Longings and Renunciations: Attitudes Towards Intermarriage in Early Twentieth Century Jewish American Novels

For Jewish American authors at the beginning of the twentieth century, intermarriage represented all of the potential joys and dangers of complete entrance into American culture. With the cultural restrictions of the Old World substantially removed from an immigrant's romantic life, intermarriage seemed to many to be the ultimate expression of liberation from an antiquated tradition, as well as from past oppression. Despite the attraction of this idea, though, the most thoughtful Jewish writers of this period looked on intermarriage with considerable ambivalence, and often portrayed their characters as ultimately rejecting the benefits of complete assimilation in favor of continued identification with their ethnic heritage. Often they created compromise figures who could balance an interest in living a modern life with a continued allegiance to Jewish identity.

In Jewish novels, attitudes towards intermarriage are, predictably enough, representative of attitudes towards assimilation in general. And the manner in which characters confront intermarriage in novels during the first half of the century was often the most explicit way an author could communicate his or her own vision of life as a Jew in America. For those who advocated a complete assimilation into mainstream American culture, intermarriage functioned as the symbolic fulfillment of all of America's promise of equality. Indeed, even in the very assertion of the primacy of romance as a discernible goal, these writers implied that a new set of values and goals defined Jewish life in modern America: no more matchmakers or arranged marriages as in the Old World. Soon, though, Jewish writers of fiction found fault with the vision which a romantic union between "Jew" and "American" seemed to promise. As their attitudes towards assimilation itself became more complex, Jewish writers of fiction similarly found problems with the ideal of intermarriage which had been popular only a few short years before. Characters in the novels of Anzia Yezierska, Edna Ferber, Sidney Nyburg, and Ludwig Lewisohn experiment with cross-cultural romance, but ultimately find that their lasting comfort and happiness depends on another member of their ethnic group who shares their memories, experiences, and challenges.

Some of the first Jewish American writers of the twentieth century advocated a complete assimilation into American ways. These authors advocated as thorough an abandonment of Jewish identity as possible for the purpose of assimilating into American life. Intermarriage was seen as a crucial step in the fulfillment of the American dream.

One might note in this context the writer Henry Harland who, though not Jewish himself, wrote some of the first popular novels about Jewish immigrant characters, in particular Mrs. Peixada (1886) and The Yoke of the Thorah (1887). Harland strongly advocated the marriage of Jews and non-Jews as a solution for the difficulties of immigration. As Sol Liptzin has observed, "Harland had hoped that among liberal-minded Jews intermarriage would be accepted as a matter of personal choice." ¹ Critical resistance to some of these ideas in the Jewish press eventually led Harland to give up on Jewish subject matter, but his precedent indicates some of the prevailing ideas which some early Jewish novelists took to heart. Early Progressive scholars and representatives of immigrant groups believed that a rapid integration into mainstream American life would be best for America as a whole, as well as for the immigrant groups themselves, and intermarriage was seen as the culmination of these efforts. ² Intermarriage would not only help make Americans of the immigrants, but would also bring renewed dynamism to the established population. Assimilation was thus not only good for the Jews, but for the good of America.

Mary Antin's well-known autobiographical novel, The Promised Land, published in 1912, is the best-known work which supports this stance. In the closing sentences of The Promised Land, when Antin writes, "And I am the youngest of America's children, and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage," the heritage to which...