“The city of their fathers”: Urban Space, Memory, and Language in Stuart Dybek’s Short Fiction

Izabella Kimak

doi:10.18778/2083-2931.15.15

Authors

Izabella Kimak Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2212-8174

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.15.15

Keywords:

Stuart Dybek, Chicago, literature of neighborhood, memory, multilingual city

Abstract

Stuart Dybek is a writer invariably associated with his neighborhood of Pilsen/Little Village on Chicago’s Lower West Side. Having grown up there as a descendant of immigrants from Poland, Dybek frequently “revisits” his old neighborhood in his writing. His texts showcase the changes of the urban space, narrated through references to the material, social, cultural, and linguistic environment. In this essay, I will analyze two of Dybek’s texts—the sequence “Hot Ice” from his second collection of stories The Coast of Chicago and the story “Qué Quieres” from I Sailed with Magellan—to probe the palimpsestic construction of urban space, whereby the past, present, and future of urban orders are narrated simultaneously. Both texts illustrate ethnic succession in the neighborhood—from Slavs to Hispanics—which finds its reflection in the linguistic layer of the stories and construes translation as an inevitable element of urban experience.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Izabella Kimak, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin

Izabella Kimak is Assistant Professor at the Department of British and American Studies at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin, Poland. Her research interests encompass contemporary American literature, with particular emphasis on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. She is Secretary General of the European Association for American Studies, a Kosciuszko Foundation fellow, and a recipient of the National Science Centre, Poland research grant for the project Sweet Home Chicago: The Windy City and American Writers of Polish Descent.

References

Dobozy, Tamas. “Returning to Places of No Return in Stuart Dybek’s Short Stories.” Identity, Diaspora, and Return in American Literature, edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger, Routledge, 2014, pp. 189–205.

Dybek, Stuart. Childhood and Other Neighborhoods: Stories. U of Chicago P, 1980.

Dybek, Stuart. I Sailed with Magellan. Picador, 2003.

Dybek, Stuart. The Coast of Chicago. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

Fisher, Alison. “The Contextual Megastructure: Design after Urban Renewal.” The City Lost & Found: Capturing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, 1960–1980, edited by Katherine A. Bussard, Alison Fisher, and Greg Foster-Rice, Princeton University Art Museum, 2014, pp. 174–205.

Galush, William J. “Polish Americans and Religion.” Polish Americans and Their History: Community, Culture, and Politics, edited by John J. Bukowczyk, U of Pittsburgh P, 1996, pp. 80–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5hjnfr.8 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt5hjnfr.8

Galush, William J. “Religious Life.” The Polish American Encyclopedia, edited by James S. Pula, MacFarland, 2011, pp. 440–46.

Gellman, Erik. “Pilsen.” The Encyclopedia of Chicago, edited by James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, U of Chicago P, 2004, p. 608.

Gladsky, Thomas S. “Mr. Dybek’s Neighborhood: Toward a New Paradigm for Ethnic Literature.” The Polish Diaspora: Selected Essays from the Fiftieth Anniversary International Congress of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, edited by James S. Pula and M. B. Biskupski, East European Monographs, 1993, pp. 129–35.

Gladsky, Thomas S. Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature. U of Massachusetts P, 1992.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile.” Poetics Today, vol. 17, no. 4, 1996, pp. 659–86. https://doi.org/10.2307/1773218 DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/1773218

Kimak, Izabella. “You Are What You Eat: Narrating Ethnic Identity Through Food in Polish Chicagoan Writing.” Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 18, 2024, pp. 214–24. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7311/PJAS.18/2024.15

Kozaczka, Grażyna. “The Neighborhood of Memory: Stuart Dybek’s Chicago.” Polish American Studies, vol. 69, no. 2, Autumn 2012, pp. 45–57. https://doi.org/10.5406/poliamerstud.69.2.0045 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/poliamerstud.69.2.0045

Kozaczka, Grażyna. “Writing Poland and America: Polish American Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.” Polish American Studies, vol. 73, no. 1, Spring 2016, pp. 69–82. https://doi.org/10.5406/poliamerstud.73.1.0069 DOI: https://doi.org/10.5406/poliamerstud.73.1.0069

Mora-Torres, Juan. “Pilsen: A Mexican Global City in the Midwest.” Diálogo, vol. 9, no. 2, 2005, pp. 3–7.

Pacyga, Dominic. Chicago: A Biography. U of Chicago P, 2011.

Radzilowski, John, and Ann Hetzel Gunkel. Poles in Illinois. Southern Illinois UP, 2020.

Rotella, Carlo. “‘As If to Say “Jeez!”’: Blight and Ecstasy in the Old Neighborhood.” U.S. Catholic Historian, vol. 22, no. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 1–11.

Rotella, Carlo. “Literary Images of Chicago.” The Encyclopedia of Chicago, edited by James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, U of Chicago P, 2004, pp. 486–89.

Rotella, Carlo. October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. U of California P, 1998. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520920101 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520920101

Rotella, Carlo. “Stuart Dybek and the New Chicago’s Literature of Neighborhood.” Chicago: A Literary History, edited by Frederik Byrn Køhlert, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 400–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108763738.029 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108763738.029

Rotella, Carlo. “The Literature of Neighborhood.” The City in American Literature and Culture, edited by Kevin R. McNamara, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 57–69. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108895262.004 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108895262.004

Simon, Sherry. Cities in Translation: Intersections of Language and Memory. Routledge, 2012.

Strauss, Darin. “What the Heart Wants.” The New York Times, 1 Aug. 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/books/review/ecstatic-cahoots-and-paper-lantern-by-stuart-dybek.html accessed 21 June 2025.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. City Codes: Reading the Modern Urban Novel. Cambridge UP, 1996.