Unfinalized Moments: Essays in the Development of Contemporary Jewish American Fiction

Jewish American Fiction on the Border: Culture Confrontations, Double Consciousness, and Hybridity in the Work of Pearl Abraham

187 Jewish American Fiction on the Border: Culture Confrontations, Double Consciousness, and Hybridity in the Work of Pearl Abraham Bart Lievens What then is the American, this new man? —J. Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer I am visible—see this Indian face—yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t, we haven’t. —Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza Borders. To connect and to divide. Not a frontier, its deadly imagination of a line between the savages and the civilized. Not exodus, with its mirage of a promisedland to end the wandering, and not simply exile or diaspora, with its involuntary sense of never-never-home. But borders. A part yet apart, home and not-home, neither “here” nor “there” . . . Borders on the edge and on the inside. —Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, “On the Borders between U.S. Studies and Postcolonial Theory” From the concept of the melting pot to contemporary postcolonial and postethnic theories: the complexity of ethnic diversity and the negotiation between the notions of consent and descent in American society have preoccupied critics and scholars almost from the very inception of the New World itself. A long history of 188 bart lIevenS immigration has “kept in flux our understandings of assimilation and resistance, assent and dissent, descent and consent.”1 In 1782, the French-American writer J. Hector St-John de Crèvecoeur stated that “he is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater.”2 The idea of shedding one’s past history and former identity has been incorporated in later theories about ethnicity as well. In 1908, Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting-Pot reflected a “perceived need to melt away differences in order to ‘naturalize’ the new immigrants.”3 This process would eventually lead to a “new” Americanized identity. Later on, Horace Kallen, in his article “Democracy versus the Melting Pot” (1915), recognized that an immigrant could not readily reject his past. His famous phrase, “whatever else [the immigrant] changes, he cannot change his grandfather,”4 mirrors the central concern in the theory of cultural pluralism. In this context, ethnic difference was tolerated (but only in the private sphere). Along the same line, Randolph Bourne advocated a “Trans-National America” (1916), emphasizing the impact of and the interaction between different nationalities and ethnicities. The citizens of American were “cosmopolitan dual citizens”5 ; the hyphenated American was to be cherished, not denied. However, cultural pluralism still underscored the Anglo-Saxon facet of the American identity. In contrast, multiculturalism “challenges the priority of this monolithic identity in American history, highlighting racial as well as ethnic diversity and claiming public resources on behalf of these groups.”6 Multiculturalism , a movement that has evolved from the civil rights movements in the 1960s, can be seen in the light “of a larger transition from species to ethnos in the recent intellectual history of the United States.”7 Moving beyond multiculturalism , David Hollinger introduced the concept of postethnicity, which “favors voluntary over involuntary affiliations, balances an appreciation for communities of descent with a determination to make room for new communities, and promotes solidarities of wide scope that incorporate people with different ethnic and racial backgrounds.”8 As these various theories show, and as Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt point out, the “search for a single ‘origin’ of the ‘American self’ has become considerably problematic.”9 Defining the “American character” along monocultural lines is viewed with skepticism and suspicion. The concepts of ethnicity and descent continue to play a significant role. Analysts recognize that ethnic minorities maintain and honor their heritage and tradition, “even beyond the third and fourth generation.”10 In 1987, almost exactly two centuries after de Crèvecoeur’s account, a new and bold statement was made by Chicana writer and cultural critic Gloria Anzaldua. In her book Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (1987), she confidently asserts her ethnic identity and cultural consciousness. Not only is she very much aware of her ethnic inheritance, she also emphasizes the plurality of her roots (white Anglo-Saxon, Mexican, and...