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“Go, Make Yourself for a Person”: Urbanity and the Construction of an American Identity in the Novels of Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Nancy Von Rosk
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Extract

Recalling His Early Days in New York, Abraham Cahan declared that he “felt strongly drawn to the life of the city.” “My heart,” he wrote, “beat to its rhythm” (Marovitz, 17). Anzia Yezierska also remembers New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century with affection in her autobiographical novel, Bread Givers. When her heroine Sarah Smolinsky is away from Hester Street, she longs for “the crowds sweeping you on like waves of a beating sea. The drive and thrill of doing things faster and faster” (129). For both of these Jewish immigrant writers, the spectacle of New York City embodied hope, liberation, and vitality, yet as they explore the immigrant's exhilarating and exasperating adaptation to urban life in America, they highlight the keen sense of loss on becoming American, on becoming modern. In their vivid depictions of late-19th-century New York life, both Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Yezier-ska's Bread Givers (1925) detail in an especially dramatic fashion a story that had not been explored before in America's urban novel: the Eastern European Jewish immigrant's adaptation to America's consumer culture. Highlighting the role of mass-produced goods and new forms of leisure in constructing a modern, middle-class American identity, both novels examine the tensions and contradictions of immigrant life as a more communal culture of scarcity gives way to an individually oriented culture of material abundance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 26 , October 2001 , pp. 295 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2001

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References

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