I just got back from a trip with Big G to the metro Detroit area, where we attended a Sadowski family reunion and belated 90th birthday celebration for his aunt, Sister Mary Albina. If you didn’t get the gist of that first sentence, they are Polish-American. They are from Flint. They are Catholic. It occurred to me as I observed four generations of Sadowskis moseying through the weekend before the Fourth of July what a wonderful representation they are of the 20th century American immigrant experience.
I don’t know how Flint became a magnet for Polish-American immigrants, but Big G surmises that a few Poles somehow found themselves there, found steady work and let the relatives back in Cracow know about it. Then in no time at all, a lot of Polish people were raising their families in Flint. That’s pretty much how Grandma and Grandpa Sadowski got there.
It was fun to hear about life in Flint 50 years ago. The city was big back then – the second-largest population in the state. That is a stunning contrast to the city’s current state of desolation, crime and poverty, which the family lamented with both sadness and anger. Most of the big auto plants are shut down and boarded up, with weeds sprouting from potholes in the giant, empty parking lots. Even the check-cashing stores have closed down in Flint.
The whole neighborhood spoke Polish back when Flint was thriving (Big G didn’t learn English until he was in kindergarten) and everyone worked for General Motors, which was founded there. In fact, back in the day, almost every adult Sadowski worked on one of the GM assembly lines. Church attendance was mandatory. Or, more precisely, the idea of not going to church did not exist. Services at the local parish were conducted only in Latin and Polish, and of course all the kids attended Catholic school.
No one in Flint was rich. The houses were modest and close together. Vacations were taken by car to northern Michigan, far away from the factories. All the kids would be squished together in the back seat on the drive up. Relatives lived close to one another and helped each other out. In fact, Big G lived with his extended family -- three generations under one roof – until he was in high school.
Those are the kinds of things they talked about at the get-together because that’s what families do at reunions: talk about themselves. They recounted the family triumphs and scandals and holidays and meals.
“Do you remember grandma ever serving vegetables? I mean besides potatoes?” Big G asked one of his cousins. The cousin pursed her lips, tilted her head and thought. You could almost see the Super 8 images of Grandma Sadowski’s house in Flint flickering through her memory.
“Maybe green beans once or twice, but I don’t really recall any vegetables,” she said.
Had Grandma Sadowski been alive, she certainly would have been pleased by the evening meal we consumed at the Polish-American Cultural Center in Troy. We started with noodle soup, served with big, fluffy dinner rolls and bowls of butter. The main course included big platters of kielbasa and sauerkraut, pierogi filled with cheese, mashed potatoes and golumpki – cabbage leaves filled with a mixture of meat, rice and spices and covered with tomato sauce. And, since that clearly wasn’t enough food, there were also platters of roast beef. We groaned and rubbed our stomachs and then 15 minutes later helped ourselves to a big pile of chruÊciki (fried pastry covered with powdered sugar) for dessert.
Polka music blared from the boom box someone had brought. Business at the cash bar was brisk. Someone else had gone to the Dollar Store earlier in the day to pick up birthday decorations for the room. After hanging the “Happy Birthday” signs on the walls, we realized that they were missing a “p” which, as the trips to the cash bar continued, become increasingly hilarious. To recuperate from dinner and dessert, we wandered into the main hall of the Polish-American Cultural Center to look at its Hall of Fame. Did you know that Madam Curie was Polish? her maiden name was Marie Skobadowska.
They never get tired of recounting their family history – most families never do – and I never get tired of listening. Theirs was an utterly commonplace, post World War II American immigrant upbringing. Yet it was also in many ways totally unique because it has largely disappeared and isn’t ever going to repeat itself in the same way. The Flint they knew as children is gone and they themselves have mostly assimilated and are scattered across the country. Big G still remembers a smattering of Polish; the generation after him doesn’t understand a word of it.
“We’re losing our oral traditions,” the husband of one cousin lamented as Sister Albina’s friends sang her a birthday song in Polish that none of us understood.
So it was lots of fun and bittersweet and intensely familiar, since so many of us have followed similar paths with our own immigrant families. And when, inevitably, another major family event occurs – a marriage, a birthday or a funeral – the Sadowskis will travel from wherever they live and gather near Flint once again.
