Andrew Carmouche
Literature 4333
Professor White
4-19-01

A Common Struggle

Whether in the Old World of community, familial relationships and traditional values, or in the New World of non-traditional relationships, individualism and uncertainty, the struggle for survival predominates the immigrant narrative. Religious and racial intolerance, social upheaval, economic hardship, and political turmoil underscore the causes of emigration, but the New world was far from idyllic, and traces of these scourges checkered the landscape of the New World as well as the Mother land.

The earliest immigrants who settled in North America were the Puritans in 1621. Unlike their predecessors in the late sixteenth, who ventured to America for the sole purpose of seeking gold and glory; the Puritans sought refuge in a vast new land, and freedom to practice their beliefs without fear of recourse from governing authority. In compact with the monarchy, the Church of England, and Anglican officials routinely oppressed and harassed the Separatists. William Bradford in his history, Of Plymouth Plantation, wrote of the Puritans, " But after these things they could not longer continue in any peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon them. For some were taken and clapped up in prison, others had their houses beset and watched night and day, and hardly escaped their hands; and the most were fain to flee and leave their houses and habitations, and the means of their livelihood " (Bradford 9).

In de-emphasizing the role of the Church, it’s rituals, and offices, and supplanting them with a more direct and personal approach to God and spirituality; the Protestant Reformation, through the works of Martin Luther and John Calvin greatly influenced and inspired the Puritans in their struggle against the controlling, corrupting and tormenting influence of the Papacy and king James I of England. Like the Hebrews in the Old Testament, the Puritans felt that God had established a covenant with them, and that it was their will to do God’s work which was to escape the corruption and persecution of the Church and to establish a community where God’s work can be done. In 1654 Edward Johnson, a wood-worker from Massachusetts, wrote in his history of the Puritans, " When England began to decline in religion, persons spread the whole land like grasshoppers, in this very time Christ...raises an army out of our English Nation, for freeing his people from their long servitude... He would bring upon their adversaries a sudden and unexpected destruction... in the year 1628, He stirres up his servants as the heralds of a King to make this proclamation...as followeth. ‘ Oh yes! Oh yes! Oh yes! all you the people that are here Oppressed!...gather yourselves together, your wives and little ones... to be shipped for his service, in the Westerne World...’ Thus Christ calls His little remnant to...create a new Heaven, and a new Earth in, new Churches, and a new Common-wealth together" (Vaughn and Bremer 269). After their journey across the Atlantic, where they suffered not a small slight, their struggle for survival was just taking hold. Two to three months after their arrival at Plymouth half of their company died of scurvy, starvation, and bitter cold. They agreed to and maintained relatively peaceful relations with the Indians. To the emigres Squanto, of the Patuxet tribe, was a Godsend; he taught them how to plant corn, about fishing, and how to procure essentials. He navigated them through the unfamiliar terrain and served them as an interpreter to various tribes (Bradford 89,94). The Puritans founded their "city upon a hill," where they practiced their faith simply and without pretension.

Since the times of Abraham the Jews have been a wandering or migrating people. Hearing the call of God,Abraham is told to bring his family and belongings to a predetermined destination where he would father a great nation. They journeyed through Palestine and then to Canaan, but a famine forced them to pickup and move westward into Egypt. Finally they moved back to Canaan and settled there between the years 1900 and 1700 B.C.(Potok 32,33). For hundreds of years they struggled against the ravages of famine and the brutality of the Canaanites. The story of the Jews is one of struggle in the realm of worship, peace and acceptance, and for a place to call home.

In Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, the Smolinsky family struggles day to day with the reality of poverty. The patriarch of the family, and the only male, Reb Smolinsky is a learned man of the Torah, and constantly tries to keep his family together by not doing common work done by men and women, but by doing God’s work by studying the Torah. He uses his Knowledge of God’s grace and wisdom to lift up the spirits and morale of his family. When the landlady came to collect the rent, and found that they did not have it, she became irate, and spoke with contempt against the father saying," Hear him only! The dirty do-nothing! Go to work yourself! Stop singing prayers. Then you’ll have money for rent!"(18) With this Smolinsky slapped her, and they had their day in court. Reb was exonerated with the help of community business people, and his reply to his wife was, " Nu? Why shouldn’t they take my part? Am I not their light? The whole world would be in thick darkness if not for men like me who give their lives to spread the light of the Holy Torah" (24). This attitude and outlook toward life, an Old World view that the patriarch Smolinsky had always succored his wife, but to his daughters, growing up in America, it was shirking responsibility. Though he clings to the traditions and values of the Old World, slowly he becomes taken in by the values of the New World, but retaining his old belief system.

He tries to marry off his daughters to respectable and rich men. After marrying off Bessie to Zalmon, the fish dealer, Zalmon agrees to pay him five hundred dollars in lost wages, for Bessie brought in a lot of money to the household. With this money the father wishes to go into business for himself, but his wife tells him, " A head for business in America, is the same head you got to have for business in Russia. You showed me enough how smart you are. Why not better earn a living by what you know, get a job as a Rabbi in a synagogue? Religion is your business"(111). He hears nothing of this, for to sell religion would be sacrilege.What would he be? selling his hopes, prayers, knowledge, and wisdom learned from decades of studying the word of God to Americans who would not know the difference. He says, " What! Sell my religion for money? Become a false prophet to the Americanized Jews! No. My religion is not for sale. I only want to go into business to keep sacred my religion. I want to get into some quick money-making thing that will not take up to many hours a day, so I could get most of my time for learning"(111). But what his wife says about him is true, that he has no head for business, he is naive and too trusting. His head is in the spiritual world; the Old World of community and togetherness where his God is the center of that existence, not the business world of America.. But here we see a willingness to assimilate to a degree that before was not present until he made an offer to Zalmon. Pressure from his wife, daughters, and perhaps to even a greater extent pressure from society; he realizes that in order to survive in the New World he will have to contribute financially to the family.

Their youngest daughter Sara runs off to college. She represents the dreams and Opportunity the New World has to offer, but for this she has to sacrifice, she has to struggle, and face fears she never knew she had," One evening, the teacher was reading was reading to us the list of subjects we’d have to pass to enter college. " Who are those bosses of education who made us study so much dead stuff?" A frown of annoyance wrinkled the teacher’s face. The others began to wink and smile at one another, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘ I only want to know what interests me. Why should I have to choke myself with geometry? How can those tyrants over the college force all kinds of different people to stuff their heads with the same deadness that we all got to know alike? I want the knowledge of the living life...’(181) Further she tells herself," Maybe if only I could live like others and look like others, they wouldn’t pick on me so much, I thought to myself"(181). Sara’s struggle to survive is the struggle to assimilate, to blend in to a newer and higher culture than the one she grew up in on Hester street. She says," I threw myself more desperately than ever into my studies. My one hope was to get to the educated world, where only the thoughts you give out count, and not how you look. My longing for the living breath of a little understanding became centered more and more in my dream of going to college. Wherever I went, in the street, in the subway, by day and by night, I had always before my eyes a vision of myself in college, mingling everyday with the inspired minds of great professors and educated higher-ups"(184). Sara’s way of blending in is through education. Her sisters have chosen to marry, but like her father, she is burning to learn, and not that ‘dead stuff, ‘ but the ‘ living life.’

Just prior to the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 two million Jews fled the country, and immigrated to England, America, Australia and South Africa. The Jews from Germany did not arouse the fury of antisemitism the Eastern European Jew did, for the Western Jew readily assimilated by taking part in the cultural and business world of America as Potok notes in his Wanderings, " They had proved industrious, had introduced into the land the hard working peddler who brought clothes and books and medicaments to isolated farmers and villagers, and had become storekeepers, international traders, land speculators, clothing manufacturers, financiers"(507). The Russian Jew, however, suffered first in Russia and then in America. They fled Russia for mainly religious and ethnic persecution, but the oppression on the legislative and economic front has not been given the attention it deserves. In the 1880s the Russian government divided Russian subjects into two categories, native born and foreigners. Although Jews have been a part of Russia for hundreds of years, they were still considered foreigners under the law. The Jews were subject to special laws whose aim was to keep them from migrating into the inner provinces, and relegate them to the western provinces and the Kingdom of Poland where Jews have lived since the middle ages. The Jew, no matter how loyal to the government, could not take part in official life, and only educated and industrious Jews were allowed to live within the inner provinces of Russia (Erickson 106-7). These Eastern European Jews lived in the run down tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. They shared the same toilets, narrow hallways, thin walls, garbage clogged air shafts with windows that faced one another from floor to roof. They were mostly poor, some were socialists, anarchists, orthodox religious, and still others were anti-religious. Their German uptown brethren often helped them, but it was not enough to stem the tide of antisemitism that followed them to the New world. In some places were signs which read " No dogs and Jews allowed here." They suffered job discrimination, exclusion from certain clubs and hotels, and in Henry Ford’s newspaper " ranted about the international Jew who was the enemy of the Anglo-Saxon civilization" (Potok 509-9).

Both the Jews and the Puritans shared a common experience in the Old World as well as the New World, and both groups held in common a trust that God would provide the means necessary that would ease and hasten their struggle for peace, and their belief in freedom from oppression and persecution. Although each group’s faith is different, their cultures and traditions divergent; they met resistance to their way of life and living with an historical perspective with God and the idea of progress on their side. Every immigrant story is a progression in every realm of thought.

Works Cited

1.William Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation 1620-1647

1981. New York: Random House.

2.Anzia Yezierska. Bread Givers

1925. New York: Doubleday

3. Chaim Potok. Wanderings: History of the Jews

1978 New York: Fawcett Crest

4. Charlotte Erickson Emmigration From Europe

1815-1914 1976. London: A&C Black