The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Jewish Exile Literature

Questions of Identity: The New World of the Immigrant Writer

Questions of Identity The New World of the Immigrant Writer ! Morris Dickstein When I was growing up in the 1950s there was no such thing as immigrant literature, though brilliant émigré intellectuals like Hannah Arendt played an important part in the cultural debates of the time. We certainly didn’t know that we were living through the golden age of Jewish American writing, but these works could hardly be called immigrant writing, as immigration had been closed off at least thirty years earlier. Some of the best writers of that period, such as Bellow and Malamud or Ellison and Baldwin, were grappling with their own ethnic identity in relation to the wider forces of American life, but the travail of previous generations , with its experience of slavery, pogroms, and the Holocaust, remained in the distant background. We knew little or nothing of the writers who had dealt directly with the migration of Jews earlier in the century. Once-famous authors like Abraham Cahan , Anzia Yezierska, Mary Antin, Michael Gold, and Henry Roth were either unfairly forgotten (as in Roth’s case) or dismissed as crude naturalists, unsophisticated in literary technique, whose work was merely of historical interest. The postwar world was unusually homogeneous, and yet New York, at least, still had large numbers of immigrants: Puerto Ricans for whom there was no Questions of Identity | 111 immigrant quota, German refugees or survivors who managed to get out before or after the war, and even Eastern Europeans such as my older aunts and uncles, who had arrived decades earlier, whose country was still Yiddish and whose folkways belonged to the rural towns of Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine. These quaint, old-world characters, strong in personality yet hobbled by immigrant fears, did figure in the works of writers who were young in the 1950s. But other subjects interested them more than the ancient history of immigration and acculturation . Some focused on the war we had just fought, not to rescue the Jews but to save the country, ultimately ensuring its postwar power and prosperity. Other writers like Philip Roth found their subjects in the material success of second-generation Jews or in the drama of growing up inside the Jewish family. Their characters were busy trying to integrate into a nation that, despite the horrors of the Holocaust, still harbored strong prejudices against Jews. Or they portrayed Jews as exemplary victims or dark symbols of man’s inhumanity to man, or delved into problems of assimilation and the barriers to full acceptance, which also spoke to their own needs as writers—not so much to live out the American dream as to gain a foothold in American literature. Where their predecessors had been written into the story as ethnic subtexts, they themselves demanded recognition as American writers, very much the way ordinary Jews struggled for inclusion as full-fledged Americans. Yet when immigrants did appear in their work, as in the tragicomic stories of Bernard Malamud, they were neither social beings defined by their historical community nor fully individualized characters pursuing a personal destiny. In tune with the existential mood of the moment, they were transformed into living metaphors, bearing the whole form of the human condition. Books including Malamud’s The Assistant and The Magic Barrel or Bellow’s The Victim and Seize the Day told grim, sometimes tormented stories. We hardly understood how much their ambi- 112 | Morris Dickstein ance was inflected by modernism, which equated dark with serious , pessimism with integrity, or by the Holocaust, which went largely unmentioned but seeped into every line, or by their own family histories, which were right up front in the autobiographical work of earlier Jewish writers but camouflaged in Malamud’s and Bellow’s more finely crafted tales. Later I was surprised at how autobiographical Malamud’s work proved to be, since he set great store by his privacy and could be highly critical of confessional writing for its defects of craft or imagination.1 Within two decades after the war, America’s relation to the world would shift again. Immigration laws were relaxed and the United States gradually reopened its borders, partly for reasons of justice—our country had long been a place of refuge—but also out of national need. The spirit of detente had eroded the barriers of the Cold War and we became more actively concerned about people imprisoned in totalitarian states. American Jews...