ZBIGNIEW?, John Guzlowski

 I was born Zbigniew Jan Guzlowski in a refugee camp in Germany after the war. My father Jan Guzlowski loved that name Zbigniew. When he was a kid, there was a famous Polish wrestler who had a name like that, and my dad wanted me to have it.  My mother was okay with the name too. Zbigniew was a common enough Polish first name, and she couldn’t see any harm in naming me that. Also, the roots of the name come from a couple of words in Polish that mean “to dispel anger.” After spending 3 years in a German slave labor camp, my mom was okay with dispelling some anger, I bet.

When we came to the US in 1951, however, we discovered something.

No one in the US could pronounce my name. Not only could they not pronounce my name, they had a great-old-time mispronouncing it. I was just a kid and other kids loved to make fun of my name. They called me big shoe and zigzag and bishop and zbubby and zuggy and on and on.  They did this in the streets before I started school, and they did it in grade school even though I went to a predominately Polish grade school in Chicago. And they did it when I went to high school. Maybe it was even worst in high school. The guys there took to mocking my beautiful Polish name by mispronouncing it, and they accentuated the mocking by doing it in a high whining singing sort of falsetto.

I put up with this for 18 years.

When I finally became a citizen in 1968, I legally changed my name Zbigniew to John. Every American can say John. (Although most Americans still have trouble with Guzlowski–but that’s another story I’ll tell you some other time.)

But a funny thing happened to me when I got to be about 32 and started writing and publishing.

I decided not to use John Guzlowski or John Z. Guzlowski as the name my writing would appear under. Instead, I decided to write under the name Zbigniew Guzlowski. That’s right. Zbigniew Guzlowski.

I thought “Zbigniew” would catch the eye of any and every editor. You got to remember, this was the time in the late 1970s and early 19802 when Polish writers like Czeslaw Milosz and Tadeusz Różewicz and Wisława Szymborska and the great Zbigniew Herbert were getting a lot of press. I figured using “Zbigniew” would help me place some poems and stories and essays. You understand, I’m sure.

Maybe it would have happened, but I never got the chance to find out if re-attaching “Zbigniew” to “Guzlowski” would be the thing that helped me create a career for myself as a writer.

When my mom, a Polish immigrant, heard I wanted to use “Zbigniew,” she blew a fuse and said I couldn’t do it. I was 32 and she was telling me I couldn’t!

I was an American now, my mom said, and I had to have an American name.

Of course, like every good Polish boy, I listened to my mom.

ZBIGNIEW? by John Guzlowski was originally published via Dziennik Zwiazkowy. The original publication, in both Polish and English, can be read here.

Over a writing career that spans more than 40 years, John Guzlowski has amassed a significant body of published work in a wide range of genres: poetry, prose, literary criticism, reviews, fiction and nonfiction.

His poems and stories have appeared in such national journals as North American Review, Ontario Review, Rattle, Chattahoochee Review, Atlanta Review, Nimrod, Crab Orchard Review, Marge, Poetry East, Vocabula Review. He was the featured poet in the 2007 edition of Spoon River Poetry Review. Garrison Keillor read Guzlowski’s poem “What My Father Believed” on his program The Writers Almanac.