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When Correspondence Wanes While the subject of personal correspondence is pervaded by practical and theoretical difficulties, aspects of the exchange of letters that are especially difficult to conceptualize are the subjects of this chapter : the waning and termination of an exchange of letters between individuals and, relatedly, the fate of their letters thereafter. These are matters that have been almost wholly neglected in the near-century of scholarly attention, from Thomas and Znaniecki to the present, given to the correspondence of immigrants with their homelands. The problems involved are wide-ranging, from understanding who undertakes the writing of letters, and why they do so and then cease doing so, to analyzing how letters are saved and come to interface with both popular conceptions of the past and ultimately even the formal discourses of academic History. They frequently appear, as do so many other conceptual problems in the interpretation of correspondence, as puzzles in which gaps and absences have to be explained. Three of the principal issues that must be considered make this clear. First, collections of archived letter-series are artifacts of an obscure and highly individualized process of saving, collection, and donation. We seldom know how or why these collections were brought together, and to this extent we cannot know how complete they are. Who brought the letter-series together for donation? What were their motives in doing so? What editorial prerogatives might they have exercised? Second, while in some cases it is clear why a correspondence ends—because, for example, of the death of one of the parties, or because families are reunited and no longer have to depend on letters for communication— in most cases the circumstances are obscure, and ultimately seem unknowable . Do the correspondents actually stop writing, or have later letters been lost, or perhaps purposely culled to destroy the embarrassing record of, for example, some conflict that alienated individuals and irreparably divided families and friends? Third, the end of a particular 6 201 correspondence does not necessarily mark the end of letter-writing itself , for epistolary careers might well have continued with other correspondents . These letters might have become lost, been retained in private hands, or even archived in some location unknown to this researcher. Some correspondences may disappear, but obviously not so necessarily the individuals, as letter-writers, who had been engaged in them. The gaps in our understandings of such matters heighten the emotional burdens of having to confront the close of a letter-series, when the reader has grown fond of, or at least interested in the fate of, the parties involved. For historians, the pathos of reading collections of letters that end suddenly and inconclusively is the realization of being cut off irretrievably from the possibility of knowing, and continuing to share, the relationship that forms the contextual narrative of a correspondence . Just as sad in such collections is the inexplicable loss of the individuals who often have assumed such vividness and vitality through their personal writings. Those collections that end because of death have their own pathos, but it is a sorrow that comes of being reminded once again that human life is ultimately finite and tragic. The known and the unknown in the lives of the letter-writers themselves hardly exhaust the puzzle that is suggested by the waning and termination of a correspondence and the fate of the letters it generated. What of the relation of the next generation to the cycle of correspondence ? One wonders why it is that there are so very few cases in which the children or related family of the next generation took over the obligations of and opportunities for letter-writing to aunts and uncles and others of their parents’ generation. One wonders, too, why there are even fewer traces of letter exchanges among members of that next generation —among the immigrants’ children and their cousins, across the ocean. To pose these questions is ultimately to pose questions about the experiential and cultural limits of access, and about the personal desire to gain access, to their parents’ worlds of the immigrants’ children. Whether born in Europe and emigrated as infants or youngsters (the socalled “1.5 generation”) or born in North America, they were simultaneously and progressively immersed in New World realities and alien to the world of the previous generation. It is also to pose questions about the consciousness of family history and of History as the formal, scholarly quest to create knowledge of the past, that...

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