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Reviews
Maria Anna Jarochowska. Poza Gniazdem: Wizerunki emigrantki polskiej w kanadzie w XX wieku. Montréal: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in Canada, 2006. ISBN 0-9692784-4-6.
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Immigration policy is a function of the needs and self-perception of the receiving country and, until the mid-twentieth century, Canada has focused on filling up the farms of that vast country which saw itself primarily through the lens of its British origins. Over the next sixty years, that policy became more multi-culturally tolerant, more pluralistic, and more educationally and employment driven. Maria Anna Jarochowska, herself an immigrant to Canada, traces the vicissitudes of Canadian immigration policy through its impact on Polish women who immigrated to that country between 1900 and 2000. |
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The book follows two tracks: it situates the fate of Polish women immigrants within general Canadian immigration policy, and it provides a rich biographical narrative that details the achievements of specific immigrants in their new country. The author divides the Polish immigration to Canada into four distinct cohorts. The first wave, from 1900–40, was associated with government policy under Clifford Sifton to recruit Central and Eastern European farmers to populate the Prairie Provinces. The second phase, 1940–57, coincided with World War II and its aftermath. It included political exiles, technical workers needed to sustain both Canada's contribution to the war effort and its transition to a more industrialized economy, and decommissioned members of the Polish armed forces. The third wave, from 1957–79, included individuals fleeing life under communism as the postwar status quo assumed a certain stability. The last phase, 1979–2000, encompassed even more people fleeing stagnation in "Peoples" Poland, exacerbated by the political repression against Solidarity, and people leaving economic uncertainties during Central Europe's economic transition in the 1990s. |
2
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Studies of Polish immigration to Canada, the author claims, have neglected the unique issues of female immigrants. Jarochowska explores some of those issues, aware of the difficulties which that enterprise can pose, particularly for the earliest cohort, where few women's memoirs are extant (and the author deems those that are to be sometimes insufficiently self-critical). Immigrants in Phase I typically came as married, to-be-married, or hoping-to-be-married women, forced to cope with primitive conditions on prairie homesteads. The women of Phase II were more autonomous, in part because they had better educations, and in part because circumstances compelled them to be. Many were wives of personnel associated with the London-based Polish Government-in-Exile, sent by the United Kingdom to Canada to remove them from harm's way in a London under the Blitz. The women of Phases III and IV were even more autonomous. Many had to act unilaterally because reaching the West during Poland's communist era was no easy task and some chose to sacrifice their families to do it. With a book that is one part overall perspective and one part profile of individual immigrants, Jarochowska puts the flesh and bones of real people on her broader analysis of overall trends. She also sets them against the progressive liberalization of Canadian society and immigration policies, factors that she claims made the country more receptive to non-WASP newcomers. |
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The book does a good job of detailing conflict and cooperation between immigrants of the four phases. The earliest immigrants and their descendents sometimes fell into conflict with subsequent arrivals because the latter, often better educated, tried to avoid the demanding physical labor which for the first group was a rite of passage. Indeed, this reviewer felt certain biases in the book including a partiality towards e;migre;s from the intelligentsia; a sympathy for Liberal Party-made Canadian immigration policy; a certain aggrieved feeling that Canada owed its earliest immigrants better treatment (without spelling out clearly what they owed Canada); and a view of prostitution on the prairies suggesting that, at least in part, its suppression was an act of power assertion by the elite. Despite these areas where we disagree, however, the overall book merits attention by those interested in the Polish immigration saga. It fills a gap, especially by bringing women immigrants' concerns to the fore. The publisher does not currently anticipate an English translation of the book; it deserves it. |
4
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| John M. Grondelski
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| Arlington, Virginia |
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