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A lthough thirty-four years separate the publication dates of Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925) and Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), and though significant historical events and social changes mark those years and the approximately three decades intervening between the plots of the two novels, they exhibit perhaps the most striking parallels of the three pairs discussed in this study. Both delineate immigrant communities in their early stages. Bread Givers describes a time span of about twenty years, presumably—because of the autobiographical nature of her work—from the 1890s to sometime before the 1910s, which roughly parallels Yezierska’s own life history (Kessler Harris vii–ix). This period also marks the high point of Eastern European Jewish immigration, and the novel illustrates the economic and social hardships of that time. Some of the Jewish immigrants who lived in dire poverty in the early part of the twentieth century have risen in the world and appear as employers of Barbadian immigrants in Marshall’s novel, which chronicles the time from 1939 to about 1947.1 While Hitler is referred to as “the worse person in the world” (184) and as “the devil-incarnate” (69) for his crimes against the Jews, there is also a sense that this does not really concern the Barbadian community, which sees World War II as “these white people getting on too bad” (69). As the Barbadians exist on the margins of American society, World War II itself is relegated to the margins of the plot as a “white man’s war.”The novel’s focus remains on the Barbadian American context for which the war has mostly economic consequences, as it provides work in the defense industry. The novel’s emphasis on community internal dynamics and on the friction between Barbadian America and the dominant white society offers much ground of comparison to Bread Givers. Ironically, though, Marshall’s novel reflects the degree to which Yezierska’s immigrants have become Chapter THREE Brown Girl, Brownstones and Bread Givers: Reconciling Ethnicity and Individualism assimilated and moved up the social ladder: the Jewish employers or classmates featured in the novel are not distinguishable from the larger white world. Silla groans about having to clean the floors of Jewish homes, Selina appears to have a Jewish friend (Rachel), and some Barbadians see Jewish success as a model for their own aspirations; but the immigrant character of Jewish Americans appears to be a thing of the past in Brown Girl, Brownstones. What makes for the eminent compatibility of both novels is not to be found in any sociohistorical similarities, though there are some, given the recent immigration of both novels’ ethnic communities, but in their conceptualization of ethnicity. In both novels, the protagonists struggle with Old World roots (which are already New World in Marshall’s case) that are closer than in any of the previous novels. Thus, Brown Girl attempts a definition of ethnicity somewhere between “Barbadian,” “African American,” and “American,” while Bread Givers negotiates “Old World Jewishness,” “New World Jewishness,” and “Americanness.” In both novels, the Americanness of the parent generation is recent and tenuous and, in part as a result, the protagonists, to some extent, struggle towards it, so that “Americanness” does not only or predominantly appear in the white materialist guise of the other four novels, serving as a threat against which an ethnic idealism has to maintain itself. However, both novels also reflect a dialogue with ethnic nationalism, though a more antagonistic one than the previously discussed texts. Ultimately, it is again the interplay between individualism and communalism , between idealism and materialism, and between ethnicity and mainstream that allows for a comparison, and this interplay, as I have shown and will discuss in greater detail in the concluding chapter , is in part endemic to the nationalist project and also a result of the tension between Bildungsroman and nationalism. Both novels are about ethnic worlds which have a specific historical location, highlighted much more in Brown Girl, Brownstones than in Bread Givers, but which are also isolated to an extent from the outside world, though they are subject to its dynamics. This isolation reflects the immigrant status of both communities. In both novels, depictions of ethnic customs abound and create a world different from the “mainstream.” This difference is primarily marked by language. Direct speech is often rendered in the distinctive vernacular (rendered in English, though, in Bread Givers) of the Barbadian or...

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