University of Alberta

Polish-Canadian Voices: The Use of Narrative and Language in Cultural Identity Construction

by

Anita Krystyna Buick

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Comparative Literature

©Anita Krystyna Buick Fall 2011 Edmonton, Alberta

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1+1 Canada ABSTRACT

This project looks at the process that takes place within Polish emigre and emigrant writing to reconcile a Polish cultural identity with the Canadian context. While social identity theorists assert a reciprocal relationship between identity and language, Joanna Lustanski's study reveals that Polish-Canadians have moved away from using language as the key determiner of cultural identity; language, therefore, is an externalization of the process of the reconciliation of multiple selves. Combining Stuart Hall's claim that "ethnicity" speaks from

"place" while identity is grounded in the re-telling of the past with the assertion by psychologists that storytelling and narratives are a means of developing and maintaining identity, one is led to realize the importance narratives and storytelling have on cultural identity construction. The prose fiction examined, using Polish diaspora as the backdrop, was written by Danuta Gleed, Barbara

Romanik, Anne Michaels, Stanley Teclaw, Anna Pieszczkewicz, Ann Charney, and Sherie Pososorski. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not have been completed without the support of many wonderful people. First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude and appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. Irene Sywenky, whose insights and advice were invaluable. Dr. Sywenky's enthusiasm and understanding helped make this endeavour an enjoyable one. I would also like to sincerely thank my committee members, Dr. Patricia Demers and Dr. Waclaw Osadnik, for their invaluable comments and for making the experience a pleasure. Their support and encouragement for the future are heart warming and greatly valued.

I am grateful to all of my friends and program-mates for their infectious interest and for all of the engaging and lively exchanges of ideas. They added a vibrancy to the program that was a pleasure to be a part of. In particular, my thanks go out to Alison Cheesbrough, Tegan Zimmerman, and Alison Turner, whose support and feedback were greatly appreciated.

Finally, my most heartfelt gratitude goes to my husband, Pawel, and my parents, Glen and Joanna, for their patience, understanding, support and limitless love. Their unwavering belief in my abilities and my strength was a ballast in times of doubt. TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1. Historical Context: Polish Immigration to Canada and Polish-Canadian Writing 12 First Wave: The Influence of Polish Politics and Images of Canada in Poland on the "Type" of Polish Immigrant 13 Second Wave: The Start of a Polish-Canadian Literary Tradition 26 Third Wave: Poles as Engaged Members of Canadian Society 29 Probable Causes for the Dearth of Polish-Canadian Prose Fiction 31

2. The Use of Language in the Construction of Polish-Canadian Cultural Identity 38 Language as Vital to Identity Construction 40 The Polish Emigre Writer and "Linguistic Rupture" 45 Language as a Bridge Between Cultures and Identities 56 Negotiation of Cultural Identity as Reflected Through Language 64

3. Narrative and Storytelling as a Means of Constructing Cultural Identity 69 Reconceptualization of the Polish Homeland and Identity in Narrative 71 The Polish Literary Map and Women as Gatekeepers to the Personal Homeland 81 The Reciprocal Relationship Between Narrative and the Construction of Self 88

Post-Script 97

Works Cited 100

Appendix: Selected Bibliography of Polish-Canadian Prose Fiction From 1990 112 1 INTRODUCTION

Canada, as a "place where people are always in the process of remaking themselves, redefining who they are" (Weber 57), affords its inhabitants the freedom to choose how they want to self-identify. For Canadians, as members of a nation of immigrants, "ethnicity" or cultural identity is one of the key components of the Canadian identity and is "constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth" (Hall, "Cultural Identity" 226). It is a process in that it "has to be recovered" and a person must "learn to tell himself the story of his past" ("Ethnicity" 19) in order for her/his "ethnicity" to be discovered.

Cultural identity "is a socially constructed act and describes one's social relationships to the world" (Lustanski 41), stemming from a desire to bond with others sharing the same heritage. However, individuals "'from' a particular community are not necessarily 'of that community" (Simon 9) in the same way discussions of fiction written by Polish-Canadian writers may acknowledge immigrant or emigre issues but should not restrict themselves to those subjects alone.

Statement and Justification of Problem

A search performed for "Polish-Canadian fiction" yields surprisingly limited results: once all the general fiction titles that have simply been translated into

Polish and those novels that are a part of "Canadian fiction" and been translated into Polish are eliminated as possible works produced from within the Polish-

Canadian cultural community, the number of texts remaining is negligible. Such results give the impression there is not a significantly developed tradition of 2 Polish prose fiction writing in Canada, a notion that is supported by one of the

leading scholars of Polish-Canadian literature. Bogdan Czaykowski, in his preliminary survey of Polish writing in Canada, states that "poetry is the only

genre in which Polish writers have produced interesting work" (33) and most of the novels and short stories written in Polish, with some exceptions, are not of the calibre that "could or should command critical attention" (34). This is especially unfortunate when Miska's bibliography of Polish writers in Ethnic and Native Canadian Literature is taken into consideration—twenty-seven of those included have written fiction in the form of novels, stories, short stories or autobiographical novel. On the other hand, Kryszak's account of Polish writers in Canada, while slightly more up to date, speaks of fiction in a limited fashion, focusing primarily on only a couple of prose fiction writers1. As Mozejko states,

"the interest in Polish-Canadian writing is of very recent date" (811), and the apparent lack of scholarly attention for the genre leads one to believe that there is little to be found in those works that have been written that recommends a closer examination.

This project has a two-fold objective, the first of which is to re-examine the Polish-Canadian prose fiction corpus, closing the temporal gap between

Miska's compilation and those uncovered works written since 1990. The corpus brings to life the underexposed tradition of Polish literature in Canada. The appendix, a current corpus that brings to the fore authors that have yet to be included in any such lists, is one of the outcomes of the research conducted for

' Although Kryszak helpfully points to the "Canadian Polish Research Institute" ["Biblioteki Polskiej w Kanadzie"], which was started in 1978, as a source for publications (259). 3 this project. Secondly, selected works from the corpus are examined with the

"critical attention" that Czaykowski believed they could not warrant. The texts selected act as a bridge between theories taken from sociology—concerning the reciprocal nature of language and the conception of self—and from psychology—asserting the vital role storytelling plays in identity construction, and studies conducted on Canadian Polonia showing the "real" world instantiation of the theories. Written by Polish-Canadians, they provide a literary exploration of the process discussed in both the theories and the scientific studies of the negotiation and reconciliation of a Polish sense of self with a Canadian identity. As the Polish-Canadian tradition of prose fiction has remained largely untouched, the critical scrutiny to which the works are subject in this project will be the first significant endeavour into this arena. The result of this project is that not only has the temporal gap been eliminated from within the

Polish-Canadian prose fiction corpus and attention called to the previously under-acknowledged works it includes, but also that this is the first critical examination of most of the selected works, directing attention to a previously relatively unexplored group of writing and perhaps facilitating its future study.

Justification of Corpus

The six books, mostly written after 1990, were chosen on the basis of the compiled corpus that bridges the temporal gap between Miska's research and the writing that has since been produced. Selected from amongst those books in the

2 The term "Polonia," taken from Latm, is used in Polish studies to refer to all generations of Poles living abroad Regardless of whether they were born in Poland or speak Polish, it describes "people who have Polish origins and are aware of them, maintain the Polish tradition and cultuie, and have some understanding of Polish national affairs" (Lustanski 50). 4 corpus that explore the physical and psychological process of leaving one's homeland to settle in a new country, these works address the issue of cultural identity construction through language and storytelling. All of the chosen texts were originally written in English. Though the compiled corpus contains texts written in Polish and English, French language texts are conspicuously absent; due to the author's language limitations, a proper in-depth search could not be conducted for Polish-Canadian prose fiction written in French. In the examination of language in the construction of Polish-Canadian identity, the following books are studied: Danuta deed's One of the Chosen (1997), Barbara

Romanik's 10 Things to Ask Yourself in Warsaw and Other Stories (2008),

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz's The Old Brown Suitcase (1994), Anne Michaels'

Fugitive Pieces (1996), Stanley Teclaw's Niagara Street (1998), and Anna

Pieszczkewicz's Soaking in the Remnants (2005). All of these texts speak to the process of reconciling with or recreating one's cultural identity as reflected in the use of language. In the exploration of narrative and storytelling as a means of constructing one's Polish-Canadian identity Boraks-Nemetz's The Old Brown

Suitcase (1994) and Michaels' Fugitive Pieces (1996) are again included as well as Ann Charney's Dobryd (1973) and Sherie Posesorski's Escape Plans (2001).

These selected works reveal that narratives—either written or oral—are vital for the development of and the reconciliation with one's cultural identity. Though

Dobryd was not published after 1990, it is included in the analysis as it revolves almost exclusively around storytelling and, in that it is autobiographical fiction, it acts as a bridge between Canadian Polonia and the fiction it produces. In that 5 these works are relatively recent and there is a seemingly low interest in Polish-

Canadian fiction, there has been next to nothing critical written about these books.

Methodology

From within the theoretical framework of emigre writing and diasporic literature, the exploration of the selected works centres on the mediation between two languages and two cultures, issues of inbetweenness, displacement, and diglossia. Using the texts to illustrate the current conditions and trends within

Canadian Polonia creates a bridge between the "real" world and the one represented in literature. Joanna Lustanski's study reveals the present attitudes held by Canadian Polonia in terms of how "Polishness" is determined and exhibited have shifted to a "culture-first" designation while studies conducted by sociologist Bogusia Temple provide insight into how Polonia abroad reconciles the translation of self that is necessitated by a switch in language and by the forced recognition of, to use Radulescu's term, "linguistic rupture." The fiction, written around the same time the studies were conducted, offers a reflection of the struggle an individual undergoes to come to terms with her/his own cultural identity and the manner in which s/he does.

The first approach to the selected works employs sociological studies conducted by Bogusia Temple on the role of language in the determination of

"Polishness"—that the confrontation by evolving forms of the heritage language forces a repositioning of one's concept of self—and the ideas of such social identity theorists as Richard Blot, Carmen Fought, and Rosemary Salomone, all 6 of whom assert a reciprocal relationship between identity and language.

Lustanski's findings that Canadian Polonia has moved away from using language as the key determiner of cultural identity are significant in that they lead one to look to language as the externalization of the process of the reconciliation of multiple selves.

The second approach to the selected works centres on Stuart Hall's notion that "ethnicity" speaks from "place" and its corresponding histories while cultural identity "belongs to the future as much as to the past" ("Cultural

Identity" 225) as it is grounded in the re-telling of the past, the narratives of which have a "before" and an "after" with which they are in dialogue. This complements Czapliriski's belief that "to be an inhabitant of a particular place means to become conscious that we exist on the pages of a palimpsest" (364) and with the creation of personal narratives, we are simply adding our storyline to theirs. When one combines the aforementioned with the psychology theories put forth by Horrock and Callahan and by McLean, Pasupathi, and Pals asserting that stories are a means of developing and maintaining identity, one is led to realize the importance narratives and storytelling have on cultural identity construction.

Chapter Outline

Chapter one provides an in depth look at the historical context—the influences motivating the Polish diaspora and the types of emigrants that chose Canada as the place in which to settle—behind the dearth of prose fiction writing by Poles 7 in Canada. The first wave" of Polish immigration to Canada, composed primarily of agrarians, was drawn by the association they made of Canada as a place of abundance and vast wilderness, a correlation reinforced over decades by the Canadian literature that entered the Polish landscape. These immigrants were distinct from those traveling to the United States and to South America in that they were peasants, often illiterate, with no clear concept of national identity. Additionally, the political upheavals and the immigration policies of both Poland and Canada prior to the Second World War were contributing factors to the agrarian nature of the emigrants to Canada. As a result, "there wasn't a single Polish writer among the pre-World War II immigrants"

(Czaykowski 2). The second wave, occurring after the second World War, brought a notably different "type" of Polish immigrant to Canada: primarily made up of bloodied soldiers, and former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps, this group was educated and included intellectuals and artists in addition to the agrarians. Consequently, a number of Polish writers also came to Canada, signalling the beginning of a more sophisticated Polish literary tradition. The third wave of Polish immigration to Canada took place in the 1980s, during the

Solidarity period in Poland; composed of ex-combatants and Displaced Persons, they were younger people with equal or better education than the average

Canadian and comparable occupational skills, which significantly decreased the cultural gap between them and their host society. Besides the economical and political turmoil experienced by the different waves, the relative disregard for the prose fiction writing by Poles in Canada may have been influenced by the

3 This took place from around 1880 to the start of the second World War. 8 tradition of the Polish poet-bard in exile that would have diminished any writing not produced by a member of the Polish Intelligentsia, as well as a general lack of interest in the enrichment of Polish studies in Canada.

Chapter two looks at the role language plays in exposing and exploring one's cultural identity. Language not only organizes the way in which people organize the world, it provides a way "of reflecting and constructing the many facets of our identities" (Fought 20). For immigrants or emigres who are forced to adopt a language foreign to them, such a change is traumatic as "it involves a

'translation of self rather than just words" (Temple, "Feeling" 287); the reciprocal relationship between identity and language is highlighted in the emigres' struggle to come to terms with their reconceptualization of their place in the world. Writers, as artists whose medium is words, are particularly concerned with the choice of language, its vitality, and the "linguistic rupture" experienced when forced to recognize the Polish language used abroad has diverged from that used in the homeland. As the writer's language changes to reflect her/his immigrant experience, the writer reinterprets her/his self and integrates her/his Polish identity with the sense of self gained from life in

Canada. In this situation, language contributes to the immigrant's sense of

"inbetweenness" that comes from being "somewhere between the 'memories of the past' and the 'desire of the future'" (Salomone 70) and, more importantly, acts as a bridge between cultures. The inevitable tension between one's Polish and Canadian identities is reflected through the "device of the stone," which in turn includes reading in the process of reconciling the two. Appropriate as a 9 response to old Polonia's concern that second generation Canadian-Poles are not learning Polish and therefore less likely to self-identify as Polish, Lustanski's study shows that contemporary Polonia has moved away from an ethno- linguistic definition of "Polishness" towards one that is "ethno-traditional;"

Poles in Canada are determined on the basis of having a "Polish mentality" that is conceived as "the interaction of the Canadian with the traditionally Polish"

(Lustanski 55, emphasis in original). Therefore, while language is an essential tool for the formulation of one's thoughts and for the manner in which they are expressed, it is not necessarily the foremost determiner of cultural identity; rather, the process of reinterpreting and reconciling their Polish and Canadian selves is what makes them "Polish-Canadian."

Chapter three explores the essential nature of narrative composition and storytelling as a means of constructing cultural identity. The tradition linking the

Polish homeland with identity, particularly for those living abroad, began to shift away from this restrictive definition during the openness and relative freedom of the 1990s. Rather than subscribing to a mythic national unity, people began creating their "own past, [their] own geneology [sic], [their] own homeland"

(Czaplihski 363); with the ability to create personal homelands, the notion that identity could be negotiated was accepted also. In that each individual homeland is created through private memory, literature allows them to gain "realness" in the public, for it is "precisely as tales told that they acquire their role as the foundation for our identity" (364, emphasis in original). Writing provides the means of creating the literary map of a people while the literature itself provides 10 a reflection of one's identity. In this way, successive generations can "read" the traces left by those that had come before and add their own narratives to the dialogue between those already written and those that will be written.

Undoubtedly influenced by a tradition dating back to at least the nineteenth century of strongly associating women with the Polish "motherland," the Polish-

Canadian women in Lustanski's study "have a significantly stronger affinity for their ethnic roots than their male peers" (44) and are "are more prone to identify with their parents' sentimental stories about the ethnic country" (56). In literature, women are assigned the role of gatekeeper to the homeland through their maintenance of Polish tradition and personal histories. This gendered conception of the homeland is reinforced by the reciprocal nature of storytelling: the listener is equally as important as the process itself of creating the narrative in terms of identity construction. As identities "are created and maintained through communication and interaction" (Horrocks and Callahan 71), one way

"to maintain or change self-conceptions is to tell stories about the self (McLean,

Pasupathi, and Pals 264). Just as the listener, through her/his acceptance or challenge of the narrative, influences the story told and, by extension, the self being created, so too do parents influence the way their children learn to construct gendered narrative. According to Hall, "ethnicity" is "located in a place, in a specific history" ("Local" 21), making it impossible to not speak out of that place and those histories, identity is not grounded "in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past" ("Cultural Identity" 224, emphasis in original); therefore, family histories provide the material for the construction of one's 11 cultural identity and the stories themselves are the vehicles through which it is accomplished. Similarly, the literary works produced by Polish-Canadians facilitate an enrichment of the ideas and culture exchanged between the two communities.

The post-script concludes the project with an assertion that Canada is a state of mind just as "ethnicity" is a matter of belief. In that Polish emigre writing is still considered to be Polish while Canada's openness accepts immigrant writers as its own, Polish-Canadians have the freedom to reconcile their multiple identities to suit their individual needs. Therefore, the hyphen between the designators "Polish" and "Canadian" can act as a bridge between the two languages and cultures and as a way of joining multiple senses of selves.

The appendix consists of an annotated bibliography of Polish-Canadian writing since 1990. In addition to disclosing the fiction published, the appendix includes some information about each author's connection to the Polish community and to the Canadian context. This corpus serves to uncover and bring to light a previously relatively unacknowledged collection of works and to encourage the continuation and the development of its study. 12 CHAPTER ONE

HISTORICAL CONTEXT: POLISH IMMIGRATION TO CANADA AND POLISH-CANADIAN WRITING

Not a tourist now, I inhale the clear air that is free and untrammelled like this giant land, reluctantly yield first place only to the oceans. Florian Smieja, "I Am Not a Tourist"

While the history of Poles in Canada may be relatively short and, until recently, seemingly straightforward, its diverse and rich core has determined the path it has taken. The three waves of Polish emigration to Canada differ greatly in nature from each other, a difference which is reflected in the literary writing respective to each wave. The firm association Poles made between Canada and its abundant wilderness and wildlife as well as the various political policies of both Poland and Canada during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries resulted in the exclusively agrarian tenor to the first wave of Polish immigration and its plethora of memoir writing. Just after the Second World War, political exiles and Displaced Persons poured over the Atlantic, creating a second wave of emigration including many writers and artists, among other more intellectual professions, whose primary form of literary expression was poetry. The third wave, an effect of the turbulence in Poland during the 1980s, was the most educated of the three and consequently the most self-assured of the three.

Most striking of all is the relative absence of Polish prose fiction written in Canada until recently. Although there is no definitive means of determining 13 the cause for this dearth, it is possible to speculate as to what may have been contributing factors. At the heart of the Polish people's struggle for identity, both at home and abroad, is the time of the partitions: the tradition of emigre writing which evolved from it helped determine the expectations for writing done abroad. However, the disparity between the levels of the traditional Polish social hierarchy—between the poet bard of the gentry and the peasant—was too great to comprehend, let alone to emulate. The resultant feelings of intimidation and inferiority as well as the contempt of the Polish-educated intellectual elite may have discouraged immigrant Polish peasants from attempting to write literary prose. On top of this, the tumultuous political situation during the twentieth century as well as the general disinterest in developing polonistyka in

Canada may have contributed to the continued lack of acknowledgement for

Polish-Canadian prose fiction. An understanding of the extensive history of emigration and factors influencing literary creativity are essential to any further discussion of Polish-Canadian prose literature.

First Wave: The Influence of Polish Politics and Images of Canada in Poland on the "Type" of Polish Immigrant

Since the time of the partitions, Poland has had a strong tradition of emigre writing. After the third partition in 1795, the last step in breaking up the

Kingdom of Poland (also called the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth or

Rzeczpospolita) among Russia, Prussia, and Austria (the Habsburg Empire),

Poland was completely wiped off the political map, its people denied

4 While the term "polonistyka" is used to describe the Institutes of Polish Philology at Polish universities, it has also come to be used to refer to the area of Polish studies, which includes a study of Polish literature and the Polish language. 14 autonomous statehood. During the period of the partitions (1795-1918), there were three incidences of social independence movements; the first of these, the

November Uprising of 1830-31, had the greatest influence on both Romanticism and the history of the nineteenth century in Poland (Witkowska 151), the effects of which were echoed again during Poland's occupation after the Second World

War. After nine months, when the insurrection was brutally put down, the imminent "return of the Russian yoke, now a hundred times more severe" (167) came as a devastating psychological blow. The knowledge of ruthless punishments as well as executions awaiting those who had participated led to what has come to be called the Great Emigration, an exodus of some nine thousand military servicemen and civilians, mainly from the intelligentsia (151,

167). Most of these highly educated young men, the country's intellectual elite, settled in Paris, where they were able to write without fear of censorship or reprisals, making it the centre for Polish writing and thought, both philosophical and revolutionary, until the twentieth century.

Polish Romantic writing, after 1831, was divided into two: that which was written in the homeland and that which was written in the emigre communities, in exile. The Great Emigration was partly labelled as such "by the fact that all the most eminent Polish poets were among the emigres: Adam

Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, Zygmunt Krasihski, Cyrian Norwid, Bohdan

Zaleski, and Seweryn Goszczynski" (Witkowska 167); this meant that the "great 15 Polish era of Romanticism... took shape abroad" (167)5. Free from imposed scholarly restrictions, the emigre intellectuals "deemed themselves to be representative of the nation as a whole, and thus harbored [sic] leadership ambitions with respect to the country" (169). This leadership was, unfortunately, not limited to "spiritual" leadership, but also extended to concrete political plots, conspiracies, and insurgent movements, none of which was successful and all ending only in disaster. Therefore, while the theory of the state and how it relates to its citizens was developing in the rest of Europe in the nineteenth century, "Poles remained indifferent to such issues" (150). Denied a statehood they had held since 1569, Poles supplanted this concept in their culture, mentality, and behaviour with that of "homeland," "which formed the spiritual keystone of national unity and identity" (150).

The emigration to the Americas, the so-called Great East European migration, by and large began in the 1880s, growing in intensity until the start of the First World War (Prymak 58). During this period, literally millions of country-folk from Central and East Europe left their villages for the West

European port cities of Hamburg, Bremen, Antwerp, and Liverpool, where they boarded trans-Atlantic steamships headed for both North and South American ports. Travelling by rail, the newcomers to North America proceeded to the

Canadian prairies and, in the United States, to the industrial states of New

England or the Mid-West; in South America, moving from Rio de Janeiro and

5 Polish Romanticism spanned thirty years (1822-1863), while the height of the period occurred after the Great Emigration, prominent writers such as Aleksander Fredro and Jozef Ignacy Kiaszewski began writing before the exodus of most of Poland's intellectuals 16 Buenos Aires, they spread to prime agricultural land in Argentina and southern

Brazil (58). This unprecedented emigration came to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of the war in 1914.

When emigration resumed in the 1920s, it was determined by the immigration policies of the respective countries of destination and by the government of the newly formed Polish Republic. In the first years after the war, the United States held the top position in terms of destination for trans-

Atlantic immigrants; however, "severe quotas against migrants from Poland enacted in 1921 and 1924 severely reduced traffic to the USA" (Prymak 60), leaving Canada and Latin America, specifically Argentina and Brazil, as alternatives. Due to what Prymak calls "the vagaries of Brazilian immigration policies" (60) of this time, most of the immigrants ended up in Canada and

Argentina. In fact, from 1919 to 1939, over 140,000 Polish citizens immigrated to Canada. According to Polish statistics, Canada was of particular importance during the inter-war years:

The general trend is from a period of no emigration to Canada

during the first years of the new republic to a modest emigration of

a few thousand per year during the early twenties, to a climax of

about 20,000 per year during the late twenties. ...During the peak

years, Canada was the destination of just short of 15% of all Polish

emigrants and 40% of all trans-Atlantic Polish emigrants. (62) 17 This movement continued in momentum until the global economic depression began in 1930.

As Prymak points out, there were other factors drawing Poles specifically to Canada. To begin with, the first migration wave during 1895-1914 served as an example for the subsequent generation. Letters to family and neighbours from the new country, sustenance payments to family, and visits from those who had emigrated all served to spread information about the country and the possible opportunities to be found there. Also, information for emigrants found in books and pamphlets and newspaper articles all described Canada in such positive terms that "the word 'Canada' in Polish came to be a synonym for well- being, abundance, and wealth" (Prymak 62). This trend continued through the

Second World War, as is illustrated by the explicit allusion drawn between the country and wealth by the Nazis running the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. People shipped to the camp had been told to pack essentials and valuables; immediately upon arrival, these belongings were taken from the prisoners and stored in a set of warehouses named "Canada" I, II, and III, respectively. These warehouses, as places of "abundance," directly linked the minds of the people with the abundance and wealth supposedly found in Canada.

An additional factor drawing people to Canada was the institutions established by the earlier immigrants. With churches and educational systems already in place, new emigrants were drawn from the old country to the new.

Balancing the factors pulling people specifically to Canada were the reasons for leaving Poland, reasons that remained the same during the inter-war 18 period as well as the pre-war period. Between the wars, Poland had one of the highest birthrates in all of Europe, resulting in a rise in population of just over seven million, increasing from 27.2 million to 34.8 million (Prymak 61). This over-population led to the parcelization of the land into ever smaller plots, making simple subsistence more difficult. Additionally, while there may have been a population boom, Poland's industrial production grew sluggishly. There were no urban centres developed enough to accommodate the surplus agricultural population, leaving them with nowhere to go but out of Poland.

Important to consider are the roles the Polish government and the

Canadian government played in the perpetuation of this migration movement. In

1919, Canada had designated east Europeans as "non-preferred" people, resulting in stiff entrance requirements; with economic improvement in the

1920s, Canadian immigration policies changed, allowing more people into the country:

By 1925, the "open door" lobby of transportation and resource-

based industries succeeded in convincing the Dominion

government to enter into an arrangement with the Canadian

Pacific Railway and the newly-formed Canadian National

Railway which allowed these companies a free hand in the

distribution of central and east European agricultural immigrants.

(Prymak 67) 19 In fact, a lot of the time potential immigrants—unsuspecting peasants—were approached in Poland by representatives of the railway companies who received five dollars for every genuine agriculturalist they "recruited" by way of, as

Prymak states, "propaganda" (61). The combination of Canada's immigration policy favouring agriculturalists and Poland recognizing the emigration movement as an opportunity to "get rid of certain 'undesirable elements' and help strengthen the Polish character of the state" (66) explains the disproportionate number of Polish Ukrainians coming to Canada. After the war, when Poland's borders were redrawn, they included the Tarnopol province of the old Austrian Galicia, an area made up primarily of Ukrainian speaking people.

During the inter-war period, out of this one province alone over twenty-five thousand people emigrated to Canada; the Lwow (Lviv) province, also once part of Austrian Galicia, came in second with over twenty thousand (62). This can be compared to Volhynia of the old Russian partition from which over ten thousand emigrated. Meanwhile, the provinces in centre and south-centre Poland each had only five thousand emigrating, whereas the western and northern provinces had none to speak of. While the Polish government did nothing to actively encourage the Ukrainian migration, it did nothing to dissuade or limit it, hoping to reduce the Ukrainian presence and strengthen Polish control in eastern Galicia

(66).

With the new reformed Polish state, public opinion shifted in favour of supporting the emigration movement (Prymak 65). In fact, before its reformation, Polish citizens, in addition to being disadvantaged in terms of 20 cultural and linguistic shock, "were further handicapped, until 1919, by the absence of support from their own national state and, except for Austrians, by consular protection as well" (Spustek 12). While the populace cheered the resultant lessening in rural overpopulation and the remittance payments sent from abroad, the Polish state "hoped that the flow of Poles abroad would help extend Polish influence in far-off lands" (Prymak 65). With all political parties taking an interest in the emigrants, the government went about setting up agencies to look after them. A special Consulate was established in 1920 in

Winnipeg specializing in the care of Polish immigrants in addition to later agencies launched in Regina and Vancouver and Polish diplomatic intervention with the Department of Immigration and Colonization in cases of discrimination against the "non-preferred" Poles (65). Moreover, the Canadian Polish

Consulates endeavoured to control the immigrants once in Canada, either by refusing to issue passports to Ukrainians who wished to return to Europe or encouraging Poles to settle in large groups separate from the Ukrainians, who were viewed as posing an assimilationist danger:

In fact, Polish emigration officials generally wished to see group

settlements that could preserve a Polish identity and, aware of

probable Canadian resistance to such plans, even thought to set up a

front organization in Canada that would be able to put them into

reality with a certain amount of discretion. (67)

When the risk and expense of such an undertaking was determined, the Polish government decided to move away from it and, instead, to expand the activities 21 of the Winnipeg consulate and to encourage Polish Roman Catholic priests to move to Canada, ostensibly to act as magnets for the dispersed Polish settlers.

The result of this strategy was to reinforce religion and language as the core determinants of "Polishness."

Until recently, this importance of religion and language in determining ethnic identity has been the dominant observation in published works on Polish identity; Joanna Lustanski reveals the shift that has taken place in the last twenty years away from both religion and language toward a "culture-first" description of "Polishness" by both first and second-generation Polish-Canadians (Lustanski

56). However, since Poland was encouraging its priests in Canada to gather immigrant Poles into ethnic-isolated communities and the expression of Polish identity was banned or severely limited in Poland , it was inevitable that language and religion came to be perceived by Poles in Canada as essential factors in determining "Polishness."

The type of Polish emigrant that came to Canada was distinct from those that settled in either the United States or Argentina. In the 1890s through the first decades of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of the emigrants were peasants—men in sheepskin coats—and often illiterate

(Czaykowski 2). These men often had an unclear concept of nationality, more readily identifying with their region or with one of the ethnic minorities—

Ukrainian, Jewish, and Byelorussian, among many others—that had been a part

6 During the time of the partitions, it was forbidden to speak Polish and to be caught organizing language schools was punishable by incarceration while after the Second World War, the Communist system in Poland (1945-1989) attempted to significantly limit the influence of the Catholic Church, resulting in a resurgence of Catholic faith 22 of the Kingdom of Poland than with the abstract notion of a nation, especially as the state of "Poland" did not exist at that time. Once Poland was formally re­ established, the government ensured the steady spread of a Polish system of public education, resulting in fewer cases of illiteracy among the emigrants, particularly when combined with the new literacy regulations for immigrants established in Canada, ensuring the old stereotype of illiterate "Galicians" in sheepskin coats began to die away (Prymak 61). While the emigrants may have been peasant farmers, they were not among the severely impoverished or destitute of Poland: "Studies of individual villages by Polish social historians... as well as the testimony of the migrants themselves make it clear that this search for a new life was a matter of social improvement ('for a better life') and not of necessity" (61). In addition to the cost of trans-Atlantic and, later, rail travel,

Canada required its immigrants to possess a modest sum upon arrival in order to meet immigration requirements, presumably for a subsequent land purchase.

This required sum is the most likely reason for the difference between the

"proletarian" emigration to Argentina and the "agrarian" emigration to Canada:

"while Polish industrial workers, artisans, and Jews tended to go to Argentina,

Polish countryfolk and Ukrainians tended to head for Canada" (61). The effect of this difference in the "type" of emigrant can be seen reflected in, what scholars such as Czaykowski and Mozejko refer to as, the low levels of creative works of "artistic significance" (Mozejko 820) produced during this time.

The Canadian literature that made its way to Poland reinforced the association people made between nature and Canada, an additional appeal to the 23 agrarian immigrant. Before the Second World War, the only Canadian works translated into Polish were three novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery (Anne of

Green Gables (translated in 1909), Anne of the Island (1931), and Anne of

Avonlea (1935)), Louis Hemon's Maria Chapdeleine (1923), Maurice

Constantin-Weyer's Clairiere, recits du Canada. Avec 16 illustrations (1936) and Grey Owl's The Adventures ofSajo and Her Beaver People (1938).

Popular travel writer Arkady Fiedler published an account of his travels in

Canada in 1937 entitled Kanada Pachnqca Zywicq [Canada Fragrant with

Resin], which reinforced the impression created by Grey Owl. It spoke extensively of the wild animals that roam free within the majestic lands of lakes and forests; cities are on the outskirts of civilization and the history of the

"Indians" is ubiquitous. The book was incredibly popular, going through nine editions by 1947 as well as being translated into several languages. It was, as far as can be determined, "the only literary product of a Polish writer's contact with

Canada in the entire interwar period" (Czaykowski 3). In that there was such a narrow picture of Canada—a country rich with land, wilderness, and wildlife— presented to the Polish people, it stands to reason that the vast majority of emigrants were agrarian.

Based on the number of translations of each work introduced into the

Polish market, Sojka goes on to "construct" a canon of Canadian literature within

Poland. Interestingly, consistently topping the list in the 40s, 50s, and 60s are

7 This summary was done by Sojka based on the complete bibliography of Canadian literature translated into Polish done by Edyta Krajewska in her chapter ("Pisarze Kanadyjskie w Polsce") of the same collection. 24

o

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mazo de la Roche, and Grey Owl . Montgomery's books, in particular, were extremely popular and were reprinted many times, except for the 1960s when the communist People's Republic of Poland9 decided to censor the books, worried that Anne's character traits could inspire the youth to protest against the government (Sojka 213). Other than this one decade,

Montgomery's novels were allowed past the censor as they advocated the importance of family, tradition, and a good work ethic, not unlike Hemon, who also emphasised Catholic values and ties to the land, all of which was important in pre-World War II Poland (213). According to Sojka, Grey Owl's works were reprinted many times, even during the most gruelling periods of The People's

Republic, as they were deemed to be "of no threat to the ideology being preached at that time" ["nie stanowila zadnego zagrozenia dla propagowanych w tym czasie ideologii" (Sojka 213, my translation)]. She goes on to speculate that de la Roche's popularity in 1948 was due to the fact that her depiction of the various trials and tribulations of the one hundred fifty year history of the wealthy

Whiteoak family were meant to serve as a criticism of a capitalist way of life.

The overall impression of Canada created by these select works was quite limited. Canadian society was made up of white British people living in small towns with a strong connection to nature, while wildlife and "Indians" form the harmonious backdrop.

8 She places Lucy Maud Montgomery (with twenty-seven books and 9 short stones in translation), David Morrell (with eighteen books in translation), and Mazo de la Roche (with sixteen translated books) in the top three positions in a contemporary Canadian canon in Poland (201) 9 This was the official name of Poland from 1952 to 1990, when it was under Soviet control 25 The abundance of available land as well as the image prevalent in Poland of Canada as a nation closely tied with nature meant that, as far as it is presently known, "there wasn't a single Polish writer among these pre-World War II immigrants" (Czaykowski 2). In contrast, 1905-1907 was an important period for the United States in that a substantial number of Polish intelligentsia and skilled workers immigrated, thereby contributing to the cultural and political life of American Polonia (Spustek 12). Though, according to Czaykowski, there were not any fiction prose writers of note (34), Polish immigrants in Canada were organizing and publishing in their own ethnic presses, the artistic quality of the writing such that it garnered neither critical attention nor literary significance. According to Stachniak, all Polish papers of this time held to the goal of an ethnic press, "to prevent its assimilation with the mainstream culture by providing immigrants with an easily available forum for discussion of immigrant issues in their native language and a source of information about the

Old Country" (44). Poems written by Polish-Canadian poets and published in the ethnic presses, "often crude and simple in form" (45), concerned themselves with the immigrant experience and frequently called for "ethnic unity."

Meanwhile, fiction printed in the Polish ethnic press was unconcerned with emigre themes as there were no ethnic prose authors: "Poles in Canada not only did not write fiction, but also made no attempt to translate Canadian fiction or even to review it for those who could read it in the original" (45). In contrast, the memoir, the earliest manifestation of Polish-Canadian writing, displayed

"features of high artistic qualities and values" (Mozejko 814). In fact, according 26 to Mozejko, Polish memoirs in Canada reached "such an intensity of practice and degree of development that there arose the need for institutionalization" (815), resulting in the founding of the Memoirism Friends Association (Towarzystwo

Przyjaciol Pamietnikarstwa) in 1969 and the release of the first issue of the quarterly Polish Memoirism in 1971.

Second Wave: The Start of a Polish-Canadian Literary Tradition

The flow of Polish emigrants ebbed during the Second World War, and did not rise again until the 1950s, signalling the start of the second wave of Poles coming to Canada. While the war scattered Polish writers across a number of countries, none of the better known writers such as Marek Hlasko, Aleksander

Wat, Witold Gombrowicz, and Czeslaw Milosz came to live in Canada

(Czaykowski 3). In the meantime, the literature published in the Polish ethnic press reflected the changing attitudes of the Polish emigre community.

Understandably, with the invasion and subsequent occupation of Poland, there was renewed interest in the Old Country. The literature published during the war, adhering to the communities' ghetto values, attempted to raise the spirit of the Polish exiles and immigrants by exalting Poland. One of the modes of thinking was that the Polish-Canadians' fight for a free Poland was also "the fight for a strong position of the Polish ethnic group within the Canadian mosaic and for its positive image in intercultural relations" (Stachniak 47). This should not be taken to mean that Canadian-Poles wanted to assimilate into Canadian mainstream culture; a shift away from a ghetto mentality toward an ambassadorial approach within Canadian Polonia did not occur until the post- 27 war years with the influx of worldly Polish emigres and the realization within

Canadian society that there was no need to demand assimilation of its ethnic communities (Stachniak 48). However, foreshadowing a future shift in attitude, the beginnings of an ambassadorial outlook were evident in the inclusion of

Canadian concerns within the Polish ethnic press during the Second World War.

After the war, a whole new type of Polish emigrant arrived in Canada.

This wave was significant in that it revitalized Canadian Polonia; the Polish population in Canada grew from 145,000 in 1931 to 220,000 in 1951 and, after another change of administration in Poland in 1956, it reached 316,500 by

197110 (Kogler 258). The "typical" immigrant from before the war might have considered her/his time abroad as temporary, an opportunity to earn money in order to realize her/his dreams in Poland (for example, buying farmland or opening a small business or workshop). However, in that they had escaped from political and ethnic persecution, censorship, and tyrannical power regimes of the war years, "modern expatriates [of the fifties, sixties, and seventies] have been refugees rather than exiles in the strict sense" (Zach-Blonska 150). These post­ war emigres left their home country knowing that they may never be able to return and that the country in which they settle would be their new homeland.

This shift, likewise, was reflected in the publications of the Polish ethnic press.

With return to Poland at the very least unlikely, if not impossible, the papers shifted away from ghetto values and began to print more information about

10 These totals are taken from Kogler's analysis of censuses from the relevant time periods and include births withm the Polish community. The 1971 total is the combination of those Canadians who view their ethnic ancestry as Polish as well as those who indicated they had multiple ethnic origins, one of which was Polish 28 Canada. This is not to say that Poland disappeared as the subject, "but rather that the articles and news items about Poland were steadily complemented with informative articles about the Canadian provinces, Canadian political parties,

Canadian scenery, wildlife, etc." (Stachniak 48). Polish-Canadians were consciously discussing their place within Canadian society and their involvement in Canadian culture, moving closer toward a true ambassadorial point of view.

The literature to come out of this period reflects such a shift in outlook.

It was during this post-war period that Canada, Czaykowski claims, finally became home to a number of Polish writers, some of whom stayed permanently.

He asserts that, as long as one uses the term "writer" loosely, "it would be possible to say that no less than fifty Polish writers have lived and written in

Canada in the postwar period" (3). They did not necessarily incorporate their

Canadian experiences into their writing, but that they finally came at all can only be seen as a step forward for the development of Polish-Canadian literature and culture. In fact, this second wave of Polish emigres to Canada was decidedly different in "social structure, educational profile, and intentions" (Mozejko 815) from all of the preceding waves. The emigres were not illiterate peasants looking to better their lives, but experienced, bloodied, and bitterly disappointed soldiers who had fought abroad for the Western Allies as well as former prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. They were also educated, most with a high school diploma and some with a university degree or professional schooling

(815). Rather than exclusively agrarians, the Polish emigres now included painters, sculptors, journalists, academics, and writers. Among the writers, most 29 notable were the poets"—Waclaw Iwaniuk was the only one of prominent international fame, though others such as Florian Smieja, Bohdan Czaykowski,

Andrzej Busza, Vladimir (Wlodzimierz) Krysihski, and Danuta Biehkowska are also worth mentioning m that, in addition to their status as respected poets both within Canada and Poland, they also took up positions at various universities.

Third Wave: Poles as Engaged Members of Canadian Society

The 1980s saw the most recent significant (third) wave of Polish immigration to

Canada, the so-called "post-Solidarity emigration" (Czermihska 179). This decade was one of severe turmoil in Poland. The Solidarity party was formed in

1981, beginning an intense, sometimes violent, struggle against the Soviet-linked

Communist party. In response to the Polish people's rebellion, The People's

Republic of Poland declared martial law (stan wojenny) from December 1981 to

July 1983; during this time thousands of opposition activists were interned (and not released until the general amnesty in 1986) and one hundred people were killed ("Poland" n.pag.). These political upheavals resulted in an immigration wave surpassing the post-war flood of ex-combatants and Displaced Persons, ending unexpectedly in 1989 with the fall of communism and the Solidarity party coming into power. According to available statistics, there were forty-two thousand immigrants during the Second World War and into the mid-1950s, whereas the wave of the 1980s surpassed eighty thousand (Skeris 155).

11 There has been a fair amount of writing done on the Polish poets in Canada, for a more in depth examination of their works refer to Mozejko, Czaykowski, Seven Polish Canadian Poets edited by Iwaniuk and Smieja, amongst others 30 Just as this latest wave of Polish emigres into Canada differed vastly from the waves that had come before, so too did the Polish community into which they were entering. Since Canada's selection criteria for immigrants favoured younger people with equal or better education than the average Canadian and comparable occupational skills, the "cultural distance between new Polish immigrants and the host society was smaller than some thirty years ago" (Skeris

156). While occupational skills may have needed upgrading due to the technological gap and different work organization, Poles' high artistic standards usually compensated for lack of capital and familiarity with modern technology.

The Polish-Canadian community, "secure in its position within Canadian society, yet actively involved in contemporary Polish problems" (Stachniak 51), started fostering the development of semi-formal circles of artists and sponsors supporting artistic activities (Skeris 159). While catering to the Polish audience, they consciously reached across community boundaries by contributing to and participating in Canadian artistic culture. Similarily, when organizing groups, the new immigrants focused on specific types of activities rather than using language, religion, or ancestry as a lodestone as past immigrants would have done; these groups continued to recognize the strong ties to their Polish heritage at the same time as they directly appealed to "audiences tied to the structures of

Canadian society, either through occupational activities or audience they would like to attract" (161). In this way they were able to root themselves in Canadian as well as Polish values. 31 This ambassadorial approach was likewise reflected in Canadian

Polonia's papers. The turmoil of the 1980s brought increased interest in Poland, yet, in contrast with the war years, there was no corresponding diminished interest in Canada. The papers, even as they reported on the events in Poland, began to publish original commentaries on Canadian themes as well as practical comments on Canadian daily life (Stachniak 51-52). Instead of remaining insular, Canadian Polonia reached beyond its boundaries to demand action from the Canadian government to make political statements supporting the Solidarity movement in Poland and, in so doing, " showed that the Polish community of

1980 was much more a part of Canada than the peasant ghetto of 1908 or the

Canadian Poles of 1939-45" (Stachniak 52). They were self-assured enough as members of Canadian society to press the Canadian government for political sanctions against the Warsaw government and for financial assistance for the underground movement. Perhaps the ghetto mentality never fully disappeared, but Polish-Canadians' ambassadorial values grew to be more pronounced as they more fully participated and engaged in Canada.

Probable Causes for the Dearth of Polish-Canadian Prose Fiction Considering the vast amount of memoir writing and the steady production of poetry (admittedly what Stachniak claims was poor quality until after the Second

World War), the dearth of Polish prose writing in Canada raises the question as to why there was a "lack of authors" (Stachniak 45) writing fiction within the old

Polonia. Other than memoirs, why was no prose of "significance" written until the second wave of Polish emigres arrived in Canada after the Second World 32 War? Interestingly, according to Pula, "while their individual circumstances and experiences varied, [Polish emigres' and immigrants'] collective experience was remarkably similar regardless of the countries where they settled" (3). With such parallels in place, it is possible to look at some of the research done on the comparable dearth of Polish-American literature in order to come to terms with a similar deficiency in Canada12. Stanislaus Blejwas was by far one of the loudest academics lamenting the "voicelessness" of Polish-American immigrants, especially when compared to the abundant literary output of other American ethnic groups. Blejwas states that "Polish Americans are an ethnic group, but not an ethnic presence on the American cultural scene" ("Voiceless" 6); unfortunately, the same can be said of Polish-Canadians prior to the end of the

Second World War. The association of Canada as a country of abundant wilderness was strong enough that, until the end of the war, the Polish community was made up of peasant emigrants. This being the case, it is easy to ascribe the lack of literary production "to socio-economic and educational factors" ("Voiceless" 6). It can be argued that, while not ignorant, the Polish peasants who immigrated were somewhat functionally illiterate in that they were limited by their probable inability to speak English and were more focused on establishing a financial stronghold in the New World than on exercising literary creativeness. However, as Blejwas rightly points out, "the Irish, Italians, and

East European Jews were just as impoverished" and they "to a considerable

12 According to Blejwas, "it was, and still is, impossible to locate more than a dozen Polish American novelists or short story writers, while there is not a major Polish American poet or dramatist" ("Voiceless" 5), this is essentially the opposite of the situation in Canada where there were Polish-Canadian poets but no prose fiction writers to speak of 33 extent, sprang from rural areas, while the Irish and the Italians also professed

Roman Catholicism" ("Voiceless" 6), another factor that could ostensibly stifle literary creativity. Yet, there are numerous examples of writing from each of these ethnic groups. Therefore, there must be some other condition that curtailed literary creativity in Polish immigrants.

The tradition of Polish Intelligensia in exile may have also contributed to the dearth of what critics consider "interesting" (Czaykowski 33) literary contributions by the lower classes. The Great Emigration of the nineteenth century set the standard for emigre writing. The Polish Romantic poets were, by and large, members of the gentry and their writing was done to perpetuate the idea of a Polish "homeland," "the spiritual keystone of national unity and identity" (Witkowska 150). However, the Poles emigrating to Canada from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century were peasants coming from rural roots. Within the Polish class hierarchy of the time, the step from one level to the next was too great to fathom let alone try to emulate; immigrant peasants would have found it inconceivable to attempt to enter the artistic realm of the exiled Poet Bards and, therefore, did no writing of their own. Blejwas posits that old world class tensions between the Polish- educated elite and the members of the "Great Peasant Emigration" and their descendants relocated alongside the emigrants to the New World together with other aspects of Polish culture. To support his claim, Blejwas refers to reports made after the First World War of how "Polish diplomats reflected their gentry pretensions, which peasant petitioners in the consulates felt" and to "the well- 34 documented tensions between old Polonia and the postwar generation of soldier exiles and political emigres" after the Second World War ("Letters" n. pag.).

Old Polonia's roots in the Great Peasant Emigration made it a target for contempt from the Polish intellectual elite.

A more concrete example of condescension between the Polish intelligentsia and the common people of old Polonia is Czeslaw Milosz's own comments about his fellow Polish-Americans. When asked why he found the title of "Polish bard" to be so irksome, Milosz responded that, besides not wanting to be associated with the romantic and the heroic, he was discomfited by the applause of all the Poles "who ha[d] come to see a famous Pole to lessen their own feeling of inferiority" and by his "constant, painful awareness of the incredible cultural crudeness of Polish-Americans" (Milosz, "Separate Nations" n. pag.). A few years later, in the Polish edition (but not in the "sanitized"

English edition) of Rok Mysliwego [Year of the Hunter], referencing his peasant cousins in the American Polonia, Milosz again asks "But what can one expect from such collective oafishness?" (qtd. in Blejwas, "Letters" n. pag.). He explicitly attributes Poland's caste system and the improbability of the extremes within it meeting as the main reason for Polish-Americans' lack of involvement in culture: "The lowest, those who emigrated after bread, certainly had no one to model themselves after because those who stood higher were too high for them"

(qtd. in Blejwas, "Letters" n. pag.). While one can commiserate with his 35 unwillingness to become this generation's poet of the Polish diaspora, a role forced on him by the emotions of the Solidarity period when the Polish people were looking for a national prophet and spiritual leader similar to those they had during the Romantic period, it is more difficult to accept that a fellow Polish-

American would contribute to and perpetuate a dialogue similar to that produced by those who revel in Polack jokes. Undoubtedly, such condescension had adverse effects on old Polonia's literary creativity and creation, as evidenced by its relative invisibility.

Another possible contributing factor to the lack of Polish-Canadian prose fiction writing was the general lack of interest in an intellectual enrichment of polonistyka in the broader sense. Prior to the Second World War, most of the

Polish emigrants were peasants and workers and, therefore, "did not participate in the development of humanities in this country" (Domaradzki 42). As a result of facilities granted to university and college students by the Department of

Veterans' Affairs, "a considerable number of Canadians of Slavic extraction profited by the possibility of free studies" (Domaradzki 42). This enabled a generation of Canadian-born Poles to "rise above" the status of peasant or worker to one where the expression of quality literary creativity was possible.

Additionally, it facilitated the "exiled intellectuals, representatives of the old

European culture, [to] join their talents for the progress of Canada" (44),

n His response to the New York Times calling him the leading poet of the Polish diaspora was an emphatic denial' "That's a complete travesty of the truth' It just isn't so' If diaspora means the various Polish ghettos in the West, then I am not the poet of that diaspora" (Milosz, "Separate Nations" n pag.). 14 He gained his American citizenship in 1970 after having lived in the United States for ten years. 36 extending Poles' participation in Canadian culture. Complicating matters,

Poland's suffering decades of colonialization and decolonialization meant that

"Polish scholars were unable to count on any support from their homeland"

(Mikos 229). There was no clear aid for and dialogue with its emigre communities on the part of Poland; since the Polish emigres were unable to speak freely, "their story was presented abroad with prejudice" (229).

Unfortunately, as they were housed in departments of Slavic Studies, "which were predominantly Russian- or Soviet-oriented, Polish scholars often found themselves without reliable support or in inhospitable environments" (230), not to mention the "malevolent activities of the secret police" (230) during the post­ war years adding to their difficulties as immigrants. Despite the development of

Slavic departments, interest in polonistyka remained low: according to the MLA

2006 survey, 24,845 students enrolled in Russian, while Polish, "listed among

204 Less Commonly Taught Languages with 1,379 students, rank[ed] lower than

Swahili with 2,163 and Vietnamese with 2,485 students" (231). With six Polish

Studies programs being currently offered, Canada's polonistyka is becoming more established and more developed, a reflection of which is sure to be seen in the evolution of Polish-Canadian prose fiction.

The striking absence of Polish prose writing in Canada's literary corpus may tempt one simply to accredit the nature of Polish emigration to Canada— peasants in sheepskin coats—as the principal reason. While this is the most distilled of explanations, these peasants did not choose Canada as their destination without influence from both the Polish and Canadian governments; 37 the impressions created from the literature to come out of Canada cemented the

association Poles had made between it and images of wilderness, wildlife, and

abundance, further appealing to an agrarian emigrant. However, besides the drive to establish a financial foothold in a new country, Polish emigrants were bombarded by other influences that undoubtedly deterred them from creative literary expression. In addition to the stifling influence of the church and their own educational paucity, peasant emigrants faced condescension from those above them in the Polish social hierarchy. Even when Polish scholars began developing a polonistyka in Canada, the oppressive environment of the Slavic departments and the general lack of interest from Canadians of Polish descent dampened efforts to contribute to Canada's literary corpus. Essential to any exploration into and understanding of Polish-Canadian prose fiction writing is such an awareness of the diverse and multi-layered history behind Polish emigration to Canada. 38 CHAPTER TWO THE USE OF LANGUAGE IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF POLISH-CANADIAN CULTURAL IDENTITY

I was not born here, I was not bequeathed this parcel of land, yet my voice quivers as I speak of it Waclaw Iwaniuk, "Elegy in a Toronto Cemetery"

Due to its ubiquity and banality, it is possible to take language for granted.

However, the emigre and the immigrant, required to adopt a disparate language and its corresponding value system, quickly realize how tied it is to the psychological and emotional part of the self. Language is the means for expressing cultural as well as personal knowledge and, with each switch in language, people are forced to learn to reinterpret themselves and their place in the world, in addition to being subject to the gaze of others. In other words, personal identity is also socially constructed in dialogue with and in reaction to others, a process Danuta Gleed in her collection of short stories, One of the

Chosen, shows through Alicja's observations of English people. Language is especially important to immigrant writers, a choice that has been complicated in the past by Poland's tradition of emigre writing and a desire to preserve national identity; with the decision as to which language to write in, comes the concern over the vitality of a language that has been cut off from the vitality of the homeland. When confronted with this "linguistic rupture," to use Radulescu's term, a re-evaluation of a Polish sense of self as well as one's Canadian identity is inevitable, a process which Barbara Romanik explores in 10 Things to Ask 39 Yourself in Warsaw and Other Stories. A consequence of the linguistic rupture inherent in emigration is a distantiation, a term coined by Fehervary (27), on the part of the writer when using an acquired language; the passion and the memories are absent from the new language, allowing an exploration of past trauma while removed from the emotion that accompanies it. Lillian Boraks-

Nemetz's protagonist in The Old Brown Suitcase uses the distantiation English allows her to come to terms with her traumatic past; similarly, Anne Michaels' main character in Fugitive Pieces looks to English in order to re-create his identity because of the lack of passion it inspires in him, but is ultimately unsuccessful.

The combination of the distantiation effect and the intermingling of a

Canadian identity with a Polish sense of self produces a feeling of

"inbetweenness," with language serving as the bridge or mediator between cultures. Interestingly, according to the results of Joanna Lustanski's study, in the last two decades Canadian Polonia has moved away from being an ethno- linguistic to an ethno-traditional community: a "Polish mentality" is now the key determinant of Polish group identity within Canada, a shift which Stanley

Teclaw illustrates in Niagara Street. With this shift away from the supremacy of language in determining Polish identity, the opportunity for the exploration of uncertainties in one's cultural identity presents itself; Loriggio's "device of the stone," used in Anna Piszczkewicz's Soaking in the Remnants, allows the reader to experience Ania's determination to reconcile her Polish and Canadian identities. Though the relationship between language and identity may not be 40 simple or clear cut, language undeniably provides a means of exposing and exploring one's identity in such a way that the reader may partake of the journey

as well. Whether used to reconcile or to recreate, language provides an external method of reflection.

Language as Vital to Identity Construction

Language, according to Grabowski, is typically taken for granted as a means of expressing personal thoughts and feelings, and we often assume "that any language can convey any idea" (179). It is not until one is forced to try to fit the thoughts and feelings so easily expressed in one language into the different nuances of another that one realizes that they do not necessarily complement one another. In fact, "all the past collective experiences of a given language community are encoded in its vocabulary, grammar and syntax, and result in a particular Weltsicht which is passed on from one generation to the next" (Trepte

216); therefore, changing one's language results in a change in one's identity.

Zach-Blonska, however, while acknowledging the linguistic division within the emigre, holds that the continuity of self is found, not in language, but in memory; "[y]et the memory of an exile is constantly disrupted by the need to

'translate' the experience of the past in order to retrieve the self (152). Temple echoes this sentiment in stating that "changing language can be traumatic as it involves 'translation of self rather than just words" (Feeling 287). If language is the means by which people organize the world, then the way in which immigrants, who are forced to adopt a language foreign to them, place themselves within the world must change along with their shift in language. 41 That is to say, if "our language shows the way we see the world", then a "switch to another language [is a] switch to a world differently organized" (Grabowski

180).

Just as language influences how one sees the world and one's place within it, it also influences how others view the speaker. Fought believes, since

"ethnicity" does not occur in isolation from other elements of identity such as class and gender, "language must provide ways of reflecting and constructing the

many facets of our identities" (20). Similarly, Blot maintains that "language is inescapably a badge of identity" in that it can situate the speaker not only in terms of geography, but also physically (age, sex), socially (class), nationally,

and ethnically (Blot 3). An individual's use of language reveals how s/he understands her/his personal identity as well as the exploration and construction

of her/his social identity. With each shift in language a different cognitive framework is invoked, resulting in a shift in verbal strategies that, in turn, evoke different worldviews and personalities; in the end, there is "a difference between what speakers can 'do' and who they can 'be' in each language" (Salomone 73).

Therefore, the adoption of the new language becomes an essential part in the emigre's personal transformation in a social sense: "[t]he processes of enculturation, acculturation, and deculturation are significant in shaping the bilingual's language skills and cultural identity" (70). In this way, identity is

socially constructed in dialogue with and in opposition to others. Whether language and identity are considered "mutually defining" (Riley 91),

"constructed simultaneously" (Blot 8), or that they "summon" one another 42 (Salomone 73), the relationship between the two is brought to the fore in

emigres' struggles to reconcile themselves to the "major modification of identity

and everything connected with it" (Kreisel 4) that comes with adopting a foreign

language.

Danuta Gleed, in her short story "Nairobi," briefly explores the process

that takes place during emigration, the construction of one's own self and the construction of the self through the gaze of others. Young Alicja and her

mother, Poles living in a refugee camp in Kenya, have been sponsored by her mother's sister living in England; on the flight out of Nairobi, where they have been living in a Displaced Persons (DP) camp, Alicja reflects on what it is about

English people that make them so easy to identify. While "[ejveryone else has been made from the bits of leftover dough that have been rolled too often and have become slack and grey from too much handling" (Gleed 80), the English have "all been cut with the same cookie cutter and have come out sharp-edged,

symmetrical and smooth" (80). They walk in a particular way—taking long easy

strides—and talk in much the same way, enunciating slowly and clearly, never rushing since, no matter how long they take, "whatever they say will be listened to without question or interruption" (80). The way the English speak becomes a reflection of the type of person Alicja wants to become: confident, carefree, and

sure of herself and her place in the world. That they all have been made from the

same mould is irrelevant as they are not "slack" and "grey." Life has not worn them down, nor, with their sharp edges, are they the type to let themselves become defeated. 43 Alicja believes changing her identity to match that which she imposes on the English can come about much like "learning a different language... which anyone can do by studying hard, watching and listening carefully" (80). She imagines her aunt, who has been living in a proper English town rather than a DP camp, will have learned this "language"—the proper means of talking, dressing, and moving. With the acquisition of this new language and the identity that comes with it, Alicja will "be safe forever" (81). Her current "language" was learned in the DP camp. It is one in which exchanges between the boys and girls are made in the bushes in order to obtain jewellery or left-over lipstick for glimpses inside the girls' underwear, and in which her mother imitates feminine helplessness in order to secure an ever-changing man and secretly feeds him love potions meant to coerce him to stay. It is a desperate, grasping, and base language; it is a language that does not allow for luxury or for freedom from care. When she asks her mother why she does not receive the things she prays for for Christmas—a bike, a puppy, for her father to recover and come home from the hospital—her mother tells her "it [is] because she didn't ask properly, the way she [is] supposed to" (82). Significantly, when asked to explain, her mother is only able to shrug her shoulders in answer. It is not a language that she knows how to speak—if it was, at least one of the dozens of men she has tried to ensnare would have stayed with her—and the identity that it reflects is not one she has internalized. Alicja, however, is determined to learn it and, subsequently, determined to become the type of person she imagines it to reflect. 44 The question of language is crucial to first generation writers in particular. The dilemma of whether to write in the language of origin or whether to switch to the host language is essential to the character of the writing. In

addition to affecting the way in which the writer thinks and expresses her/his

sentiments, it is unavoidably limiting when it comes to audience. By choosing her/his mother tongue, the writer's readership is restricted to the "home" audience—the "audience of last resort," according to Jerzy Stempowski (qtd. in

Trepte 217)—and to a very select group of emigre individuals and those proficient enough to be able to appreciate the work in the original. These writers become what Young, extending McLuhan's concept of the "missing face" of

Canadian culture, refers to as the "unheard voices of Canadian ethnic writers" since they write in a language other than English or French (104). In writing in an "ethnic" language, they are making their work inaccessible to a broader and more mainstream public.

The issue of language is complicated further by Poland's tradition of emigre writers composing almost exclusively in Polish. Throughout the past two hundred years, Poles have suffered outsiders imposing restrictions upon them regarding how to be Polish. The people of partitioned Poland, in particular, endured the most extreme restrictions; when national customs and traditions were defiled and the official use of the Polish language was banned, "to be a

Pole... was to be exiled in one's own country" (Kreisel 6). In response, language became one of the lodestones of Polish identity. Since the Polish intelligentsia that had fled during the Great Migration was expected to champion Poland in the 45 struggle for independence, the use of Polish became essential. It came to represent the Polish people's patriotic struggle. Most Poles were still convinced of the intimate connection of language to national identity through until the late

1980s: "Any switch of language in public was not only regarded as a clear abandonment of the national heritage, but was even seen as a betrayal of the nation" (Trepte 218). It is for this reason that, during the time of the partitions, the three Poles—ApoUinaire in France, Joseph Conrad in England, and Stanislaw

Przybyszewski in Germany—who did not write in their native Polish were condemned (217). This attitude shifted when Czeslaw Milosz garnered international acclaim; Milosz, who won the Nobel Prize in 1980, and Witold

Gombrowicz, a Nobel Prize candidate in 1968, both leading figures in Polish emigre writing of the past fifty years, paved the way for Polish writers abroad writing in languages other than Polish.

The Polish Emigre Writer and "Linguistic Rupture"

As time in emigration progresses, the issue of the language vitality must be addressed. It can be argued that the longer an individual is out of contact with the living version of her/his mother tongue, the staler her/his own language will become. Emigres cut off from their motherland no longer hear their language spoken in the course of mundane life, and "[their] knowledge of everyday life in the country of [their] origin changes from tangible to theoretical" (Milosz,

"Notes" 281). When they do hear it, it is either at home, spoken amongst family, or it is among the other equally cut off members of the emigrant community: in 46 other words, "the great and powerful stream that carries their language flows elsewhere" (Kreisel 10).

An effect of this divergence can be seen in the reactions of both the old

Polonia and the new immigrants in Temple's study examining the role that

Polish language plays in the construction of identity . According to her findings, the type of Polish spoken was used to differentiate ways of being Polish and to make judgements and build a hierarchy between people: while the old

Polonia referred to the newcomers' language as "dirty, rude and barbaric," the newcomers felt that the older people and those Polish speakers born in England

"used Polish that was out of date and uneducated" ("Feeling" 294). It can be argued that when separated from the emotions, sentiments, and sensations of the motherland, for an individual, whether s/he is immersed in the new language or only uses it on a basic level in order to get by, "the experience of exile is painfully woven with a sense of linguistic rupture and of longing for the 'mother tongue' as it is spoken in the 'mother land'" (Radulescu 2, my emphasis). That is, until the individual is forced to come to terms with the evidence of that rupture, at which time s/he is forced to re-evaluate her/his sense of self. The type of Polish spoken is an easy way to identify a person's background, "for people born in England, the recent arrival of migrants from Poland ... led to challenges to their sense of 'Polishness'. This identification process also involved a re­ positioning in relation to 'Englishness', particularly for participants born in

England" ("Feeling" 294). The result of this interaction is what Radulescu,

15 While her study is situated in Northern England, one can draw parallels between probable reactions of the Polish group in Canada and of those in the study 47 borrowing from William Gas16, calls the feeling of inner amputation, "the painful realization that time has passed in these too familiar places without you" (1).

This clash between the space, language, and culture from which the emigre has been estranged and the stark reality that what has been cherished in memory has evolved forces the immigrant to re-examine and readjust her/his concept of self.

The title story, "10 Things to Ask Yourself in Warsaw", of Barbara

Romanik's collection of short stories illustrates the linguistic rupture that comes from being separated from the space which one has imbued with memories of childhood, sentimentality, and a deep connection to an inner self. Baska, who moved to Canada when she was eleven years old, has trouble placing herself culturally in relation to others. She is defensive about her continued claim to her

Polish identity and uses the Polish language to reinforce it. When she meets

Marek, a Pole who had moved to Chicago, hated it, and so returned to Poland, on her trip to Warsaw, she responds to his complimenting her language proficiency with the explanation "I was born in Poland; I lived here until I was eleven years old" (Romanik 132), thereby decisively declaring her inclusion in a shared cultural identity. Marek is unsure of such a declaration, one minute including her by calling her "a typical Polish bullshitter" (138), the next calling her a tourist. She, again, emphatically declares her "Polishness" when she cuts him off and states "I'm not a tourist" (139).

16 "William Gas called exile 'a severing of blood,' and compares the feeling of loss which results from exile to the loss of a limb" (Radulescu 13). 48 Despite her apparent certainty, Baska is "unable to decide which language to speak" in the hostel in which she is staying and, in the end, "mostly

[she is] quiet" (135). When asked by an American who is also staying in the hostel where she is from, Baska answers "Canada," despite having arrived using a Polish passport. However, when in Canada there is an emphatic disconnection between her and her fellow classmates; at first Baska's lack of English drove them away as "[t]hey thought she was willingly silent, stubbornly dumb, and they resented it," but "[l]long after she began to read, speak and think in English,

Baska had nothing to say, to most" (138). Unable to communicate and identify with the group, she internalized their suspicions and began to feel "suspect" herself, reinforcing her desire to identify herself with her "Polishness."

Regardless of her desire to belong as a Pole, the realization of her division from Polish culture and, subsequently, Polish mentality is forced upon her. When she goes to listen to Marek's friends' band, she is excited to realize they are singing songs by Lady Pank, a popular Polish rock band from the eighties, translated into English and set to different melodies. She is thrilled she is enough of an "insider" to have made the connection and, consequently, is

"hurt but clueless" (144) by Marek's anger toward her. Afraid someone may have heard her exclamations and irritated by her incomprehension, he explains:

"Lady Pank is 80s. Anyway, everybody thinks all Polish music

jest pojebana ["is fucked-up"]. Do you think Polish people want

to listen to Polish music?" 49 "I don't understand."

"Don't understand. Don't understand. What are you? Stupid?

Do you listen to Polish music in Edmonston?"

"It's Edmonton... sometimes... that's not the point..."

17 "Wierzq cijak kurwa cholerze... "

"Fuck you." She uses English. [...] Marek grabs her arm

from behind. "Leave me alone," she says in English.

"Mow po polsku ["Speak in Polish"]," Marek says and turns

her around roughly. "We're all Polish here, aren't we? he yells

into her ear. (144, my translations)

Something Marek takes for granted as a Polish person living in Poland is

completely foreign and inconceivable to Baska. Her incomprehension is represented by a switch in language in the writing; she does not understand why

Polish music is pojebane nor why Poles are not interested in listening to it.

Marek's Polish phrases are extremely colloquial and used largely by the youth culture; by including them in an otherwise primarily English text Baska's

incomprehension is emphasised and, since they are not translated, is shared by the reader. While she may self-identify as Polish, when she is confronted with

specificities known only to those living in Poland, she is forced to recognize her partial status. In reaction to this cultural rupture, Baska reverts to a language that

17 While literally translated as "I believe you like a whore does a bastard," the meaning conveyed is "I don't give a fuck" (my translation). 50 marks her as an outsider, English. However, since Baska was so emphatic in her claims to a Polish identity, Marek is unwilling to allow her to waver, forcing her to run from him and her inability to understand. The division within herself that

Baska is unable to resolve reiterates itself the next day when she replies that she is from Kietrz, "niedaleko od Opola" ("not far from Opole") (148, my translation) to someone's inquiry as to where she is from, but then "slips into the tour group unnoticed and watches, just as she has done all week" (149). She answers the man in Polish, further reinforcing her claim to "Polishness," and then proceeds to silently join the tourists, showing herself to be indistinguishable from them. Even as she is unable to come to a resolution between the ethnicities—Polish and Canadian—with which she identifies, she uses language to reinforce or divorce herself from each as the need arises.

The issue of linguistic rupture is one with which each writer must come to terms. Milosz admits that, as an emigre, "a writer notices that he is unable to address those who care and is able to address only those who do not care"

("Notes" 281). The emigre writer who left her/his motherland because of political and civil strife did so as it was a place where s/he was not free to speak out. However, once abroad and able to freely express her/himself, there is no one listening. The people to whom s/he writes of her/his experiences have continued with their lives, gaining different experiences and hardships. They have, in living, evolved and their language will have changed to reflect their evolution. In essence, the motherland becomes more foreign to the immigrant, exiled or migratory, with each passing day. It can be argued that this is 51 especially traumatic for writers, who are dependent upon language to express their innermost thoughts, feelings, and impressions (as opposed to artists who use other media to create). Writers, in particular, are housed more firmly in the shell of language, and, so, are rooted in the idiom of their mother-tongue (Trepte

216). Once displaced, s/he may have difficulty feeling the deeper nuances, sentiments, and emotions in the new language that are present in the mother tongue. Trepte writes that Jerzy Kosihski decided to write in his new language,

English, as "it seemed to him more appropriate because it was more rational, and he could write without the passion he would express in his native Polish about violence, despair, and pain" (220). Written language, in particular, has a distancing effect in that it is "more like a translation than a transcription of the spoken language" (Burke 20). Fehervary, also, believes that "the translation of extraordinary experience into language seems to involve distantiation" (27), a remoteness that is worsened by being removed from the language. She claims that there are some things "that simply cannot be articulated or described, at least not explicitly" (28, emphasis in original). Such situations are exacerbated when the depth and nuance given to language by memories and sentiment are absent.

Lillian Boraks-Nemetz's The Old Brown Suitcase begins with the passionlessness of new languages. Slava is a young Polish Jew who, after escaping the Warsaw Ghetto, has finally arrived in Montreal; the Rosenbergs, with whom Slava's family will temporarily live, and her parents discuss what needs to be done in order to begin life anew in Canada. When she learns of

Slava's name, Mrs. Rosenberg declares it to be inadequate and asks whether she hasn't another name "more familiar to Canadians" (Boraks-Nemetz 3); Slava's middle name, after it is anglicized from Elzbieta to Elizabeth, is deemed to be better. However, the dismissal of her Polish name for something so "harsh" (7)

sounding leads Slava to question her identity. After burning all evidence— documents, photos, birth certificate—of her existence in Poland, being forced to

cut short her hair that she had been growing out her whole life in order to "fit

in," and now changing her name, Slava questions whether a life can be completely erased: "Was I suddenly to become an Elizabeth? What about the

Slava of the past fourteen years" (9)? Despite her parents wanting her to behave as though she was born the day they got off the boat, as new people with new lives, she refuses to forget Poland and the life she lived there. This creates more than just a tension within her, but rather a split with the familiar "Slava" on one side and the "strange," "unnatural," and "wretched Elizabeth" on the other (77).

Slava struggles to reconcile the two identities. When she is labelled

"canadienne-polonaise," she replies u[p]as encore canadienne" (Boraks-Nemetz

39); however, the process of the two cultural identities coming together had already begun when "the past and the present... melted together" (32) and she is able to interpose the Canadian reality—a farm in Ste. Adele, Quebec—with memories of Poland—her grandmother's farm in Zalesie—and have them meld into one another. In the end, Slava decides to embrace "Elizabeth" in order for her "immigrant image" (122) to fade and for her to look and talk like a Canadian.

This process is externalized through her writing. She began her writing using

Polish, some of her stories dating back to just before the start of the war when 53 she was five years old and to her time in the Warsaw Ghetto when she was seven. These early stories are written in Polish, but as her English improves (and her Polish is getting "rusty"), Slava finds "writing in English offer[s] [her] a challenge" (161). She continues to write stories in "uncertain English, using a

Polish word here and there" (162), her many mistakes propelling her forward, until, in the end, she decides to rewrite all of the stories she has collected. With the horrors of the war, the internment in the Ghetto, and the subsequent escape from the Ghetto and later from Poland occurring in the Polish and German languages, writing about her experiences in English is like "entering a world of words ... where [she] felt almost totally free" (163). For her, English is divorced from the terrors of not having enough to eat and from watching people be brutalized as well as the welcome reminiscences of going shopping with her father on her birthday and attending her first ballet recital. While she seems to prefer Polish, as English words are used too loosely and therefore lose some of their true meaning (165), it is the distantiation magnified by this looseness that allows her to write so effectively and honestly about her past.

Anne Michaels' poet-protagonist in Fugitive Pieces actively looks to language in order to create a new identity that will reconcile with the old. Jakob is rescued as a young boy by Athos, smuggled out of Poland, and taken to

Greece until the end of the war when they both moved to Toronto. After the rescue, man and boy set about learning each other's languages and "[take] new words into [their] mouths like foreign foods; suspicious, acquired tastes"

(Michaels 21). Jakob's first experience with acquiring a foreign language is after 54 he had just suffered a terrible trauma, explaining the unpleasantness of the experience. However, as his tongue "learned its sad new powers," he "longed to cleanse [his] mouth of memory" (22) so that Athos' Greek feels natural to him, replacing his mother tongue and all of his associations with it.

It is not until he is older and living in Canada that he looks to English and poetry as the true means of recreating his identity. English, without the baggage of history weighing it down, provides a means of distancing from the past; in this way Toronto, a city of immigrants, is a "city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of farewell" (Michaels 89). As Athos instructs Jakob in the subtleties of the language, English once again becomes food that he "shove[s] into [his] mouth, hungry for it" (92). His reaction is physical, as it would be when eating real food: "[a] gush of warmth spread through [his] body, but also panic, for with each mouthful the past was further silenced" (92). At first Jakob believes language will wipe clean his past and tries "to bury images, to cover them over with Greek and English words" (93), but despite his dedication to mastering the meanings of words he is still reduced to grief, "thin and ugly with feeling" (101), when he stumbles upon the Jewish market and hears the consonants and vowels—"fear and love intertwined" (101)—of his childhood. When Jakob first encountered Athos, he said the one phrase he knew in more than one language; he "screamed it in Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping [his] fists on [his] own chest: dirty Jew, dirty Jew, dirty Jew" (12-13). These languages are forever associated equally with terror and suffering as they are with love and friendship. 55 English, conversely, is free of all such associations and, thereby, is a means of escape from his memories and his "former" self.

He realizes the true power of such freedom when he progresses from composing word play to facilitate his learning of the language to actual composition of texts: "when I began to write down the events of my childhood in a language foreign to their happening, it was a revelation. English could protect me; an alphabet without memory" (Michaels 101). With this distance he feels toward it, English becomes "a sonar, a microscope, through which [he] listen[s] and observe[s], waiting to capture elusive meanings buried in facts" (112); it becomes a tool with which he can create new meanings for his memories of the trauma his family suffered and that he, alone, survived. He wants, through his poetry, to "raise [his] foreign song and feel understood" (110), but in the end,

"all [he] achieve[s] [is] awkward shrieking" (112). As a poet and a translator,

Jakob is constantly looking to express new truths: according to him, "[t]he poet moves from life to language, the translator moves from language to life; both, like the immigrant, try to identify the invisible" (109). In his embodiment of all three roles, he uses language and poetry to distance himself from life and his memories, then tries to "translate" the poems he himself has created into a new understanding of old memories or, at its most extreme, into new memories, various scenarios in which his sister, Bella, is still alive. Once he feels his

English is strong enough, Jakob becomes obsessed with the moment "language at last surrenders to what it's describing" (162). However, just as he is unsuccessful at integrating socially as an immigrant—he always holds himself 56 aloof from the bustle of Toronto and he feels a stranger in Greece regardless of

how long he lives there—he is unsuccessful at using English as a means to

recreate his identity. He "rip[s] the black alphabet to shreds, but there's no

answer there" (167); relying solely on language itself to resolve his splintered

identity is insufficient. In the end, he must look to another person, the love of

his life, for help in reconciling his multiple selves.18

Language as a Bridge Between Cultures and Identities

Though the river of language may flow elsewhere, the emigre's mother tongue is

neither stale nor non-existent, but, rather, is evolving to better reflect the

immigrant experience. Just as the emigre undergoes a gradual transformation in

the process of acquiring new experiences and facing new dilemmas, so too does her/his language evolve. Janusz Ihnatowicz, a Polish poet who came to Canada

in 1952, two years later wrote about the possible future of the Polish language in

the West:

Polish literature outside Poland is either condemned to die out...

or to develop into a Polonian literature ... or perhaps into several

Polonian literatures (Polish-English, Polish-American, Polish-

French) ... This is inevitable [...] since the problems we face and

for which we must find new words, the situations in which we

find ourselves and which we must name will not be found in these

books, (qtd. in Czaykowski 6)

18 This process is discussed in the next chapter. 57 He continues to condemn the alternative, a language one can only access through literary works, likening it to Latin. Though the fear of stagnation and death of the language is present in the emigre community, as long as people continue to use it to express and to reflect contemporary life (with the occasional boost incoming immigrants will give to it), the language will not only remain relevant, but also take on a life of its own.

The emigre writer, in particular, is especially conscious of language issues when considering the new narratives and the exchange of stories her/his writing will produce. Since the 1950s, the general trend appears to be for the

Polish emigre writer in Canada to adopt an ambassadorial rather than isolationist attitude. Whether one uses Mostwin's term of "Third Value19" (borrowed from

Jan Lukasiewicz) or Grabowski's "Culture Contact20," this method of reconciling the two opposing cultures is crucial in identity formation. Central to both terms is the intermingling of aspects from the mainstream culture as well as the heritage culture. This process is particularly visible in the writing of immigrant writers and writers looking to link their "ethnic" community with society at large. A "successful switch from one sphere of collective experience to another demands a new self-presentation and self-interpretation" (Trepte 216) as well as a reconstruction of a world that meets the needs of the new readership.

19 The Third Value represents the creative process where a person who is faced with choice between two opposite or different systems is not limited by absolute either/or decisions In the case of immigrants to Canada, they adopt selective Canadian values while retaining their Polish heritage, thereby enriching Canadian culture "Thus they converted the old one-way adjustment process to a two-way creative interaction" (Mostwin 25) "Culture contact means that we accept certain features from the dominant culture even if we keep our own", the result of which is partial or complete acculturation (Grabowski 181). 58 As the writer is reinterpreting her/his self, s/he integrates her/his cultural identity

with the sense of self gained from life in Canada. This idea of an animate Self is not unlike Kreisel's metaphor of identity-as-tree: "New branches, new leaves could grow. New roots could be put down, too, but the original roots need not be discarded" (Kreisel 8). The new becomes as much a part of him as the old.

By enforced distantiation from the world inherent in her/his mother tongue, the immigrant is afforded the choice of what role language will play in

the future. Within a social context, language can play a significant part in the

"in-betweenness" that comes from being "somewhere between the 'memories of the past' and the 'desire of the future'21" (Salomone 70). With roots grounded in the Polish experience, the immigrant's present is spent deciding to what degree

s/he will integrate within Canadian realities. This dislocation and "cultural transplantation" (Filipowicz 165) results in a double perspective. Consequently, language, particularly in emigration, cannot be the determinant of ethnic or cultural belonging, but rather a "mediator or bridge between different cultures and civilizations" (Trepte 216). If language is knowledge and provides insight into specific cultures, adopting new languages creates in equal measures a distantiation from the old and an understanding of the new.

Significantly, according to Lustanski's study, "the function of identity appears to be gradually transferred from the Polish language to other values of ethnicity" (50) within Canadian Polonia. Over the last two decades, since language and religion are no longer persecuted in Poland itself, Canadian

21 She borrows these terms from Bela Feldman-Bianco. 59 Polonia no longer feels these components of Polish cultural identity to be under threat, which consequently, decreases their value as the central indicators of group inclusion. In other words, Poles living in Canada "[will] not be defined as ethno-linguistic, but rather ethno-traditional" (50). This means, regardless of whether the individual was born in Poland or can speak Polish, awareness of her/his Polish origins and the maintenance of Polish traditions and culture are the determining factors of membership in Canada's Polonia. Young (second generation) Polish-Canadians, as they have grown up in Canada and speak

English fluently, tend to identify with the "new" country's culture rather than their parents' culture. They are able to construct their own identities within "the multicultural Canadian mosaic" and "express their desire to reclaim and enhance not only their Polishness but also their double ethnic identity" (54), regardless of whether this process takes place in English or Polish.

Lustanski's study reveals that Polish people living in Canada are connected primarily on the basis of having a "Polish mentality." This mentality is separate from the immigrant experience with its inherent struggles; rather, it is conceived by the second generation as "the interaction of the Canadian with the traditionally Polish" (Lustanski 55, emphasis in original). Undoubtedly, the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious nature of Canada would have had some bearing on the shift made by young Polonia away from language as an identity marker toward the importance of maintaining Polish traditions and customs. Some of old Polonia, with their outdated associations of Polish language providing a means of taking pride in and maintenance of Polish culture, 60 may be less pleased with such a shift. Perchai condemns Canadian Polonia "who unlike our Jewish and Ukrainian friends did not put their children as members of a community first, but rather simply put them first" (243); the end result of which is, after a thousand years of Poles fighting to retain their own identity,

"most of their children have lost the legacy of that struggle" within a generation of their arrival in Canada (243). He laments the fact that parents, in trying to forget their traumatic past, neglected to pass on the Polish language as a marker of cultural identity, the effect of which is that less than seventeen percent of young people speak Polish, a number that dwindles to less than four percent by the third generation. Interestingly, Jedwab's analysis of the statistics concerning ethnicity and heritage language retention gathered during the 1991 and 1996 census reports supports, in part, Perchai's concern. While, in 1996, only twenty- three percent of Poles born in Canada had retained use of their heritage language

(Jedwab 30), the Polish language is particular in that it has a high percentage

(9.9%) of "external" speakers—those who speak the language without being of the corresponding "ethnic" origin—"but low retention rates keep [the language] from a situation where the number of speakers would exceed the number of people of single ethnic origin" (25). However, Lustanski's study, published twenty-four years after Perchai voiced his concerns, proves that the inability to speak the Polish language does not equate to a decrease in those claiming a

Polish identity.

Stanley Teclaw's Niagara Street embodies the melding of the Canadian identity with preservation of the "Polish mentality." Niagara Street is written 61 from the perspective of Stanley, who uses his mother's voice to retell her stories and her mother's (his grandmother's) stories of being a Pole in Toronto. While all three generations are represented, each successive generation subsumes the voice of the one before, ending with the third generation male voice as dominant.

While this raises questions of authenticity and appropriation in cultural identity and gender representation, it is important to remember that Teclaw's primary interest, according to his short biography on the inside cover of the book, is recording the oral history of Toronto's Polish community, in this instance based on a series of interviews with his mother, Helen. With the stories told from his mother's perspective but in his voice—as is inevitable as he is the one writing and editing her words—the sense of the interaction of the Canadian with the traditionally Polish is captured.

The most striking example of this melding occurs in the last chapter, which is told completely from Stanley's point of view and takes place on the

Saturday before Easter when he helps his parents prepare for the traditional meal celebrating this religious holiday: traditional customs and methods of preparation are combined with standard North American ingredients. Helen readies herself to cook using Palmohve dish soap, Pyrex measuring cups, and, in case of a shortage of jars for the cwikla, a condiment made of cooked beets and grated horseradish, two or three jars of Gerber's baby food have been bought. During the cooking process, she works on a General Electric stove; Stanley uses

Kleenex tissues to wipe his eyes, which water from the sting of the hand-grated horseradish. In the actual cooking, Helen uses a bottle of V-8 vegetable juice in 62 the sauce for the cabbage rolls, Heinz vinegar in the cwikta, Crisco to coat the pans for the cake, and Mazola corn oil to polish the eggs for the Swiqconka .

The repeated and persistent explicit naming of each brand of product used is glaring within the context of detailed descriptions of the family's traditional holiday preparations. Helen, a second generation Polish-Canadian, allows

Canadian influences to blend with her Polish identity. Polish cuisine and the proper cooking of it has great value for Helen's mother in determining "real"

Polishness, so Helen's desire to cook Canadian food equally well casts suspicion as to whether she would "make a good enough Polish wife" (24). Although

Helen does not steadfastly adhere to all Polish customs, Wigilia is the one in which she has chosen to faithfully participate, making it "the one constant" throughout Stanley's life: "[t]he Easter of 1975 was exactly the same as the

Easter of 1965" (Teclaw 43). Stanley, a third generation Polish-Canadian, through the practice of Polish traditions and customs, is able to integrate his

Polish sense of self with his Canadian identity.

Additionally, Niagara Street shows the shift within Canadian Polonia away from being an ethno-linguistic community toward an ethno-cultural self identification. As the stories progress from concerning Sophia, a first generation

Polish-Canadian, to Helen, her daughter and a second generation Pole, and, lastly, to Stanley, Helen's son and a third generation Pole, the devaluation of language as the dominant determiner of cultural identity coincides with the

22 This is a Polish Catholic tradition wherein a sampling of food—kielbasa, hard boiled eggs, ham cold cuts, rye bread, salt, cwikla or horseradish, and butter—meant to be eaten for Easter Sunday breakfast along with a small lamb made of sugar or wax representing the lamb of God are presented in a basket and taken to church on Holy Saturday in order to be blessed by a priest. progressive inability to speak the Polish language The collection begins with

Sofia, who, essentially, does not speak any English She is forced to use her children as mediators between her and Canadian society In fact, when the social services inspector comes to their house to evaluate the family's continued eligibility for the Mother's Allowance cheque, Sophia does not have any direct contact with her The inspector directs all her comments to Joe, Sophia's eldest son, as does Sophia herself Here, the conversation between mother and son is written in Polish, with translated text in parentheses, while the conversation with the inspector is in English, which Joe then translates for his mother (the English translation of which is included in parentheses) Juxtaposed to this is Helen's,

Sophia's youngest child, slightly limited Polish and her consequent inability to understand every situation When she is sixteen, her boss, a Polish Jew, at the apparel company for which she sewed commented that one of the other women

"szyje tak jak prosie. sika" (30) It was not until she returns home and asks her mother that she is able to learn he was criticizing the woman's inability to sew straight by saying "She sews like a calf pees" (30) Stanley, as a third generation Pole, "[speaks] 'everyday' Polish to [his] father but 'advanced' Polish

[goes] beyond [his] comprehension" (44) This progression of language loss is visible m the interactions between his father, a first generation Pole, his mother, and himself his father only speaks to him in Polish, a language which he, in turn, uses to respond, while his mother speaks primarily in English, with the exception of moments of high emotion, during which she reverts to using Polish

In actuality, a ' prosie/' or "prosiak is a piglet not a calf 64 exclamations such as "Holera! " ("Damn!") (42). Though Stanley only understands every third word of the Swiqconka mass, the fact that he is maintaining Polish cultural traditions is what makes him a member of the Polish community, a factor he also uses to determine others' membership in the group.

After the blessing of the baskets and mass, he especially notices "all the attractive young Polish women" (45) walking along the sidewalk. Significantly, he considers them to be "Polish," not "Polish-Canadian;" he knows nothing about these women except that they were also participating in Polish tradition and culture, factors value laden enough for him to automatically grant them access to a Polish identity.

Negotiation of Cultural Identity as Reflected Through Language

The tension between the Polish and the Canadian identities can be extended to the reader through the inclusion of foreign words and phrases within the text itself. If "the question of identity is played out in the weaving of the words"

(Canton 143), the language of the words can reflect either a distantiation or a merging of cultures within said identity. Borrowing from Mary Di Michele, who called the Italian words interspersed throughout her poems "little stones she had dropped in the flow of the English" (Loriggio 39), Loriggio refers to the placement of the heritage language within a text written in the dominant language as the "device of the stone." By inserting gaps within the work, the clash of languages "situates the author and the reader, who are insiders or outsiders or both" (39). When left untranslated, the gaps created by the words in

The actual Polish spelling is "cholera," while "holera" is how it is pronounced. 65 the heritage language distance the reader from temporarily situating her/himself within the Polish community; this effect is intensified when the character in the work is also unable to understand the heritage language used. On the other hand, by translating the linguistic "stones" dropped into the text, the reader is invited to partake, however temporarily, in the group identity. Whether it is translated or untranslated, Polish words break the flow of an English text, "illustrat[ing] the tension and negotiation at work in a bicultural identity" (Canton 144) and reminding the reader of her/his own position in relation to the group.

While Teclaw's use of the device of the stone serves to illustrate the loss of value in language as a determinant of "Polishness," in Soaking in the

Remnants, Piszczkiewicz's use of the device of the stone reveals the progression of her Polish identity reconciliation. When Ania first arrives in Poland, she has difficulty adjusting to the switch in identity that she expects of herself. This distance from her "Polish identity" is indicated in the first story, "First Stop," by the lack of translation following the Lord's Prayer she and her mother recite over various family members' graves. The next story in the series, "You Don't Want

That," continues to show her discomfort with her lack of "enough" Polishness in that the Polish words and phrases continue not to be translated. However, they are now followed by a layperson's pronunciation guide in parentheses; accordingly, the reader may not understand what is being said, but s/he can now pronounce it correctly. The distantiation produced in the reader as a reflection of the assumed alienation Ania feels from her Polish identity is countered by the excessive detail she provides about her extended family in Poland. With this 66 only being her third visit back since she left when she was three-and-a-half years old, she is constantly doubting her place in the Polish community: "I say I'm

Polish and never wholeheartedly believe it" (Piszczkiewicz 16). To alleviate her concern about "fitting in," "[tjalking in," and "[bjuying in" (16), Ania uses her ability to recite all the names and connections of her Polish family as "a personal acceptance in the family" (15). With her success in appearing as "just someone passing by. Someone fluent. Someone Polish" (21) when she goes shopping is the beginning of her acceptance of her dual identity and the possibility that she can cast aside her doubt of herself.

This process of reconciliation continues to be reflected in the presentation of the Polish language. Ania's conversation in Polish with the shopkeeper in "You Don't Want That" includes English translations in parentheses; by the third story, "Under Three Thousand," the Polish conversations are presented in English. By omitting the process of translation, besides making it easier for the reader to immerse her/himself in the story and making the story progress more fluidly, the progression to a unified sense of self is presented. By this point in her stay, Ania has "promised [herjself [shej'd get the feel for living here" (27). Despite completely standing out within the village and a lack of mutual understanding between her and the villagers, Ania is determined to stop translating herself—and consequently her language—and simply "be" herself. In this way, she is finally coming to terms with the duality within her self. In the end, she is successful in embracing her Polish identity; in the next to last story in the cycle, "Proper Directions," she is taken to be not just 67 a Polish visitor, as she had been in the second story, but a fellow native of

Krakow. In the cab driver's mind she is a university student living in Krakow:

"He thinks I live here! And I've spent less than four consecutive years in

Poland. [...] In his mind, I'm a local!" (72). In "The Red Jar," the last story of

the cycle, Ania attends a Polish mass in a cathedral in Toronto where she is able

to hear in the chanting "the words that roll off the tongue, the words that fall into one another, that phase in and out," the stops between which one has difficulty making out "[ujnless you know" (76). The opening scene of the book in which the prayer is untranslated stands in direct opposition to this closing scene in

which not only is a translation of the prayers provided in parentheses, but Ania is

able to completely immerse herself in the music of the language itself, reflecting

the resolution she has found within her dual identity.

Though language is essential to not only how one's thoughts are formulated but the manner in which they are expressed, it is not necessarily the foremost determining factor in identity formation. Assuming s/he is proficient in more than one language, which language a writer decides to use and with which

an immigrant decides to most identify is a matter of choice and will; as Kosiriski

asserts "You can change a family name and you can change the language, but you can never undo circumcision. Never, ever" (qtd. in Trepte 220). Just as the immigrant writer is losing touch with the intimacies of life in her/his homeland,

s/he is also gaining insight into another way of life. However, language can be a tool with which identity is examined and broadcast. Interestingly, all of the

authors examined compose almost exclusively in English; for each, language is a 68 means of exploring and perhaps challenging their Polish identity within the

Canadian context. The switch from one culture and its respective language to another necessitates a "translation" of self on the part of the speaker; in this way, writers are able to look at Canadian experiences through Polish eyes and Polish experiences through Canadian eyes to produce works that reflect their dual identities. In other words, "[l]ike the hyphen in the term Polish-Canadian, the act of translation announces separations as much as connections, a reminder of the difficult, multiple existence of the emigre [sic]" (McKay 9) and immigrant alike. The identity of each of these Polish-Canadian authors and the characters they portray in their writing are, likewise, multi-layered, a product of the reconciliation of their Polish sense of self with their Canadian homeland and of their heritage language with their use of English. The process of this self- reinterpretation and the reconciliation of their disparate identities is as much what makes them Polish-Canadian as their place of birth or citizenship papers. 69 CHAPTER THREE NARRATIVE AND STORYTELLING AS A MEANS OF CONSTRUCTING CULTURAL IDENTITY

Just as history tells us who we are, identity is made of the stories we tell ourselves. Philip Riley, Language, Culture and Identity

The emigre, while moving forward to a new land and a new life, can bring the

past forward in the form of storytelling. Particularly for Poles living abroad in

Canada and elsewhere, the Polish homeland was traditionally linked to the Polish

identity. After a long history of political upheavals, Poland was liberated from

foreign Soviet influence in 1989 and the link between the two began to be

questioned. As Poles began creating their own narrative homelands based on personal memories and experiences, the concept of "Polishness" likewise shifted to suit individual needs. As the Polish homeland taken from memories and

imagination is private and differs from person to person, the only way to access

it is through written narrative. Each created literary homeland enters a discourse

with those that had been written before and those that will be written in the future; this literature enables access to the personal Polish homeland that, in turn, provides a reflection of one's identity. Lillian Boraks-Nemetz, in The Old

Brown Suitcase, explores the connection between written narrative and the construction of identity through Slava's exploration of self through written texts.

If homeland can be created as story, its inhabitants must be able to read it; each narrative homeland becomes another line in a series of stories for successive 70 generations to uncover. Ann Charney explores the effects this dialogue has on identity construction in Dobryd as her protagonist struggles to come to terms with the melding of the world from her Aunt's stories with her own present reality. As important as the story's content, the process of storytelling is essential to the construction of identity. The narrative, an expression of emotions and impressions created by an event, is subject to outside pressures: by accepting or challenging the story, the listener acts as a possible source of affirmation; at the same time the storyteller is subject to societal pressure for the story to conform to accepted norms. In addition to the already existing differences in narrative form according to gender (as put forth by McLean,

Pasupathi, and Pals), there is a tradition of associating women with the Polish homeland that perpetuates these differences. Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces illustrates such differences in the process of narration and, consequently, in identity construction through Ben, the protagonist in the latter part of the novel, and his relationship with the women in his life. Sherie Posesorski, in Escape

Plans, similarly examines women's role of receptacle for the family history and, consequently, as gatekeeper to the narrative homeland. Stories, in both their conception and delivery, are an essential component to the resolution between

"ethnicity" and the construction of identity in that they provide an external validation of memory and experience and a link between the (ancestral) homeland and the Canadian present. 71 Reconceptualization of the Polish Homeland and Identity in Narrative

With the country's long awaited liberation from foreign rule in 1989, Poland's literary map likewise underwent shifts wherein old trends evolved and new trends emerged (Czaplihski 357,360; Shallcross 8). Freedom from communist era restraints and restrictions (1945-1989) meant there was no need to perpetuate the mythos of the Polish homeland—an Arcadian land where its multi-ethnic, multi-lingual denizens live in harmony with and acceptance of each other

(Czapliriski 358-59)—as the "spiritual keystone of national unity and identity"

(Witkowska 150) for Poles living both within the country and abroad as it no longer suited present realities. The end of the persecution by outside forces that had impelled people to live abroad in order to "keep alive a form of Polishness which was banned in Poland" (Lustanski 57) resulted in changes within the literary tradition of the "mythic homeland" that began in the 1980s and continued to develop alongside the established conventions as the Solidarity movement gained momentum in its revolt against the Soviet presence in Poland.

When the country was finally able to open itself to the world, its people gained new experiences and outlooks, the myth of the Polish homeland as idyllic and stabile was increasingly called into question.

In that, for centuries, the Polish homeland had been intimately linked with the construction of a Polish identity, the destabilization of the myth, subsequently, had a direct effect on the perception of identity. According to

Czaplinski, the contemporary hero of Polish prose from the 1990s was one who

"no longer define[d] himself in reference to a larger (regional or national) 72 whole" (363). Instead, the stories s/he told and the places s/he inhabited were based on memory—imagined spaces—rather than historical record. Shallcross rightly points out that compared to the nomadic nature of the Roma or the diasporic history of Jewry,

Poles are not wanderers.... However, their homeland's boundaries

have frequently moved under their feet. Subversively, the mobile

homeland of the relatively immobile people shaped its inhabitants'

identity and difference, while, in turn, they determined their

home(land)'s cultural and national profile. (Shallcross 3)

It was the struggle to reclaim the political and geographic space that led to the construction of identity by the mythic or imagined space. However, with the openness and comparative freedom experienced in the 1990s and the de- ideologizing and subsequent privatization of that time, individuals looked more to their own selves in choosing and shaping a personal homeland. It follows that if one can determine one's homeland, identity can also be negotiated; thus, "in the prose of the 1990s homeland and identity themselves become myths" as

"each one strives to create his own past, his own geneology [sic], his own homeland" (Czapliriski 363). With the creation of a private homeland, one can

selectively choose the personal significance of ancestral roots and selected histories.

Particularly for the emigre, the homeland—mythic or personal—left behind exists primarily in memory. Filipowicz observes that emigre poets "tend 73 to assume the role of custodian of tradition" ("Fission" 167), looking to the past rather than the future. This is inevitable as the world they have left behind has

continued to change and evolve without them; it would have been only through

tradition that they would have been able to speak relevantly both to the "home

audience" and to fellow emigres. On the other hand, post-Solidarity writers have

the possibility of looking beyond tradition and the requirement to write a hero

who "finds his identity through linking his biography with the great collective narrative" (Czapliriski 364). Above all, emigre and emigrant writers are afforded

a great creative freedom with the departure from their homeland, for in

"leav[ing] a place behind, you liberate it for your imagination to play with"

(Hutcheon 298). Whereas "ethnicity" may be "located in a place, in a specific history" (Hall, "Local" 21), making it impossible to "speak except out of place, out of those histories" (21), identity is not grounded "in the archaeology, but in the re-telling of the past" (Hall, "Cultural Identity" 224, emphasis in original).

Cultural identity, according to Hall, "belongs to the future as much as to the past" ("Cultural Identity" 225) in that it acknowledges an individual's desire to look back to a particular place and its histories while s/he undergoes a constant transformation in the present. As cultural identities "are the points of identification which are made within the discourses of history and culture"

("Cultural Identity" 226) there is freedom for individual needs and desires in the development of self identities. Therefore, the opportunity afforded by the changes within the tradition of the mythic homeland to conceptualize that place

and its corresponding histories in such a way as to suit an individual exploration 74 of one's "ethnicity" is invaluable. Fictionalization of space provides a flexibility for authors to write according to their needs; they can use their own singular experiences and memories as the foundation on which to build their particular cultural identity.

Memory, especially, is deeply private and individual. Poland, as a reference point, has "different significances and meanings in people's lives and it can be mobilised in different ways" (Temple, "Diaspora" 21). While Poland may be a historic site, it exists equally as a remembered space, a personal memory. Beneventi claims that, as such, "it resides in an unretrievable [sic] past" and "must be resignified through memory, language, and through the writing process itself (223); Temple similarly asserts that when remembered places become part of people through their memories, then the "memories are worked into narratives of [their] lives" ("Diaspora" 22). Czaplinski also believes the perpetuation of the mythic (personal) homeland of the 1990s is to be found in literature in that each of these homelands is essentially a palimpsest: "an already- written text, and at the same time an empty page" (364). It is only in literature that these individual homelands exist, take shape, and gain "realness," for it is

"precisely as tales told that they acquire their role as the foundation for our identity" (364, emphasis in original). Writing provides the means of creating a map of one's personal homeland while the literature created provides a reflection of one's identity.

Importantly, the distance from the audience offered by writing allows the writer to reconstruct for her/himself the significance of the stories related. Free 75 from the pressures of a listening audience present in oral communication, writing allows time for reflection and for thoughts and emotions to develop. According to Horrocks and Callahan, writing about private experiences enables the author to be the audience, removed from social expectations; furthermore, writing "is a two-dimensional way to freeze time, forcing the experience into reality where it can be emotionally expressed and accepted as truth" (Horrocks and Callahan 73).

Such a process is essential for the stabilization of one's identity in that it provides a "mechanism for understanding the uncertainty of the past, managing the emotions of the present, while creating and maintaining a cohesive identity across future contexts" (82). Unencumbered by the worry that the story deviates from the norm or may be too disturbing or difficult to tell, writers use the process of composing their narrative as a means to come to terms with the emotions produced and the lessons learned by the experience, thereby adding to their ever evolving self-concept of identity.

In an effort to actively affect her own identity construction, Slava, the protagonist of Boraks-Nemetz's The Old Brown Suitcase, first appropriates narratives written by others as her own life-stories. Attempting to distance herself from the hardships and horrors that she had faced during the war as a

Polish Jew, Slava, to avoid having to reveal anything about herself, uses the stories about her favourite heroine, the Russian Princess Nina Dzavaha, "as if they were the stories of [her] life" (Boraks-Nemetz 83) to answer questions about herself. In fact, she does this in two separate circumstances: at the age of ten, when she hides at her grandmother's cottage in Zalesie, Poland, pretending 76 to be the child of a family acquaintance, and four years later in 1947, when the

family moves to Rockville, Ontario. In Poland, the younger Slava borrows

information concerning the Princess' identity directly from the book, only

beginning to invent details of her own when she sees her lie has been accepted

by her listener. She makes her stories "very exciting, full of captures and

escapes" and doing so is "easy, and so much more enjoyable than [her] life... in

Zalesie" (98). Despite her new friend's promise to keep her "identity" a secret,

the girl tells all the other children about "Nina the Georgian Princess,"

catapulting Slava into heretofore unknown popularity. The consequences of her

friend's untrustworthiness and Slava's own recklessness are avoided when the

little girl's parents are killed by the Underground for being Nazi informers and

when Slava escapes discovery during the subsequent Nazi searches by hiding in

a hole in the woods for days.

In Canada, Slava uses the same strategy to avoid giving true details of her

life to her Canadian classmates. Frightened that someone will challenge her but

cognizant that the "real story" would not be believed either, Slava maintains the

fictional Princess Dzavaha's life-stories to be her own after adjusting the particulars to fit a Polish setting. Just like her Polish version of her fictional self

who hides in the Polish Tatra mountain caves to escape persecution by her royal

father's enemies, Slava goes to ground when her lies are discovered by the other

children. This time the consequences are unavoidable and they flush her from her hiding place, jeering and calling her names. In both situations, the process of

appropriating a fictional story that has no deeper significance to her concept of 77 self proves incompatible with her attempts at identity construction. Though

Slava wants to be brave like Princess Nina in the face of danger as well as adventure, her lack of personal historical connection to the work makes it unsatisfactory as a means of understanding her own self.

Unable to turn to her fictional heroine, Slava embraces writing stories based on her own life experiences. With the failure of her Canadian attempt to identify with Princess Nina, she turned to her diary and "poured out [her] heart"

(Boraks-Nemetz 92); since she was unable to talk to her parents about the situation, "[o]nly [her] diary would learn how [she] really felt" (92). Slava also composes stories in an effort to come to terms with the various traumas she has suffered and their resultant emotions. By translating her real-life events into fiction—for example, while desperately hiding in the hole in the woods with the hope of escaping discovery by the Nazis, she wrote a story about a child lost in the desert—Slava was able to organize the events for herself through a medium that provides her with some distance and the opportunity to edit the action and the emotion they produce. This process is "like entering a world of words - where [she] felt almost totally free" (163). Such writing, like memory, is extremely personal, so much so that Slava "[felt] that [her] stories were [her] very soul" (162). Her brown suitcase that she has kept since before the war holds a folder "now full of little stories, some written during the war, others from the time of the Ghetto and afterwards" (161). In the end, having realized her own stories are the most appropriate source for an exploration and, subsequently, a creation of identity, she eventually takes them out of her suitcase with the 78 intention of rereading and reworking them, thereby further delving into her developing concept of self.

Just as a place can be a homeland only on the condition that it can tell a story, so must the inhabitant of the desired homeland fill the role of a reader:

In today's world, to be an inhabitant of a particular place means to

become conscious that we exist on the pages of a palimpsest. We

are walking on the traces left by others, who lived here before us.

It is on top of their already-written stories that we fill the page anew

with our own; blurring the signs of their sojourn, adding our own

storylines to theirs. (Czapliriski 364-65)

Therefore, it is only by understanding one's own narrative that a region's "story" is revealed. The shift from the "homeland narrative" to the "narrative homeland"

(365) results in the freedom to create one's identity and ties to a particular region as well as to the past "in the form of stories in our memory" (365). After the turmoil of the 1980s and the political changes initiated in 1998 , individual narratives leading to small homelands replaced the broad, impersonal narratives of the great homeland as the "motherland of all Poles" while still maintaining an awareness and comprehension of the previous inhabitants' already existing stories. Accordingly, everything that is narrated "has a 'before' and an 'after'— a 'margin' in which others may write" (Hall, "Question" 123); the process of

In 1998, Polish Parliament approved legislation transforming Poland's forty-nine provinces into sixteen new ones. The aim of this decentralization was to do away with communist era administration and to shift power to local governments ("New Provinces" n Pag) 79 writing equally inscribes in the margins of other works as it produces its own margins in which other stories will remark. In composing their own narratives, individuals position themselves in dialogue with the stories that had been created before, adding yet another layer of storyline to the literary palimpsest for successive generations to uncover.

All of the characters in Ann Charney's Dobryd are preoccupied with a homeland that no longer exists except in their memories. Dobryd itself—the village in which Ann's family has been living from the time her grandfather moved there as a young man—was unable to survive the war, even in name, as the settlement was renamed by the Soviets after they annexed and rebuilt it; nevertheless, it is the site for all of the family stories and the ideal to which everything is compared. It is through her aunt's often unrelated stories that Ann becomes aware of "a remote world" that had vanished before her birth (Charney

51), but, like other lost cities, had left behind "a mythical legacy that goes beyond fact" (85). Her aunt's stories permeate Ann's life until she imagines she is a part of them; her senses are betraying her so that smelling, tasting and feeling in the present seem to be "false cues." It is only when "[Ann's] aunt resumes her story [her] confusion fades" (61). Internalizing her aunt's history to the point where she is unable to recognize her own story, Ann never questions the truth of the stories and her mother's silence neither confirms nor denies them.

Less extreme are her daydreams in which Ann melds the past and the present— all the people from her aunt's reminisces and all their friends from the present coexist without contradiction: "I watch over them. Their emotions and my own 80 flow through me, while I control their gestures by transposing my own longings and desires into their existence" (81). This melding of her aunt's past and her present leads to the point where Ann feels more at home in the narrated world; she looks at herself performing daily tasks and marvels at the role of happy schoolgirl she is able to play, feeling "smug about the way [she] had separated

[her] inner, real life from this playacting" (118). Absorbing her aunt's personal history to such a degree causes Ann to subsume her identity into that of her

Aunt's; as the stories become hers, the identity expressed within them grows to be hers as well.

Even as she is subsuming herself in her Aunt's world, Ann comes to recognize that it is one to which she will never have access except through the stories themselves. In the end, she resents them since "in both worlds [she] always thought of [her] self as an intruder, an imposter, doomed to live in perpetual exile" (Charney 52). When she felt herself equating the real world with a world of playacting, Ann usually sensed "that such distinctions were dangerous to [her] well-being and [she] willed them away" (118). Even when she was able to take joy in something, the fact that her aunt's and mother's past

"always intruded and spoiled the present" (117) resulted in a resentment that grew as the years progressed. Years later, in Canada, sure that she had managed to push the stories away to be forgotten, she continued to come into contact with people and events that revived and elaborated upon them: "They insisted on being remembered, and eventually the threads of these stories became entangled with those of [her] own life" (81). Determined to live a life separate from the 81 one portrayed and to have parts of herself that she must never expose to others,

Ann, nevertheless, cannot extricate herself from the storylines written before her

and their indelible effect on her conception of self.

The Polish Literary Map and Women as Gatekeepers to the Personal Homeland

Just as each piece of writing is layered between already existing and future

narratives, each individual is part of a continuing storyline spanning generations.

While experience and memory are personal in that one can have ownership of

each, because "experience is something [we] share with and owe to others"

(Zach-Blonska 151) and memory uttered aloud becomes a story that "is part of a

long chain of stories joining different continents and countries, languages and

cultures; joining old world and ... new" (Keefer 3), they are as bound by outside

influences as they are by personal. When opened to the imagination, private

memories that are invariably intertwined with public history are transformed into

stories that confer meaning to one's identity: narrated "ethnicity", in addition to both personal and public history, is tied up "with forms of imagination that comprehend multiple, and often conflicting, perceptions of experience" (7). In

this way, narratives, especially collective stories, may not strictly be true factually, but their real significance is found in the emotional and symbolical

meaning that they convey (Gross 379; Horrocks and Callahan 72).

Consequently, the relationship between "ethnicity" and the past "is a constructed

one" (Hall, "Ethnicity" 19); it is comprised of the stories people tell themselves in order to reconnect with their history and their "roots." Furthermore, if identity is "a process of identification, ... something that happens over time, that is never 82 absolutely stable, that is subject to the play of history" (15), such stories are what

people use to position themselves and by which they are, in turn, positioned.

The creation and reading of the literary map is less straightforward when

the second generation members of a cultural community look to explore and

construct their respective identities. Perchal, in particular, laments what he sees

as the disconnection between the children of the first generation emigre

community in Canada and the Polish homeland; within a generation of their

arrival, the children of the Poles who came to Canada had lost the more than one

thousand year old legacy of the struggle to retain a separate Polish identity.

Understandably, the parents had been trying to forget their own traumatic pasts

and to build a new life in a new land. However, this desire to distance

themselves from the old life and its "Polishness" had the effect that their children

"simply slid into being like most other English Canadians" (Perchal 246). As

there was no struggle necessary to retain a Polish identity in Canada and there

was an equal lack of Polish "things" on which to build an identity—"no

experience of that land, and only a limited experience of its people" (246)—it

was inevitable that the children would more likely self-identify as Canadian.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Lustanski's study, conducted

twenty years after Perchal's article was published, disproves the validity of his pessimistic stance. With the political climate of the 1980s and 1990s opening the door to a re-examination of the understanding of the Polish homeland and one's place in relation to it, so too did the understanding begin to shift as to what it meant to be Polish within Canada. According to Lustanski's results, seventy- 83 eight percent of second generation Poles polled viewed themselves as Polish

(versus ninety percent of the first generation) and of this group seventeen percent declared a hyphenated identity (43). Meanwhile, only three percent of the second generation group refused a Polish identity for the Canadian one.

Interestingly, according to the results, more women tend to self-identify as

Polish than men, who comprised five percent of those who chose the Canadian identity compared to the one percent of women who also did so. Recognizing that the pool of participants questioned is quite small, Lustanski tentatively claims "that the girls have a significantly stronger affinity for their ethnic roots than their male peers" (44). Her study reveals that even as there is a consensus that a "Polish mentality" is the key determinant of "Polishness" for Polish-

Canadians, what the first generation immigrants would consider to be the "Polish way of thinking" is not necessarily how the second generation conceives it. In fact, second generation as well as newly arrived Poles can "opt out" of the definitions of "Polishness" set out by the established Polonia while still defining themselves as Polish (Temple, "Feeling" 295). Shaped by their social experience within the Canadian landscape, young Polish-Canadians define a "Polish mentality" as "the interaction of the Canadian with the traditionally Polish"

(Lustanski 55, emphasis in original). Further supporting her cautious claim that women feel a stronger tie to the "homeland" are the results showing that according to the young female second generation respondents and the group born in Poland, attachment to the homeland is what most often connects Polish

Canadians. Lustanski offers a possible explanation for such findings by positing 84 "that the girls are more prone to identify with their parents' sentimental stories about the ethnic country, which are usually idealized"26 (56). As Abdelhady asserts, attempts to concretize the homeland are insistently gendered (60): Polish women are emphatically held to be gatekeepers to the homeland through their maintenance of Polish tradition, personal histories, and through their ability to bear children.

Perpetuating and reinforcing this connection is a strong tradition of associating women with the Polish "motherland." In that the homeland is portrayed as the nation's mother, during the time of the partitions Poland was personified as a woman in chains or a woman being lowered into a grave, murdered when the nation-state of Poland disappeared from the map (Witkowska

149); equally iconic is the ideal of "Matka Polka" to which each woman was customarily meant to aspire—the "Polish Mother" birthing sons who were to fight for Poland's freedom while, maintaining the home(land), "she will take care of everyone, complain to no one, and weep only when alone" (Graff 105). This ideal was the precursor of the Soviet "brave victim"—"the resourceful and selfless female of the communist period" (105); she, in turn, was replaced by a resurgence of the cult of the Madonna that "celebrates heroic, self-sacrificing women and motherhood in a national context" (Matynia 369) after the fall of socialism when the Catholic church swept into the political power vacuum.

Consequently, "[d]esire for the homeland, figured as desire for a woman, is a

26 This is similar to the attachment to the homeland on the part of the Polish-Canadians born in Poland who left at a young age and whose early childhood memories inspire a certain nostalgia (Lustanski 56). 85 familiar trope" (Filipowicz, "Home" 279) in Polish emigre literature.

Considering such an established history of equating womanhood with the homeland, it should come as no surprise that its effects are still being felt, both in literature and in the Polish-Canadian community.

Ben, the second generation East-European Jew to whom the narrative perspective switches in the second part of Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, has difficulty coming to terms with the importance of his parents' past experiences.

The family narrative is a noiselessness in which words drift away: "[his] parents and [he] waded through damp silence, of not hearing and not speaking"

(Michaels 204). As Ben grows to know his father through his speechlessness—

"hours, wordless and close, shaped [Ben's] sense of him" (216) so that "the images [he] planted in [Ben] were an exchange of vows" (218)—his mother becomes his source for any details of his parents' lives before they came to

Canada. These divulgences occurred behind his father's back, resulting in yet another conspiracy of secrets subject to a "code of silence" (223). It is not until

Ben moves out of the house during his second year of university, thereby distancing himself from her, that his mother stops sharing intimacies with him; she "still bent towards [him] with confidences, but only in order to withdraw them.... She would begin a story and then fall silent.... When [he] protested, she suggested [Ben] go into the living room and join [his] father" (231). Already distrustful of him and his ability to ignore them for weeks at a time, Ben's mother turns him away even more frequently after his wife, Naomi, enters their lives. 86 Though Naomi, with her happy childhood, is "a foreigner, a stranger in

[their] midst" (Michaels 249), she connects with Ben's parents in a way in which he is unable. Due to her Canadian upbringing that was devoid of a bloody struggle for survival, to Ben's family

[s]he was blunt and sweet, a crayon, when everything before her

had been written in blood. She blundered in with her openness, her

Canadian goodwill, with a seeming obliviousness to the fine lines

of pain, the tenderly held bitterness, the mesh of collusions, the

ornate restrictions. (248-49)

While the family lives in a place of absence, a space left by history and "rotted out by grief (233) in which they are able to hide, Naomi stands on clear solid ground and embraces them all. When she graciously and patiently accepts his father's gruff silence, he is able to open to her in his own limited way; similarly, by learning the traditional recipes and listening to the family stories, she becomes the daughter Ben's mother had always wanted and a co-conspirator in her secret discussions.

The development of these relationships ensures that traditional gender roles perpetuate from one generation to the next. Like his father before him, Ben was "thrust out" (247)—"[his] mother held kitchen conferences with Naomi, in the guise of discussing ingredients or dress patterns, while [he] sat mute with

[his] father in the living room" (247)—to make room for Naomi in his mother's heart as a confidante. Regardless of the intensely growing jealousy this inspires, 87 Ben is powerless to alter the family dynamic. Naomi, in the role of daughter, becomes the gatekeeper of the family histories and secrets. It is only when she lets slip some reference to an extended family member or to a particular episode that Ben is even aware of his dearth of knowledge concerning his familial roots; similarly, Ben collects "an irregular and intimate knowledge" (238) of Toronto through her expertise acquired by a municipal affairs project of hers.

Analogously, Ben casts Petra, his lover during his trip to Jakob's home in

Greece, into the role of receptacle for his histories; freely admitting he does not listen when she tells him her stories, he "wanted to tell her everything [he] knew

... to whisper into her hair until she fell asleep, [his] words inventing her dreams"

(277). The women keep and disseminate the traditions of hearth and home(land) and it is through them that the men gain access. Furthermore, just as "[his] parents' past is [his] molecularly" (280), so too will Ben pass his history onto his child through Naomi: "I want to believe she can rinse the fear from my mouth.

But I imagine Naomi has a child and I can't stop the writing on its forehead from growing as the child grows ... even as it bursts across the skin" (280). It is his inherited grief Ben is bequeathing the next generation, but it is Naomi's child who is the recipient; Naomi is the Mother through whom stories are passed down just as she is the gate through which stories of the personal home(land) are accessed. The women in Ben's life represent the traditions and histories of the motherland and, as such, serve as receptacles for the already existing stories, thereby preserving the past. As gatekeepers of the personal homeland, they 88 afford the men access to this private space as well as provide the means of passing it on to the next generation.

The Reciprocal Relationship Between Narrative and the Construction of Self

Among psychologists there is a clear consensus concerning the reciprocal relationship between narration and the construction of self (Alasuutari 7;

Horrorcks and Callahan 70; McLean, Pasupathi, and Pals 262, Pasupathi 138;

Tuval-Mashiach 25027). In terms of content, stories reflect one's identity in that they provide information about an event directly from a person's life and reveal beliefs about the characteristics and capabilities of the self as well as ideas held about the world (Pasupathi 138); additionally, since there are many such events, that a particular story has made it into the repertoire of life-stories that are retold on multiple occasions and for different audiences signifies its importance in the self-concept of identity. Created from the life and perceptions of the speaker,

"[njarratives capture fragments of identity" (Horrocks and Callahan 69-70) as expressed through stories representing a conception of self. The choice concerning which experiences and emotions are narrated and the manner in which that is done is a "tangible picture of identity across contexts" (70) revealing enduring themes of one's life.

Stories are a means of not only reflecting but, more importantly, developing and maintaining identity. In that "[ijdentity is an emotional process that is understood through personal reflection and enactment with others"

27 The introduction to this article provides extensive references to other works in the social sciences concerning narrative in relation to identity, how stories are a means of learning about identity, and how gender clearly influences how narratives are constructed. 89 (Horrock and Callahan 71), narrative is the mechanism used to make sense of one's thoughts and emotions. The very act of composing narratives is the means through which a person works out his or her thoughts and beliefs and, by expressing them via storytelling, reinforces them. As Horrocks and Callahan assert, "[identities are created and maintained through communication and interaction" (71), in which case, "one way to maintain or to change self- conceptions is to tell stories about the self (McLean, Pasupathi, and Pals 264).

One manner of attaining such change is through simple repetition: by repeating stories until they have become internalized as part of one's self-concept, people look to "create self-views they would like to hold but that are not yet established" (Pasupathi 144). Another way to affect such change lies in the fundamentally collaborative nature of storytelling: for every speaker there is a responsive listener, both of whom brings their own personal history to the encounter "that serves to constrain and shape particular stories" (144). Each story is subject to "pressure toward consistency" within the teller's "life narrative"—stories told on one occasion can ultimately influence the sort of self created in other contexts (144)—while still having to adapt to the demands of the listener and to social circumstance. Listeners influence the story being told, whether by supporting its validity or challenging its premise or particular details, and their behaviour "changes how elaborative the story is in the moment of telling, with effects that are evident on subsequent remembering occasions"

(McLean, Pasupathi and Pals 267). In this way, identity is constructed from both within and from outside: that storytellers compensate according to the listener's 90 response shows the importance "the ways we imagine ourselves to be seen by others" (Hall, "Question" 122, emphasis in original) has on our concept of self.

Such public reinforcement (coupled with repetition) provides both the social validation needed as well as the personal validation owning an experience through story endows. Consequently, stories enable a management of the public and the private self, both of which can be revised through subsequent storytelling.

Michaels' poet-protagonist of Fugitive Pieces, takes the reciprocal relationship between teller and listener to an extreme in that Jakob is unable to come to terms with his own layered identity without melding his history with that of his wife's. He is unsuccessful in his attempts to come to terms with his trauma by way of his first wife's help. Though he admires "her armour of words" (Michaels 133) and the way "[i]n her mouth English was dangerous and alive, edgy and hot" (132), the distance she maintains prevents him from entering her past and her memories, something he needs to do to recreate his own. Whereas Athos, his adoptive father, "replaced parts of [him] slowly"

(144), Alex wants to push through to the present, "to explode [him], set fire to everything. She wants [him] to begin again" (144). After half a day spent

"gnawing through misery" (144) in the dark to reach the moment that "a story eat[s] its way to the surface" (144), Alex, once again, "barges in with her shameless vitality" (144) and turns on the lights. She thinks she is helping him by returning him to the world and rescuing him from the "jaws of despair" (144); nonetheless, each time she floods the room with light, chasing the shadows away 91 while "a memory or a story slinks away, it takes more of [Jakob] with it" (144).

With her bull-headed zest for life, Alex is unsympathetic to the difficulty he finds in reconciling with his past, thereby preventing him from doing just that.

On the other hand, Michaela, Jakob's second wife, not only understands his need to immerse himself in old despair but also facilitates his resolution with its lingering after affects. In the beginning, when Michaela is forthcoming about her history and "offers her ancestors to [him]," Jakob is "shocked at [his] hunger for her memories" (Michaels 179). Initially, Jakob fears her openness will reveal

"in [his] body the terrible things that have marked [him]" (179); however, the longing he feels for the sense of absolution listening to her brings him is too strong to be denied. As she continues to open to him, offering him an alternative history to the tragedy of his sister's death, Jakob "cross[es] over the boundary of skin into Michaela's memories, into her childhood" (185). In entering her past and her stories, placing them within himself, Jakob becomes "irrevocably unmoored" from the past and finally is "suspended in the present" (188). In fact, this process is so successful that "[u]nknowingly, her hands carry [his] memories" (192). Just as people persist in retelling a story with the goal of internalizing and then exhibiting the characteristic within it, Jacob, by absorbing

Michaela's stories into himself, seeks to produce a change in himself. In telling

Jakob stories about her family members and their exploits, Michaela, eventually, is narrating Jakob's history; realities meld until Jakob sees a past that could have been while hearing Michaela's words of a past that was. As he imagines Athos might have said: "If one no longer has land but has the memory of land, then one 92 can make a map" (193). Using Michaela's memories, Jakob is able to create the personal homeland that he needs in order to reconcile his multiple selves, putting aside the one that hindered and harmed.

The ability to create stories is learned in childhood; essential to the development of children's narrative abilities is the parents' provision of narrative structure. Just as parent-child reminiscence is one of the first contexts for children to develop an "understanding of the self as storied" (McLean, Pasupathi, and Pals 265), it follows that the more elaboration mothers provide in their narration as children get older, the more information children themselves supply in their own narration, resulting in a reciprocal relationship (265). Significantly, gender is also related to the elucidative aspects of reminiscing in that "[p]arents are more elaborative with girls, and girls provide more unique details of past experience than do boys even when boys and girls are at similar language levels"

(265). Furthermore, studies of late adolescents and adults have shown that

"females create more complex narratives than do males" (265). While these patterns will obviously have an impact on the formulation of individuals' respective life-story events later in life, these gender differences are also linked to a person's emotional self-concept. Studies have shown that parents will minimize emotion or emphasize the pragmatics of dealing with a situation with their sons and they will elaborate on the feelings associated with an event with their daughters (265); in other words, "girls are socialized into creating a more emotional and interpersonal self-concept than are the boys" (265). This

"programming" carries through to adulthood. Investigations into gender 93 difference within "master narratives"—a term coined by researchers "to address how people engage in discourse under the umbrella of the norms and expectations of a given culture" (273)—have revealed that, in response to life- threatening situations, women employ a master narrative of "care and concern" and men employ one of "stoicism and bravery" (273). Furthermore, examinations into adult narrative construction have shown that, while men tend to devise clearly defined plots that are more linear, chronologically ordered and continuous, women "construct narratives along multiple dimensions" in a more fragmentary way28 (Tuval-Mashiach 250). As long as parents continue to perpetuate such differences when engaging in narrative construction with their children, dissimilarity between women's stories and men's will continue.

Sherie Posesorski's Escape Plans shows a clear division according to gender within the family's narrative construction. Becky, the twelve-year-old protagonist of the novel, is as engrossed in her mother's storytelling as her mother is in sharing her memories with Becky. Whenever the opportunity presents itself, her mother narrates a part of her earlier life, sometimes with the aim to teach Becky a lesson and sometimes simply to entertain her. Regardless, when her mother stories her past for her, "Becky [is]n't just listening, but [feels] like she [is] seeing and feeling everything as if she was there" (Posesorski 24).

With each telling, her mother adds more details, creating a more elaborative and,

28 Perhaps this can account for the predominance of women authois within the Polish- Canadian prose fiction genre, while men, on the other hand, seemingly dominate the genre of poetry writing However, this is speculation based solely upon observable trends within the respective genres and not on any concrete research (which would have been outside the bounds of this project). 94 consequently, more interesting story. As she internalizes her mother's history,

Becky becomes determined to hear all of her stories, thereby becoming an expert on her mother's life. This internalization continues to the point where, when her mother passes on one of her stories to her daughter—"I gave it to you. So it's your story now too" (68)—Becky melds her own life narrative with that of her mother's. She dreams of the situation related in the story, but places herself within it and adds her best friend to its list of characters. Absorbing her mother's narrative history to the point she repeatedly "becomes" her mother will have a significant impact on how she creates her own life stories and, by extension, on her conception of self.

Her father, on the other hand, has no interest in establishing such a connection using stories between his past and his children. While "[h]er mother liked to remember things" (Posesorski 22), both good and bad, her father likes to forget. When Becky asks him about his life in Poland or anytime before he came to Canada in 1948, "he would just say he had forgotten" (22) or he would respond "in Yiddish, a nechtiker tog! which meant it's gone, so forget about it"

(22). On the one occasion her father makes mention of his childhood, it is so unexpected an occurrence that it startles Becky. After sharing the one short story commiserating with Becky and her brother's experience with bullying, he falls silent, leaving Becky to wonder whether he was "silent because he was remembering or because he was trying to forget" (103). In an attempt to learn more about her father, Becky starts to ask him another question about his past, only to be silenced by her mother placing her index finger over her mouth, 95 shaking her head, and beginning her own tale to distract from her husband's secrecy. This episode strikes Becky with the fact that, though so many things had happened to them, "while she knew lots about her mother's story, she knew next to nothing about her father's" (104). Significantly, her younger brother,

Jeffie, is also left out of parent-child storytelling episodes. Similar to Ben in

Fugitive Pieces, Jeffie is without a significant source for the participation in reciprocal family storytelling due to a silent father and a mother who does not, to a great extent, share her narrative with him (something that can only partially be explained by his young age),. With such a reticent-to-speak father and an extremely expressive mother, there is little doubt that narrative and, by extension, the way in which identity is conceived and articulated will remain gendered.

The narrative process is undeniably tied to the formation of a concept of self. Not just a biased reflection of the speaker, stories reveal deeper life patterns and perceptions; more importantly, stories themselves as well as the process of story construction are instruments for constructing identity. The narrative, whether composed orally or in writing, is a vehicle for the self-management of emotions and impressions brought about by life events; in this way, identity is the inspiration behind the story, but in creating the story identity is being developed. Equally reciprocal is the dynamic between the storyteller and her/his audience. Subject to the approval of the listener in addition to societal pressures, the narrator is forced to adapt her/his story to the situation and the context in which it is told, and each subsequent retelling has a lasting effect on her/his 96 identity conception. The reciprocal nature of both processes ensures that identity is never immutable or stable. Consequently, as Polish emigres are able to move away from the traditional perception that identity is intimately tied to the homeland, they are able to create personal homelands that speak to their respective needs in creating their cultural identities in Canada and elsewhere, the stories of which can be passed down to later generations. Family histories— intersecting the public and the private, the national and the personal—provide the material for the construction of one's cultural identity while the stories themselves are the vehicles through which it is accomplished. 97 POST-SCRIPT

When questioning "Who am I?" from within the vastness of Canada's lands, many of them unknown, one is redirected to ask "Where is here?" (Atwood 24-

25). The question "here" implies different considerations: what is this place in relation to other places and how does one find one's self here? In the end, according to Atwood, Canada must be the space not only one's body inhabits but also one's mind: Canada is "a state of mind" (26). Interestingly, Maver also claims that Canada is "a state of mind" (4), not because it is an "unknown territory for the people who live in it" (Atwood 26), but because of the fluidity of its borders and the multiplicity of its people (Maver 3-4). As Yann Martel points out, a Canadian novel may not take place in Canada, but this chameleon-like quality is perhaps what makes it typically Canadian—"Canadian is whoever says that he or she is Canadian" (Martel, qtd. in Maver 4). The exploration naturally progresses from the question of "Who am I?" to "What am I to think or do?"; however, until one is able first to answer the question "Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?" (Maclntyre, qtd. in Salomone 83), the earlier question is unanswerable. A person's identity cannot be separated from the histories out of which s/he comes—a re-telling of the past (Hall, "Cultural Identity" 224)—just as "ethnicity" is "located in a place" (Hall, "Local" 21) and "is seen above all as a "matter of belief (Edwards 8). By knowing the histories from which one comes and the narratives of which one is a part, multiple selves can be reconciled. 98 Canada is a place that embraces its inhabitants' narratives and calls them its own. Conversely, writers not originally from the United States, such as

Czeslaw Milosz, are viewed as emigre writers (in this case, of Polish literature) and are "not considered to be a part of American literature" (Mozejko 809).

Marek Pytasz goes so far as to say that "it is possible only in Canada that Polish emigre writers consider themselves the writers of that country" as they are not made to "feel an immigrant, but a full-fledged member of the Canadian community, irrespective of origin, education or accent" (qtd. in Czaykowski 16-

17). In Canada, such writers are discussed as Canadian writers, albeit hyphenated ones. Arguments against the hyphen explain that qualifying nationality in this way denies people full access to a Canadian identity. This stance has validity only if one needs a single coherent conception of nationhood; as Hutcheon rightly points out, "[hjyphenizations are merely the externahzations of the reality of hybridity" and, in trying to create a singular sense of "Canadian- ness", there will be those who are excluded (289). However, if the hyphen is looked upon as a bridge connecting the old homeland with the new and an individual's history with her/his present, it becomes a means of connecting all of

Canada's inhabitants. According to Davis, one-sided assimilation is impossible—it can only be mutual (xxiv); therefore, Canadian Polonia enriches

Canada's so called "cultural mosaic" even as it is simultaneously enriched by its

Canadian situation. In writing one's cultural heritage while fully identifying oneself with the Canadian context, the author helps Canada's literary heritage to grow and evolve. 99 With the step this project makes in creating a contemporary corpus of

Polish-Canadian prose fiction, an unexplored literary tradition has been brought to light and its development illustrated. If literature serves as a map of who a group of people is and where they have been, an exploration of Polish-Canadian fiction will provide insight into two histories, that of the people who came to

Canada and their descendents and that of their experiences as Canadians. That no significant attempt has been made to develop an understanding of the fictional prose of an entire group of Canadians means that a whole part of Canada's history and heritage has gone unknown. Now that this first step has been taken, the corpus of Polish-Canadian fiction can continue to be expanded upon and its exploration can progress with greater ease.

Additionally, ties between Poland and Canada can be strengthened by a cultural exchange through these works as they "introduce certain Polish traits and properties into their work, but the overall effect has a distinctly Canadian flavour" (Heydenkorn 3). This especially is the case as Polish emigre literature is not regarded as literature of the Polish diaspora, but simply as Polish literature:

"a national literature is formed by a people's language and cultural heritage, regardless of the territory where a writer lives" (Filipowicz, "Fission" 160). As such, Canada needs to be more emphatic in its embrace of this previously unacknowledged Polish-Canadian fiction. When this happens, a dynamic and interesting exchange of cultures and ideas is likely to take place between the two nations. 100 WORKS CITED

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY OF POLISH-CANADIAN PROSE FICTION SINCE 1990

Abramow-Newerlv, Jarostaw. -was born in Poland and lived in Toronto from 1985 to 1989. He has published other works; however, this is the only piece of fiction, inspired by Toronto's Polonia, to embody Canadian influences.

PanZdzichW Kanadzie. Warszawa: Wydawn. Polonia, 1991. [serial]

Boraks-Nemetz, Lillian, -was born in Warsaw, Poland, where, as a child, she survived the Holocaust, escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, and lived in Polish villages under a false identity, which is the storyline in The Old Brown Suitcase.

Ghost Children: Poems. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2000. [poems]

The Lenski File. Montreal: Roussan, 2000. [novel]

The Old, Brown Suitcase: A Teenager's Story of War and Peace. Brentwood Bay, B.C: Ben-Simon Publications, 1994. [novel]

The Sunflower Diary. Montreal: Roussan, 1999. [novel]

Gleed, Danuta. -was born in 1946 in a refugee camp in Lusaka in the former Northern Rhodesia. Her family moved to Nairobi, Kenya where she spent her childhood as a Polish refugee in a second camp until her family moved to England. She emigrated to Canada in 1969. This work was published posthumously. The royalties of its sale fund the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for best first collection of short fiction in the English language by a Canadian author. One of the Chosen. Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 1997. [short stories]

Michaels, Anne, -was born and raised in Toronto, the daughter of a Jewish- Polish immigrant. Fugitive pieces. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. [novel] 113 Miner's pond: poems. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1991. [poems] Skin Divers. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2007. [poems] The weight of oranges. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1985. [poems]

Nattel, Lilian. -Her family emigrated from Poland before the war (the only mention she makes of this is on the inside dust jacket of the hardcover edition of The River Midnight). She was born and raised in Montreal. The River Midnight. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 1999. [novel] The Singing Fire. Toronto: A.A. Knopf Canada, 2004. [novel] Web of Angels. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2013. [novel]

Piszczkiewicz, Anna, -is the daughter of Polish immigrants and was raised in Toronto. She calls Krakow her hometown.

Soaking in the Remnants. Toronto: Life Rattle Press, 2005. [short story cycle]

Posesorski, Sherie. -lives in Toronto. Escape Plans. Regina: Coteau Books, 2001. Print, [novel] Old Photographs. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2010. Print, [novel] Posesorski, Sherie, and Alison Acheson. Shadow Boxing. Regina: Coteau Books for Teens, 2009. Print, [novel]

Romanik, Barbara, -identifies herself as a Polish-Canadian from Edmonton who now resides in Winnipeg.

10 Things to Ask Yourself in Warsaw and Other Stories. Winnipeg: Enfield & Wizenty, 2008. [short stories]

Sadowski, Czeslaw, and Lech Ramczvkowski. -This book contains two narratives: the first is the memoir of Sadowski; the second is the autobiographical novel of Ramczykowski who spent time during the war in Soviet prisons before eventually moving to Canada (where an Ojibwa tribe made him their honourary leader). He lives on Prince Edward Island. 114 Pomniki; Indianskie lato. [Monuments; Indian Summer.] Toronto: Canadian Polish Research Institute, 1993. [memoir; autobiographical novel]

Stachniak, Eva, -was born in Wroclaw, Poland. She came to live in Montreal in 1981 and currently lives in Toronto. She emphatically claims two internal voices, Canadian and Polish, that speak in two languages, each a part of herself. Garden of Venus. Toronto: HarperCollinsCanada, 2005. [novel] Necessary Lies. Toronto: Dundurn P, 2000. [novel] Polska w Kanadzie, Kanada w Polsce. Ed. Miroslawa Buchholtz. Toruri: Wydawnictwo Adam Mirszalek, 2000. [includes 3 short stories by Stachniak]

The Winter Palace. Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2011. [novel]

Teclaw, Stanley, -was born and raised in Toronto's Polish immigrant community. The collection is based on his mother's (oral) stories of his grandparents' move from Poland to Canada. Niagara Street. Toronto: Life Rattle Press, 1998. [autobiographical short story cycle]

Zaraska, Marta. -currently lives in Paris. The book listed below was inspired by the few years she lived in Canada as an immigrant. Zawieszeni. ["Suspended."] Warszawa: Muza SA, 2007. [novel]