Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Goldstein, Evan R

Titel

Prisoners of Assimilation

Ist Teil von

• The Jerusalem report, 2005-11, p.40

Ort / Verlag

Jerusalem: Jerusalem Report

Erscheinungsjahr

2005

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Nexis Uni

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Between 1880 and 1924, an estimated 5 million Jews passed through Ellis Island, and New York's Jewish population grew from 80,000 to 1,250,000. Increasingly disconnected from Europe, especially as it descended twice into the hellish chaos of war, and insecure in their condition as hyphenated Americans, immigrant Jews wrestled with the personal and collective challenge of situating themselves within the American scene. As portrayed with poignant acuity in [Abraham Cahan]'s seminal novel, "The Rise of David Levinsky" (1917), Jews (and indeed all newcomers) wrestled with the burden of the immigrant stigma and the crippling torrent of anxiety and self-loathing that it unleashed. Consider this comment by Henry Roth, the author of the celebrated 1934 immigrant novel "Call It Sleep," who late in his life said that "The importance in my development of being a Jew lay precisely in the length I went to, or the efforts I made, to escape the stigma of being Jewish." Or, as another writer put it, these immigrants were "prisoners of assimilation." [Donald Weber]'s self-described "exercise in cultural recovery and reception" opens with several essays on early Jewish immigrant fiction and film. The front of the book takes us more or less chronologically through World War II. It is anchored - or "haunted," perhaps - by the visage of Cahan's David Levinsky, a sweat-drenched bundle of neuroses. Levinsky's earnest striving to "make it," to become a man of refined cultural tastes despite his "greenhorn" roots, generates the driving tension of this archetypal genre novel (a genre it practically established). "Table manners are the beginning of all culture," Anzia Yezierska (another practitioner of the genre, and a prominent subject of "Haunted") once wrote, and in a recurring motif that extends all the way through the fiction of Cahan, Yezierska and Henry Roth, the dinner table is the setting for high drama. By mid-century, there were Jewish communities in every state of the union. "The Goldbergs," which surprisingly enjoyed a broad audience and eventually moved to television, epitomizes how the intrusion of Jews into these new areas did much to demystify old stereotypes. The Jews were beginning to conform to the homogenized standards of middle-class life in postwar America. Around the time of World War II, many of the old tensions of their newcomer condition had indeed been resolved. In addition, the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust quelled the bitterest aspects of anti- Semitism in America, and a recrudescence of such hatreds seemed unlikely. And yet, the search for a tenable Jewish-American identity that would bridge the generational divide unleashed a fresh flood of self-conscious preoccupations. As Weber writes, the rising generation - Abraham Cahan's metaphorical children - was "trapped between two worlds, helpless, in a kind of liminal void, overwhelmed with terrific shame in reaction over the parents' boorish manners and mangled speech, conflicted by their filial desire to break free, yet not able to sever themselves irrevocably from the nourishing roots of family and faith."