Lost in America

In no literature in the world has the immigrant novel been more varied, more original, more persistent than in ours--and this for the most obvious of reasons. The word "America" has been experienced, for at least 150 years, by millions all over the world, as a euphemism for the fabled land, where, washing up half drowned on a richly receptive shore, one is assured salvation of an undreamt-of order. So they have been driven to come--wave upon wave upon wave of Jews, Italians, Irish, Latinos, Asians, Africans--and, sooner or later, large numbers of them produce the written document detailing the disparity between the fantasy and the actuality: the one that is so powerful it seems to the writer that now just to utter the word America in quotes is to achieve metaphor.

Only rarely do these novels have a life beyond the one given them on publication day. Even when well written, they are, all too often, claustrophobically enclosed by a tale of survival beyond which America itself remains an abstraction, hardly ever quickening into the life with which a real--rather than a testifying--protagonist would have to engage. A perfect example is Abraham Cahan's 1917 The Rise of David Levinsky, an early rags-to-riches story with a strong psychological bent that fails to deepen precisely because Cahan's character is sealed into a ghetto environment that remains static. Levinsky's New York is crowded with Lower East Side Jews who hand him on, one to another, until at last he prospers, but the city itself never emerges as a place of vast and varied doings beyond the streets of the ghetto, where the characters soon become indistinguishable. The sole development in the novel, finally, is Levinsky's awareness of the absence of development.

Yet the genre is a resilient one. To read an immigrant novel of, say, 1910, conceived in social realism and sentiment, followed by one written fifty years later, in the wake of Modernism and the Holocaust, is to see how stubbornly it has kept itself alive--and every now and then sheltered a piece of work that bursts the bounds of its own conventions, thereby announcing the presence in our midst of a genuine writer.

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