Polish-American Folklore (review)

One of the familiar themes that emerges in nearly every investigation of Poland and its people is the persistence of Polish culture. Although literally wiped off the map of Europe for more than a hundred years, and stifled by Communist control for more than fifty years, the Poles and their culture have not only endured these hardships, but even thrived in often unexpected ways. The same may be said of the Poles who immigrated to and settled in the United States, as Deborah Anders Silverman makes clear in this informative and well-documented study. Like many of the other ethnic groups who came in large numbers to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Poles were able to achieve a certain degree of upward mobility, moving from inner-city working-class neighborhoods to more spacious and affluent suburbs. In the process, these Poles became Polish Americans.

But an essential ingredient of Polish American identity, according to Silverman, is the preservation of strong folk traditions. Even as they absorbed the idioms and ideas of the multicultural United States, and even as they intermarried and were dispersed among other ethnic groups, Polish Americans have been able to maintain a distinct cultural identity of their own, "selectively and imaginatively representing their ethnicity through folklore" (p. 25).

The great strength of Silverman's study is its solid research, particularly the interviews and fieldwork she has conducted among Polish Americans, primarily in the region of western New York, since 1978. She ably integrates this material into each of her chapters, which are devoted to such topics as holiday celebrations, rites of passage, wedding customs, folk narratives, folk religion, folk medicine, folk songs, the polka, folk dance, folk arts and crafts, and foodways. In each case, Silverman begins with a historical perspective, demonstrating some of the continuities between Old and New World traditions, before concentrating on the ways in which Polish Americans have been able to adapt and maintain their folklore in an ever changing world.

Silverman's fascinating chapter on the polka, for instance, describes the many different directions that this distinctive dance music has taken from its original 19th-century roots in peasant culture. By the 1930s, the polka had developed into a largely working-class phenomenon, especially in Polish urban neighborhoods such as Chicago; by the 1990s, it had spread even further—not only into a religious form (celebrated by Catholics as the polka mass), but also into cyberspace, thanks to the alt.music.polkas newsgroup on the Internet.

One of the misconceptions that Silverman helps to dispel is that Old World Polish culture was monolithic. For outsiders, a Polish-speaking Catholic from Silesia may have seemed much the same as one from Białystok or Kraków. But to a Polish immigrant, the distinctions between the Prussian Poles, Russian Poles, and Austrian Poles (based on the three European powers that had partitioned Poland in the late 18th century) were obvious. Silverman notes that she "collected more personal narratives about this factionalism than any other topic," with members of each regional faction often casting slurs and clashing culturally with each other (pp. 80-81).

To be sure, there are some small gaps in Silverman's research. For instance, she should have provided a larger folkloric context for more of the narratives she includes in her study. Some of the folktales and legends she cites have parallels with traditional tale types and motifs, which might have aided her analysis. Likewise, her all-too-brief discussion of the infamous cycle of "Polack" jokes might have benefited by including the perspective of Lydia Fish's article, "Is the Pope Polish? Some Notes on the Polack Joke in Transition" (JAF 1980:450-454). Whereas Silverman contents herself with a repetition of the standard observation that "such jokes stereotype an ethnic group and perpetuate a negative image" (p. 85), Fish observed that even when Poles in Buffalo were telling unflattering jokes about the recently elected Pope John...