Polish(ed): Poland Rooted in Canadian Fiction (10)

by Kasia Jaronczyk (Editor), Małgorzata Nowaczyk (Editor)

What is the literary and cultural benefit of a diaspora anthology? It presents work from a community, a family of writers. It represents a cultural contribution to Canadian literature. It makes it known where they come from personally and metaphorically, what inspires them. In this case, they are all writers who share Polish-ness, in whatever ways we define it, as a part of their personal story, be it through similar experiences, influences, or perspectives on the world, a sense of history and of who they are. And also, through interest in the Polish diaspora, writers who have no Polish roots.

Genres: Short Stories

232 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2017

Reviews

[anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I received an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

2.5 ☆

Well, I’m Polish so of course I jumped at a chance to read this! I’m not exactly sure what I was expecting though. I guess I imagine something rooted so deeply into our culture, I would just nod to myself all the time in a “yes, exactly!” kind of way. There were moments like that but on the whole? I don’t think it was a book for me.

Because, you see, it’s not a bad book at all. All the stories are well written & each author had something interesting and important to them to say. Only personally I found them too short to really connect to any of them. Maybe I should have seen that coming - I mean, it is an anthology of short stories, come on. But still, every time I truly got invested in a story, it ended. Sometimes so abruptly I couldn’t really tell what was actually the point.

That’s also the reason why it’s so hard to judge this book. Because there were great stories and some that I couldn’t even bring myself to finish. (Like Rosetta. I really don’t care about the imagery there or if he actually slept with the girl - it was a gross concept from the very beginning and the girl was nothing more than a manic pixie dream girl.) There were stories describing Polish people in a way that made me lowkey uncomfortable - like Happily Ever After. I mean, does the author really believe people here - especially young people - don’t speak English? Even my mother’s generation was taught that in school. And yet here we got one single character who could & his English was so incredibly awkward and cringey, I don’t even know how would anyone think of it. There was a story with a “back when I was gay” line and frankly, I didn’t come here for homophobia.

But still, this was an Experience. Most of the stories were sad in one way or another and that felt very Polish somehow, true to our hearts. You could feel the nostalgia in them, which I think was what I was actually looking for all the while.

[Magdalena Milosz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this collection, which is perhaps why I judge it more harshly than I otherwise might. As a Polish-Canadian reader/writer, I really appreciate the concept and some of the considerations put forward by the editors in the Preface and by Magda Stroińska in the Foreword: identity in multiple languages, exile from homeland, diasporic communities. Several of the stories were quite good, but others felt like throwaways, giving the anthology as a whole an uneven feel. Grammatical and spelling errors got in the way of enjoying several of them - a good copyedit would have gone a long way. And I felt that the set-up sometimes lacked follow-through; as another reviewer mentioned, the connections to Poland or Polish identity were at times tenuous or irrelevant. Still, a few gems gleamed and the editors left me with some food for thought and further avenues to explore my heritage through literary channels.

[Grazyna Nawrocka · Rating 4 out of 5]

I reached for this book because Mark Bondyra, who is my friend, published a story there. The short stories are in English, but are in some way (mostly by the authors' origin) related to Poland.

Overall impression is disappointment. None of those stories feels Polish. They might have been written as well by Canadians. Maybe except for "The Bear" by Katarzyna Jaskiewicz, and Mark's story.

I liked the book, but miss more insights to cultural differences.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Short stories (23 of them) whose unifying feature is that they're written by Canadian authors with strong to tenuous connections to Poland, either recent (this generation) immigrants or several generations removed from their Polish roots but still feeling a strong connection with that country. As in any anthology, the strength and quality of the writing varies and the connection of each story to Poland can be, again, strong to tenuous. Overall, I have to say that I enjoyed most of these stories, with a few (I won't say which) at one end or other of the pleasing me bell curve. Full disclosure: my parents were both born in Poland and escaped ahead of the invading Nazis in 1939, so my own connections to Poland have their own emotional bell curve. All-in-all, many a worthy read in this small book.