Special Sorrows: The Diasporic Imagination of Irish, Polish, and Jewish Immigrants in the United States (review)

The course of immigration historiography over time has been one of ever-growing expansion and sophistication. The earliest view was generally optimistic stressing a one-way movement to America. This was followed by the more sober Handlinesque picture of a pathological immigrant assimilation which in turn was followed by the idea of a certain cultural persistence and toughness. Most recently scholars like Thistlethwaite, Nugent, and others have depicted the migration as an international and global phenomenon, viewing the movement as a dispersion to many lands, a diaspora.

Matthew Josephson follows this latest trend of placing migration in a world context. His work, Special Sorrows, highlights the importance of the national homeland in the minds of newcomers and thereby makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of American immigrant adjustment. While this perspective from the Old World is not totally new, Kerby Miller, for example, had already referred to the Irish emigrant mentality as “exile” and Donald Pienkos did much the same for Polish Americans, Josephson’s approach is an advance and distinctive for its comparativity. He draws upon certain events taking place in the United States showing how three immigrant groups, the Irish, Poles, and East European Jews continually viewed those happenings through their own nationalistic prisms.

Josephson’s major methodological achievement in this reviewer’s estimation is his use of valuable primary materials for all three groups. For a field that is structured largely on single group histories, his comparative approach and his linguistic feat are admirable. As a result the reader comes away with the surprising insight that ethnic nationalism was important well beyond the traditional patriotic societies; it was certainly on the minds of the less committed bodies, the pious Polish Roman Catholics and Orthodox Jews. The work also will intrigue its audience from its employing the latest feminist or gender theory on nationalism.

In the most imaginative section of the study Josephson shows how the groups took positions both pro and con on imperialism, specifically the Filippine and Cuban issues in the ’90’s, by referring to their own situation under imperial oppression, the British and East European empires. Of course since the proponents of American imperialism justified their cause in part on Anglo-Saxon superiority, the Irish spokesmen here were able to rally and broaden their group’s opposition to the issue.

While the work does show the salience of ethnic nationalism more than previously imagined, it omitted an important related matter that should have been addressed, the consciousness of the rank and file. Its focus rests too heavily in this reviewer’s judgment on the statements and writings of intellectual and social leaders. Admittedly the Irish masses here and abroad did possess a strong ethnic and national consciousness. But the situation is not that clear for Poles and East European Jews. The work then really ignores the level of consciousness for these two groups in Europe. The reader for example gets no sense of Jewish or Polish identity before they arrived on these shores. Josephson does show the influence and vigor of national awareness among the elite in America, but that sense of localism and regionalism held by the lower classes, those felt sentiments about the shtetl, okolica or osada, also intensified here. What role did those feelings have on ethnic nationalization? In general the reader remains uncertain just how pervasive nationalism was among the masses of Polish and Jewish immigrants.

Another obvious weakness concerns the work’s rather difficult presentation. The writing is full of weak, bland verbs and innumerable qualifying adjectives. In addition the author’s penchant for the passive tense frequently obscures his meaning. A typical example follows in the author’s discussion of the immigrants’ position on imperialism (p. 184):

As [one] writer’s bitter reference to Anglo-Saxondom suggests, the overall map of immigrant sympathies was complicated by a late-nineteenth century racial taxonomy which, in...