5. Into the mainstream

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

The Dance Hall

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.

Forverts/Forward

Forverts (the Jewish Daily Forward or The Forward) was a Yiddish-language newspaper based in New York City that appeared as a daily for eighty-six years. It was the largest and most influential Jewish newspaper in the world, the most widely read socialist daily in the United States, and the foreign language newspaper with the largest distribution in the United States. Launched on 22 April 1897, Forverts was founded by a group of Yiddish-speaking members of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP). Abraham Cahan (b. 1860–d. 1951) was appointed its first editor. He left after a few months but returned in 1902 to lead the paper for some forty-eight years, until his death. Although Forverts was a Socialist paper, its readership encompassed the broad masses of eastern European Jewish immigrants in early-20th-century America, regardless of their political orientation. As many scholars have argued, Forverts played an important role in the Americanization of its readers, providing them with useful information about their new country and helping them integrate into American life. But it was an immigrant paper in a much deeper sense, too. By adapting ideological ideas and cultural trends from eastern Europe to the American reality, Forverts became instrumental in developing a new kind of secular Jewish identity. Its editorial policy was to preserve a socialist and nonreligious tone, to use simple Yiddish, to publish a range of articles—some more serious, others light—and to serve as a platform for both high-quality and popular literature (shund). As a result, Forverts contributed a great deal to the development of Yiddish literature, and many great Yiddish writers, including Isaac Bashevis Singer, published in its pages. The paper’s advice column—“a bintl brief” (a bundle of letters)—was especially popular. It regularly printed readers’ questions about important aspects of everyday life together with the editor’s responses reflecting his views on Jewish society and family life in America. No less important was the women’s page, which encouraged women to participate in the job market alongside their family roles. On the political front, Forverts supported the labor movement, participated in Jewish political debates during World War I, and fought immigration restrictions. In its early days, the paper featured anti-Zionist views, though this changed after the Balfour Declaration (1917) and Cahan’s trip to Palestine (1925). Demographic changes following immigration restrictions in the 1920s caused a gradual decline in its distribution. The paper continued as a daily until 1983, when it became a weekly. In 1990 an English-language weekly joined the Yiddish newspaper. Since early 2019, both the Yiddish and the English editions are entirely digital.

Fictions of Irregular Post-Soviet Migration

This chapter explores Sana Krasikov’s short story collection One More Year (2008) and Anya Ulinich’s novel Petropolis (2007) in order to develop a comparative approach to representations of irregular and unauthorized migration, a form of movement that has been largely identified with migrants from Mexico and Central America. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich represents ethnically and racially diverse protagonists from Russia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan, who arrive in the United States on nonimmigrant visas and become irregular or undocumented. These two works move beyond the themes of assimilation and family migration that dominated twentieth-century cultural productions by eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent, such as Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, and Anzia Yezierska. Their work laid the foundation for a literature of assimilation to a middle-class white US racial identity that became fully available to European immigrants by the mid-twentieth century. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich emphasizes post-Soviet characters’ experiences of diminished access to the US labor market, residency, and citizenship rights, and thus positions itself in the larger context of contemporary US immigrant writing.