THE
IMMIGRANT EXPERIENCE
In
a nation of immigrants, picking ten books about the immigrant
experience is no easy task. One could plausibly argue that any
book about post-Columbian America concerns the immigrant experience.
Therefore
I established a few basic guidelines in order to make the task
a little more feasible. Some of these, I think, rest on pretty
solid ground. I have not, for instance, included any books on
slavery. While slaves were certainly immigrants of a sort, their
brutal and coerced immigration is so different from other immigrant
narratives that I feel their stories deserve their own category,
or that they should be included under a collection of works on
the African-American experience.
Other
delineations were more subjective. I have not included any accounts
of the Plymouth Plantation or Jamestown or the Quaker colony in
Pennsylvania, among others. I think that all of them would be
better off in a separate, “colonial America” category.
These early colonists were the first immigrants, of course, but
their experiences were also fundamentally different from those
who came after them—being stories of conquest and expansion,
rather than those of adaptation and assimilation.
I
have, as well, largely slighted writing about most of the newest
immigrants, which means mostly Asian and Hispanic Americans. This
is not meant to imply any disrespect or indifference toward the
peoples or the literature in question. Rather, it is due to the
fact that these stories are so new that it is not yet possible
to get any real historical perspective on them. I apologize for
any disappointment this may cause, but it is a situation that
can easily be rectified a few years down the road. It is my hope
that here in America, we will always have to revise the immigrant
story.
This
also leads us to another problem with selecting any ten best books
about the immigrant experience. What one prefers in immigrant
books usually depend on what immigrants one wants to read about;
very little has been written on “immigrants” in general.
I am interested in all immigrant groups myself, but I must admit
that my own professional efforts have per force centered disproportionately
around two peoples, namely, Jewish and Irish Americans. I apologize
as well for any partiality that this experience may reflect.
My
other professional prejudice is toward fiction. Of course, in
immigrant literature the line between fiction and nonfiction is
especially blurred. Memoirs are frequently disguised as novels—or
embellished with novelistic touches. And “purely”
fictitious works are often able to get closer to the truth of
the immigrant experience than some of the more plodding, academic
nonfiction on the subject.
With
all these caveats in mind, my selections are as follows:
How the Other Half Lives, by Jacob Riis.
No top ten list of immigrant books would be complete without it.
How the Other Half Lives is that rare book which not
only recorded history but changed it. It is also an exception
in the genre in that it is not about any one immigrant group,
but about how all the different nations that crowded
into lower Manhattan in the late nineteenth century lived and
worked.
It
is, as well, America’s first great multi-media work. Jacob
Riis was trained as a journalist, and his understated prose and
relentless statistics make an irresistible case for social reform.
But it is his pictures that really strike at the heart. He was
an amateur photographer, and more than once came close to setting
his subjects’ homes on fire with the primitive flash technology
their cave-like, tenement interiors required. But what images
he produced! Here is the teenaged girl pausing in a Ludlow Street
sweatshop, smiling through a pair of scissors held up to her mouth.
Here is a man celebrating the Sabbath in his tenement basement,
looking utterly exhausted. Here is a twelve-year-old string puller,
his hollowed eyes and emaciated face showing what has already
been a lifetime of work.
Riis
would become an intimate of Teddy Roosevelt’s, and his book
would help spur the progressive movement, providing it with a
devastating testament of human degradation. How the Other
Half Lives is not free of some of the most pernicious stereotypes
of the day (“the Chinaman…is by nature as clean as
the cat, which he resembles in his traits of cruel cunning and
savage fury when aroused”; “Thrift is the watchword
of Jewtown, as of its people the world over.”), but he at
least took notice of many neglected ethnic groups, including African
Americans and American Indians. His book is, all in all, indispensable.
Five
Points, by Tyler Anbinder, is also about a number
of different immigrant groups, though by focusing on the old Five
Points neighborhood of New York it ends up concentrating by necessity
on the first wave of Irish immigrants, in the period before and
just after the Civil War. Five Points is an academic
work, published just last year, but it is lively and well-told—and
blessedly free of Riis’s prejudices. Anbinder starts every
section with a colorful story or biography, and proceeds from
there to paint a sweeping portrait of one aspect or another of
immigrant slum life—in the decades before Riis’s time.
Luc
Sante’s Low Life makes up a third
in this trilogy of lower Manhattan, the red-hot center of the
American immigrant experience. His book is not, per se, about
immigrants so much as it is about the underside of urban culture
in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. But he ends up
writing so much about immigrants—and writing so beautifully—that
I have included it here. Low Life is a more sweeping,
idiosyncratic book than either Five Points or How
the Other Half Lives, but as such it provides a wonderful
overview of working-class, immigrant life.
Easily
the richest trove of immigrant writing is that by and about American
Jews, and no book in this genre quite compares to The
Rise of David Levinsky, by Abraham Cahan. Immigrating
from Lithuania at 22 as a wanted revolutionary, Cahan would serve
for over fifty years as the imperious editor of that great engine
of assimilation, the Yiddish-language newspaper, The Forward—a
daily with a circulation of over 200,000 during its heyday in
the 1920s. It was also a vocation that may have cost Cahan a place
in the very first rank of American letters. Levinsky
is a dark and superbly written novel, one that spells out the
cost of immigrant success in the material rise and spiritual descent
of a young man. I chose it over Cahan’s fine novellas, Yekel
and The Imported Bridegroom, only because it is a more
complete work.
Charles
Reznikoff’s By the Waters of Manhattan
is a melancholy, immigrant “success” story in the
same vein, beautifully crafted. I selected it, only after much
agonizing, over Michael Gold’s turbulent memoir-disguised-as-a-novel,
Jews Without Money, Henry Roth’s coming-of-age
novel Call It Sleep, and Samuel Ornitz’s Allrightnik’s
Row (Haunch, Paunch, and Jowl).
The
passionate heart of Jewish immigrant writing, though, belongs
to Anzia Yezierska, whose own tragic, rags-to-riches-to-rags story
would make an epic in itself. I selected her memoir, Red
Ribbon on a White Horse, over her generally autobiographical
story collections, The Bread Givers, How I Found America,
and Hungry Hearts—though all are worth reading
for the story of a woman trying to make her way not only as a
Jewish immigrant in gentile America, but also as a woman in the
thoroughly male writing world of the 1920s.
Pietro
Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete
was the first book ever written about the Italian-American experience
to be a Book-of-the-Month club selection, back in 1940. It is
a bold, sentimental, Joycean tearjerker of a novel, one that brought
its subject into the consciousness of many Americans for the first
time.
William
V. Shannon’s The American Irish is a little dated now, having
been published in 1966, but it is a very well written, insightful
look at the Irish immigrant experience in its entirety, including
wonderful portraits of leading Irish politicians, prelates, and
artists, and a telling look at Irish-American folkways.
Finally,
Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, and
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Memoirs of a Woman Warrior
are both unforgettable renderings of the Chinese-American immigrant
experience since World War II, told particularly from the women’s
perspective. Both are relatively recent works, of course, and
I have little to add to the encomiums they have received, and
which are well-deserved. Ultimately, I could not choose between
them, and so I have included both books. Together, they have done
much to spark a whole new era of writing about American immigration.
Besides
the near-misses I have mentioned above, there were many other
works that I seriously considered but did not select, either because
their main focus was somewhat removed from the immigrant experience
itself, or because I liked other books just a little bit better.
These
would include—in rough order of immigration wave—Herbert
Asbury’s The Gangs of New York, Edwin O’Connor’s
The Last Hurrah, Jack Beatty’s The Rascal King,
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Beyond the
Melting Pot, George Washington Plunkitt and William L. Riordon’s
Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, Peter Quinn’s Banished
Children of Eve, Noel Ignatiev’s How the Irish
Became White, Iver Bernstein’s The New York City
Draft Riots; Ronald Sandor’s The Downtown Jews,
Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd, Irving Howe’s
World of Our Fathers, David Von Drehle’s Triangle,
Henry L. Feingold’s Zion in America, Stanley Feldstein’s
The Land That I Show You, Annelise Orelick’s Common
Sense and a Little Fire, Leon Stein’s collection,
Out of the Sweatshop; Milton Hindus’s anthology, The
Old East Side; Hutchins Hapgood’s The Spirit of
the Ghetto, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Patrick
J. Gallo’s Old Bread, New Wine: A Portrait of the
Italian-Americans, Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreau’s La
Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience;
Maxine Hong Kingston’s China Men, Ronald Takaki’s
anthology, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of
Asian Americans; Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean
Streets, Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Sing
Songs of Love; Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls
Lost Their Accents, Anne Fadiman’s Spirit Catches
You and You Fall Down, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter
of Maladies, Bharati Makherjee’s Jasmine,
Marina Budhos’s Remix; and finally, Aiiieeeee:
An Anthology of Asian American Writers.
