American Narratives: Multiethnic Writing in the Age of Realism

2. Mary Antin and Assimilation

Mary Antin and Assimilation Since the publication of her autobiography The Promised Land in 92, Mary Antin has been both commended and disparaged for her adamant belief in Americanization. However, her book contains a much more complex depiction of the process than critics have assumed . While pro-American rhetoric and Antin’s joy in regard to her acculturation dominate the book’s tone, Antin also carefully delineates her reasons for transforming herself into a U.S. citizen, and she includes some of the pressures and difficulties she experienced in her new country along her path to citizenship. Some contemporary scholars have rejected assimilationist texts because they express currently unpopular ideas such as allegiance to the dominant culture and rejection of one’s traditional heritage, but this wholesale dismissal overlooks the very real allure of American citizenship that was experienced by many immigrants . The Promised Land is an important work of realism because it reveals the social forces behind the powerful pull of assimilation while focusing on the individual as the locus of cultural transformation. And even though Antin declares herself a completely acculturated citizen, her residual ties to her community and Jewish culture reflect a more accurate account of how integration often works. To decry the subject of assimilation in American literature as objectionable is to misunderstand one of the prevailing realities of immigrant life in America. The Promised Land portrays the tension of negotiating a path to citizenship in a society that often gave immigrants conflicting signals, and Antin’s positive chapter two 30 tone comes from her pride in having come through this process to gain success in her adopted country. From 890 to 95, over 0 million immigrants from southern and eastern Europe came to the United States; about one-third of them were Jewish. Most came because America seemed to offer more opportunity and freedom than was available to them in their native countries. In 88 Czar Alexander of Russia severely restricted the lives of Jewish citizens by levying discriminatory taxes, limiting their access to education, and restricting where they could live and the types of jobs they could take. The May Laws of 882 drove Jews from the countryside and, in 89, from Moscow and other Russian cities. In 88 government-authorized pogroms began against Jewish settlements throughout the Pale. Jews in Austria-Hungary and Romania were not victims of the same type of organized violence as their Russian counterparts, but they were subjected to deep-rooted anti-Semitism and similar restrictions on their livelihood. These conditions prompted the mass migration of eastern European Jews, who started to come to America in great numbers in the summer of 88. Most of these immigrants settled in the big cities in the northeastern United States, creating ethnic enclaves and finding work in factories, doing piecework for the garment industries, or selling goods and services in their neighborhoods. In 905, after the failure of the first Russian Revolution, an increasing number of political activists, professionals, and intellectuals also began to arrive in the States. Some old-stock Americans were unsettled by this influx of “new immigrants ,” both because of their great numbers and because they represented cultures unfamiliar to American society. Nativist attitudes began being expressed in the press, and in 894 Henry Cabot Lodge and other young Boston Brahmins founded the Immigration Restriction League. This small but socially influential group argued that America should retain the white, Anglo-Protestant characteristics of its Revolutionary forebears, that the descendants of “real” Americans were losing their majority in the country due to immigration, and that the new arrivals (Italians, Jews, and Slavs) were mentally, socially, and culturally inferior and would therefore lead to the corruption of the nation.1 Though Jewish immigrants were not welcomed by many Americans, some took up their cause and attempted to ease their transition into Mary Antin and Assimilation 3 32 American Narratives the new culture. Jewish American descendants of an earlier migration from Germany, who were more established in American society, set up associations to tend to the needs of the wave of Russian Jews. They created organizations that offered free medical care, relief services, and classes to teach English and prepare immigrants for citizenship. These established Jewish Americans were working both to give much-needed aid to the newcomers and also to Americanize them so that others in society would not develop...