“Go, Make Yourself for a Person”: Urbanity and the Construction of an American Identity in the Novels of Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska

Prospects ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 295-335 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Von Rosk
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Urban Novel ◽  
European Jewish

Recalling His Early Days in New York, Abraham Cahan declared that he “felt strongly drawn to the life of the city.” “My heart,” he wrote, “beat to its rhythm” (Marovitz, 17). Anzia Yezierska also remembers New York's Lower East Side at the turn of the century with affection in her autobiographical novel,Bread Givers. When her heroine Sarah Smolinsky is away from Hester Street, she longs for “the crowds sweeping you on like waves of a beating sea. The drive and thrill of doing things faster and faster” (129). For both of these Jewish immigrant writers, the spectacle of New York City embodied hope, liberation, and vitality, yet as they explore the immigrant's exhilarating and exasperating adaptation to urban life in America, they highlight the keen sense of loss on becoming American, on becoming modern. In their vivid depictions of late-19th-century New York life, both Cahan'sThe Rise of David Levinsky(1917) and Yezier-ska'sBread Givers(1925) detail in an especially dramatic fashion a story that had not been explored before in America's urban novel: the Eastern European Jewish immigrant's adaptation to America's consumer culture. Highlighting the role of mass-produced goods and new forms of leisure in constructing a modern, middle-class American identity, both novels examine the tensions and contradictions of immigrant life as a more communal culture of scarcity gives way to an individually oriented culture of material abundance.

The Dance Hall

2021 ◽  
pp. 148-172
Author(s):  
Sonia Gollance
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Marriage Patterns ◽  
Dance Culture ◽  
Jewish Immigration ◽  
American Capitalism ◽  
European Jewish

Dances were an extremely popular entertainment for immigrants to New York around 1900, including eastern European Jews. Whether in commercial dance halls or neighborhood associations, dancing academies or saloons, writers identified dance spaces with youthful revelry and American capitalism. Yet this pursuit of fun and independence was a complicated endeavor, since leisure culture cost money at a time when working-class immigrants struggled to save their meager resources. Although dances promised romance and flirtation, they often also served as a reminder of the way American capitalist impulses complicated Jewish courtship and marriage patterns. Both Abraham Cahan (Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, 1896) and Kadya Molodovsky (From Lublin to New York: Diary of Rivke Zilberg, 1942) depict American dance culture ambivalently, whether reflecting on the great wave of eastern European Jewish immigration to the United States from 1881–1924 or American Jewish responses to the Holocaust.

The American Business of Italian Food

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simone Cinotto
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Food Industry ◽  
Marketing Strategies ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Business ◽  
East Harlem ◽  
Italian American ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Generation

This chapter examines the layered worlds of the Italian food business and consumer marketplace in East Harlem. In order to understand the central role of food in the making of Italian American identity, it is necessary to look at how Italian American food entrepreneurs in New York sought to link food with ethnic identity. This chapter first discusses the history of American-made Italian food and food consumption among Italian migrants between 1890 and 1920, along with the development of the U.S. food industry at the turn of the twentieth century. It then looks at the emergence of a new generation of consumers and food businesses during the period 1920–1940. It also considers the marketing strategies of Italian food producers and the response of Italian American consumers in the interwar years in relation to ethnicity and modernity. It shows that the centrality of food created an entrepreneurial ethnic middle class based in the food trade, which nurtured—and in turn supported by—the symbolic connection between the consumption of Italian food and the construction of diasporic Italian identities.

Introduction

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (6) ◽  
pp. 819-827 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bettina Hitzer ◽  
Joachim Schlör
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
East European ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
The One ◽  
Role Of Religion ◽  
Religious Landscape

This article introduces a special issue that investigates the place of religion in the spatial and cultural organization of west and east European cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Discussing different frameworks for a conceptualization of the role of religion within the urban context during the past two hundred years, it argues for adopting a broader perspective that takes into account the multiple and often conflicting processes and practices of religious modernization. Thus, it places particular emphasis on scrutinizing a space in between, that is to say, the area of contact between the outward influence on the spatial development of religious communities on the one hand and the inner workings of such communities on the other hand. Based on an 1880s debate over the way Jewish immigrants changed the religious landscape of New York Jewry as well as on the results of the following contributions, it supports a fresh look at the turn of the century as a period of intensified religious life and visibility within metropolises that contributed to the development of more “modern,” individualized forms of religious sociability and, in the same vein, fostered the emergence of modern urbanity.

The ‘Yidishe Paganini’: Sholem Aleichem's Stempenyu, the Music of Yiddish Theatre and the Character of the Shtetl Fiddler

2014 ◽  
Vol 139 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Small Town ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Character Type ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Immigrants

ABSTRACTThis article explores the music of Yiddish theatre in early twentieth-century New York by considering multiple adaptations of Russian Jewish author Sholem Aleichem's 1888 novel Stempenyu, about a klezmer violinist, which was transformed into two theatrical productions in 1907 and 1929, and finally inspired a three-movement recital work for accompanied violin by Joseph Achron. The multiple versions of Stempenyu present the eponymous musician as an allegory for the ambivalent role of the shtetl – the predominantly Jewish small town of Eastern Europe – in defining diasporic Jewish life in Europe and America, and as a medium for the sonic representation of shtetl culture as it was reformulated in the memories of the first generations of Jewish immigrants. The variations in the evocations of Eastern European klezmer in these renderings of Stempenyu indicate complex changes in the ways Jewish immigrants and their children conceived of their connection to Eastern Europe over four decades. The paper concludes by viewing changes in the symbolic character type of the shtetl fiddler in its most famous and recent manifestation, in the stage and screen musical Fiddler on the Roof.

GAUGING THE GERMAN JEWISH

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 579-588
Author(s):  
DANIEL B. SCHWARTZ
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Leo Strauss ◽  
Vast Number ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Jewish Thought ◽  
Essential Questions ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
German Jewish

Few fields are as riddled with terminological indecision as “German Jewish thought.” One cannot invoke this sphere without immediately bumping up against essential questions of definition. Should membership within its bounds be reserved for those who wrote, primarily, as Jews for Jews, even if in a non-Jewish language? Or should its borders be expanded substantially to include Jewish contributions to secular German thought—or, perhaps more aptly put, secular thought in German, in order not to exclude the vast number of Central European Jewish innovators who wrote in the language? If one takes the latter route, the problems only proliferate, for the question then ensues, what makes any of these supposed Jewish contributionsJewish? How is the Jewishness of a particular work, school of thought, or sensibility to be gauged and assessed? How does one avoid the risk of reading too much in—or too little? How does one steer clear of reducing Jewishness to some stable core or essence, without relying on a notion so broad and diffuse as to be effectively meaningless? And always lurking is the question whether, in imputing Jewishness to a cultural product or outlook, one has betrayed its creator, who would have recoiled at being labeled a “Jewish” author or artist. These problems are not peculiar to German Jewish intellectual history. They arise wherever and whenever Jews have been disproportionately prominent in the shaping of secular culture—for instance, in the writing of the “New York intellectuals” in the postwar United States. But the role of authors and artists of German Jewish background proved especially pronounced even after many, like Hannah Arendt or Leo Strauss, emigrated to escape the Nazis. In their new environments, they remained active participants in intellectual life, and the question remains whether they were carrying on the tradition of German Jewish thought.

From the Russian Pale to the Lower East Side: The Cultural Roots of Four Jewish Women’s Radicalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annelise Orleck
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
East Side ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
East European ◽  
Cultural Roots ◽  
Labor Radicalism ◽  
European Jewish

This chapter traces the roots of East European Jewish women’s Socialism, feminism and labor radicalism in the Eastern European towns and cities where they were born during the late 19th century. It then follows Schendierman, Newman, Lemlich and Cohn as they moved to New York City and became involved in labor and women’s subsistence activism.

The Shtetl in the Hebrew Theatre of Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s

2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-191
Author(s):  
Shelly Zer-Zion
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Cultural Meaning ◽  
New York University ◽  
Theatre Companies ◽  
The Future ◽  
European Jewish ◽  
The University ◽  
Large Corpus

During the 1930s, the two Hebrew repertoire theatre companies in Palestine – the Habima and the Ohel – performed a large corpus of plays dealing with the landscapes of the Eastern European Jewish shtetl. Their fascination with the shtetl is surprising, considering the fact that these two companies were deeply committed to the Zionist project, whose ethos was building a new society in Eretz-Israel and negating the diasporic condition of Jewish existence. This article explores the landscapes of the shtetl as they were presented on the Hebrew stage of the 1930s and analyzes their aesthetic and cultural meaning for their audiences at that time. It shows that the shtetl plays formed a memory landscape that served the formation of a modern, consolidated, ethnic Jewish collective in Palestine, which shared a unified narrative of its past, as well as national aspirations for the future. Shelly Zer-Zion is a lecturer of theatre at the University of Haifa and was previously a Fulbright post-doctoral scholar at New York University. Her recent publications include Habima in Berlin: The Institutionalization of a Zionist Theatre (Magness Press, 2015), and her research is currently supported by the Israeli Science Foundation.

The Reel and Surreal of Race in America: Michel Gondry and the African–American Identity Crisis of Dave Chappelle

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-166
Author(s):  
Monique Taylor
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
African American ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
American Identity ◽  
African American Identity ◽  
Real Community

In this chapter Monique Taylor analyses the concert documentary DaveChappelle’s Block Party (2005), directed by French filmmaker Michel Gondry, which depicts the organization and performances of a “block party” hosted by African-American comedian Dave Chappelle in Brooklyn, New York. Chappelle’s Block Party featured performances by some of the biggest names in hip hop, rap, and R & B music, including ?uestlove, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, the Fugees reunited with Lauryn Hill, and Kanye West. The chapter argues that Gondry plays the role of outsider-looking-in as both a participant in as well as an observer of aspects of American cultural conversations on memory, identity and language. Taylor’s chapter draws attention to Dave Chappelle’sBlock Party’s construction of a hybrid and hyper-real community through the use of strategies such as movements back and forth in time between the entertainers’ performances and the preparations leading up to the concert which highlight the production of the event, surreal visual embellishments, and prominent allusion to symbols of African–American identity. The chapter also places the film within the context of Chappelle’s own exploration of his identity and struggle to “keep it real.”

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