Live from Winona

I'm up here in Winona this week, spending the remnants of my summer "vacation" in my ancestral stomping grounds. In the morning I go to the Polish Museum (now with awesome Wikipedia page), to soak in the ambiance, look through the collections, and chat with any of my countrymen and countrywomen who happen to pass through.

Here's a delightful little snippet (translated in the English version of Borzyzskowski's The Kashubs, Pomerania and Gdansk, p. 62) culled from a 1911 article in Gryf by the Kaszubian scholar Jan Karnowski (1889-1939).

The Kashubian population is characterized mainly by two attributes: religiousness and justice. Religiousness is a fundamental breathing of the Kashubian soul, not guided by reasoning, but deeply grasped through feelings. It is in customs, tradition, and above all the personality of priest that stand in for the reasoning. The justice of a Kashub is firm, persistent, with no allowances. This may be a reason for that famous suing mania, that relentless stubbornness and persistence in own rights. A Kashub is ready to forgive all faults and grudges. But he shall never forgive an injustice. 

It is enough to hurt those two aspects of a Kashubian soul and the hostility will last forever! Such an effect had the anti-Polish policy of the Prussian government. As said above, more or less until the period of Kulturkampf, the Prussian government enjoyed a significant confidence within the Kashubian population. The cultural struggle, however, opened their eyes.

Confirming, of course, a lot of what I already suspected about my countrymen and countrywomen. But it is interesting to note Karnowski's contention that most Kaszubians were "more or less" comfortable with Prussian rule prior to the Kulturkampf. The fact that my Kaszubian forebears were not driven out from their homeland is important because it suggests (among other things) that when they reached Winona they did not bring any particular feud with the Germans. Perhaps their desire to form their own congregation with their own Polish priest was simply that.