Traitors and True Poles

by Karen Majewski

Author	: Karen Majewski
Publisher	: Ohio University Press
Total Pages	: 265
Release	: 2003
Genre	: American literature
ISBN	: 0821414690

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During Poland’s century-long partition and in the interwar period of Poland's reemergence as a state, Polish writers on both sides of the ocean shared a preoccupation with national identity. Polish-American immigrant writers revealed their persistent, passionate engagement with these issues, as they used their work to define and consolidate an essentially transnational ethnic identity that was both tied to Poland and independent of it. By introducing these varied and forgotten works into the scholarly discussion, Traitors and True Poles recasts the literary landscape to include the immigrant community’s own competing visions of itself. The conversation between Polonia’s creative voices illustrates how immigrants manipulated often difficult economic, social, and political realities to provide a place for and a sense of themselves. What emerges is a fuller picture of American literature, one vital to the creation of an ethnic consciousness. This is the first extended look at Polish-language fiction written by turn-of-the-century immigrants, a forgotten body of American ethnic literature. Addressing a blind spot in our understanding of immigrant and ethnic identity and culture, Traitors and True Poles challenges perceptions of a silent and passive Polish immigration by giving back its literary voice.

East Central Europe in Exile Volume 2

by Anna Mazurkiewicz

Author	: Anna Mazurkiewicz
Publisher	: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages	: 365
Release	: 2013-08-19
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 1443852104

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The East Central Europe in Exile series consists of two volumes which contain chapters written by both esteemed and renowned scholars, as well as young, aspiring researchers whose work brings a fresh, innovative approach to the study of migration. Altogether, there are thirty-eight chapters in both volumes focusing on the East Central European émigré experience in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The first volume, Transatlantic Migrations, focuses on the reasons for emigration from the lands of East Central Europe; from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the intercontinental journey, as well as on the initial adaptation and assimilation processes. The second volume is slightly different in scope, for it focuses on the aspect of negotiating new identities acquired in the adopted homeland. The authors contributing to Transatlantic Identities focus on the preservation of the East Central European identity, maintenance of contacts with the “old country”, and activities pursued on behalf of, and for the sake of, the abandoned homeland. Combined, both volumes describe the transnational processes affecting East Central European migrants.

Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction

by Patricia Okker

Author	: Patricia Okker
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 267
Release	: 2012-06-12
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1136643192

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Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction explores the vibrant tradition of serial fiction published in U.S. minority periodicals. Beloved by readers, these serial novels helped sustain the periodicals and communities in which they circulated. With essays on serial fiction published from the 1820s through the 1960s written in ten different languages—English, French, Spanish, German, Swedish, Italian, Polish, Norwegian, Yiddish, and Chinese—this collection reflects the rich multilingual history of American literature and periodicals. One of this book’s central claims is that this serial fiction was produced and read within an intensely transnational context: the periodicals often circulated widely, the narratives themselves favored transnational plots and themes, and the contents surrounding the fiction encouraged readers to identify with a community dispersed throughout the United States and often the world. Thus, Okker focuses on the circulation of ideas, periodicals, literary conventions, and people across various borders, focusing particularly on the ways that this fiction reflects the larger transnational realities of these minority communities.

Poles in Illinois

by John Radzilowski

Author	: John Radzilowski
Publisher	: Southern Illinois University Press
Total Pages	: 245
Release	: 2020-02-14
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0809337231

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Illinois boasts one of the most visible concentrations of Poles in the United States. Chicago is home to one of the largest Polish ethnic communities outside Poland itself. Yet no one has told the full story of our state’s large and varied Polish community—until now. Poles in Illinois is the first comprehensive history to trace the abundance and diversity of this ethnic group throughout the state from the 1800s to the present. Authors John Radzilowski and Ann Hetzel Gunkel look at family life among Polish immigrants, their role in the economic development of the state, the working conditions they experienced, and the development of their labor activism. Close-knit Polish American communities were often centered on parish churches but also focused on fraternal and social groups and cultural organizations. Polish Americans, including waves of political refugees during World War II and the Cold War, helped shape the history and culture of not only Chicago, the “capital” of Polish America, but also the rest of Illinois with their music, theater, literature, food. With forty-seven photographs and an ample number of extensive excerpts from first-person accounts and Polish newspaper articles, this captivating, highly readable book illustrates important and often overlooked stories of this ethnic group in Illinois and the changing nature of Polish ethnicity in the state over the past two hundred years. Illinoisans and Midwesterners celebrating their connections to Poland will treasure this rich and important part of the state’s history.

A History of the Polish Americans

by John.J. Bukowczyk

Author	: John.J. Bukowczyk
Publisher	: Routledge
Total Pages	: 378
Release	: 2017-07-12
Genre	: Social Science
ISBN	: 135153520X

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In the last, rootless decade families, neighborhoods, and communities have disintegrated in the face of gripping social, economic, and technological changes. Th is process has had mixed results. On the positive side, it has produced a mobile, volatile, and dynamic society in the United States that is perhaps more open, just, and creative than ever before. On the negative side, it has dissolved the glue that bound our society together and has destroyed many of the myths, symbols, values, and beliefs that provided social direction and purpose. In A History of the Polish Americans, John J. Bukowczyk provides a thorough account of the Polish experience in America and how some cultural bonds loosened, as well as the ways in which others persisted.

Letters from Readers in the Polish American Press, 1902–1969

by

Author	:
Publisher	: Lexington Books
Total Pages	: 589
Release	: 2013-12-11
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0739188739

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A Corner for Everybody is a unique collection of close to five hundred letters from Polish American readers, which were published in the Polish-language weekly Ameryka-Echo between 1902 and 1969. In these letters, Polish immigrants speak in their own words about their American experience, and vigorously debate religion, organization of their community, ethnic identity, American politics and society, and ties to the homeland. The translated letters are annotated and divided into thematic chapters with informative introductions. Polish Americans formed one of the largest European immigrant groups in the United States and their community (Polonia) developed a vibrant Polish-language press, which tied together networks of readers in the entire Polish immigrant Diaspora. Newspaper editors encouraged their readers to write to the press and provided them with public space to exchange their views and opinions, and share thoughts and reflections. Ameryka-Echo, a weekly published from Toledo, Ohio, was one of the most popular and long-lasting newspapers with international circulation. For seven decades, Ameryka-Echo sustained a number of sections based on readers’ correspondence, but the most popular of them was a “Corner for Everybody,” which featured thousands of letters on a variety of topics. The readers eagerly discussed everything from occurrences in local communities, to issues paramount to the formation of their ethnic identity and assimilation, church, religion, gender, politics, relations with new immigrant waves, and other ethnic groups. The letter-writers debated the American labor movement and strikes, described hardships of the Great Depression and World War II, and argued about American domestic politics, and foreign policy. They also keenly followed changes in their homeland and called for work on behalf of the Polish nation. The Ameryka-Echo letters are a rich source of information on the history of Polish Americans, which can serve as primary sources for students and scholars. They also provide a new, fascinating, and lively look into the passions and experiences of individuals who created the larger American historical experience.

Polish American Voices

by Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

Author	: Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann
Publisher	: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages	: 493
Release	: 2023-11-29
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 1003802087

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This volume presents 145 primary source documents of Polish immigrants from different waves and backgrounds speaking about their lives, concerns, and viewpoints in their own voices, while they grapple with issues of identity and strive to make sense of their lives in the context of migration. Poles have come to America since the Jamestown settlement in 1608 and constituted one of the largest immigrant groups at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. As of 2020, the Census Bureau lists them as the sixth largest ethnic group in the country. The history of their experience is an integral part of the American story as well as that of the broader Polish diaspora. Each of the ten comprehensive chapters presents a specific theme illuminated by a selection of letters, press articles, fragments of memoirs and autobiographical fiction, interviews, organizational papers, and other publications, as well as visual sources such as cartoons, posters, and photographs. Brief introductions to the documents and a "Further Reading" section offer historical context and point readers to additional resources. The book provides students and scholars with a broad understanding and an incentive for future study of the Polish experience in the United States.

Polish Literature in Transformation

by Ursula Phillips

Author	: Ursula Phillips
Publisher	: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages	: 314
Release	: 2013
Genre	: Literary Criticism
ISBN	: 3643902891

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This volume emerged from the conference "Polish Literature Since 1989" held at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies. It shows how the profound political and economic transformation that has taken place in Poland since the end of communism in 1989 has affected literary culture and literary scholarship, such as: changing conceptions of Polish nationhood and identity * the impact of European integration (since 2004) * the effects of migration * revised conceptions of the foreign or the marginal, and new understandings of what is understood by emigre or emigrant literature * sensitivity to issues of gender and sexual identity, as well as the impact of feminism and queer studies * the huge impact of revived interest in the Jewish heritage, in Holocaust memory, and in Polish-Jewish relations. (Series: Polonistik im Kontext - Vol. 2)

Across the Atlantic: The Adamowicz Brothers, Polish Aviation Pioneers

by Zofia Reklewska-Braun

Author	: Zofia Reklewska-Braun
Publisher	: Lulu.com
Total Pages	: 242
Release	: 2015-07-15
Genre	: History
ISBN	: 0996398120

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During the summer of 1934, two Polish amateur-pilots, Joe (Józef) and Ben (Boleslaw) Adamowicz, who immigrated to the US more than twenty years earlier, flew over the Atlantic on a single-engine plane Bellanca. Their trip took them from New York to Warsaw; they were the first Poles to do so. They became instant celebrities, favorites of the journalists, photographers, and the public on both sides of the Atlantic. Alas, their triumph was short-lived, followed by a fall from grace, to imprisonment and bankruptcy. This richly illustrated book brings to life their forgotten story. Written by a historian, journalist and educator Zofia Reklewska-Braun and director, writer, scholar, and author of over 50 books, Dr. Kazimierz Braun, this book was originally published in Poland in 2011.