David Herman
The Immigrant Voices, Part 2: Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska

David Herman - The Immigrant Voices, Part 2: Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska

- My name is David Herman, and today I’m going to be talking about Jewish American writing; particularly during the period between the 1900s and the 1920s, a very sadly neglected period in the history of Jewish American writing. Last week, for those who weren’t able to join us, I was talking about the Sephardic Jewish American poet and writer, Emma Lazarus, the first great Jewish American writer, and her famous poem, most famous poem, “The New Colossus,” which was first published in 1883. And the ending of the poem goes like this: “‘Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!’ cries she with silent lips. ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door.’” What is striking about these famous last lines, which 20 years later were inscribed on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, is the contrast between “your tired, your poor, your huddle masses earning to breathe free,” and this curious last line, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” Lazarus was also the only major Sephardic Jewish American writer, and more important, she was also the only major American-born Jewish American writer during these years. After her, the leading Jewish American writers were all immigrants or the children of immigrants from Poland and from Russia, meaning the Russian Pale, usually. For the next 50 years, Jewish American writers would be debating one central question: is America, especially New York of course, the promised land or an accursed one.

“Woe is me, bitter is me,” says Shenah Peshah in “Hunger” by Anzia Yezierska. “For what is my life? Why didn’t the ship go under and drown me before I came to America?” And then there’s a famous scene at the beginning of Henry Roth’s great novel, “Call it Sleep.” He writes, “They had been standing in this strange and silent manner for several minutes when the woman, as if driven by the strain into action, tried to smile, and touching her husband’s arm, said timidly, ‘And this is the golden land.’” She spoke in Yiddish. “The man grunted, but made no answer. She took a breath as if taking courage and tremulously, ‘I’m sorry, Albert, I was so stupid.’ She paused, waiting for some flicker of unbending, some word which never came. ‘But you look so lean, Albert, but so haggard, and your moustache, you’ve shaved.’ His brusque glance stabbed and withdrew, ‘Even so, you must have suffered in this land.’ So is it a golden land or is it a land where people suffer?” And this is the question that really dominates Jewish American writing through the early years of the 20th century, particularly from the 1900s to the 1930s. Today, I’m going to be talking about the period from the 1900s to the 20s, and then on December the 28th, I’ll be talking about a remarkable group of Jewish American writers from the 1930s. But they all shared the same preoccupation, the same question that gnawed away at them and their characters. So after Emma Lazarus, the major Jewish American writers are from Poland and the Russian Pale. Crucially, for the first 50 years, Jewish American literature is an immigrant literature; by immigrants, about immigrants, and largely for immigrants.

Bear in mind, between 1880 and 1920, during those 40 years, approximately 23 million European immigrants came to America. There was a huge population explosion in Europe, there was the impoverishment of land and lack of work, and of course, in Russia in particular, there was political repression and there were the pogroms. And these three forces; the population explosion, the impoverishment and loss of work, and the political repression, drove Jews in particular, but not only Jews, from Poland and the Russian Pale in particular to America. Some, of course to Britain, some to France, but above all to America. And by America, that usually means New York and the East coast. And they were drawn to America because it had an expanding economy, and there was the promise of religious, political and social freedom and equality. So, something like 2 million Jews came to America. One and a half million just between 1883 and 1904 in those 21 years. So the Jewish population in America rose during this period from about quarter of a million to three and a half million. In other words, it increased 14 fold. And if you think of some of the names, I’m sorry if this sounds a little bit repetitive, but it’s both the quantity of names and the quality of the names that is so astonishing.

Emma Goldman, born in Lithuania, came to America in 1885. Harry Houdini, came to American in 1878. The mother of the Marx Brothers came to America in 1879. Abraham Cahan, who were going to be talking about a bit more, came from Lithuania to America in 1882. The Warner Brothers came in 1883. Alan Ginsburg’s paternal grandfather came in the 1880s. E.L. Doctorow’s grandfather came from Russia to New York in 1885. Louis B. Mayer and Sam Goldwin, two of the most famous Hollywood moguls, came in the 1890s. Irving Berlin, born Israel Berlin came to America at the age of five in 1893. Asa Jolson, better known as Al Jolson, born in a small Lithuanian town in 1886, came to America, to Washington DC in 1894. Alan Ginsburg’s mother came in 1905. Grace Paley’s parents came from the Ukraine in 1905. Henry Roth came around 1906 or 1907 from Galicia. Meyer Shapiro, the famous art critic, born in Lithuania, came to America in 1907. Ben Shahn, the great artist, came in 1908. Leo Rosten, as in “The Joys of Yiddish,” came in 1911 from Poland. Irving Howe’s parents came in 1912. Abraham Bellow, the father of Saul Bellow, came to Canada in 1913, and Saul Bellow was born in Canada and then came to Chicago. Mark Rothko came from Dvinsk to Portland, Oregon in 1913. Grace Paley was born in 1922, the daughter of Zenya and Manya Goodside from the Ukraine. Philip Guston, the artist who’s exhibited currently at the Tate Modern in London, was born in Montreal in 1913, his parents left Russia in 1905, around the time of the revolution and the wave of pogroms there. And so on and so on. This is just barely touching the surface. Of course, they weren’t always very welcome.

There’s an extraordinary scene in a book called “The American Scene,” published in 1907 when Henry James is taken by a friend to go and look at the Lower East Side in New York. And he describes what he saw. “A great swarming, a swarming that had begun to thicken infinitely as soon as we had crossed to the east side and long before we had got to Rutgers Street. There is no swarming like that of Israel, when once Israel has got a start. And the scenes here bristled at every step with the signs and sounds, imitable, unmistakable of a jury that had burst all bounds.” James’ guide took him to the literary cafes of the Lower East Side which James called torture rooms of the living idiom. For there he heard the accent of the future, an ethnically altered language. There is a different view, of course, and Irving Howe, one of the great Jewish American literary critics wrote in his most famous book, “World of Our Fathers” in 1976, on page 585, “Out of the immigrant Emelia that came pouring a torrent of memoir, fiction and autobiography, ranging from the cheap hokum of ethnic self-indulgence to serious works of art, written in English, but often with Yiddish tonalities. Unconsciously preserved or deliberately imported, these writings mirrored the yearnings of nostalgia, the tyrannies of memory, the powerful measures of loss. Most of this writing turned out to be of small literary value, the very urgencies behind its composition hardening into narrowness of scene, parochial return and mere defence. A handful of novels, stories and poems may live.”

Leslie Fiedler, another of the greatest Jewish American literary critics, wrote in 1964 in his book “Waiting For the End,” “Up to the end of the last century,” meaning the 19th century, “and in a certain sense, that century did not end for us until the conclusion of World War I,” in 1918. “Jewish American literature remains not only theoretical, but parochial. No, the compelling images,” he wrote, “of Jews were made by writers who were not merely Gentiles, but antisemites.” And he had in mind people like Wyndham Lewis, Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfs, E.E. Cummings, T.S. Eliot, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald. So these immigrant writers, these early immigrant writers, what are the key issues that confront their writing? So first, should they write in Yiddish or in English? A new kind of English infused with Yiddish words, inflexions and syntax emerged. It’s a kind of polyglot writing. On the one hand, there is Yiddish, Mamaloshen, the language of the family, of the market and of women. Secondly, of course, Jews read and prayed in Hebrew, the language of religion and law. And thirdly, there is the language of Gentile neighbours and the host society, particularly obviously English. Then there is the question of their relationship to the Yiddish culture of Central and East Europe. Mendele Sforime, Sholem Aleichem, I.L. Peretz. There is one striking thing, well, there are a number of striking things about these Yiddish writers, but one of particular relevance for us is that all three of them died during the first World War, between 1915 and 1917. Sholem Aleichem had in fact, come to America where he died in 1916. Sholem Asch also came to America. So you get a kind of crucial changing of the guard in Yiddish literature with the deaths of Peretz, Sholem Aleichem and Sforime. So, one thing that made Jewish American literature possible was the influence of Yiddish, its rhythm, its language; second, the death and eclipse of the great generation of Yiddish writers; and third, the passing of Yiddish itself as American Jewish immigrants began to assimilate. But nevertheless, for in the early years, or for the generation born in the 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, they had still a very strong connection to Yiddish and Russian culture.

If you think of Alfred Kazin’s “The Kitchen.” The dying mother in “Tell Me A Riddle.” The references to Grandma Lausch and Odessa in Saul Bellow’s breakthrough novel, “The Adventures of Augie March.” There is still a strong sense of that vanished culture. It hadn’t entirely vanished for them, it was still very resonant in their childhoods. And something else that is crucial to these early Jewish American writers, is that the immigrant experience and the old world are seen anew. So they have one foot in the old world and one foot, one might say, in the new world. So most of the writers of this period, certainly all the major writers are all born in Russia and in Eastern Europe. Abraham Cahan was born near Vilnius. Sholem Asch was born in Kutno. Joseph Opatoshu was born in Poland. Jacob Glatstein was born in Lublin. They write in Yiddish, and they write for the Yiddish Press. And they write for the cultural institutions established by the new immigrants, the Yiddish Press obviously. The first Yiddish newspapers appear in America in the 1870s. And of course, from the 1880s there’s Yiddish theatre. And their stories crucially are set in immigrant neighbourhoods as we’ll see, and in the world of trade unions and the garment industry and so on. It’s a world of poverty. Geographically, it’s very precise. These stories are set in the Lower East Side in particular, but also Brooklyn and the Bronx. And it’s a world of whores, gangsters, tenements and bars. And above all, it’s the world of the family, particularly in the writing of the women. And you get, also crucially, the theme of Americanization. The relationship of immigrants to the new world. And we see this perhaps most of all in the writings of Mary Antin, who will come to.

But we also see a relationship to the old country. A world of pogroms, dybbuks, Rabbis. It’s not just that world of Isaac Bashevis Singer . You see in story by Lamed Shapiro, . The brothels and prostitutes in Sholem Asch’s “God of Vengeance.” Alfred Kazin’s memoir “The Kitchen.” There’s an interesting moment in Joseph Heller’s post-war novel; well, 1979, “Good as Gold,” one of his better novels. “I haven’t worked it out yet,” Gold began, “He avoided Lieberman’s eyes. But I would do a sober, responsible, intelligent piece about what it has been like for people like you and me to be born and grow up here. Certainly, I’ll go at least a little bit into the cross-cultural conflicts between the traditions of our European born parents and those in the prevailing American environment.” Crucially, if we were to compare the generation who are writing before, during, and immediately after the first World War, with the famous generation who emerge after the second World War, one of the key differences is college education. The absence of ideas, intellectual culture, literariness, modernism in the writing of these earlier writers. These earlier writers, a writing at the time of Freud and the cultural revolution, the modernist revolution between 1900 and the 20s. But their writing is completely untouched by it. It’s as if Joyce and Eliot and Picasso had never existed. The writing at the heyday of modernism, Virginia Wolfe and . But their writing is untouched by it. This is very different from when we come to someone like Henry Roth in the 30s, or Saul Bellow in the 40s and 50s. And there is a crucial sense that these writers are marginal, outside the mainstream. If you think of Cynthia Ozick’s extraordinary story, written much later in 1969, called “Envy; or, Yiddish in America.” Which is partly about the relationship, in fact, largely inspired by the relationship between an older generation of Yiddish writers and their response to the sudden fame of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the only one of the great Yiddish writers living in America to have made the big breakthrough into the mainstream. Edelstein, who is desperate, he’s one of these struggling Yiddish poets, writers who’s desperate to somehow break into the mainstream.

And he’s met a young translator called Hannah, who he’s hoping to persuade to translate him into English so he can make the big break. And he says, “So, you’re not interested?” Hannah says, “Only in the mainstream, not in your little puddles.” Crushing. She said, desolately, “You don’t interest me. I should have to be interested.” And she’s not interested because A, he’s writing about a lost world that nobody in America now cares about, until Bashevis Singer comes along with it. And secondly, because he writes in Yiddish, he can’t write in English. So he is completely marginalised. He and all the other Yiddish poets and writers who had to come as immigrants. So the sort of themes we find in this earlier writing, between 1900 and the 1920s, are class mobility and assimilation. How do you fit in? How do you rise upwards? Generational tensions between parents, still very rooted in the old world, East Europe and the Russian Pale, Yiddish speaking of course, and the children who are growing up in America, born in America; and even if they’re not born, they perhaps came as very young children, coming to America, desperate to assimilate, desperate to fit in, desperate to be successful. The subject of Abraham Cahan’s most famous novel. And of course, this is the point, when the wife in Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep” turns to her husband, Albert, who’s come to meet her at the harbour just when her boat has arrived from Europe, and one of the first things she notices is he’s shaved his moustache off. And there’s no reference to a beard, but anyway, the moustache is gone, so he’s clean shaven, which is an extraordinary assertion of assimilation. Then there’s the question, again, particularly for women writers of arranged marriages as opposed to romantic love. Are you forced to have an arranged marriage? Can you choose who you marry? And then of course, there’s the encounters with ethnic hatred in the working class, multi-ethnic neighbourhoods of the Lower East Side and the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Then there’s the question of tradition. Older religious beliefs, traditional ethical standards, and whether you could, should break away from them. Whether the writers can, but also of course, whether their characters can. And then there’s the crucial role of education, learning, books, libraries - a recurring theme in many of these stories, especially in the stories of Mary Antin. And the young protagonists. Children in Henry Roth’s “Call It Sleep.” The young people in the stories of Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska. And of course, the crucial symbols of America. The flag, the song, the Statue of Liberty. So we get, constantly, a tension between the pre-modern old world and the new world. So, Mary Antin wrote about immigration as time travelling. “My age alone, my true age would be reason enough for my writing. I began life in the Middle Ages, as I shall prove, and here I am, still your contemporary in the 20th century, thrilling with your latest thought.” So let’s start, there are three particular writers I want to focus on. So let’s start with Abraham Cahan, born in 1860, and he dies in 1951. The crucial differences between Cahan and Emma Lazarus we looked at last week, were firstly that he writes in prose, not verse. Secondly, he’s 11 years younger, which it does not sound a great deal. But actually, when you think of the speed of change, the growth and the fast growing Jewish population in America with explosion of immigrants, of Jewish immigrants in particular, 11 years was a very significant period. Bear in mind, that when she wrote “The New Colossus” about Jewish immigration to America, inspired by her perception of the new Russian immigrants fleeing the pogroms in Russian and arriving in America, by the mid 1890s, let alone by the 1900s, the number of Jews in New York had absolutely taken off. Thirdly, he wrote some fiction, and nearly all his journalism, he was a prolific journalist and editor, was in Yiddish.

Crucially, of course, Emma Lazarus was very well educated on the east coast of America and came from a very affluent family. And in any case, was Sephardic not Ashkenazi. And crucially, fourthly, he was born in East Europe in a small Lithuanian village near Vilnius. And he comes to America in 1882, the year before Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus” was published. And his experience in these early years in New York, he’s working in sweatshops, he joins the labour movement, he wrote for two Yiddish socialist weeklys, and he becomes a teacher, a labour organiser, and then eventually a novelist and a journalist. His first story in English is published in 1895. His first novel, “Yekl,” a tale of the ghetto, is published in 1896. And from 1897, but particularly from 1902, for nearly 50 years, he’s the editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, a Yiddish newspaper. In 1897, its circulation was less than 6,000. In 1912, its circulation was 130,000 copies a day. So that is a major selling Yiddish newspaper in America. Then in 1898, he publishes the “Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish.” You see, bridegroom, do you have a choice to marry, do you not have a choice to marry? And other stories of Yiddish, New York, including his most famous story, “A Ghetto Wedding.” And then in 1917, he writes his famous novel, “The Rise of David Levinsky,” which was described by one critic in a book called “The Modern American Novel” as a fable of economic success and moral catastrophe. Somewhere, David Levinsky leaves his old home in Lithuania in the Shtetl to New York with 4 cents in his pocket, which even then, I mean then was nothing, shaves off his beard and ear locks crucially, a crucial moment in his assimilation into America.

And it’s a rags to riches story. But it’s also what he gives up. So the rooted and religious life is abandoned in favour of a secular life, a life of alienation and what one might call complex sexuality. “A Ghetto Wedding” was written in 1898. And it begins, “Had you chance to be in Grand Street,” in downtown Manhattan, “on that starry February night, it would scarcely have occurred to you that the ghetto was groaning under the culmination of a long season of enforced idleness and distress.” That starry February night - that’s an interesting image. And grinds against the image of enforced idleness and distress. In the first three paragraphs of the story we come across words like groaning, distress, whoa, self torture, forlornly, piteous, desperation, ruin, abject, martyrdom, famine and hope dirt. That is the world of the Lower East Side. The Lower East Side poor, I should say. Peddlers, Nathan, the romantic lead is a cap blocker turned peddler, hocking chinaware on Grand Street. Goldie, his beloved, was employed in making knee breaches. He is in his mid 20s, a thick set fellow of 25 or 26, she is about the same age. And the story is a story of romance and love and marriage. Goldie is described as an epitome of exquisite femininity. She is the last epitome of exquisite femininity. We’re going to find in the world of castrating mothers, kvetching wives and legions of ex-wives of Jewish American writers. We’re a long way from Saul Bellow and Philip Roth here. And it’s interesting looking at the few references there are to Jews and tradition, as in Judaism and tradition. There’s a description of the bard, a tall, gaunt man with a grizzly beard and a melancholy face. There’s no sentimentality or the rosy elegiac glow about the old world. “You and I are orphans,” Goldie says to Nathan. Though her mother is, in fact, in Russia. But of course, she might as well be dead if she’s in Russia, and Goldie and Nathan are on the Lower East Side.

Which raises the question of course, not just of who are her parents, who are Nathan’s parents, but who are Cahan’s literary parents? Which is always a crucial question whenever you are thinking about Jewish American writing and at any point in the 20th century. A Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, almost 40, no formal education in America; which tradition does he belong to? Then we get that apartment. The vacuity of the rooms, freshly cleaned, scrubbed and smelling of whitewash, filled with small, modest, humble things, rather like Cahan’s story. And the story ends with the two of them walking home alone. “When they found themselves alone in the deserted street, they were so overcome by a sense of loneliness of a kind of portentous haunting emptiness that they could not speak. So on they trudged in dismal silence.” Again, the language; alone, deserted, loneliness, emptiness, and then crucially, they could not speak. They trudged in dismal silence. This is a phrase, they could not speak, that haunts immigrant writers. Can they speak? Are they mute, are they dumb, do they have a voice? What kind of voice might they have? Without a college education, struggling to learn English. What kind of voice do they have as writers? And then the last sentence; “An old tree whispered overhead it’s tender felicitations.” An old tree, of course, because we’re back to the tension between the old and the new tradition. We’re back to the starry night of the first sentence. But then tender felicitations. Enjoy these tender felicitations, the whispering trees and the starry night, ‘cause you ain’t going to get any more once Hertzog and Portnoy come on the scene, or Grace Paley or Cynthia Ozick. Think of Grace Paley’s story, “The Loudest Voice.”

“I’m surprised to see my neighbours making tra-la-la for Christmas. My father couldn’t think of what to say to that. Then he decided, 'You’re in America! In Palestine, the Arabs would be eating you alive! Europe, you had pogroms. Argentina is full of Indians. Here you got Christmas. Some joke, huh?’” Or Cynthia Ozick, we’re back to “Envy or Yiddish in America.” “Edelstein was grief stricken, but elated. This is after his wife’s miscarriage. ”‘My sperm count!’ he screamed. ‘Your belly! Go fix the machine before you blame the oil.’“ One definition of Jewish American literature is no one whispers, full stop. And if they were to whisper, they certainly wouldn’t be whispering tender felicitations. Mary Antin was born in 1881 and died in 1949. "A Ghetto Wedding” was published in 1898. And so we’re going to leap forward to 1912, just before the first World War, and to Mary Antin’s novel, “The Promised Land.” The first bestselling book written by and about a Jew in America. It sold about 85,000 copies from 1912, when it was published, and 1949 when she died. By now, bear in mind, there are over a million Jews in New York City alone. Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus” has now been inscribed on a bronze tablet and displayed inside the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Al Jolson has performed in black-face for the first time in 1904. The first Nickelodeon is opened in 1905. Irving Berlin’s written “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911. The Triangle Shirwaist factory fire in New York killed almost 150 people in 1911. There has been a revolution. I mentioned earlier about the speed of change. It’s not just demographic change and the growth of the immigrant population, it’s also all these huge symbolic moments which defined the new wave of Jewish immigrant life. Mary Antin became an instant celebrity when her novel was published in 1912.

Widely and favourably reviewed, and yet it’s a sad book about the complexities and losses of immigration. A work of mourning for the still vital forces of tradition, spirituality and family, forsaken in her effort to win America, in her phrase. She herself was born in Polotsk, a Shtetl in the Russian Pale in 1881. Her native language was of course Yiddish. She immigrated to Boston at the age of 13, and attended a prestigious Boston Latin school for girls. In 1902, she married out, she married a 31-year-old American-born palaeontologist at Columbia University, son and grandson of Lutheran clergy. And then in 1912, her novel “The Promised Land.” It is published, interestingly, with a golden Statue of Liberty engraved on the front cover, its torch on the spine. And it is a vivid account of her life in Russia, or I should say her lives in Russia and in America, of her childhood, her immigration to Boston and her Americanization in the state schools where she thrived. It’s a sort of story of the American dream. And in fact, she writes, “America became my dream.” And it ends like this. “America is the youngest of the nations and inherits all that went before in history. And I am the youngest of America’s children, and into my hands has given all her priceless heritage; to the last white star spied through the telescope, to the last great thought of the philosopher.” Excuse me. “Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future.” Wow. She has many conversions . ‘Cause it’s an autobiographical novel. “I was born, I have lived and I’ve been made over,” she writes. She considers herself absolutely other than the person whose story I have to tell. So like David Levinsky and Abraham Cahan’s novel, she reinvents herself in America. From Russian outcast to American citizens. From traditional Judaism to liberal transcendentalist. From communal ethnicity to American individualism. And from impoverished immigrant to bestselling author.

And a year later, she publishes a short story called “The Lie.” I’m afraid it’s a terribly sentimental and soppy story about a Jewish immigrant boy, referred to as the Little Alien at one point, born in Russia and his relationship with his American school teacher. So it was about Russia against America. versus the American public school system and the public library. “Everything was different,” Mary Antin writes, “in America, and David Rodinsky liked the difference. His father said, 'when I was a young man in the old country, I wanted to be a scholar, but a Jew has no chance in the old country.’” So the simple opposition becomes a darker world in the past,. Russia, where his father had seen monstrous things, “the slime of the evil past,” he says. And then there’s something more complex about the new life and its tensions with the past. “David was caught in the meshes of a complex inheritance, contradictory impulses tore at his heart.” He has this kind of breakdown described as his sudden breakdown, overwrought nerves. He’s overwrought. And his father’s life, his son’s life, the struggle of the cost to reconcile the contradictions between the past and the present. He saw his whole experience as an unbroken thing at last. And then comes the crucial role of books, ideas and learning, especially American history, mythology and books. For example, Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” plays an enormous part in the story. “Citizenship is David’s patriotic ambition,” as the writer says. “My David will be a good American, no? On Washington’s birthday,” George Washington’s birthday, “the class was singing ‘America.’ My father didn’t die here, how can I sing such a lie? There was a sense of irreparable loss derived from the knowledge that he had no share in the national funds.” So we have references to the American history, Paul Revere, the Independence Bell, Pilgrim fathers, David has to dress up as George Washington.

And then on the other hand, his Jewish history. “Your people, your ancestors perhaps fought the Roman tyrants,” his teacher says. “I do believe that the pilgrim fathers didn’t all come here before the revolution; isn’t your father just like them, and didn’t he come looking for the same things? It’s the same story over again. Every ship that brings your people from Russia, and other countries where they’re ill treated, is a Mayflower. If I were a Jewish child like you, I would sing America louder than anyone else!” But there are three twists in the story. His teacher, Ms. Ralston, was the first person who’d ever seen the real David Rodinsky. That was a curious statement to make considering that his mother and father and sundry other persons had had some acquaintance with David previous to the reading of “Paul Revere’s Ride.” The real David, it is made clear, is an American school bookish, not Russian, not Jewish. And at the end of the story, David’s father showed the teacher to the room where David lay and closed the door on them both. It was not he, but Ms. Rolston, the American teacher, that his boy needed. And there are constant references to silence, muteness, the lack of a voice; and this is not coincidental. There is a reference to his extreme reserve. “In private conversation, it was hard to get anything out of him except ‘yes ma'am’ and ‘no ma'am,’ or ‘I don’t understand, please.’ He laid his book on the teacher’s desk without a word. He seldom made any comment on the reading at the time. When the rest of the class sings America, he stopped and stared absently at the blackboard. David’s adoring eyes gave the thanks which his tongue would not venture to utter.

To Ms. Rolston’s anxious questions he answered not a syllable.” The story is about education, learning and books. The key to making it in America, to being American. The point though, is that the person wanting to learn is Jewish, and the person who offers learning, the teacher, is American. And is an American Gentile. And then finally, Anzia Yezierska, born in the early 1880s, died in 1970. We leap forward another eight years, this time to 1920, and to another Jewish woman writer. And like Mary Antin, she was born in East Europe, this time in Russian, Poland. English was again, not her first language. And like Mary Antin, she came to America in the early 1890s. So both were born in the old country, but were formed in America. Antin in Boston, Yezierska in the Lower East Side, like Abraham Cahan. Both wrote a few stories and books in a short time and then disappeared. This is crucial. Neither had the long career of someone like Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Arthur Miller. You see these bookshelves behind me? You could line any one of these shelves with the books by Roth, Bellow, Miller, Heller, Mailer. Not in the case of these writers. Antin’s best known work was concentrated in a few years before World War I. She had a kind of breakdown during the first World War and never recovered as a writer. Yezierska did write six novels and books of short stories between 1920 and ‘32. But apart from her autobiography, she never published another book after that. Her best book is “Hungry Hearts,” a book of short stories published in 1920.

It was a book that made her name. Melodramatic and sentimental tales of women’s lives in the tenements, sweatshops of the Lower East Side. They’re not great literature, but there are very interesting things going on. They’re about women, mostly young women, often breaking away from tradition, past, the older generation. In the case of Shenah Peshah in the story “Wings,” she works for an uncle who exploits her. There’s a matchmaker, Mrs. Melker. And she says, “I’m living in America, not in Russia! In America, if a girl earns her living, she can be 50 years old and without a man and nobody pities her.” There’s the pawn broker, Zaretsky. But there is nothing, nothing sustaining or liberating about Jewish tradition or the Jewish past. The old country is demonised. It is not idealised, it is not romanticised, this is not “Fiddler on the Roof.” “What did I have out there in Savel that I should be afraid to lose? The cows that I used to milk had it better than me.” She’s desperately poor, desperately lonely. “My heart chokes in me like in a prison. I’m dying for a little love, and I got nobody, nobody,” wailed Shenah Peshah as she looked out at the dismal basement window. She’s crushed by her loneliness. She sank into a chair. She’s an orphan, she’s unmarried. Desperate for love, desperate for contact. She aspires to two worlds; one, the world of learning, books and education. “The world that lifts me on wings with high thoughts,” she says. And secondly, America.

“Now I see America for the first time,” she says. “But what is America? The world they aspire to fantasise about, to dress like an American. She pawns the feather bed her mother left her in order to buy an American style dress. I’m through for always with old women’s shawls! This is my first American dress up,” she says. “To talk like an American, to be American, to be an American woman, to be free, anything is possible.” And then there’s the reality of tenements, sweatshops and loneliness. Unsustained by the past, by tradition, by roots, unable to break into the new world of high thoughts. So she goes crazy. There are recurrent images of prisons, cages and caged birds. She has choking fits, she is breathless. And again, the third writer out of three, she’s mute, without a voice. The very intensity of her longing left her faint and dumb. “'I can’t give it out in words, your kindness.’ She wavered speechless. She did not have the slightest notion of what she would saying. ‘Why should it be so hard for me to say to him what I mean? Why shouldn’t I be able to say to him plain out, Mr. Barnes, you’re an angel from the sky?’ Most cruelly when he leaves. ‘In God’s name, don’t leave me!’ She longed to cry out. ‘You are the only bit of light that I ever had, and now it’ll be darker and emptier for my eyes than ever before.’ But no voice could rise out her parched lips.” So in both Mary Antin’s “The Lie,” and in Anzia Yezierska’s story “Wings,” young Jewish immigrants, especially women, but also young men, aspire to two worlds; the world of learning and books, and the world of America. And in some strange way, these worlds move in and out of each other.

And are both Gentile. America is Gentile. The world of books and learning is Gentile. Ms. Rolston and John Barnes in the Anzia Yezierska story are in charge of this world of high thoughts. That the Jews want access to, but somehow don’t have the words or voice for. So what would a Jewish American voice be like? Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska’s sentimentality and melodrama. The tender felicitations and starry night of Abraham Cahan. All these broken dreams, desperate hopes amidst the poverty of the tenements, the sweatshops and the peddlers. And here, in the 1920s, we must stop. Why stop there? Because we’ve kind of reached a dead end. Just as Antin, Cahan and Yezierska did. “Up to the end of the last century,” Leslie Fiedler wrote. “And in a certain sense, that century didn’t end for us until the end of World War I; Jewish American literature remains not only theoretical, but parochial.” You get the immigration Acts of 1921, ‘24, which restrict immigration. The great tide of 1881 to 1924 stops. But, we also see the first glimpse of the Golden Age. In 1923, Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer are born in Brooklyn. In 1924, Saul Bellow and his family moved to Chicago. George Gershwin writes “Rhapsody in Blue.” In 1925, Edna Ferber is the first American Jew to win the Pulitzer surprise for fiction. And in 1927, Al Jolson is a jazz singer. Heller, Mailer and Bellow. We ain’t seen nothing yet. The interesting thing is, as you’ve probably already worked out, the immigrant generation wrote about the experience of immigration.

But the great works of Jewish American writing, which we’ll come to, will come from the children and the grandchildren of the immigrants. On the 28th of December, I’ll be talking about four astonishing writers from the 1930s, underrated, not well enough known, Mike Gold, Nathaniel West, and then the two greatest of all, Henry Roth’s masterpiece, “Call it Sleep” and Delmore Schwartz’s extraordinary story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” Published in 1937 in the first issue of Partisan Review, which became, for the next 70 or 80 years, one of the great Jewish American publications. And in the first issue, was a story by Delmore Schwartz, friend of Saul Bellow. Saul Bellow will later translate Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel The Fool” in Partisan Review in the 1950s. So, that is it, until December the 28th when I’ll be talking about this extraordinary group of writers. It’s just time to look at some of your questions.

Q&A and Comments:

Gloria Shan; “Emma died in Toronto. When she came to Toronto, she lived with my girlfriend’s grandparents, the Langbords.” Thank you, Gloria! That’s really interesting to know.

David Sephton replies to Gloria, “were they Leslie Landlord’s parents or grandparents?”

Dennis Glauber. “The fathers of both Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer immigrated from Europe to South Africa where they stayed very briefly before heading to North America.” I don’t think that is true, about Saul Bellow’s parents. I think their his father immigrated to Canada where Bellow was born. And Norman Mailer’s father, I’m afraid, I don’t know enough about. But that’s a really interesting thought.

Lorna Sandler; “It would be lovely if you could show us portraits, photos, book covers of these writers as some are not familiar to us. Snippets or quotes from them would also be very enlightening. Though the shape of the movement is interesting.” Okay.

Betty Lowenstein; “I read 'The Bread Givers’ many years ago and it just broke my heart.” Thank you.

Rita; “Thank you for your kind words.” Rita, Much appreciated.

And that, I think is that. So, thank you. I’ve obviously stunned you into silence. Thank you for all your questions. And see you on December the 28th. Thank you.