Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction

By Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Though often unnoticed by scholars of literature and history, Polish American women have for decades been fighting back against the patriarchy they encountered in America and the patriarchy that followed them from Poland. Through close readings of several Polish American and Polish Canadian novels and short stories published over the last seven decades, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction traces the evolution of this struggle and women’s efforts to construct gendered and classed ethnicity.

Focusing predominantly on work by North American born and immigrant authors that represents the Polish American Catholic tradition, Grażyna J. Kozaczka puts texts in conversation with other American ethnic literatures. She positions ethnic gender construction and performance at an intersection of social class, race, and sex. She explores the marginalization of ethnic female characters in terms of migration studies, theories of whiteness, and the history of feminist discourse. Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction tells the complex story of how Polish American women writers have shown a strong awareness of their oppression and sought empowerment through resistive and transgressive behaviors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9780821446447

Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Grażyna J. Kozaczka is a distinguished professor of English and the director of the All College Honors Program at Cazenovia College. She is the author of William Dean Howells and John Cheever: The Failure of the American Dream and numerous articles on Polish American literature. She has also authored Old World Stitchery, and articles on Polish folk dress and adornment.

Book preview

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction

Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series

Series Editor: John J. Bukowczyk

Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, edited by Bożena Shallcross

Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939, by Karen Majewski

Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979, by Jonathan Huener

The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956, by Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made, by Mary Patrice Erdmans

Testaments: Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile, by Danuta Mostwin

The Clash of Moral Nations: Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935, by Eva Plach

Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by Jerzy Andrzejewski

The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939, by Sheila Skaff

Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939, by Neal Pease

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy, edited by M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula, and Piotr J. Wróbel

The Borders of Integration: Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924, by Brian McCook

Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki, by Mikołaj Stanisław Kunicki

Taking Liberties: Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama, 1786–1989, by Halina Filipowicz

The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland, by Joanna Mishtal

Marta, by Eliza Orzeszkowa, translated by Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, with an introduction by Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, by Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Series Advisory Board

M. B. B. Biskupski, Central Connecticut State University

Robert E. Blobaum, West Virginia University

Anthony Bukoski, University of Wisconsin-Superior

Bogdana Carpenter, University of Michigan

Mary Patrice Erdmans, Case Western University

Thomas S. Gladsky, Central Missouri State University (ret.)

Padraic Kenney, Indiana University

John J. Kulczycki, University of Illinois at Chicago (ret.)

Ewa Morawska, University of Essex

Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University

Brian Porter-Szûcs, University of Michigan

James S. Pula, Purdue University Northwest

Daniel Stone, University of Winnipeg

Adam Walaszek, Jagiellonian University

Theodore R. Weeks, Southern Illinois University

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction

Grażyna J. Kozaczka

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

ohioswallow.com

© 2019 by Ohio University Press

All rights reserved

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Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8214-2339-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-0-8214-4644-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

The Polish and Polish-American Studies Series is made possible by:

The Polish American Historical Association,

The Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut,

The Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professorship in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and

The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

Support is also provided by the following individuals:

Thomas Duszak (Benefactor)

George Bobinski (Contributor)

Alfred Bialobrzeski (Friend)

William Galush (Friend)

Col. John A. and Pauline A. Garstka (Friend)

Jonathan Huener (Friend)

Grażyna Kozaczka (Friend)

Neal Pease (Friend)

Mary Jane Urbanowicz (Friend)

Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek (Friend)

Literature, unlike history, political theory, and anthropology, has the ability to both transform and to perform the work of cultural awakening.

—Rani Neutill

Contents

List of Illustrations

Series Editor’s Preface

Preface and Acknowledgments

Guide to Pronunciation

Introduction. Polish American Women

A Cultural and Literary Construct

1. Faces of Resistance

Monica Krawczyk’s Immigrant Women

2. At Midcentury

Polish Americans Writing Their Identity

3. Suzanne Strempek Shea’s Gendered Ethnicity in the 1970s and 1980s

4. Leslie Pietrzyk and Ellen Slezak Constructing Ethnic Motherhood

5. Tragic Motherhood in Danuta Mostwin’s Jocasta

6. Transgressive Sexuality in Polish American Fiction of the Last Twenty-Five Years

7. (Im)migrant Homelands in the Early Twenty-First Century

8. Experiments in Ethnicity

The Solidarity 1.5 Generation

9. Fifty Years of Girling

Models of Polish American Femininity in Young Adult Literature

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Cover of If the Branch Blossoms and Other Stories (1950)

Cover of Prize Winning Stories: Monica Krawczyk Short Story Contests 1960 and 1963 (1964)

Suzanne Strempek Shea

Leslie Pietrzyk

Cover of Testaments: Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile (2005)

Aga Maksimowska

Karolina Waclawiak

Series Editor’s Preface

Although the Polish American ethnic group may not have produced as much women’s fiction, in English, nor supported as large a number of woman writers as some other ethnic groups in the United States, Polish American women’s literature nonetheless has a long tradition in North America. In Something of My Very Own to Say: American Women Writers of Polish Descent (East European Monographs, 1997), coeditors Thomas S. and Rita Holmes Gladsky introduced and explored the work of select exemplars of this genre in a collection of scholarly essays and literary excerpts spanning the late nineteenth though the twentieth century. Karen Majewski’s Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939 (Ohio University Press, 2003) later examined the very early literature by Polish American female authors, much of it written in Polish and a lot of it serialized in the immigrant Polish-language press, amply demonstrating the breadth and depth of this literary tradition. The third volume in the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series, Majewski’s book has become a classic in the canon of ethnic literary criticism.

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction by Grażyna J. Kozaczka, professor of English at Cazenovia College in New York, now takes the investigation of this subject from the mid-twentieth century to recent and contemporary times. Professor Kozaczka shows the enduring importance of patriarchy in the experience of Polish American women and their often quiet, sometimes even secret efforts to fashion an independent sphere of thought and action for themselves and their daughters. In doing so, these women writers demonstrate that ethnicity has been a gendered concept and that men and women understand and experience, construct and perform group belonging and ethnic identity in different, gendered ways. Looking at the long development of Polish American women’s fiction in North America, Kozaczka charts a significant change over time in the way Polish American women writers work out an ethnic identity for themselves. Once deeply rooted in their local communities, their social connections, and broader historical processes, in more recent times ethnic identity has become a deeply personal, individualized part of the unique experiences that shape each Polish American woman’s life.

Publication of the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series marks a milestone in the maturation of the Polish Studies field and stands as a fitting tribute to the scholars and organizations whose efforts have brought it to fruition. Supported by a series advisory board of accomplished Polonists and Polish Americanists, the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series has been made possible through generous financial assistance from the Polish American Historical Association, the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies at Central Connecticut State University, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professorship in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and through institutional support from Wayne State University and Ohio University Press. The series, meanwhile, has benefited from the warm encouragement of a number of other persons, including Gillian Berchowitz, M. B. B. Biskupski, Robert Blobaum, the late Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Thomas Duszak, Mary Erdmans, Martin Hershock, Rick Huard, Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, Grażyna Kozaczka, Anna Mazurkiewicz, Brian McCook, Anna Müller, Thomas Napierkowski, James S. Pula, and the late Thaddeus Radzilowski, and from the able assistance of the staff of Ohio University Press. The series also has received generous assistance from a growing list of series supporters, including benefactor Thomas Duszak, contributor George Bobinski, and additional friends of the series including Alfred Bialobrzeski, William Galush, John A. and Pauline A. Garstka, Jonathan Huener, Grażyna Kozaczka, Neal Pease, Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek, and Mary Jane Urbanowicz. The moral and material support from all of these institutions and individuals is gratefully acknowledged.

John J. Bukowczyk

Preface and Acknowledgments

The origins of this book go back to the place inhabited by many immigrants to the United States, a place often demarcated by conflicting notions of otherness, familiarity, acceptance, marginalization, approval, exclusion, and stereotyping. Being an immigrant from Poland myself, I have observed the contradictions embedded in the existences of Polish immigrants who are privileged through their racial identity, yet are restricted by mainstream assumptions about their immigrant social-class position. Upon learning that I was born in Poland, a new acquaintance at a professional dinner gushed with praise over a Polish housekeeper whose efficiency and devotion had once impressed her. A well-meaning colleague once advised me that I could supplement my income by baking my signature Polish cookies and selling them at the college where I teach. Processing such comments is at times uncomfortable, yet the self-consciousness I feel might itself be a product of the everyday contradictions that constantly inform immigrant identity. I have pondered the decision of an ICE officer who stopped our car on a lonely road near El Paso, Texas, only to wave us through the roadblock after a cursory glance in. Obviously, my blond hair and my very fair skin did not conform to his image of an immigrant. To him, I was not other, but one of us who must be protected rather than challenged. I still smile, remembering the genuine shock expressed by a close friend when she heard me label myself as an immigrant. After all, she knows me as an English-speaking white woman who teaches American literature at an American college. How could I ever fit her image of an immigrant?

The anecdotes I briefly sketched are less dramatic than they are intimate: they outline a space within which the narrative of my life unfolds, right at the intersection of powerful forces of race, social class, and gender as well as Polish, Polish American, and American mainstream cultures. It is where I construct my identity 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.

*   *   *

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.

*   *   *

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 her amid various identity options, and empowers her to make independent choices even if they appear whimsical or irrational. Harriet’s closest friends get annoyed with her insistence on ‘being Polish.’ Harriet is a third generation American; in fact, she is a third-generation Massachusettsian, in fact, she is a third-generation Stoughtonian. However, Harriet likes being Polish as she thinks it gives her full permission to be stubborn and prideful.⁴ Harriet freely selects and deliberately constructs a gendered ethnic self by identifying herself fully as Polish despite her multiethnic gene pool and her American birth. She consciously ignores her strong emotional attachment to America and her partly olive⁵ skin, a visible link to her Spanish and French great-grandmothers. This third-generation ethnic woman approaches ethnicity as a voluntary choice, as a matter of consent rather than descent,⁶ when she decides on Polishness as her space of identification. Harriet’s contemporary, Anya, the narrator cum protagonist of Karolina Waclawiak’s debut novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms (2012), deploys a similar ethnic matrix when she engages in ethnic cross-dressing. However, Waclawiak’s character distances herself from Polishness. Dissatisfied with her Polish roots, Anya, an immigrant albeit a child immigrant, recognizes ethnicity as an artificial construct to be discarded or modified at will by employing a carefully selected set of ethnic markers⁷ that would allow her, she believes, to move seamlessly from the rejected Polish identity to the desired identification with Russian immigrants.

Both Elizabeth Dembrowsky and Karolina Waclawiak, who write the Polish American self, rework yet again the archetypal plot of American becoming, of leaving, arriving, and staying in-between, and of constructing self from the opposite pulls of disparate cultures. Taking advantage of the privilege of whiteness, they grant their characters freedom to blend with the dominant culture, to construct a Polish American ethnic self, or even to engage in an appropriation of markers belonging to the ethnic other. These new ethnic shape-shifters may slip in and out of different identities to satisfy an immediate need or to gain a social advantage.

Such liberty to self-create was not always an option available to Polish immigrants and ethnics. Their struggle has been both chronicled and championed by several generations of Polish American writers, especially women writers, who believed that their stories deserved to be heard and whose fiction reflected as well as shaped ethnic ideas of gendered identity. Taken together, their narratives trace the developmental trajectory of ethnic views of self, shaped internally by the Polish American communities and externally by the mainstream culture. They also offer a complex portrait of Polish immigration with its covert class system, pervasive presence of the Roman Catholic Church and patriarchy, as well as uneasy attitudes toward both the homeland and the receiving country.

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction opens a long-neglected conversation on the construction of the gendered white ethnic self in Polish American post–World War II literature principally by women writers raised in the Roman Catholic tradition. My focus on self-construction limits my choice of texts to ones written predominantly by Polish ethnic and (im)migrant women. For some of the (im)migrant women, their immigration status might remain fluid throughout their lives when they repeatedly change homelands. Many never decide on a permanent homeland but stay within a pattern of repeated migrations between Poland and the United States. An inclusion of a small number of texts by Polish Canadian women, male authors, and non-Poles enriches this study by allowing a comparative analysis of ethnic self-construction and the construction and representation of gendered identity. This juxtaposition delineates the internal (i.e., Polish American) and external (i.e., mainstream) cultural contexts of self-construction in addition to shedding light on barriers between women and self-actualization. It illustrates, as in Joseph S. Wnukowski’s⁸ short story, some of the struggles faced by Polish American women. Moreover, the selection of texts reflects the settlement patterns of Polish immigrants as strongly circumscribed by their religious identity. As Timothy L. Smith finds, common religious affiliation was a crucial reason for groups of immigrants to settle together. Smith believes that it was even stronger than a common language, common history, and common descent. He suggests that the customs and beliefs of particular varieties of faith and the traditions of loyalty to them seem, then, to have been the decisive determinants of ethnic affiliation in America.⁹ Though there is, undoubtedly, a need for more research about fiction produced by Polish writers hailing from a range of religious traditions, such work exceeds the scope of the present study, which focuses for the most part on a fairly unified group of writers hailing from Polish American Catholic communities.

The principal purpose of this volume is to offer considered readings of a number of novels and short stories that narrate the first-, second-, and third-generation American experience of white ethnic women, present a detailed and sociologically realistic image of the Polish diaspora, and testify to the Polish American awareness of ethnic uniqueness. Moreover, Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction aims at adding a literary voice that so far has not had a strong presence in the academy among numerous studies of other ethnic literatures as well as historical and sociological studies of Polish immigration to the United States. As sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans suggests, We know a lot about why people migrate, but less about how people make sense of migration. . . . One way we can understand how people make sense of their worlds is to listen to their stories.¹⁰ Erdmans clearly points to narratives as agents of identity construction and to literature as an important forum for groups marginalized due to their ethnicity, gender, social class, or race. In addition, the present study shifts the current discussion of diasporic literature in a new direction away from research conducted by scholars of Polish literature and centered on the literary output of World War II émigrés. Its historical and artistic values notwithstanding, émigré writing, published almost exclusively in Polish, has had little impact on the American reading public. The popular ethnic literature at the center of this study allows readers to witness the construction process of gendered ethnicity within an easily assimilable and largely invisible white ethnic group over the last three-quarters of a century.

The chronological as well as thematic organization of this study traces evolutionary changes in identity construction of ethnic women. The narrative trajectory presented here begins with the short stories of Monica Krawczyk, whose immigrant women are firmly rooted in the homogeneous working-class ethnic communities of the 1930s and 1940s. It follows with the narratives developed by her disciples in the 1950s and early 1960s, where female protagonists move away from the ethnic neighborhoods to the fast-growing white American suburbs as they gain middle-class status. Yet, their literary daughters choose to return to the Polish American centers in fiction by the next generation of women. Writers such as Suzanne Strempek Shea and Leslie Pietrzyk return to strong working-class ethnic roots in their stories set in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, the turn-of-the-century texts, and especially narratives from the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, propose a new on demand model of ethnicity for young well-educated women who are perfectly assimilated into American society. Such characters populate novels by Elizabeth Dembrowsky, Dagmara Dominczyk, and Karolina Waclawiak. Benefiting from their white invisibility, they can blend in with the mainstream, they can identify themselves as Polish American if they so choose, or they can engage in ethno-racial cross-dressing.

The organization of Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction underscores one of this book’s assertions about the direction of assimilatory moves. As evidenced by Krawczyk’s short fiction, being consigned to the position of a racial subaltern by the mainstream motivates immigrants to engage in a series of assimilatory actions to prove Americanness. However, once they claimed Americanness, left the position of the foreign other, and obtained an undisputed place within the white mainstream, Polish characters felt liberated from all ethno-racial considerations. Secure in their whiteness, they allow experimentation within their ethnic spaces while they construct and reconstruct Polishness to claim ancestral heritage and retain unique cultural identity.

Just as race is consigned to silences in Polish American literature of the last decades, so, too, for the most part, is the memory of the original homeland and its victimization: during the partitions when Poland ceased to exist as an independent country (1795–1918), during World War II, and during the years of the communist regime. With the original homeland growing increasingly distant, many second- and third-generation writers of the second half of the twentieth century anchor ethnic identity in largely homogeneous neighborhoods built by immigrant ancestors. Yet, they all acknowledge that the hold on Polish communal ethnicity has grown more tenuous as white ethnic urban communities gradually disappear. Interestingly, the demise of ethnic neighborhoods combined with the disintegration of the communist system in Europe reestablishes connections in Poland. Young, well-educated, and prosperous Polish American characters turn their gaze back on the ancestral homeland as they reconstruct gendered ethnicity in the twenty-first century. The evolution of identity constructs in Polish American fiction since World War II illustrates significant changes in ethnic patterns among Polish Americans: a gradual movement away from strong homogeneous ethnic communities toward individualistic neighborhoods of one. It also follows the parallel trend in contemporary literature with its continuing change of focus from large historical processes and events to a total concentration on the fate of an individual.¹¹

In Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, I argue that over the last three-quarters of a century, Polish American popular literature by women writers challenges the Polish American woman’s invisibility by offering a consistent image of her. My readings show that she is a woman well aware of being positioned at an intersection of several often-hostile forces where gendered ethnicity is inextricable from classed ethnicity. She contends with social-class restrictions and damaging expectations that often go back to the distant Polish past. She may have to cope with nationalistically inflected expectations of the intelligentsia class or struggle with the working-class patriarchal oppression supported by the Catholic Church under the guise of elevating her status in the image of the Virgin Mary. Her awareness of these restrictions, her refusal to internalize them, and her rejection of victimhood become acts of rebellion as she resists the need to please and constructs a gendered ethnic identity in pursuit of self-fulfillment. Ethnic, immigrant, and also in some cases migrant fiction¹² becomes liberatory as it advocates empowerment against oppression and charts the deployment of female-centric patterns of resistance while showing how Polish American women successfully perform gendered, ethnicized, and classed Americanness.

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction considers the ways women negotiate discourses of belonging as well as posits that it is women who, by writing their gendered ethnic identity, tell the story of Polish Americans and join other ethnic women in telling the story of America. In their narratives, Polish American homes become the sites where, through the efforts of women, ethnic consciousness has been forged and transmitted from generation to generation within female clans. Women have always been the force behind constructing Polish American identity, not only in the home but also in neighborhoods, where their tireless work in Polish American parishes and secular organizations sustained the larger ethnic community. Capturing their vision of themselves, Polish American women authors over the past seven or eight decades created an entry point into the ethnic story of Poles in America.

II

The period immediately following World War II marked the particularly vigorous growth of ethnic fiction, since it was the time when Americans were taking a fresh look at ethnicity and race and were beginning a discussion of their place in American culture. Tracy Floreani argues convincingly that all ethnic narratives deepen our understanding of American culture.¹³ Polish American texts by women authors make an important contribution to the field of writing by ethnic women in the United States as they join in creating a space of self-expression for those who were often silenced and as they document women’s attempts to reclaim power and visibility. Even a brief comparison of Polish American texts with narratives by women from other immigrant groups uncovers interethnic commonalities in treatment of gendered, classed, and often raced ethnicity. Within such an environment, Polish American women writers take on an active role in contributing to the American multiethnic social environment through their focus on ethnic performance, advocacy of women’s empowerment, and development of gender-aware themes.

Many critical studies that focus on literary output of women from a wide range of ethnic groups such as Chinese American, South Asian American, Irish American, Italian American, Hispanic/Latina/Chicana American, etc., draw attention to the value of ethnic literature by women in ushering doubly marginalized groups, both ethnic and female, into the mainstream. Lucia Guerra-Cunningham, writing about Latina American women, sees their stories as a way to freedom from the oppressive dungeon of silence. She credits narratives with identifying the processes that led to relegating women to the position of the silent Other.¹⁴ Likewise, Karen M. Cardozo in her analysis of Jhumpa Lahiri’s South Asian American fiction praises Lahiri as well as Chinese American Maxine Hong Kingston for introducing two formerly ostracized ethnic groups into the cultural mainstream.¹⁵ The crucial role of fiction in bringing attention to ethnic women and in recognizing the value of their stories has also been presented by Sally Barr Ebest in her book, The Banshees: A Literary History of Irish American Women Writers, and by Mary Jo Bona in Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary, in By the Breath of Their Mouths: Narratives of Resistance in Italian