A History of American Literature

740 The American Century: Literature since 1945

just how alert, perceptive, and predictive science fiction writers can become, as

they attend to what Eliot Rosewater called “the really terrific changes going on.”

Creating New Americas

Dreaming history: European immigrant writing

Sometimes it has seemed more appropriate to call the changes going on in and

around America during the past half a century terrible rather than terrific. Those

changes, in particular, have helped account for the waves of immigration that have

turned the United States into even more of a “universal nation” than it was in the

first two centuries of its existence. Immigration from Europe, for instance, increased

dramatically after World War II. Between 1945 and 1950, almost 350,000 displaced

persons arrived in the United States. Despite restrictions imposed by a conservative

political administration, many of these were Jewish people. Many, too, were from

Eastern Europe, as growing anti-communist sentiments during this period

encouraged a welcome for refugees from this area. Welcome as refugees from

communism, often unwelcome if they were Jewish, these immigrants from old

European cultures entered established communities in the United States,

communities that perhaps retained their allegiance to the old ways and even the old

language. Haunted by war and Holocaust, they brought their own special freight of

memories, their own unbearable past with them, a past that made it difficult, if not

impossible, for them to embrace the millennial hopes associated with America. It

sometimes made it difficult for them, too, to subscribe to the inherited beliefs of

their culture. As a character in Meshugah (1994) by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991)

declares: “I owe nothing to the Almighty as long as He keeps sending us Hitlers and

Stalins. He is their God, not mine.” Singer himself came to the United States from

Poland in 1935. He became a journalist, writing in Yiddish for the Jewish Daily

Forward. It was there also that he published most of his fiction. Dealing with the

mixed inheritance of Polish Jews, their traditional faith and folkways, their daily

village life, their mysticism and sexuality, their lively personal relationships, he

combined fantasy with humor. His first major work, Satan in Gusay, was published

in Yiddish in 1935 and in English twenty years later. It describes the aftermath of a

Polish pogrom in the seventeenth century, when the surviving Jews turned to a

messianic sect with erotic and mystic beliefs. The first of his books to appear in

English was The Family Muskat (1950), a naturalistic account of the decline of a

Jewish family in Warsaw from the beginning of the twentieth century until World

War II. It was followed by other books set in Poland, like The Magician of Lublin

(1960), The Manor (1967), and The Estate (1969). Throughout his life, Singer also

chronicled ghetto life in wry, pungent short stories, collected in such volumes as

Gimpel the Fool (1957), The Spinoza of Market Street (1961), and Passions (1978).

Enemies: A Love Story (1972) was the first of his novels to be set in the United

States. It comprises a kind of post-Holocaust trilogy with The Penitent (1983) and

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