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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2024
Walking between two rows of benches in the modern Catholic church, the bride looked radiant and sparkling with happiness. “Janet looks stunning,” the groom's aunt, Judy, told me with pride before leaning closer to add: “But above all she loves Kevin so much. She even converted for him!” When I asked about Janet's religion before embracing Catholicism, Judy responded: “I don't know exactly. But I guess she must have been Jewish?” Janet's family was not Jewish, as I learned later; yet who was a more likely candidate for a “stranger” and “convert” in the Polish American community's eyes? This conviction grew in me the more oral histories on the local Polish American community I got to know and the more I talked with its youngest generation.
The priest concurred with Judy's observation, devoting a good deal of his sermon to the bride's engagement in the new church and the mature relationship she developed with the new creed. After the mass was over, the wedding guests dashed to the wedding venue, a rural winery. The groom's best man (Kevin’s closest friend and the leader of the local polka band) gave a touching speech in a mixture of English and Polish, recalling Kevin's deceased parents. Then, adopting a more humorous tone, he spoke about why Janet would be a perfect wife, this time focusing not on her religious devotion but on her farming skills. Among the guests were many of Kevin's relatives and other local Polish Americans, who today are the biggest ethnic community in Hatfield and Hadley, Massachusetts, the two towns I am focusing on in this chapter. Talk of Polish wedding and culinary traditions dominated the event, leaving Janet's family somewhat in the background. The presence of a Polish anthropologist—“a real Pole,” as the hosts proudly presented me—slightly unsettled these discussions, as not only did I turn out to be incapable of dancing polka, but my lack of knowledge of certain “Polish” dishes and my vegetarianism put my ethnic identity in question.
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