Traitors and true Poles: Narrating a Polish-American identity, 1880-1939.

Abstract

While the Polish immigrant generation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century produced relatively little literature in English, it created a significant, largely overlooked, body of Polish-language works supported by community publishing companies and an active press. This study identifies for the first time one segment of that literature: Polish-language prose fiction which engages issues of immigration and was written and published in the United States before World War II. These works provide an insider's view into early Polonia's cultural life and history, its political and ideological rivalries, and its very deliberate attempts to define and shape a common ethnic identity. Polish immigrant literature was guided by the imperative of partitioned Poland's lost statehood and competing visions of American Polonia's role in the nation's political resurrection. Influenced by Polish Romanticism and Positivism, journalist-authors created a literature based upon transnational political designs and cultural patterns, conflating family and nation and encouraging readers to interpret their emigration as a process beginning in the context of Poland's political oppression and ending not in Americanization, but in symbolic or actual return to Poland. Authors shared a common commitment to develop a national consciousness among the masses of peasant immigrants who comprised much of their reading public. To reach these often poorly-educated readers, they utilized literary forms which were likely to be familiar and accessible, including the short humorous tale, the epistolary, and the crime novel, investing them with political and social meanings. However, the construction of a common identity was complicated by regional, class, religious, and ideological differences among the immigrants from partitioned Poland. Activists themselves disagreed on definitions and obligations of Polishness, using the same morally-charged rhetoric of treason and betrayal to propose and enact competing ideologies of group identity and strategies for national survival. Contrary to the popular image of the silent Slavic immigrant, these works testify to American Polonia's multi-voiced, often contentious, engagement in national and international issues, and to its vocal participation in the creation of its own social and cultural worlds.