Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 301But the irony is that, by this stage, Gitl herself is becoming assimilated too, as Jake
observes with some irritation. Not only that, as he prepares to marry Mamie, he
feels, “instead of a conqueror,” like “the victim of an ignominious defeat.” He has
lost more than he has gained by becoming what he defines as an American. Similar
feelings of loss haunt many of the characters in The Imported Bridegroom and
Other Stories of the New York Ghetto (1898), a collection of tales, and Cahan’s other
major novel, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). In the novel, a rich but deeply
dissatisfied garment manufacturer looks back at his rise from poverty in Russia
and in the ghettos of New York. It is another variation on the theme of the price of
success and Americanization. In later years, Cahan wrote five volumes of memoirs,
Leaves from my Life (1926–1931); he also became a powerful voice in Yiddish and
national journals. But it is his fiction that has left a mark. If, as Toni Morrison has
claimed, American literature of the twentieth century was shaped by its encounter
with the immigrant, then Cahan clearly stands near the beginning of that trend. He
was among the first to rewrite the story of what it might mean to be an American.
A more clearly optimistic version of the encounter with the immigrant is offered
in the work of Mary Antin (1881–1949). Born in the Jewish Pale, the area of Russia
where Jews were permitted to live, Antin arrived in America when she was 13. While
still young she wrote From Plotz to Boston (1899), an impressionistic account of
the emigration of her family. And in 1912 she extended her early book to make The
Promised Land, a fuller account of the hardships of European Jews and the freedom
and opportunity they discovered in America. Loosely structured around the Book of
Exodus, from which its title is drawn, The Promised Land tells of the rebirth of its
author in the New World. In America, Antin tells the reader, she was granted new
clothes, substituting “real American machine-made garments” for her “hateful
homemade European costumes.” She was given a new name to replace her “impossible
Hebrew” one, Mary for Maryashe, and allowed to “wear” the “dignified title” of her
surname “even ... on week days.” Above all, she was offered a new life, the core and
agent of which was education. For Antin, “the essence of American opportunity”
was, she explains, that “education was free.” At school, she learned the new language,
the knowledge, that would enable her to become an American, a free, self-reliant
citizen. “The apex of my civic pride and personal contentment,” she recalls, “was
reached on the bright September morning when I entered the public school.” That
moment when she entered school for the first time, accompanied by her siblings and
led by her father, is rehearsed in reverent detail. It is, as Antin portrays it, the crossing
of a threshold: the proud father sees it as “an act of consecration,” and even the
children are excited as they walk toward “the Elysian fields of liberal learning.” As the
father handed over the certificates that enable his children to begin their schooling
it was as if “he took possession of America,” Antin remembers: he and his family
were now finally moving from an oppressive, almost medieval past into a future
bright with promise. “I am wearily aware that I am speaking in extreme figures, in
superlatives,” Antin confesses, but these were her thoughts at the time, “typical of the
attitude of the intelligent immigrant child toward American institutions.” And,
“what the child thinks and feels,” she adds, “is a reflection of the hopes, desires, andGGray_c03.indd 301ray_c 03 .indd 301 8 8/1/2011 7:54:25 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 25 AM