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The Jewish Immigrant Experience
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Abstract
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References
1 Sherman, Bernard, The Invention of the Jew: Jewish–American Education Novels, 1916–1964 (New York: Thomas Yoseloff, 1969), 19Google Scholar; Guttmann, Allen, The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971)Google Scholar; some recent work continues in the same reflectionist vein: see most of the contributions to Link, Franz, ed., Jewish Life and Suffering as Mirrored in English and American Literature (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 1987).Google Scholar Other introductory accounts of Jewish immigrant experience include Edward A. Abramson, The Immigrant Experience in American Literature (BAAS Pamphlets in American Studies 10, British Association for American Studies, 1982) and Burchell, R. A. and Homberger, Eric, “The Immigrant Experience,” in Bradbury, Malcolm and Temperley, Howard, eds., Introduction to American Studies, second edn. (London: Longman, 1989), 158–80.Google Scholar
2 Howe, Irving (with the assistance of Kenneth Libo), World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovitch, 1976).Google Scholar
3 The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 175.Google Scholar
4 These include (parts of) Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations that Made the American People (Boston: Little, Brown, 1951)Google Scholar, and Adventure in freedom: Three Hundred Years of Jewish Life in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1954)Google Scholar; Higham, John, Send These to Me: Immigrants in Urban America (New York: Athenaeum, 1975Google Scholar; revised edn., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984); Sanders, Ronald, The Downtown Jews: Portraits of an Immigrant Generation (New York: Harper & Row, 1969)Google Scholar, which focusses mainly on Abraham Cahan and the labour movement.
5 Baum, Charlotte, Hyman, Paula and Michel, Sonya, The Jewish Woman in America (New York: Dial Press, 1976), xiii.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., xi.
7 See, for instance, Sochen, June, Consecrate Every Day: The Public Lives of Jewish American Women, 1880–1980 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Sinkoff, Nancy B., “Educating for ‘Proper’ Jewish Womanhood: A Case Study in Domesticity and Vocational Training, 1897–1926,’ American Jewish History, 77 (1988), 572–99Google Scholar; Weinberg, Sydney Stahl, The World of Our Mothers: The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).Google Scholar
8 New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985; the work studies both Jewish and Italian immigrants.
9 Ibid, 136; for another worthwhile perspective see Sorin, Gerald, The Prophetic Minority: American-Jewish Immigrant Radicals, 1880–1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)Google Scholar and “Tradition and Change: American Jewish Socialists as Agents of Acculturation,” American Jewish History, 79 (1989), 37–54.Google Scholar
10 Ewen, , 200.Google Scholar A self-confessed “revisionist” – and controversial – history of American-Jewish history is Hertzberg, Arthur, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989)Google Scholar; on the controversy, see Goren, Arthur A., “Preaching American Jewish History: A Review Essay,” American Jewish History, 79 (1990), 538–52.Google Scholar
11 Other recent oral histories include Bletter, Diana, The Invisible Thread: A Portrait of Jewish American Women (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989)Google Scholar; Cowan, Neil M. and Cowan, Ruth Schwartz, Our Parents' Lives: The Americanization of Eastern European Jews (New York: Basic Books, 1989)Google Scholar; Leviatin, David, Followers of the Trail: Jewish Working-Class Radicals in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
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13 Recent biographical studies have discerned the operation of similar processes in Yezierska's personal relationships. See Henriksen, Louise Levitas (with assistance from Jo Ann Boydston), Anzia Yezierska: A Writer's Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Dearborn, Mary V., Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey (New York: Free Press, 1988).Google Scholar See also Burstein, Janet, “Jewish-American Women's Literature,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, 8 (1989), 9–25Google Scholar, for a persuasive alternative reading of the novel that sees the protagonist finally stepping into her mother's shadow.
14 The central primary texts are Antin, Mary, The Promised Land (1912; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Stern, Elizabeth G., My Mother and I (New York: Macmillan, 1917)Google Scholar; (as Leah Morton) I Am a Woman and a Jew (1926; rpt. New York: Wiener, 1986)Google Scholar; Cohen, Rose, Out of the Shadow (1918; rpt. New York: Ozer, 1971)Google Scholar; Ganz, Marie (in collaboration with Nat J. Ferber), Rebels: Into Anarchy and Out Again (1919; rpt. Millwood: Kraus, 1976)Google Scholar; Moore, Bertha Pearl (as Bertha Pearl), Sarah and her Daughter (New York: Seltzer, 1920).Google Scholar Antin is discussed in all the major studies; on Stern see Drucker, Sally Ann, “Autobiographies in English by Immigrant Jewish Women,” American Jewish History, 79 (1989), 55–71Google Scholar (which also briefly looks at Cohen); Ellen M. Umansky, Introduction, in Stern, I Am a Woman and a Jew, v–xviGoogle Scholar; Buelens, Gert, “Representing the Jewish Immigrant Experience,” in Singh, Amritjit and Skerrett, Joseph T., eds., The Uses of Memory in Multi-Ethnic Literature (forthcoming)Google Scholar; there are brief remarks on Stern, Cohen and Ganz in Kurt Dittmar, “Jüdische Gettoliteratur: Die Lower East Side, 1890–1924,” in Ostendorf, Berndt, ed., Amerikanische Gettoliteratur: Zur Literatur ethnischer, marginaler und unterdrückter Gruppen (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), 74–76Google Scholar; see also Karmel, Rose Yalow, Aggravating the Conscience: Jewish–American Literary Mothers in the Promised Land (New York: Peter Lang, 1988).Google Scholar
15 The City (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1977)Google Scholar; “Immigrant Ghetto Fiction, 1885–1918: An Annotated Bibliography,” American Literary Realism, 6 (1973), 169–95Google Scholar; some earlier dissertations and articles restrict themselves to the more obvious authors, such as Cahan.
16 Assimilation and Dissimilation: Erscheinungsformen der Marginalitätsthematik bei jüdisch– amerikanischen Erzählern, 1900–1970 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang Verlag, 1978)Google Scholar; “Jüdische Gettoliteratur,” 50–112.Google Scholar
17 Berlin, William S., On the Edge of Politics: The Roots of Jewish Political Thought in America (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978).Google Scholar
18 Creative Awakening (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987)Google Scholar; The Image of the Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1974).Google Scholar
19 Although some works remain virtually unknown, such as Waldman, Milton, The Disinherited (New York: Longmans, 1929)Google Scholar and Worth, Marc (pseud.), Walls of Fire (New York: Cosmopolitan, 1925)Google Scholar; other writers are persistently mislabelled as Jewish, for instance Albert Edwards (pseud. of Arthur Bullard).
20 Fried, Lewis et al. , eds., Handbook of American–Jewish Literature: An Analytical Guide to Topics, Themes, and Sources (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Walden, Daniel, ed., Twentieth-Century American–Jewish Fiction Writers (Dictionary of Literary Biography 28, Detroit: Gale, 1984)Google Scholar deals more selectively with the immigrant period.
21 Fischel, Jack and Pinsker, Sanford, eds., Encyclopedia of Jewish–American History and Culture (2 vols.) (New York: Garland Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar; Pinsker, Sanford, Jewish-American Fiction, 1917–1987 (Boston: G. K. Hall, forthcoming).Google Scholar
22 Klein, Marcus, Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Sollors, Werner, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Boelhower, William, Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature (Venice, 1984; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; see also Sollors, , “Nine Suggestions for Historians of American Ethnic Literature,” MELUS, 11 (1984), 95–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “A Critique of Pure Pluralism,” in Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 250–79Google Scholar; Sollors, , ed., The Invention of Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Boelhower, , “The Brave New World of Immigrant Autobiography,” MELUS, 9 (1982), 5–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “The Fabulae Mundorum of Jewish–American Autobiography,” In Their Own Words, 1 (1983), 29–45Google Scholar; “Hic Sunt Pantherae: Race, Ethnography and Modern American Literature,” in Boelhower, , ed., The Future of American Modernism: Ethnic Writing Between the Wars (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
23 “Avant-Garde Ethnics,” in Boelhower, ed., 22, 23.Google Scholar
24 “Ethnicity, Minority, and Power: Challenges to (American) Literary Historiography,” in Boelhower, ed., 54.Google Scholar See also in the same collection: Dickstein, Morris, “The Tenement and the World: Visions of Immigrant Life,” 62–93Google Scholar, and Rosenthal, Regine, “The Cultural Work of American Jewish Immigrant Autobiographies,” 152–75.Google Scholar
25 Conference of the Netherlands American Studies Association, 5–7 June 1991; see the contributions by Roger Daniels, Günter Lenz, Arnold Krupat, Mario Maffi, Berndt Ostendorf, Werner Sollors, and others, in Hans Bak, ed., Multiculturalism and the Canon of American Culture (forthcoming).
26 See Krupat, Arnold, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming).Google Scholar
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