What a Former Detroiter Saw in Clint Eastwood's "Gran Torino"

Cynthia Zawatski is a long time supporter of the Polish American Congress and its Anti-Bigotry Committee.  After she saw Clint Eastwood's film "Gran Torino," she wrote a Letter to the Editor which she wanted to share with us. Now retired, she was raised in Detroit in a family of ardent Polish American activists.  In the 1930's her father, Thaddeus Przylubski, was prominent in labor circles as a founder and organizer of the United Auto Workers in that city. After moving to Ashland, Oregon where she now resides, Cynthia became an outreach director for the United Farmworkers Union. Clint Eastwood's portrayal of Walt Kowalski in his film "Gran Torino" struck such a responsive cord in her, it prompted her to pen her personal recollections and send them to us.

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Ashland, OR. I am a longtime subscriber to the Journal. I wait expectantly for each new edition.  I am seldom disappointed.  But, in the January edition, a piece out of Los Angeles was reprinted. The subject was the new movie “Gran Torino.”

The reporter presented what was a simplistic, uninspired critique of a film about which he or she had little understanding.  He called it a story about Hmong immigrants.  He reported that Clint Eastwood played a Polish American man and that the film was made in Detroit.
 
Perhaps the journalist has no familiarity with Detroit or the industrial Midwest.  The human drama that is taking place there, the heartache of those who built the great city of Detroit – the great union that gave them prosperity – the churches, the fine schools, the sense of place, the dignity and the pride they earned for themselves and their offspring.
 
It must be told, as in the case of the film’s main character, Walt Kowalski, many were in fact Polish.  They built a new life after being driven out of Poland early in the century. My father was one of them.
 
Clint Eastwood’s character is -- as the actor said himself -- an “urban legend” born of truth and no small amount of agony as Detroit and its people see their beloved city vanish before their very eyes.
 
These brave people, who generations ago came themselves as immigrants, have seen many challenges and have overcome them as a people bound together by a sense of oneness.
 
But over the last decade, an obstacle named “globalization” has presented a chain of events that even they cannot seem to overcome.
 
No matter how hard they struggle, and as those who built this good life watch nearly helplessly, all they have known seems to fall into chaos.  A new people arrive.  A people from far away who come with hope to also find a better life.  In “Gran Torino” these two cultures come together, a clash at first, and then they join together to defend their honor.
 
Walt Kowalski is not only a legend.  He is a Polish American hero.  This film should be in every Polish American home to be viewed by generations to come in remembrance of those who came before.  As with Walt Kowalski, ours is a generation whose time, as we have known it, perhaps is coming to an end. 
 
While we are remembering the past and observing the present,  we also honor those new immigrants who must find a way to build a new beginning – even as our people did.
 
It is a beautiful aspect of the film that these new immigrants, the Hmong people whom Walt Kowalski came to love, were helped, protected and taught by a Polish American veteran who has his own private darkness caused by having been through a terrible war.
 
There are generations now of Walt Kowalski’s.  But his is the definitive moment in our history.  We perhaps shall not see the likes of him again.
 
Clint Eastwood has given us here more than he may know.  He has given Polish Americans – truly all Americans – a  legend.
 
It is a time now to pause and remember our fathers and mothers and to honor them as this film does, even in its sometimes hard-edged humor.  We pray history will.

Cynthia Zawatski
Ashland, Oregoni
(541) 482-0807

http://www.thegrantorino.com/#/video/