Traitors and True Poles. Karen Majewski

Felicja Romanowska, singer, musician, and author

       Editor and author Hieronim Jabłoński

      CHAPTER 2

       Printery of Robotnik polski, Chicago, circa 1900

       Staff of Polak Amerykański Press, Buffalo, 1901

       Office of the Polish National Alliance’s Zgoda, circa 1910

       Antoni Paryski, not long after his arrival in the United States

       Cover of Sen na jawie (The daydream) (1911)

       Toledo printing plant of Ameryka-Echo and the Paryski company

       Melania Nesterowicz

       Zalewski bookstore in Chicago, circa 1910

       Cover of Czar miasta Kościuszko (The charm of the town of Kosciuszko) (1936), a novel celebrating the anniversary of Kosciuszko, Mississippi

      CHAPTER 3

       Cover of Ofiara hypnotyzmu (A victim of hypnotism), featuring the Polish-American detective Bronisław Sęp (1911)

       Cover of Rabusie grobów (The grave robbers), pirated from an English-language original (1912)

       Cover of Wróg ludzi (Enemy of the people), one of the Zofia Jastrzębska novels (1911)

       Cover of W źelaznych kleszczach (In iron pincers) (1915)

      CHAPTER 4

       Cover of Z pennsylwańskiego piekła (From a Pennsylvania hell), a novel about immigrant miners (1909)

       Cover of Ciekawe gawędy Macieja Grzędy (The interesting tales of Matt Seedbed): A “doctor of enlightenment” instructs an immigrant on the importance of reading

       Title page of Jak się zemścił borowy Zielonka (How Greenie the gamekeeper got revenge), the first known Polish immigrant novel published in the United States

       Julian Czupka, journalist and author of immigrant short stories

       Cover of Fat Hanka Dumpling and Her Seven Boarders

       Cover of Mój pierwszy “Thanksgiving Day” (My first Thanksgiving Day) (1908)

       Cover of Anioł stróż i djabel stróż (Guardian angel and guardian devil) (1932)

      CHAPTER 5

       Cover of Zakonny welon (The nun’s veil), one of a series of satirical, anticlerical novels (1925 reprint of 1920 edition)

       Stefania Laudyn, before emigrating to the United States

       Cover of Baczność! Jenerał Tabaka ma głos! (Attention! General Tobacco has the floor!), a collection of sketches satirizing Polonia’s patriotic-military organizations (1913)

       Cover of Na ludzkim targu (In the human market) (1911)

       Helena Staś, frontispiece to American edition of In the Human Market

      CHAPTER 6

       Pan redaktor w zalotach (The editor’s courtship), title page

       Changing roles in the Polish-American family, as shown on the cover of Djabełek, a humor magazine published in Detroit (1933)

       Stanisław Osada, journalist, novelist, and immigrant activist

       Cover of W dniach nędzy i zbrodni (In days of misery and crime) (1908)

       Cover of Porwana w noc poślubną (Kidnapped on her wedding night), reprinted in 1988 from a 1936 original

       Cover of Sprzedawaczka z Broadwayu (The salesgirl from Broadway) (1937)

      Series Editor’s Preface

      WHILE THE LITERATURES of a few immigrant communities already have entered the contemporary American literary canon, literary life within Polonia—the Polish immigrant and ethnic community—remains to date largely terra incognito. Heavily peasant in composition, the Polish immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often have been portrayed as an inarticulate, undifferentiated mass, silent and rough like the coal many of them dug in the mining towns of industrial America.

      In Traitors and True Poles Karen Majewski gives us a truly pathbreaking work that decisively dispels the image of the voiceless Polish peasant. A singular expert on the ethnic literary genre, Majewski here reconstructs an entire ethnic literary tradition, one nearly extinguished by the ravages of language loss, the passage of time, and simple neglect. From it, she explores the nationalist and feminist themes that animated immigrant discourse within the Polish ethnic community between the 1880s and the 1930s. Along the way, Majewski also has managed to assemble biographical profiles of hitherto little known Polish émigré writers who formed an influential cultural elite (and, in some measure, political cadre) in turn-of-the-century Polish America: the immigrant intelligentsia.

      A thoroughly interdisciplinary work, Traitors and True Poles not only speaks to matters literary and cultural but also plumbs the foundations of one ethnic group’s “hyphenated American cultural identity.” Majewski persuasively argues that literature (and the arts) “were powerful ideological tools in the struggle to define Poland and Polishness, on both sides of the ocean” at a time when the Poles were a submerged and colonized nation (and later, when a post–World War I Poland, recreated as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, was compelled to reinvent itself). Examining a cluster of interlacing literary topics, Majewski shows that this transnational immigrant literature served as “an instrument of national definition and consolidation” during these years and that its audience was not the American or outside world but the immigrant community alone and for itself. Traitors and True Poles accordingly stands as a landmark work in the field of immigrant history, outsider literature, and ethnic studies.

      Winner of the Polish American Historical Association’s prestigious Kulczycki Prize, Traitors and True Poles is the second volume in the new Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. The series revisits the historical and contemporary experience of one of America’s largest European ethnic groups and the history of a European homeland that has played a disproportionately important role in twentieth-century world affairs. The series will publish innovative monographs and more general works that investigate under- or unexplored topics or themes or that offer new, critical, revisionist, or comparative perspectives in Polish and Polish-American studies. Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary in profile, the series seeks manuscripts on Polish immigration and ethnic communities, the country of origin, and its various peoples in history, anthropology, cultural studies, political economy, current politics, and related fields.

      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