Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Polacy w Chicago: Doświadczenie imigranta. integracja, izolacja, asymilacja

2023; Polish American Historical Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23300833.80.2.09

2330-0833

Michał J. Wilczewski,

Polish Historical and Cultural Studies

Polacy w Chicago: Doświadczenia imigranta. Integracja, izolacja, asymylacja is the result of an international conference of the same name held in Warsaw in 2018. Under the editorship of renowned historian of Polish immigration Adam Walaszek, the volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars seeking to answer one question: “What were/are the experiences of people of Polish descent in the [city of Chicago]?” (p. 8). In answering this question, these scholars focus on issues related to everyday life in Chicago's Polish communities from the earliest moments of Polish migration in the 1830s to the present day. Topics range from relationships between immigrants and the Catholic Church to juvenile delinquency and living conditions in immigrant communities to Polish record labels and Saturday schools. Though the volume addresses the Polish American community in general terms, it is careful not to see Polonia in Chicago as a monolith but instead as a dynamic and vibrant community full of sometimes divergent opinions, political sympathies, and even senses of Polishness. Polacy w Chicago is a welcome contribution to our understanding of the development of ethnic communities in Chicago and in the United States.In fourteen chapters and one addendum, the book focuses on the various facets of Polish life in Chicago. Many of the chapters are microhistorical in their scope, but this focused approach helps reveal a more nuanced understanding of the daily trials and tribulations Polish immigrants to Chicago faced over time. After a brief introduction written by Adam Walaszek, the book begins with a chapter on the relationship between Polish immigrants and the Roman Catholic Church in Chicago. Here, Marcin Borys offers a biographical sketch of the sixteen historically Polish parishes that helped shaped the Polish diasporic community in the city. As Borys argues, the churches were not only useful for helping organize the Polish community geographically, but they also played an important role in the social and cultural life of immigrants. These churches became the social backbone of much of the Polish American population and were central to community building for newly arrived immigrants. Taking new arrivals under their wing, this network of churches helped soften the undeniable culture shock immigrants faced by recreating familiar structures in the diaspora. In the end, Borys reveals the dynamic relationship between parishioners and their new religious community.While Borys focuses on the religious character of Polish Chicago, Krzysztof Wasilewski considers Polish Americans’ relationship with labor and their own class consciousness. In his chapter, he focuses on the Dziennik Chicagoski's (a leading Polish American newspaper at the turn of the century) treatment of the 1894 Pullman Strike, one of the most consequential labor strikes in American history. Wasilewski argues that like other leading American newspapers, the Dziennik Chicagoski decried the strike, warning of the importance of preventing the collapse of American capitalism. At the same time, however, the newspaper was sympathetic toward Polish workers’ plight, while urging them to remain civil in the strike and not participate at all. Wasilewski ultimately argues that the newspaper's treatment of the Pullman Strike was used to build and strengthen the national sentiment of Polish Americans as Americans, and marginalize their class identity, so that they would be better received within American society more broadly.Joanna Dobrowolska's chapter asks how the organization of a Polish pavilion at the 1893 Columbian Exposition affected the lives of Polish American immigrants and those Poles still living in the partitioned Polish lands. She argues that the World's Fair offered Poles and Polish Americans an opportunity to showcase Polish culture to a global audience and ultimately advocate for the reconstruction of a Polish state. In demonstrating the uniqueness and independence of Polish culture, Poles in America and back at home hoped that the world would recognize the need for an independent Poland.Collectively, Adam Walaszek, Marcin Szerle, and Dominic Pacgya focus on the conditions of everyday life in Chicago's Polish communities. Walaszek presents us with a case study on the Back of the Yards neighborhood, perhaps the poorest and most dilapidated of the Polish communities in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. Surrounded by smelly and dangerous stockyards and city dumps, the neighborhood was a “symbol of human misery” (p. 99). Using unpublished notes of American reformers, Walaszek paints a picture of the squalid conditions in which Polish immigrants lived, but he also focuses on how they overcame these tremendous obstacles. Finding relief in labor activism, churches, and other organizations, Polish immigrants were able to advocate for change and improve their living conditions. Szerle uses essays and interviews with Polish immigrants over the course of the twentieth century to understand the standards of living in which Polish immigrants found themselves upon their arrival. Pacyga, Chicago's biographer and an expert on the city's Polish American community, breaks down Polonia's responses to juvenile delinquency in the early twentieth century and shows how the community came together to create various welfare organizations to counter the troubling rise in juvenile crime.Monika Gabryś-Sławińska's chapter looks at the disparities between internal and external representations of the city's Polish American community, focusing on the interwar writings of Polish consul Aleksander Szczepański and the newspaper Tygodnik Ilustrowany. She argues that while Szczepański's more internal analysis of Chicago's Polonia revealed an immature ethnic community that needed ongoing support and contact with the Polish homeland, the newspaper offered an external defense of the Polish community, claiming that it was fully matured and ready to participate in broader American spaces. Here Gabryś-Sławińska points to the ongoing tension between maintaining ties with the Polish homeland while needing to exist within American society.Fast-forwarding to the post–World War II era, Janusz Wróbel's contribution offers a nuanced understanding of Polonia's relationship with the Polish Communist government. After the war, Polonia largely rejected the Polish People's Republic (PRL) and the Polish Communists similarly sought to disengage with the largely anti-communist Polish diaspora. While it is commonly understood that this tension existed throughout the Cold War, Wróbel argues that as of the 1960s, Władysław Gomułka sought to reengage with Polish communities abroad, expanding relations with them with three major aims: first, to defend the recovered territories in Western Poland; second, to offer financial aid to Poland; and third, to expand tourism and cultural exchange. As a result, the relationship between Polonia and the PRL mellowed, though it never resulted in a full embrace.Andrzej Bonusiak's chapter focuses on the lifecycle of Polish schools in Chicago from their creation first as ethnic schools attached to parishes and later to Saturday school programs. He highlights the various shifts in educational materials and availability of teachers over the course of the twentieth century and ends with a somber analysis of the future of Polish Saturday schools in America. As fewer immigrants from Poland arrive in Chicago, the survival of these Saturday programs hang in the balance.The following five chapters focus on various Polish and Polish American organizations in Chicago. Paweł Sieradzki's chapter shows how the International Eucharistic Congress held in Chicago in 1926 helped solidify the relationship between Polonia and the Catholic Church back in Poland. The arrival of three Polish bishops and many more clergy to Chicago during the congress resulted in a dialogue between Polish and Polish American Catholics and helped quell Poles’ fears of the Americanization of Polish Chicagoans. Karolina Skalska uses the stunning collection of musical recordings housed in Chicago's Polish Museum of America to show how Polish recording companies in the city used familiar Polish folk music to develop Polish nationalism and ties to Poland in spite of an increasingly Americanized immigrant population. Magdalena Grassman similarly looks at the history and ongoing construction of Polish national identity among the Polish medical community in America. Anna Horolets analyzes contemporary Polish Americans’ recreation and their use of public space in Chicago, focusing not only on such established Polish spaces as theaters, museums, restaurants, and community centers but also more ethnically nonspecific spaces like parks and streets. She demonstrates how city block parties in particular are central to community building in today's society. In the last chapter, Maria Zakrzewska uses her experience as a retired librarian with the Chicago Public Library (CPL) to discuss how the library system catered to the Polish American community over time. While in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the CPL was slow to respond to Poles’ literary needs, largely because they were illiterate peasants, by the interwar period, it took on a more social role helping with translation services. Later in the twentieth century, when waves of more educated Polish immigrants arrived, the library expanded its collections to accommodate the Polish-speaking population. The final part of the book, a short speech by Antoinette L. Trella, speaks of her experience and role in the Polish Women's Alliance in Chicago.Polacy w Chicago offers a broad overview of various experiences in the lives of Polish immigrants to Chicago. Despite the book's many successes, it has two flaws. The first has to do with the book's organization, which is haphazard and only sometimes follows chronologically. Perhaps the book would have benefitted from a more thematic organizational approach with chapters grouped by conceptual frameworks. The second issue is that the book is largely devoid of the experience of women in Polonia. Though it ends with Trela's speech at the conference from which the book originates, a more analytical chapter on the experience of women immigrants from Poland is badly needed and missed in this volume. Despite these slight weaknesses, the volume has much to offer students and scholars of Polish and Polish American history, the history of Chicago, and migration history.