Chicago Polish Parade, May 2019, Photo by Andrzej Mikolajczyk
Maja Trochimczyk at the Huntington Library, Photo by Susan Rogers
The PAHA Newsletter appears twice a year. It serves the membership as an official and informational bulletin. It is free with any PAHA membership. The newsletter brings up-to-date information on the activities of the PAHA Council as well as the association's individual members, and on the PAHA conferences, projects, and publications. We also publish short articles about the history of Polish diaspora, including family history of emigrants scattered around the world. The newsletter is archived by the National Library in Warsaw, Poland, as one of the many documents about the cultural life of American Polonia.
You may read newsletters published since 2000 online on PAHA Website:
https://polishamericanstudies.org/text/78/newsletter-free.html
Below there are sample stories from PAHA Newsletter Fall 2018 issue.
Dr. John J. Bukowczyk with PAHA President, Dr. Anna Mazurkiewicz. Photo by Marcin Szerle.
PAHA’s Value to Polonia and to Its Members
By John J. Bukowczyk
Revised excerpts from “The Polish American Historical Association—Its Place, Role, and Legacy within the Field of U.S. Ethnic History,” keynote address given at the 75th Anniversary Conference of the Polish American Historical Association at Loyola University in Chicago, September 7, 2018.
First, PAHA, with its long history, has been an essential structural element in the organizational life of Polonia as an American ethnic group. Sociologists would tell us that such “institutional completeness” is important for the vitality of ethnic groups and their survival; and a historical society, encouraging the preservation of historical memory, is a vital part of that “completeness.” Second, for a segment of Polish-American society (many of us I am sure would attest), PAHA has promoted a version of Polish ethnic identity, the alternative to which might have been (for many of us—scholars, teachers, intellectuals, professionals) marginality within or more complete and ethnically anonymous assimilation and absorption into our respective professions, institutions, disciplines, and neighborhoods and into the larger American society. Third, through its efforts at partaking in the organizational, institutional, and intellectual activities of the historical profession in the United States, PAHA has advanced that perennial quest by members of one of America’s historically more marginalized and maligned white ethnic groups for respect and recognition. In this sense, the lay Polish-American scholars who steered PAHA in recent decades have shared much in common with the nuns and priests who went before them; all have been, in a sense, emissaries, missionaries, and flag-bearers.
The Polish American Historical Association of recent decades has been especially significant within Polish America, I would argue, for modeling ways to “be Polish” in modern and post-modern American society and the globalizing contemporary world. In practice it has erected a proverbial “big tent” of Polishness, welcoming members of all political opinions and ethno-cultural or ethno-religious backgrounds and affiliations. The vision of Polishness that in recent years I think it has promoted has revolved around a belief that Polish Americans are united not by what they do, or how they think, or how they “perform” ethnicity—and especially not by any (racialist) belief that they share some fictive common “blood”—but by their shared commitment to advancing the study of one of America’s major ethnic groups and by their—by our—common history.
For us, Polonized has not meant polarized. While no less honoring Polish cultural heritage, PAHA in recent decades has promoted a pluralist, secular, civic vision of Polishness, one, I might say, which evokes Jagiellonian and Enlightenment ideas about who may be a Pole. Although the bulk of PAHA’s membership shares a Polish ethnic background, PAHA has not been an “ethnic” organization per se, but has welcomed a diversity of persons to membership and officer positions and has published and recognized scholarship on Polish-American topics regardless of the ethno-religious or ethno-cultural background of its authors. Its conferences and other programs, meanwhile, have included—indeed, invited—participation by non-Poles. PAHA’s established practices in this regard, conducted in a pluralist American society, could—should—become a model for Polish-American organizations and groups throughout America and throughout the Polish diaspora. Indeed, they could be a model for other ethnic groups and even for nations throughout the world.
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John J. Bukowczyk is Professor of History at Wayne State University in Detroit and past president (1990-92) of the Polish American Historical Association. Author of A History of the Polish Americans (1987; New York: Routledge, 2017) and editor of Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture, and Politics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), Bukowczyk also is the editor of the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series published by Ohio University Press.
Translation of Orzeszkowa’s Marta
Issued by Ohio University Press
Ohio University Press has just published Marta, a pioneering feminist novel by 1905 NobelPrize finalist Eliza Orzeszkowa, as part of its Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. The book is translated by Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, with an introduction by Grażyna J. Kozaczka. We think it has excellent potential for classroom use in women’s studies, Polish studies, and women’s writing, labor history, and nineteenth-century literature courses. Of Orzeszkowa’s many works of social realism, Marta (1873) is among the best known, but until now it has not been available in English. Easily a peer of The Awakening and A Doll’s House, the novel was well ahead of the English literature of its time in attacking the ways the labor market failed women. An excerpt and Grażyna J. Kozaczka’s introduction, including discussion questions, are available here:
https://ohioswallow.com/extras/Marta_Excerpt.pdf. If you are an editor who is interested in a review copy for your journal or website, you can request one here: https://ohioswallow.com/request/review/OUP71G904J381 (for international requests, the press will hard copies at their discretion). If you are interested in assigning the book to a class, you can request a free pdf exam copy here: ohioswallow.com/request/exam/OUP71G904J381
Prof. Grażyna Kozaczka commented about the book: “Orzeszkowa wrote Marta early in her career and the novel reflects her interest in the women’s issues. The novel focuses on a young sheltered genteel woman who has recently lost her husband and discovers how difficult it is to support herself and her small daughter. Without a safety net of a family, without education that could secure her a job, Marta learns quickly that the world can be quite hostile to a single woman. In her novel, Orzeszkowa offers a brilliant picture of Warsaw society during the second half of the 19th century as she follows her unfortunate heroine.” The beautiful book cover features a reproduction of “Macierzyństwo,” a lovely painting by Olga Boznańska.
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