Reviewed in Slavic and East European Journal

By Aleksandra Fleszar and Arna Bronstein, University of New Hampshire

Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880-1939 is a study of the ethnic literary genre suggested by the title. It is truly a pioneering work which examines a sphere of literature heretofore unexplored and nearly annihilated by time and neglect. Majewski saves this important contribution to the understanding of immigrant identity and culture from death and omission. In the editor’s preface, John Bukowczy states that “the Polish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often have been portrayed as an inarticulate, undifferentiated mass, silent and rough” (xi), an image that this study dispels with a great deal of respect for its subject. Bukowczy introduces this work as an interdisciplinary study and a “landmark work in the field of immigrant history, outsider literature, and ethnic studies” (xi). Majewski argues quite persuasively that the period from the 1880s to the start of WWII was characterized by a very active immigrant press, and that an examination of this press has been to date omitted from academic studies of literature. She limits her work to examining Polish prose fiction in the American context, eliminating from consideration those plots set outside the U.S., and examining the role of this literature in Polonia as a part of the process of defining “Polish” in the American context. Traitors and True Poles is divided into six chapters with an epilogue, followed by a section entitled “Profiles,” which is actually a list of Polish immigrant authors and publishers that includes some limited biographical data. The final entries are a bibliographic essay entitled “Strategies in Recovering Polish Immigrant Writing,” bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, and a limited index.

The central six chapters of this work trace the history of Polish immigrant prose fiction in its cultural and historical context, providing the non-native, non-Polish immigrant reader with the necessary background and parameters for understanding the values and interests that shape the Polish immigrant self-identification process. In the first chapter, Majewski argues that the role of literature was primary in the creation of the Polish national identity and the Polish-American self-identification. Chapter 2 provides a diachronic view of publishing in the Polonian cultural milieu, while the next chapter examines the detective narrative genre set in the United States with the central theme of family and ethnic loyalty and its converse, betrayal; however, Majewski argues that this genre should be viewed not just as a detective series, but as ethnic and national allegories. Her arguments for this theory are quite persuasive. The continuing theme of self-definition and group identity is the central focus of the fourth chapter; however, here it is viewed as a tool influencing the immigrant to define his/her immigration in terms of political oppression and to see himself or herself within the sphere of a common national Polish identity marked by shared suffering and exploitation. Majewski examines characters of this genre in a “continuing relationship to the homeland” (12). She deconstructs the notion of self-identity in a political context, where American immigrant Poles are linked to all other Poles. Chapter 5 provides the background for the competing ideologies of the time and demonstrates how each, using the same rhetoric, presented its own politically charged version of the notion of group identity, thus supporting its own version of national survival, which was so basic to the concept of Polishness, particularly during the time of the partitions. In Chapter 6 the predominant idea of reproducing Polishness is examined through the drama of love, sex, and family, where the personal was invested with the political. Here Majewski argues that such personal themes served as a means of resolving collective identity in order to model the proper ways of reproducing national identity, i.e., Polishness.

In the epilogue, the author provides a current context by placing her study within the realm of interdisciplinary studies and by comparing her subject, immigrant Polish literature from 1880 to 1939, with that of post-Solidarity immigration. Here Majewski draws some interesting parallels between the two waves of immigration and the literatures associated with them. She notes that recently the American Polonia has experienced a renewed influx of immigrants, and that the patterns of literary output are quite similar to those of stara emigracja [old immigration]. She draws particular attention to the wakacjusze, visitors who come from various levels of society and who opt to stay in the U.S., legally and illegally, and who, like the old immigrants, hold an ambiguous relationship to both America and Poland. Pre-World War II immigrant literature was heavily influenced by the Polish social and literary movements of Positivism, embodied in the works of authors such as Konopnicka and focusing on the question of Poland’s statehood and the development of a Polish national consciousness among its immigrant readers. While pre-Solidarity immigrant literature was centered around the “deliverance” of Poland from Communism, current immigrant prose is no longer concerned with such political issues. Yet it does address the question of its own relationship to the new Poland. Thus, as Majewski asserts, “Literature reveals immigration, past and present, as a personal and social process of negotiation and accommodation” (153).

Traitors and True Poles not only provides a valuable contribution to the study of Polish cultural and political history, but in a sensitive and respectful manner facilitates the understanding of American ethnic literature and multiculturalism, by adding the voice of the heretofore “silent” Polish writers of the “old immigration.” Majewski’s bibliographic essay on the strategies of recovering Polish immigrant writing, her list of selected immigrant authors and publishers, and the bibliographies of both primary and secondary sources are welcome additions in the process of identifying this body of literature, which appeared mostly in periodicals and newspapers and which has been ignored by the scholarly community.

Slavic and East European Journal