Pseudonymic Passing and Ambivalent Whiteness in the Contemporary Polish American Immigrant Novel

Abstract

In Karolina Waclawiak's novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms (2012), the Polish American immigrant narrator changes her name from the “too-Polish” Zosia to Anya, in order to “pass” as Russian and gain access to the titular social club. This attempt to pass as Russian—imbued with personal hopes for a sense of belonging and power—alludes to a history of tensions across American ethno-racial lines, while at the same time illuminating significant differences among Europeans otherwise presumed to be simply White. Anya's attempts to pass center around her gendered and sexualized embodiment, a step that then allows her to define her relationships to the United States and Poland by questioning, developing, and leveraging her new name in exchange for a new ethno-racialized identity. The novel's thematic and formal preoccupation with naming and names thus reflects the ways in which immigrants negotiate the interconnectedness of identity's multiple manifestations and forge identities on their own terms. The privilege of the choice to pass within and among Slavic ethnicities distinguishes texts like Twin Palms as the ancestral inheritors of a US-immigrant literary tradition while also marking the Whiteness of their protagonists. Anya's particular imagination of US-immigrant-selfhood is predicated on ethno-racial differentiation and gendered embodiment determined both by an overidentification premised on erasure and by distinction within the twenty-first-century American racialized milieu. Waclawiak's narrative deploys different strategies at the level of naming in order to circle around the issue of race while simultaneously centering the differences within post-Soviet Slavic White ethnicity.