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Dom, Namai, Heim: Images of the New Immigrant's Home
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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Saul bellow, in Humboldt's Gift, extends Chicago's present imaginatively back to its immigrant past. Through the mediating vision of Charlie Citrine, he remembers an old neighborhood's “Polish days” when its “small brick bungalows were painted fresh red, maroon, and candy green.” “I always thought,” Citrine says in calling up this vision of things past, that “there must be Baltic towns that looked like this, Gdynia for instance.” Nearly a century before Bellow's novel, the same commingling of places—and almost the same sense of transplanted homes and communities — seized the imagination of the novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz. Looking at homes in an immigrant section of Chicago and reading the Polish inscriptions and names on the houses, “it seemed,” Sienkiewicz said, “as though I were in Poland.” Bellow's and Sienkiewicz's doubled visions of place, their sense of Europe and America transposed and telescoped, turn on the lingering ambiguities of the new immigrant's experience—the paradoxical act of finding and losing home and identity in America.
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References
NOTES
1. Bellow, Saul, Humboldt's Gift, (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 71.Google Scholar
2. Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Portrait of America: Letters of Henryk Sienkiewicz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 277.Google Scholar
3. Bellow, , Humboldt's Gift, p. 72.Google Scholar
4. The first two advertisements for “homes and lots”-domy i loty and ogniska i loty-come from Polish language newspapers published in Chicago: Dziennik Chicagoski (04 11, 1892, p. 4)Google Scholar and Gazeta Polska (09 11, 1890, p. 3)Google Scholar. Namu ir lotu is quoted from an ad in Chicago's Lithuanian paper, Lietuva (08 28, 1919, p. 4)Google Scholar; “lotti per fabbricarvi le loro case” (“lots for building their homes”), from the Italian weekly, La Italia (06 17, 1893, p. 3)Google Scholar. Although all of these papers were published in Chicago, each had a claim upon a national audience.
Further reference to foreign language papers, except where otherwise noted, will be given parenthetically in the text. With the exception of Lietuva, which was examined in the Balzekas Museum in Chicago, the newspapers used here were available only in microfilm copies. All microfilmed copies save Dziennik Chicagoski and the Arbeiter Zeitung, which were obtained from the Center for Research Libraries (Chicago), were examined and copied at the Immigration History Research Center, University of Minnesota (St. Paul).
5. Gross makes this statement in the introductory two pages of the Tenth Annual Illustrated Catalogue of S.E. Gross Famous City Subdivisions and Suburbs (Chicago: Samuel E. Gross, 1891)Google Scholar, n.p., pamphlet, available at the Chicago Historical Society library.
6. Handlin, , The Uprooted, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), p. 95.Google Scholar
7. In the beginning pages of his introduction to Peasants and Strangers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Josef J. Barton makes this point. He disputes Handlin's claims, particularly the assumption that immigration was a rite de passage, that it marked “the immigration of people to a wholly new social system.” See also Greene, Victor's For God and Country: The Rise of Polish and Lithuanian Ethnic Consciousness in America: 1860–1910 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1975)Google Scholar, on Polish and Lithuanian immigrants' “yearning for American real estate,” pp. 17 and 29. Golab, Caroline's Immigrant Destinations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977), pp. 46–8, 112–13Google Scholar, argues much the same point.
Hogan, David's dissertation Capitalism and Schooling (University of Illinois, 1978)Google Scholar, like his article “Education and the Making of the Chicago Working Class, 1880–1930,” History of Education Quarterly, 18 (Fall 1978), 227–70Google Scholar, stresses the significance of the immigrant's home as a means of “economic security.”
8. I have used Vatslaf A. Hlasko and Thomas H. Bullick's translation of After Bread: A Story of Polish Emigrant Life to America (New York: R.F. Fenno & Company, 1897)Google Scholar. Future references to this novel (AB) will be given parenthetically in the text.
9. Sienkiewicz, , Portrait, pp. 284–5.Google Scholar
10. See the series of ads for the “Canadian Pacific Irrigation Colonization Company” in Gazeta Polska that ran weekly from July 25 through September 12, 1907; the “sun furnishes the water” ad cited appeared on September 12, and like the other ads was placed on page 7. The ad for “Nowa Kolonia Polska w Stanie Missouri,” “a New Polish Colony in Missouri,” appeared in Dziennik Chicagoski (06 25, 1904, p. 4)Google Scholar. Gross's ad was placed in La Italia (07 29, 1893, p. 3).Google Scholar
11. According to Giergielewicz, Mieczystaw, Henryk Sienkiewicz (New York: Twayne, 1968), p. 67Google Scholar, After Bread was “written as a deterrent, and Sienkiewicz conceived it as a lecture which was given repeatedly in 1880.”
12. Kuryer Polski serialized Za Chlebem (After Bread) in 1892; see the ad in the September 7, 1892 issue, p. 2. Dyniewicz in a special supplement to the November 18, 1909 issue listed Za Chlebem among the books he published.
13. The Jungle (New York: New American Library, 1973), p. 29Google Scholar. The Signet Classic edition unfortunately still seems the most accessible edition of the novel. Future page references to The Jungle (J) will be to this paperback edition and will be given parenthetically in the text.
14. That Jurgis is an American “in dialect, culture, and religion” seems now a commonplace. Bloodworth, William A., in Upton Sinclair (Boston: Twayne, 1977), pp. 61–62Google Scholar, argues the point cogently, saying that Sinclair intended “to destroy popular attitudes about foreigners as generally and morally different from the white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant American image.” Alfonsas Sesplaukis, striking a somewhat polemical stance, tries to show the numerous ways in which Jurgis acts “contrary to the Lithuanian character.” He argues this claim in Lituanas, 23 (1977), 28.Google Scholar
15. See Gross, , Illustrated Catalogue, pp. 60–3.Google Scholar
16. The “$9 a month” brick home that Gross advertises in Dziennik Chicagoski (10 6, 1900)Google Scholar is located within the boundaries of the subdivision described in his Illustrated Catalogue (1891), pp. 60–3Google Scholar. The homes sold there were for “men working … in the Packing Houses.”
17. Various ads in Dziennik Chicagoski (DzC) stress that an “osada” or ethnic settlement will be part of a coming subdivision, suburb, or farming community. For example, see J. C. Pietrowicz's ad addressed “to Polish Citizens”; it notes that land in Pulaski Park has been set aside for a church and school (DzC, 07 16, 1891, p. 4Google Scholar). The Brooks & Company ad (DzC, 10 12, 1891, p. 3Google Scholar), is headlined “Polska Osada”; P. Kiolbassa's ad for “Cragin” (DzC, 07 2, 1891, p. 3Google Scholar) assures buyers that a Polish church and school is to be built.
The term was also used in Czech and Lithuanian communities, as Frank Kirchman's ad in the Czech daily, Denni Hlasatel (06 17, 1891, p. 3) illustrates.Google Scholar
18. Golab, Caroline, Immigrant Destinations, p. 166Google Scholar; see also Victor Greene, For God and Country, p. 29Google Scholar. Greene discusses the efforts of Lithuanian and Polish immigrants “to reconstruct … their Old World” communities.
19. My Antonia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 115Google Scholar. All references to My Ántonia (MA) are given parenthetically in the text; the first edition has been used.
20. Stouck, David, in Willa Gather's Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), p. 50Google Scholar, interprets Jim's renderings of Shimerda's death and his homesickness as a “softening… of disturbing, painful realities.” But Stouck does not, in stressing Jim's “pastoral” style, deny the link he sees between Shimerda's death and his homesickness.
21. For example, A. Gray, in promoting a new subdivision offered through his “city agent” W. J. Kowalski, gave out free “circulars with maps, tickets and pertinent information” (DzC, 07 11, 1891, p. 3Google Scholar). Wedell & Cox distributed free plans and an illustrated pamphlet, “printed in English, German, Scandinavian and Dutch” (Gazeta Polska, 06 28, 1888, p. 4).Google Scholar
22. Rolvaag, O. E., Giants in the Earth (New York: A. L. Hurt, 1929), p. 46Google Scholar. The second ellipsis in the passage quoted is Rolvaag's. Future references to this edition will be given parenthetically (GE) in the text.
23. Per Hansa's tragic pursuit of home and land in America has been read as Rolvaag's critical comment on “American optimism” and “Americanization” in Kristoff F. Paulson's forceful article, “Rolvaag as Prophet: The Tragedy of Americanization” in Thorson, Gerald, ed., Ole Rolvaag: Artist and Cultural Leader (Northfield, Minn.: St. Olaf's College Press, 1975)Google Scholar. Harold P. Simonson's chapter on Rolvaag, in The Closed Frontier (New York: Holt, 1970)Google Scholar, also defines Per Hansa's tragic pursuit of the American dream; Simonson sees his epic powers, virtues, and weaknesses as American in character.
24. Mlakar, Frank's He, The Father (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950)Google Scholar evoked generally favorable reviews in 1950, though most reviewers, like J. G. Hitrec, praised it while noting the “shapelessness in the plot.” See the Saturday Review, 33 (07 22, 1950), 14–15Google Scholar. Future references to this edition are given parenthetically (H) in the text.
25. Sienkiewicz, 's short story, “The Lighthouse Keeper,” is available in translation in Lewicka, Jadwiga, ed., Polish Short Stories, (Warsaw: Polonia Publishing House, 1960)Google Scholar. It was originally published in 1881.