Still unmeltable?

Good bye homegrown tomatoes.  Good bye homegrown corn. Good bye homegrown watermelon, cucumbers, peppers, and squash. Another summer has passed. I will miss you.

There is a new librarian at the Community Center library. She is a younger woman of Greek descent and her name is Stella. I was telling her that her Greek name is very popular among the older generation Poles. Her husband is also Greek and she loves the Grecian life. You can tell. She has a couple of very cute kids and a beautiful family. A real ethnic girl.

I don’t know if Stella is the daughter of immigrants. On the outside, she is an all-American woman but she chose marriage to the Greek man. The name, the marriage, the family. so what immediately came to mind was “unmeltable ethnic.” She is one of the PIGS: the Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slavs of Michael Novak’s subject in his book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics, The New Political Force of the Seventies (The Macmillan Company, New York, New York, 1971). The word “unmeltable” is a description of southern and eastern European ethnics that continue to live together, marry one another, and hold on to values and beliefs of their native land.

Unmeltable is now forty years old and this is one of the great books of our immigrant experience, by one of our great Polish heroes (even though Michael Novak is Slovak). I would encourage you to read it and compare where we were in 1971 and where we are today. The 1971 study is primarily about politics but even more about perspective; how do the southern and eastern Europeans think and perceive their role in American life within the WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant) culture, how they are perceived, and how they respond. It is about how they fit in the mosaic along with the WASPs, the Irish, the Jews, and African Americans. These groups have some things in common but none of them have everything in common, especially how they think.

In 1971 most of our immigrant grandparents were still around, accent and all. They experienced the fear, trepidation, and the unknown of the new land. They felt the weight of being an outsider. They didn’t have the energy or the time to think. During the sixties and seventies our parents became established and probably for the first time, felt secure to express their opinions and thoughts, within and outside the group. This is the “ethnic consciousness” that Novak talks about.

       The rise in ethnic consciousness is, then, part of a more 
       general cultural revolution…When a person thinks, more
       than one generation’s passions and images think in him. 
       Below the threshold of the rational or the fully conscious,  
       our instincts and sensibilities lead backwards to the
       predilections of our forebears. More deeply than
      Americans have been taught to recognize, their own
      particular pasts live on in their present judgments and
      actions (page 32).

This ethnic consciousness is weighed and compared in a number of different settings and events during the seventies: “Inferiority in America,” the political arena (focusing on Greek-American Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew), intellectual life, the Catholic Church (and in particular, the Irish-Catholic Church), the Jewish awareness, “The concept of the Avant-Garde” (differences), and “The ethnic Democratic Party”. In the tug-of-war carried out by the PIGS in all of these spheres, a number of values remained constant according to Novak: family and community. There was a heavy emphasis during the fifties, sixties, and into the seventies for family and community – first communions, baptisms, Church festivals, neighborhoods (or coming back to the old neighborhood), legion posts, and trying to hold on to all of these. Our mothers and fathers felt very at home in the family and community but could also work the bigger American room as well.

So from the point that grandma and grandpa got us here (“The first generation took with them into the stinking steamships the lives of at least four generations. Immigration lasts at least a hundred years.” page 204), where are the PIGS now, in 2012, regarding their ethnic consciousness? Are we still “unmeltable?” How can we apply the instincts and sensibilities of our consciousness to similar or new “settings and events?” Think of how much our culture and society has changed in even the last ten years, much less the last forty. We are in the last leg of the journey and I can’t wait to see what happens.

On the Yahoo! Ticker – Bill Smitrovich.

You’ve seen him in hit shows and movies. According to Wikipedia, Bill Smitrovich’s real name is William S. Zmitrowicz, son of Anna Wojna and Stanley William Zmitrowicz, who was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1947 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Smitrovich). You can check Bill’s body of work yourself but his most recent film is The Rum Diary (2011). Add Bill as yet another accomplished Polish-American actor.

If you have a thought about this month’s topic, an answer to the question, a question of your own, or have interesting facts to share, contact me at: Edward Poniewaz, 6432 Marmaduke Avenue, St. Louis , MO 63139 ; eMail alinabrig@yahoo.com.

N.B. If you send eMail, reference the Polish American Journal or the Pondering Pole in the subject line. I will not open an eMail if I do not recognize the subject or the sender.