Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction

[Editor's note: In The Polish Review 66, no. 1 (2021), Angela Pienkos reviewed Grażyna Kozaczka's book within the methodological framework of ethnic studies. Bożena Karwowska's review, in contrast, combines an ethnic studies approach with a focus on gender and literary analysis.]Contemporary societies, especially those built on conquered lands by various groups and waves of immigrants, have been searching not only for their own national identities, but also for categories that would help to identify and describe their various social groups and strata. Throughout the years, academics have coined many different terms and tried many different approaches, often publishing works not only clearly products of their contemporary day and age (and quickly becoming outdated), but also making it difficult for the next group of researchers to navigate through both the material evidence and critical approaches. This body of critical works, one of the greatest testimonies of societal and individual struggles and achievements, grew over the years as the categories with which academics and readers approached literature simultaneously evolved and highlighted the differing aspects of authors’ artistic expressions of their external and internal realities. The challenge of facing both a growing number of (though sometimes hard to find) literary works and a multitude of academic viewpoints has been enough to deter academics from painting a panoramic picture of Polish literature in America. Instead, they tend to focus primarily on studies of a rather limited scope; it is worth noting, however, that some of them have been really interesting and even ground breaking. Grażyna Kozaczka, the author of Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, deserves special recognition for taking on a particularly challenging and difficult task. Her readers are presented with a brilliant and multilayered study of both female literary characters of Polish ethnic-fiction in America and its women authors.Kozaczka begins her study with personal observations about her own position in American society as an academic and an immigrant woman whose Polish background translates into concurrent privileges of white inhabitants of this country, yet also the inferior position of members of an ethnic group commonly associated with lower social status. The core of her study is comprised of this very duality of familiarity and otherness, and acceptance and marginalization, which jointly culminate into a variety of contradictions characterizing the liminal space in which Polish-American women have coined their identity. The book is thus, at the same time, a very personal, if not intimate, story of a researcher who is also a reader, and an academic study of literary works both portraying women and written by women with a background that Kozaczka herself can relate to. This places her work in a growing category of studies blurring the lines between researchers’ own experiences and their research, thus creating a very unique position and point-of-view from which their authors see the objects of their study. Kozaczka's lived experience of ethnicity, class, and gender, combined with an excellent working knowledge of theories and concepts characterizing each of these categories, allows her to move elegantly through what she has learned and what she has experienced to arrive at academic discussions of literary texts written by Polish American women of various generations.Literature has known connections between the personal lives of authors and their narrators and characters for centuries, and critics are accustomed to moving freely between real life biographies and their artistic transformations. As an academic trend, crossing the personal line in academically oriented studies is a result of feminist approaches reaching out to broader contexts of class, race, and gender, and later informed by the notion of intersectionality. By the same token, it compels a researcher to engage in a variety of categories used in several academic disciplines; consequently, in the introduction to her book, and later in studies of texts and their contexts, Kozaczka presents herself to the reader as a researcher conversant with various relevant approaches, but also as a researcher who understands that critical approaches can, and in fact are, tools of colonization. Ergo, carefully considering various academic positions, she mediates between Polish and American cultures, delivering a study that shows her understanding of both cultures and societies and creates a model placing her as a leading scholar of this field, one paving the way for others and refining relevant academic tools.Kozaczka discusses the ethnic prose written by Polish American women primarily as a source of information about Polish Americans and about Polish women whose gender identity has been shaped by the culture of the country they live in and beliefs and customs characteristic for the culture of their country of departure. Consecutive chapters of the study, though devoted to specific authors and literary works, build an understanding of America not as a homogenous country and society, but as a complicated and complex system of diverse communities with different internal compositions and their dynamics and cultures that tend to differ access to wealth and privileges. This impressive body of literary works, mostly related to their authors’ own experiences, include, among others, stories by Monika Krawczyk, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Leslie Pietrzyk, and Ellen Slezak, as well as Danuta Mostwin who is relatively well known in Poland. Though the collection of authors discussed by Kozaczka really is impressive and suggesting additions might not be fair, one can still wish that Alicja Iwańska were included, so as to bring to the study a challenging experience of a Polish American academic and writer who clung to her migrant identity while moving between countries and various parts of the USA, portraying American society and its academic institutions as complex, stratified and complicated.Similarly, Kozaczka's reading of literary works shows Polishness not only as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon consisting of the version of Polish culture specific to the time of departure from Poland, but also as a set of similarly contemporary customs and mores in Polish-American homes. As different groups of Polish immigrants have come to America from different regions and at different times, their level of education and understanding of the world also vary. Alongside religious views that, according to the author, often support or cause the marginalization of women, limited literacy among Polish women has created Polish-American homes that served very particular models of Polishness to the next generations, often outdated and remote from contemporary developments in Poland. In fact, Kozaczka carefully avoids binary categories; in example, when referring to the racial categorization of Americans, she refers to Poles as “white,” but also as “not quite white,” portraying shades rather than repeating stereotypes. “Ethnic” refers to various groups, not necessarily in binary opposition to the “mainstream” (or non-ethnic), so, throughout the study, Kozaczka refers to Latin American authors, but also to Italian or Irish—the latter seen as following the same Catholic cultural and religious models that Poles tend to. Focusing as well on contrasts and differences, there is, for example, in Polish-American women's writing, a noticeable absence of topics regarding violence, poverty, and racism, characteristic for other ethnic prose. Similarly, Polish American women are, in her description, immigrants, Polish Americans, or migrants—depending on the relevant social views and predominant categories of description at any given time. It is thus not a surprise that literary works written in Polish as well as “youth literature” made it to the collection of works included in the study.Interestingly, following John Bukowczyk's observations, Kozaczka sees American feminist thoughts and movements as having a limited impact on the emancipation of women in the Polish diasporas in the USA. It is the private space of the home rather than public life that makes Polish American women strong, teaches them independence, and helps them form identities (rather than subjectivities). This is just one of many examples of how the scholar works with categories perfectly suited to describe processes in one culture, even while they might obscure the understanding of another. It is the lived experience of the scholar that makes her sensitive to the real-life experiences recorded in literary works. It is thus not a surprise that Kozaczka, analyzing literary works by Polish American women, sees not only gender, but also ethnicity as performed, challenging another category commonly pushing ethnic authors to the margins of critical interests.Despite the often-limited interest of publishers, readers, and critics, possibly a result of the secondary or dubious literary values of some of the works discussed (the topic of the literary qualities of the texts was unfortunately, though understandably, not undertaken by Kozaczka), Polish-American women writers have created a picture of identity formation that also provides engaging overviews of Americans of Polish descent. By the same token, the book is a scholarly study and an interesting read, making it a welcoming addition to academic courses in American literature, anthropology, and sociology, but also useful for general readers, who will learn a lot from it about Americans, Poles, and multilayered contemporary societies

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