Polish-American Folklore

by Deborah Anders Silverman xii + 236 pp.

Polish-American Folklore. By Deborah Anders Silverman. Ed. Judith McCulloh, Terry Sears, and Mary Giles. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 236. Index, photos. $29.95 cloth.

Deborah Anders Silverman's Polish-American Folklore is a volume in the series Folklore and Society, edited by Roger Abrahams, Bruce Jackson, and Martha Weigle. Silverman interviewed Polish-Americans in western New York and other locations with large Polish communities to supplement her extensive research. Each chapter has many short quotations, from informants and scholarly publications; in addition, a guide to Polish pronunciation helps the reader through many difficult Polish names and words. The first and second chapters provide a good history of Poland and the migration to America; they also set the tone of the book.

Silverman's summary of Polish-American folklore is thorough in its inclusion of all the major holidays and traditions. Each of the fifteen chapters is approximately eleven pages long; accordingly, "The Christmas Cycle and Minor Holidays" and "Games People Play: Folk Arts, Crafts, and Recreation" each receive a few pages of insight and description, though there is scarce mention of variations and no "thick description" of a single family's tradition. While the attention to the topics is brief, Silverman includes folklore theory in her commentary. In keeping with the general tone of the book, the theory applied to each chapter is more introductory than interpretive; it raises interesting points and surveys the theories of well-known folklorists appropriately and correctly, but with very little in-depth analysis.

The book's focus is on folklore in Polonia (neighborhoods where Polish families settled), though the majority of Silverman's informants are from Buffalo, New York. The Polonia that Silverman studies was settled in the late nineteenth century and during the turn of the twentieth century. Because the cited informants are Poles whose families have lived in America for generations, the book does not address the experiences of the many Poles who have immigrated over the last 80 years--first and second-generation Polish-Americans whose customs and beliefs are shaped by America and by their lives in twentieth-century Poland.

Silverman does well detailing traditions and customs in a broad manner; her writing is accessible and the research thorough, her fieldwork and research condensed into a general description of Polish-American folklore. Silverman's book serves as an overview to long-standing Polish-American folklore.

Tamara Kubacki
Lake County Discovery Museum