Ethnic Conflicts in Contemporary Polish American Fiction.” Polish Review 49, no. 4 (2004): 1045–64.
“The Invention of Ethnicity and Gender in Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Fiction.” Polish Review 48, no. 3 (2003): 327–45.
“‘The Silent One’: The (Absent) Voiceless Mother in Recent Narratives by Leslie Pietrzyk and Ellen Slezak. Polish American Studies 66, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 43–54.
All translations from the Polish language, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.
Guide to Pronunciation
The following key provides a guide to the pronunciation of Polish words and names.
a is pronounced as in father
c as ts, as in cats
ch as guttural h, as in German BACH
cz as hard ch, as in church
g (always hard), as in get
i as ee, as in meet
j as y, as in yellow
rz as hard zh, as in French jardin
sz as hard sh, as in ship
szcz as hard shch, as in fresh cheese
u as oo, as in boot
w as v, as in vat
ć as soft ch, as in cheap
ś as soft sh, as in sheep
ż as hard zh, as in French jardin
ź as soft zh, as in seizure
ó as oo, as in boot
ą as a nasal, as in French bon
ę as a nasal, as in French vin or fin
ł as w, as in way
ń as ny, as in canyon
The accent in Polish words almost always falls on the penultimate syllable.
INTRODUCTION
Polish American Women
A Cultural and Literary Construct
The stories immigrants tell about themselves become a way of making sense of who one is, how one can be of many worlds at once, and most importantly, making sense of those experiences in light of both the homeland and the host culture.
—Archana A. Pathak1
My mother ended each story the same way: “To be alive in this country is a miracle. You should thank God every day.”
But this was the only place we knew. How could someone else’s stories make us understand?
—Leslie Pietrzyk2
A woman . . . called to let me know she was hoping we would be playing authentic Polish music. . . . What did I know about what they listened to over there? I only knew that this was the music we played here, and it happened to be sung in Polish, and sometimes told of Polish things.
—Suzanne Strempek Shea3
I
For three-quarters of a century now, Polish American women writers have been reaching for the ancestral to write female Polishness into the narrative of America. Striving to eliminate or circumvent deeply embedded and institutionalized barriers, they find their strength and uniqueness in relational female networks that go back to the original homeland. They continuously construct and reconstruct gendered ethnicity amid tensions brought on by forces of social class, ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation as well as by political and religious pressures. Their success in moving Polish American ethnic space from the nineteenth-century marginality of the “not quite white” immigrants to the normalized middle-class center of the twentieth century freed them to experiment with multiple ethno-racial constructs in the twenty-first century.
Harriet Zabrosky serves as an apt example of a Polish American woman of the new century. She is the twenty-something protagonist of Elizabeth Dembrowsky’s experimental novel, My Monk (2009), and her self-constructed identity testifies to the malleability of gendered white ethnicity in twenty-first-century America. Dembrowsky allows Harriet to challenge the invisibility of a white ethnic, situates