Growing up, I rarely heard Polish outside of my immediate family. But in my teenage years, to my delight, I heard the language spoken by Tony Soprano’s maid, Lilliana—and again by another frustrated and plucky maid named Dorota, who shouted in Polish at Gossip Girl’s chic debutantes. I quickly realized that if a show was centered on the quotidian lives of rich people in the tristate area, odds were that an Eastern European maid would show up eventually. Even Sex and the City centered an episode on Miranda’s pious housekeeper, Magda, replacing her vibrator with a relic of the Virgin Mary. Though the trend peaked in the aughts, it continues today on shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, where a Polish maid named Zelda can be found mashing potatoes in a pastel pink dress.
What is it about Eastern European women holding feather dusters and silver lunch trays, alternately rolling their eyes and passing along hard-won wisdom? How did this particular type of immigrant become a trope readily found in the background of our favorite television shows? On the occasion of Gossip Girl’s upcoming HBO Max reboot, and ahead of the same platform’s Sex and the City revival, I decided to find out.
“There are so many hardworking immigrants in this country, and of course they want to see people like themselves—not just big Hollywood stars. I think a lot of people relate to this hardworking immigrant couple who are struggling,” Katalin Pota, who played Lilliana, tells me over the phone. She’s referring to her character and Lilliana’s husband, Stasiu (played by Albert Makhtsier). A memorable scene from partway through The Sopranos finds the two of them in a curious position: sitting in a park together and studying for the American citizenship test as FBI agents look on with curiosity, hoping to gain insights into the misdeeds of Tony Soprano—the personification of an American dream turned to rot.
Pota, who’s originally from Hungary, understands the tenacity it takes to live in a new place—let alone clean up after people like the Sopranos. Ever the modern woman, Lilliana rightfully holds contempt for her boss. She begrudges Tony in a way that makes you wonder, more than once, if the series might end with her taking revenge on the Soprano family. To this day her portrayal is celebrated by the show’s fans: “I still get letters from people,” she says. “They send me pictures and stills from the show and ask me to autograph them and send them back. People would stop me in the supermarket for my autograph. So it looks like it’s still very popular.”
Much of Lilliana’s enduring appeal lies in her immigrant persistence, a quality Gossip Girl’s Zuzanna Szadkowski also embodied. Funnily enough, Szadkowski too had a tenure as a Polish maid on The Sopranos before moving on to play the now iconic role of Dorota. “I wore pretty exactly the same outfit later as Dorota,” says Szadkowski over the phone with an audible smile. “I played other offshoots [too]—a Ukrainian nanny, other kinds of Eastern European people who work for rich people in New York on TV.” Szadkowski has benefited from this unlikely brand continuity: “My name on paper is so Polish; you see all the z’s. So when people see me coming, they have an expectation of Eastern European characters. I’m fluent in Polish, so you kind of end up auditioning for these roles over and over again.”
Dorota, though, wouldn’t be relegated to the sidelines. Misplaced as she was in a world of oversized sunglasses, Chanel coats, and teenage transgression, she became a central player in Gossip Girl’s moneyed universe. Why? “The fans really gravitated towards Blair, and because Dorota was like a cheerleader moral center who really watched out for Blair, it makes sense that they took to Dorota. They saw themselves represented in her,” Szadkowski guesses. “Coming from a different class, different age, different place: She’s this Eastern Bloc mentality that is a grounding force. It’s a big contrast. It works comedically in that world too.”
She’s right. Dorota became a patron saint of Old World wisdom and pragmatism over the course of the show. She also delivered some of Gossip Girl’s best one-liners, compliments of Szadkowski’s genius deadpan expression and offbeat timing. (Take, for instance, what Dorota declares after Blair finds herself unexpectedly with child: “I must say, best part of pregnancy is knowing who father is.”) Her Cold War–inflected witticisms spawned hundreds of appreciative Reddit posts, fan cams, and tweets galvanizing her as an unlikely hero of the show.
Szadkowski sees something deeply Polish in Dorota’s quips. “There’s a kind of Slavic sense of humor—dry and darker—that I think is fun to write for,” she says. “It’s fun for actors to embody that. So it makes sense that you have the occasional Polish maid.”
Matilda Szydagis, who plays the loyal Zelda—the Weissman family’s Polish maid on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—agrees. “I think the show’s brilliant writing has brought out her bold, honest, unfiltered Eastern European attitude,” she tells me. “It’s refreshing, especially in a classic American setting around 1960, when it wasn’t socially acceptable to be honest about feelings.” Like Szadkowski and Pota, Szydagis also came by her part honestly: “I was born and raised in Marquette Park on the South Side of Chicago to Polish immigrants. My first language was Polish. When I’m rehearsing Zelda’s lines, I think to myself, How would my mom say this?”
It’s fitting that all three actors have deep, personal connections to the characters they’ve played. As University of Warsaw professor Anna Sosnowska-Jordanovska explains, these maids are reflections of a historical phenomenon with extensive roots “In New York City, domestic cleaning became a significant ethnic niche for Polish, often undocumented, female immigrants,” she says. “This sensibility somehow connected New York City upper-class households with Polish and Eastern European housekeepers”—and in turn, TV writers hoping to present a heightened version of reality created characters based on those housekeepers.
Though most of them appear on shows set in the present day, there’s still something anachronistic about these women, with their pressed uniforms and Old World manners. According to Sosnowska-Jordanovska, that’s no accident. She argues that Polish maids also represent something more profound: the idea of traditions that have faded in a digitized world of Tinder courtship and oversized salads, “what American women have lost in the course of emancipation, getting rich, and staying sexually attractive.” But even when straying from their advice, the protagonists of these shows find value in the antiquated wisdom imparted to them by their maids.
Perhaps, then, shows are drawn to this trope out of a nostalgia for a bygone society where roles were more defined—a time when maids met rich people at their door to collect their coats. These characters fulfill a fantasy about the working class being confidants and trusted allies, instead of three-dimensional people who may well be apathetic to their employers’ daily melodramas. Shows featuring Polish maids present them as hardworking and disciplined—too often forgetting that these traits are born from adversity rather than dutifulness to the people they serve. But as textured and beloved as these characters are, they’re still largely cast to the sidelines rather than being treated as protagonists in their own right. A show that centered one of the maids would have plenty to work with, though, with just as much drama and heart.
For an example of what’s possible, look no further than Lucyna Turyk-Wawrynowicz. In 2006 the Manhattan housekeeper made Page Six for stealing from her celebrity clients, including forging the signature of one on credit card slips to buy luxury goods and lingerie at Barneys. During her trial, per The New York Times, prosecutors accused her of being motivated by a “stew of jealousy, anger, and class consciousness”; indeed, Turyk-Wawrynowicz justified her actions by saying that her rude employers got what was coming to them. (Isabella Rossellini got off scot-free, though, because Turyk-Wawrynowicz thought she “treated [her] well.”) Though it was short-lived and by dubious means, she briefly had the trappings of a life well lived in New York City. As Carrie Bradshaw famously said, “In New York, you’re always looking for a job, apartment, or a boyfriend.” It’s hard to know precisely what Turyk-Wawrynowicz was searching for—but I would gladly watch a television show that dares to find out.
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