Traitors and True Poles by Karen Majewski

Author:Karen Majewski [Majewski, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, World, Europe, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Nationalism & Patriotism, Social Science, Discrimination
ISBN: 9780821441114
Google: hecPDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2003-04-15T03:42:56+00:00

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

Stanisław Osada, journalist, novelist, and immigrant activist. Courtesy Polish National Alliance

If Osada’s fiction contains a foreign whore, she is opposed by a Polish madonna, who at the death of her fiancé enters a Felician convent, joining “the powerful army of sister-teachers” dedicated to the education of Polish immigrant schoolchildren (100). The roles into which the conservative Osada inserts his women characters emphasize the purity and idealization of the Polishness his work proposes. The political intrigue and betrayal that fill Osada’s novels are spurred by lustful, non-Polish, women who manipulate their Polish lovers and husbands into committing multiple treasons: against their immigrant countrymen, against their fellow laborers, against their own ethnic selves.

Nowhere is this pattern more insidious than in his fascinating and disturbing W dniach nędzy i zbrodni (In days of misery and crime). Once again, competing ideologies are represented by two women. One is Janka, an innocent orphan under the guardianship of the Polish immigrant who saved her from suicide. That immigrant is none other than Leon Czołgosz, who by the end of the novel will assassinate President McKinley. The lover who entraps Czołgosz in a violent web of physical and ideological passion is the revolutionary Róża, a character based primarily on Emma Goldman.16 Róża is “not only a Jewess, but a Russian. . . . A Jew by birth,” the novel’s hero explains, and a Russian by culture. She speaks proper Polish, but not only was she raised in Russia, she also absorbed Russian social thought to such a degree that . . . what remained in her of Jewishness is only the strength of her hatred, the property of the inimitable race from which she came.”17 Osada’s anti-Semitism, which not only this novel but his numerous other writings demonstrate, makes familiar, tangled associations between Jewishness, socialism, and Russianness, all of which Osada represents as dangerous to Polish interests. Familiar too is his characterization of the impassioned Róża: “dark and destructive sensuality is the dominant feature of Jewish heroines” in Polish literature from the beginning of the twentieth century to World War I.18 Osada suggests that, in the end, only a pure Polish maiden could have saved Czołgosz from the bewitching Róża. But this maiden must eventually become a wife, and the mother of new generations of Poles on American soil.

Osada is not alone in warning against exogamy by spiritualizing and idealizing Polishness through the romantic relationships of which he approves, while sexualizing the relationships he condemns. Much of this literature depicts the Americanized Pole, of whatever generation, as seduced and demoralized by this country’s materialism and lack of regulation. Particularly for female immigrants, Americanization becomes associated with emotional superficiality and promiscuity. In Czesław Łukaszkiewicz’s Guardian Angel and Guardian Devil, for example (see chapter 4), a young immigrant’s transformation from a Góral into a Pole is contrasted with the moral decline of his eager-to-Americanize village sweetheart, a Polish Sister Carrie who

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