Growing Up Between Two Worlds

The children of immigrants who came to the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Melissa R. Klapper asserts, bore "the twin burdens of living as symbols and as individuals" (p. 179). As symbols, immigrant children embodied nativists' fears of race suicide, economic competition, and national degeneration; Progressive reformers' hopes for social progress and social order; and immigrant parents' expectations for the survival and success of the family and ethnic community. As individual "real people," immigrant children experienced the transformative forces of immigration, industrialization, and urbanization at the turn of the twentieth century (p. 182). They also actively participated in the economic, social, and cultural lives of their families and urban and rural communities, thereby playing a vital role in forging the United States into a modern nation. Klapper's new book deftly examines both of these dimensions of the lives of turn-of-the-century immigrant children. No history of the modernizing of America is complete, she convincingly argues, without an exploration of the ways in which immigrant children contributed to the larger processes of social change unfolding all around them.

Close to twenty-five million immigrants came to the United States between 1880 and 1925, as part of one of the largest and most consequential movements of peoples across the globe in world history. Klapper is interested in the child migrants who were among that number, as well as those who were born in the United States to immigrant parents. Her first book, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (2005), offered an original and in-depth look at the experiences with cultural persistence and adaptation of one group of immigrant children. In her more recent work, Klapper broadens her scope, comparing and synthesizing the experiences of children from the range of locations from which immigrants at the turn of the century embarked on their journeys—eastern and southern Europe, Mexico, Canada, and East Asia. The literature on the history of turn-of-the-century immigration to the United States, as well as of specific ethnic groups, is voluminous, as Klapper acknowledges in her bibliographic essay. Previous scholars have certainly recognized that children were part of this story, but Klapper is among the first to take these "small strangers" as her primary concern. In doing so, she builds on and contributes to the approach of scholars working in the burgeoning field of the history of children and childhood, whose goals are to listen to children's voices and recover their experiences, as well as to analyze how those voices and experiences have served as forces of historical change.

Klapper succeeds terrifically at achieving a "balanced approach [that] explores and appreciates both similarity and difference in immigrant children's lives" (p. 179). Drawing on a wide range of memoirs and oral history interview collections, she manages to highlight the particular experiences of growing up among specific groups of immigrant children, while weaving these together into a shared story in which immigrant children from diverse backgrounds are connected by such common themes as discrimination, education, and gender. Klapper astutely notes that some of the patterns in the growing up experiences that she discovers reverberated beyond the immigrant, ethnic, and working-class communities that are her main focus. Children from across the social spectrum in the turn-of-the-century United States increasingly found their lives influenced by the state, largely through the expansion of public schooling, and by the rise of mass consumer culture. Regardless of their ethnic or class backgrounds, many children were compelled to navigate between the influences of tradition and modernity, and they sometimes clashed with their parents as they did so, a likelihood that increased as they grew older. Indeed, the struggles young immigrants faced in transitioning from one world to another, coping with conflicts over identity, and disputing with an older generation over assertions of youthful independence were at least partly analogous to the challenges characterizing the stage of...