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Review - Writing Home: Immigrants in Brazil and the United States, 1890-1891

No cover image for this one, because there wasn't one on Goodreads and the library copy I had was just a plain blue cover. 

I first encountered this book while working for a Polish American nonprofit in 2016/2017, and was at the time told the story of the "Kula letters." A collection of correspondence seized by the tsarist censor in Warsaw, it had been kept in an archive--but that archive was destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The only surviving letters, a collection of those from 1890 and 1891, were those that Witold Kula and his students had been using for research. The rest--thousands of letters--were lost.

I found the subject matter interesting, and the story even more so--but merely put the book on my to-read list to request from interlibrary loan at some future date. I left my job at the nonprofit in 2018; the person who recommended this book to me passed away that same year. And yet finally I checked a copy of this book out of the library and read it, and it feels like a conversation with the past.

This really is a neat collection of letters, and worth looking through for anyone with an interest in late 19th century immigration into the US and Brazil from Poland. The majority of the letters are written by Catholic Poles, but there is a solid sampling of letters whose authors were Jewish as well, and a handful of letters translated from German.

Some of the translation choices are a little odd to me (given names are almost always anglicized), but the letters are certainly readable and the extensive endnotes help with some of the less obvious pieces. Partly because all of these are letters that were stopped by the Russian censor in Warsaw and never reached their destination, many cover very similar themes--instructions on how to emigrate, promises of steamship tickets, packing lists. Others are more personal and emotional in nature, and it's really interesting to read through them. I doubt most people would be inclined to sit down and read it cover-to-cover, though.

The introduction of the book discusses the context of the letters, both at the time they were written and details on why it specifically letters sent to a limited geographical area in 1890 and 1891 that survive to find their way into this volume.

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