Digital Homeland: Polonia on the World Wide Web

Abstract

When my great-grandparents ventured for America at the beginning of the 20th century, one can only imagine the ordeals they went through. Leaving a small Podlasie village (then Russia) in mid-winter, probably illiterate, not knowing a word of English with only the address of a distant uncle in New York City (E. 155th Str. 274), they headed for Hamburg, the port of departure, where they boarded the ship “Pisa”, and after a long and probably turbulent voyage in class three (sailing the Atlantic in mid-winter is always rough), reached Ellis Island, port of entry to the United States – and reached the Promised Land. There, being made to change their family name from Lewkowicz to Lefkovic (with a diacritic sign over “c”), they moved on further south to the Pennsylvania coal mines of Shenandoah, where they laboured for several years before eventually returning to their native village. In fact, they repeated this cycle twice! “Staying connected” with the family they had left was difficult and in many cases probably impossible. Space and time did matter then. As a result, it meant partly losing their homeland, resulting in deterritorialization1. The present situation of my family, living on what I call a “Polish Island in Western Massachusetts,” would have been inconceivable for my great-grandparents – the immigrants of yesteryear. These days, being “fully connected”, they enjoy all the benefits of the global communication networks that unite farflung spaces. Now, diasporic communities of various ethnic backgrounds, of which Polonia is a good example, are able to “connect” with their geographically distant families and homeland and thus simultaneously remain culturally, emotionally,