In Between
In Between
Anna Cichopek-Gajraj in a conversation with Marta Cieślak and Anna Muller
You were born in Poland and you live and work in Arizona now. Would you tell us a bit about your background and journey from Poland to Arizona?
When I was growing up in Kraków in the 1970s and 80s, I would never in a million years have imagined myself in Arizona! But here I am… In the 1990s, I studied history at the Jagiellonian University and worked as a tour guide in Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow. I met some amazing people from all over the world; among them two who were connected to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor: John Hartman and Erica Lehrer. We became friends. They both suggested that I apply to the history grad school at the University of Michigan because, as far as they knew, it was the best US program which combined Polish and Jewish studies. And so I did and they were right. I graduated in 2008, had a couple of jobs in Ontario, Canada, then a postdoc in Florence, Italy, and then was extraordinarily lucky to get a tenure track job at Arizona State University in 2010, during the recession, when academic jobs were harder and harder to come by.
Do you self-define as Polish American? What does Polish American mean to you? Do you think Polish American identity as a concept has changed over time or perhaps is changing?
No, a short answer is no. I have never identified as Polish American. Your question is making me realize that only now and it’s making me think that perhaps I should. But I don’t. I must say that I'm thankful for this question as it forces me to think it through… It's been twenty years since I came to this country in August 2001. I became a citizen in September 2019. During the ceremony, I cried like a child, thinking about what I’d lost and what I'd gained on the way, through the migration process, through coming here. I know, in civic terms, as a citizen, I am an American but I've never really felt American, whatever it means. I don’t think of myself in these terms. If I had to identify myself in national ethnic terms, which I don’t like doing, I would say I am Polish, although my Polishness has evolved. When I'm here, in the US, my accent, my way of thinking, my way of relating to people, to work, to family and home, all of it makes me an outsider. But when I'm in Poland, my relatives and friends tell me that I got americanized, that I've changed. And they are surely right! My parents mean small silly things like drinking water instead of herbatka (tea). But it's also something more fundamental, more profound that has changed. So to answer your question in a long and convoluted way: I'm in-between, a typical first-generation immigrant hybrid. At home in both and in neither. Actually, in all of this, I became a huge local patriot of my hometown, Krakow. This local identity feels the safest, the most authentic if you will…I realize how much I love Krakow every time I visit and walk down all the memory lanes.
You completed your PhD at the University of Michigan so you lived in a state with a long history of Polish immigration and a strong presence of Polish Americans. Now, you live in Arizona, which historically has not been a center of Polish migration. Has that change had any impact on how you think of your own Polishness and how you think of your own identity not only in the United States but more specifically in the regions where you live and work?
No, I don’t think that it has impacted my own identity, but I must say that I have become more and more comfortable with the Polish American diaspora although I’m not institutionally affiliated with it, nor am I active in its institutional life, which has more to do with my own unease about organized activities than with Polonia. My friends in our migration reading group at ASU recently made me realize that a historian, who would use only institutional sources to study the Polish American diaspora in the beginning of the 20th century, would have entirely missed the lives of immigrants like me.
I must confess that when I first came to Michigan twenty years ago, I carried with me tons of prejudices against Polish Americans. Perhaps, this is the main reason why I've never considered myself a Polish American. I did not want to be identified with this community. My formative years were spent in Kraków, in a very liberal cohort of college students who loathed traditional culture, conservatism, and, what we imagined to be, the 19th century ideas of nationhood and patriotism. We were the urban product of the 1990s, with its enthusiasm for the European Union, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism. And for us, American Polonia was a skamienielina (fossil)! Of course, I thought of Polish Americans through a stereotypical prism of the Chicago and New York old Polish neighborhoods. As a result, I spent all these years in Michigan and I've never visited Hamtramck, not even once. I visited Greenpoint once with a Polish friend. She came to the US when she was a teenager, from a working-class family, and she was very upset with me when I expressed all kinds of views which she found deeply offensive and ignorant. And she was right. I really didn't understand this community, I didn't know how culturally and socially heterogeneous it was, what fascinating history it had! I only came to understand it slowly when I entered migration studies and started my research on postwar migrants. I went to Chicago and met some extraordinary people through the Polish Museum there. Although generationally we had different views on nationhood, patriotism, or religious devotion, their warmth, kindness, and good humor stole my heart.
Perhaps because Arizona does not have a well-established Polish community, comparable to that of Chicago or New York, or perhaps because the more time passes, the more I crave an interaction with Polish speakers, I now have more Polish American friends that I've ever had. As an academic, I also reach out to the Polish community in Phoenix when I organize events on Polish-Jewish history. And the Polish Arizonians I know are incredibly eager to participate. Our former honorary consul Bogumil Horchem and his wife Elzbieta were great patrons of these efforts.
You’re an expert in modern Jewish history in the context of Eastern Europe. How did you arrive at Jewish history as your core field of expertise? Does the fact that you are Polish have any impact on your research?
To answer the first part of your question, my love for Jewish history started when I was 17. I have no Jewish background and I grew up with very little knowledge about Jewish history in Poland. Of course, in elementary school, we all learnt about Kazimierz the Great and Esterka and then we read Zofia Nałkowska and Tadeusz Borowski about the wartime, and I went to the Museum of Auschwitz when I was in eighth grade. But it obviously had nothing to do with the comprehensive understanding of Jewish history as part of Poland’s history. That changed in high school. I had a great fortune to be recruited by a true humanist and great educator, late Franciszek Dębski, into Towarzystwo Miłośników Historii i Zabytków Krakowa (the Society of Friends of Krakow’s History and Heritage). I remember he took us to the Jewish quarter of Krakow, Kazimierz. That’s when I discovered synagogues and Jewish cemeteries, or the Jewish history of my own city; the history I had no clue existed! It had a tremendous impact on me. Reading The History of the Jews in Kraków and Kazimierz, 1304-1868 by Majer Balaban only deepened my fascination. To make a long story short, at the university, I had no doubt that I would write an MA thesis on Jewish history but I wrote one on the anti-Jewish pogrom in Kraków in August 1945.
As for your second question, my Polishness - I have no Jewish background - obviously affects how I write about Polish Jewish history. Historians are never completely neutral or objective and we always bring our unique positionality into our work. Ideally, I try to bridge both Polish and Jewish historiographies, which are often isolated from each other. That’s one of my main objectives in my new research project. But my Polishness is always an issue, at times, in interesting ways. For example, it plays an enormous role in my interviews with Jewish survivors, with whom I spoke for my new project. I'm now writing an article, which tackles that very issue. I noticed that during those interviews, I came to represent Poland to my interviewees. It is very emotional, you know, because they have tons of emotions about Poland and there I come and they have a chance to “deal” with Poland through me: the love and hate that they might have, the grievances, the sorrow, the bitterness as well as the appreciation of Polish culture. All of this gets reenacted during our conversations in soul-wrenching ways.
In the traditional immigration scholarship in the US, Jewish immigrants from Poland or the Polish lands are separated from what is typically called Polish immigrants, the term usually applied to Polish Christians but not to Polish Jews. Does this distinction make sense to you? Why do you think it has been so deeply rooted in scholarly debates?
Yes, it does make sense to me because it mirrors a long history of Polish-Jewish relations in Poland, where the two communities always lived next to each other but really apart, in different cultural, linguistic, and religious universes. This physical proximity but mental isolation was then recreated in the diaspora, and not surprisingly so. The rise of racial antisemitism of the Roman Dmowski kind in the 1890s, the systemic discrimination of Jews, Polish citizens, in interwar Poland, the devastating experiences in the wartime Polish countryside, where Jews were more often than not betrayed by their neighbors, and finally the post-WWII violence against survivors, all left a legacy, which is terribly difficult to overcome. The absence of free public discourse under communism delayed the necessary debates by decades, although even countries with free media, like France or Germany, only took on that task in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, in Poland, there has been so much academic and non-academic work done to address the difficult parts of our history, with the Jedwabne debate being perhaps the most notable example. But the last five years or so has set us back. Yet again the chasm between Polish and Jewish national communities, their sensibilities, and their histories deepened. This mental and political universe is felt in historiographies. Right now, with the Grabowski-Engelking lawsuit in February 2021, the Polish judicial system is engaged in adjudicating historical inquiry at a request of a far right-wing antisemitic organization! This is obviously not helping. As long as the whitewashing of Polish history continues, as long as there is no mental space for admitting that not all Poles acted as “martyrs and heroes” in the first half of the 20th century, we have no chance for a meaningful integration of the two histories. At the same time, the generalized image, so entrenched especially in American Jewish communities, of a Pole sucking antisemitism with mother’s milk, also needs to stop. We need to engage in educational outreach to show the heterogeneity of Polish society in Poland and of the Polish diaspora. I must say that constantly arguing that not all of us are antisemites takes an emotional toll. So does studying the crimes of my forefathers.
Is there space for Polish Jews or Jewish Poles in the debates on what it means to be Polish American? What can we do to create that space and perhaps widen the traditional definition of “Polish American”?
There must be such space. I should add though that while we should find ways to incorporate the two histories in intellectually productive ways, I do not think that we should merge them. Imposing Polishness on historical Jewish migrants from Poland who never self-identified as Poles does not make any sense to me and certainly would not have made any sense to them. At the same time, Polish studies in the US should open space not only for those Polish Jews who did self-identify as Polacy, but also for Jewish history as a part of the history of Poland and its diaspora in general. Polish Jewish history is Polish history! The history of Poland and its diaspora, reduced to the history of ethnic Poles who were also Catholics, is a distortion and an erasure of Poland’s complex multiethnic and multireligious past.
What can we do to open this space? In Barbara Burstin’s fascinating book about Polish Jews and Christians in Pittsburgh after the war, there is this incredible scene where she invited both groups to a meeting. After the initial apprehension, they started talking to each other and left the meeting with much deeper mutual understanding and with some mutual respect, or the beginnings thereof. So maybe Gordon Allport’s contact hypothesis that prejudice may be reduced by equal status contact between majority and minority groups in the pursuit of common goals, is the way to go (The Nature of Prejudice, 1954). That’s a human level. On an academic level, scholars like us have an obligation to include Jewish stories in the history of Polish migrations to shift the paradigm of Polish American Studies as Catholic studies. I hope to do that with my new project.
Do you mind telling us a bit about your new project?
My next book is titled In Transit: Postwar Journeys of Jewish and Catholic Refugees from Poland (1940s-1950s). It will focus on the global displacement of Polish Catholic and Jewish families in the aftermath of World War II. It aims to, first, go beyond a linear narrative of postwar migrations from the DP camps to the United States. Second, it integrates Polish Jewish and Catholic experiences, which are almost exclusively narrated in isolation from each other. Third, it focuses on the agency of the refugees, placing it within gendered family dynamics and broader historical contexts. The project draws extensively on oral histories in addition to a variety of archival sources, mainly from immigrant organizations.
Do you see yourself as someone who potentially could help build bridges between Polish Americans and Americans of Polish-Jewish descent? And is such a dialogue necessary?
I hope that this new project is my important contribution to that end. But of course, being a Polish historian in Polish-Jewish studies in the US places me in a unique position to facilitate conversations about our difficult history. I routinely give talks to both Jewish and Polish audiences in Arizona to do so. Of course, my personal friendships with Jewish survivors and their families probably do most to build bridges, whatever it means…