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Reviews
Danuta Mostwin. Testaments: Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005, 120 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1607-3.
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This short book marks a large achievement for several reasons. First, Marta Erdman's and Nina Dyke's translations represent, according to the introduction, "the first rendering of [Danuta Mostwin's] fiction into English." Second, Professor Mostwin's storytelling in "The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski" and "Jocasta" captures firsthand the heartbreak of dislocation; Mostwin herself is a post-World War II émigré. Third, Joanna Rostropowicz Clark's and Thomas Napierkowski's introduction and afterward, respectively, offer insights not only into the author's life and works, but also into the state of American ethnic literature. And, fourth, Chiquita Babb's jacket design (the cover photo by Jacek Lech Mostwin, the author's son, shows a dreary storefront whose opaque window blurs the lights within) artfully reflects the opaqueness of American life to the Polish exile. This is an important, attractive book. Much of value is found behind the storefront window. |
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In the first novella, few people care about the old man, Blaise, as he dies in a hospital that resembles "a huge labyrinthine snail with a green dome and additions stuck on here and there." Emigrating to the United States fifty years earlier, he has put the old country behind him while never really embracing the new. Saving his pay from the steelworks, buying chickens from which to make the soups that last him a week, living in "a squalid little room," he finds himself, at seventy-eight, financially well off if discontented. Though he "knew the story of every house and every store on his stretch of the street the way a museum custodian knows his exhibits," Blaise Twardowski might be the loneliest man around.
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When a newcomer opens a business sending parcels to Poland, Blaise Twardowski resents the change in Broad Street's routine. A more recent political émigré than Blaise, Jan Wieniawski, the business proprietor, has himself grown dissatisfied with American life as does his secretary Stefanski, once "the flower of the new communist elite" and the most recent to arrive here. In time, having no one else in America, Jan Wieniawski and Blaise Twardowski trust, even like, each other, Wienawski helping the old man decide whether to leave his money to a distant cousin in Pittsburgh or to equally distant relatives in Poland from whom "[r]equests for help kept flowing in," especially when news of Blaise's ill health reaches them.
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In addition to this sad, engaging narrative of estrangement and isolation partly mitigated by Blaise Twardowski's lone friendship, the author describes—deftly and dramatically, I t—the types one associates with twentieth-century Polish immigration. Her doing so gives the novella added socio-political and historical significance. Blaise, in the United States fifty years, denies himself comforts in order to save money for a future which, when it arrives, holds little joy; Jan Wienawski, who "had come after World War II," longs for the old country despite "the salt and bitterness" of life there; Stefanski, the former communist, cautions Wienawski to speak softy in the office lest a party apparatchnik overhear his complaints; and, finally, Antek Dakrocki, the American-born lawyer, who has "never eaten anything bitter in his life," values neither Poland nor the United States so much as he does a good meal. Each character is confined and defined by Broad Street with its clusters of "bread immigrants." In Blaise Twardowski's life, Mostwin reflects the disillusionment of an aging immigrant remembering and, in the end, accepting his past.
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Examining "a more pathological landscape of the human soul," according to Rostropowicz Clark, the second novella offers a striking counterpoint to the first. Whereas "The Last Will of Blaise Twardowski" with its male characters is told from the omniscient point of view, "Jocasta" with its female protagonist and antagonist is told from first person, limited point of view. The narrator organizes her recollections of Henryka de Chatin, an émigré, around the four apartments where the old woman has lived hoping for a new life with her son, grandson, and German daughter-in-law. Each American apartment represents a further diminution of hope. Over time, the former Henryka Szatkowski, "[p]erhaps her daughter-in-law, or perhaps her son, did not want her to have such a Polish name," becomes alienated from Greta, the daughter-in-law who refuses to allow Henryka's grandson to learn Polish. Living in increasingly reduced circumstances, the old woman eventually passes eighty years of age awaiting the moment when she and her beloved son Jan will be reunited. In her last apartment building, "old people ... peer[ed] with childish curiosity ... chattering in thin, shrill voices ... for it was seldom they saw strangers in this old people's home run by the city." Perhaps Henryka's condition has grown worse, for in a dream the narrator sees Henryka on the street "in a wheelchair like the one she had used in her last apartment." Here is another heartbreaking tale.
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Despite the emphasis on lost dreams and regret, Testaments, with its beautifully stark cover photo and book design, its illuminating essays, and most of all its creator's masterful storytelling is a rich book, eloquent with the loss that this distinguished writer must herself have known.
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Anthony Bukoski
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University of Wisconsin-Superior
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