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CHILDREN OF STRANGERS by Anthony Bukoski. Southern Methodist University, 1994. $22.50 cloth; paper $10.95.

by Norbert Blei

There are fourteen short stories in this superb second collection by University of Wisconsin-Superior teacher/writer Anthony Bukoski, most of them set in Superior. And any one of them can break your heart.

Anthony who? Anthony Bukoski.

There are writers and there are writers. There are stories and there are stories, especially in Wisconsin. But then there are stories of the kind to be found in Children of Strangers. And writers perhaps you never may have heard of. Or heard enough of.

Part of the problem with American writing today is that we are always hyping the wrong books, praising too many of the wrong writers. Anthony Bukoski's Children of Strangers will never appear on The New York Times best seller list --- or any best seller list in Wisconsin. Yet his collection of stories is as good, if   [p. 46]   not better, than anything on anyone's best seller list of fiction anywhere in this country. Bukoski is simply a master of the short narrative form with some incredibly human stories to tell, but he is unfortunately (or fortunately) situated in the northern regions of Dairyland where both the news and the culture tend to remain "local." The word just never gets out as it should.

Good writing is often relegated to those forlorn pockets of America, where real stories are born and a certain honesty abides. Where writers find themselves in spiritual exile. Especially the ethnic-American writer, such as Bukoski telling of the Polish-American experience in Superior, Wisconsin. People with names like Vankiewicz, Slipowski, Burbal, Borzynski, Wilenski. "The Polkaholics," a title of one of his finest stories. Neighborhood organizations like the Thaddeus Kosciusko Fraternal Lodge. The Whoop 'n Holler Tavern. St. Adalbert's Church, and Father Nowak, the parish priest.

"We didn't none of us discover America," says Father Nowak at one point in "The River of the Flowing Banks," a story of two cultures, two faiths (Polish-American and Native American) "not me, not the Sisters. Not me and you especially, Warren, we're Polish." But it's the humanity of the priest that shines through as he quietly brings both cultures together in a ritual of requiem both Catholic and Indian.

I have been an admirer and practitioner of the ethnic-American story from my early beginnings as a writer and consider it one of the most vital segments of American literature. It started in the oral tradition of my own family and neighborhood (Czech-American/Chicago). It continued with my discovery of Saroyan's Armenians, James T. Farrell's Irish, Isaac Bashevis Singer's New York/Polish Jews, John Fante's Italians, Harry Mark Petrakis's Greeks, and remains with me today. To this list I would add and highly recommend Anthony Bukoski's Polish-American stories which resonate far beyond Superior.

In every story Bukoski gets it just right: the place, the people, the story itself. The ethnic-attitude. The life and death struggle of a European sub-culture on its deathbed in so many parts of America. The whole human condition in Superior as seen through the eyes of "the children of strangers": Polish Americans as well as Native Americans (Ojibwa) and the latest wave, the Vietnamese.

Superior itself is poignantly captured in story after story --- "The Tomb of the Wrestlers," "A Chance of Snow," "Country of Lent" ("I wish this sidewalk went someplace," says one of the characters) --- as a midwestern wasteland of deserted shipyards, streaks of grain, ore and coal dust everywhere, rusted tracks, "a city that grows smaller the more they tear down." A city that has seen its better days and serves as a kind of counterpoint in setting to much of the despair felt by the people of ethnic cultures trying to fit in. People who have been beaten back by time and the diminishment of customs till their only faith is unexplainably "old world." And a matter-of-fact hopelessness uttered in the constant refrain: "Nie szkodzi" . . . it doesn't matter.

Only it does. And these stories by Anthony Bukoski are a living testament to the faith of memory and art.

Author/teacher/publisher Norbert Blei lives in Ellison Bay, where he now operates Cross + Roads Press. He recently contributed an essay to Wisconsin's Rustic Roads.