Valerie Lawrence
LITR 4333
April 22, 2002

Immigrant Experience through Popular Media

       The immigrant experience had been told over the years in several different ways.  It has been written about in books, it has been told through song, and it has been shown in movies.  Many of these different forms of media have told the same stories, but they are seen in different ways.  These different forms of media show the journey to the New World as a successful experience sometimes, and as a horrifying experience at other times. There are several different movies that have striking similarities to literature about the immigrant experience.

       There are many similarities between the novel “Bread Givers” and the movie The Jazz Singer.  While Anzia Yezierska’s story tells of a young girl who is determined to escape her Old World father and run her own life, The Jazz Singer tells the story of a young boy trying to do much the same thing. Sarah Smolinsky wants to become an educated woman and not allow her father to ruin her life the way that he ruined her sisters’ lives. Al Jolson’s character of Jakie Rabinowitz wants desperately to become a jazz singer, but his father, Chantor Rabinowitz, is determined that he follow in his footsteps and become a chantor in the synagogue. The characters find sympathy through their mothers who help save them from their fathers’ wrath and help them achieve their dreams. Sarah has an ally in her mother who does not understand her need to live on her own and go to college, but respects her decision although her father does not.  Sarah has to run away to get what she wants, and her mother defies her father in order to keep in contact with her.  Jakie Rabinowitz’s mother acts as a middleman between Jakie and his father.  She understands that this is a New World and Jakie should be allowed to do what is in his heart to do and not what is in his father’s heart for him to do.  He does not have to run away in order to achieve his goals; his father throws him out on the street after finding him singing in a jazz club.  Both Jakie and Sarah work hard in order for their dreams to be realized in the New World.  They are both very self-disciplined individuals. However, they both have something missing in their lives and it is not until the end of their respective stories that they find what it is.  Sarah rediscovers her heritage and lets her father back into her life and helps him out when he needs it.  Jakie rediscovers his heritage and sings at the ceremony for the Day of Atonement because his father is too ill to do so.  He has to miss his first starring role in a Broadway show in order to do this. Sarah and Jakie both find love in their stories, but Sarah’s father and Jakie’s mother are both worried that they will marry non-Jewish partners. Both characters end up making better lives for themselves than they would have if they had gone along with their parents’ wishes, and not given in to the New World mindset.  It is interesting to note that when Jakie realizes that he must be proud of his heritage and do this one thing for his father, he is dressed in black face.  He says that his “heart is crying out for the songs of his people and for Israel”, but he is saying all of this as a black man.  When he is doing this, he is representing two marginalized groups in society that have both endured their fair share of racism and discrimination.  If he had not mentioned Israel in his speech, it could have easily been a black man talking about his race and his people.

There is a Jewish folk song that evokes the feeling of

the ancient Jews trying to find the promised land, but also

gives the idea of why these New World Jewish children felt

they had to choose their own paths. It is called “Free to

Be, You and Me”.  The last stanza in to the chorus says

Every boy in the land /Grows to be his own man. / Every girl in the land / Grows to be her own woman./Take my hand, come with me, / Where the children are free. / Come with me, take my hand, and we’ll run / To a land where the river runs free, / To a land through the green country, / To a land to a shining sea, / To a land where the horses run free, / To a land where the children are free, / And you and me are free to be / you and me. (Mack 2002)

The song speaks of the “promised land” where they will be free.    It could be referring to the ancient Jews finding the land of milk and honey, but it could also be interpreted as a New World where the men and women could practice their religion freely. The lyrics of this song indicate that the children would be free to live their own lives; however, the stories of Sarah and Jakie’s New World experiences contradict this desire for personal freedom.

            Another ethnic group that had troubles in the New World were the Italians.  They did not have as much trouble within their own families, but they had problems gaining acceptance from the rest of the world.  The piece of poetry that creates a picture of the plight of the Italians is “American Dream: First Report” by Joseph Papaleo.  He shows how the Italians faced discrimination by other Americans.  This is also shown in a movie made by Italians called Good Morning Babylon by the Taviani brothers.  In the poem by Papaleo, he discusses people in general, calling the Italians dirty, and describes the lack of good jobs for Italians.  The brothers in the movie have to deal with the same kind of discrimination.  They come to America, hoping that their skill of masonry will get them good jobs so that they can make enough money to go back to Italy and save their father’s business.  They are quickly disappointed, and must take degrading jobs in order to support themselves. They land in Hollywood, wanting to work on the movie sets for D.W. Griffith, but are met with discrimination from Griffith’s employees who think they are nothing but dirty Italians.  This is heightened by the fact that they are forced to live in a shack filled with birds where it smells awful all of the time. In the end of Papaleo’s poem, the Italians become “well-dressed citizens devoted to the disinfection of our carpets”. (Papaleo 88) The brothers are finally given a chance to work their given craft, although they have to resort to trickery in order to so, and they become wealthy and well-respected in the process.   They become well-dressed citizens and have impeccably clean homes and offices.  They take American wives and begin to enjoy living in the country that had once treated them like dirt.  However, just as the characters in the poem forget their heritage, the brothers quickly forget their heritage and their promise to their father.  Rather than go back to Italy with the money they made, or send money back to their father, they stay in America and enjoy living the high life.  Even a visit from their father, who denounces the way they are living and their failure to keep their promise does not compel them to return to Italy.  One brother goes back to Italy after his wife dies, and he becomes disgusted with the American way of life.  However, his brother chooses to stay in America with his American wife and raise his son as an American.  He became too assimilated to return to the life of poverty that was in store for him in Italy.

Another movie that shows the plight of the Italian immigrants as well as other immigrant groups is the silent movie The Iron Horse by John Ford.  The movie is about the building of the transcontinental railroad.  The immigrants working on the railroad were working like slaves, and they were forced to live in horrible conditions.  The movie, in some ways, depicts the immigrants as being happy to live this way.  It also shows the immigrant workers as being rough, uneducated, and dirty. There is a song in the movie that the immigrants sing that is shown on title cards that depicts the type of backbreaking labor they are doing. “Drill ye terriers drill / Drill ye terriers drill / For you work all day / with no sugar in your ‘tay / when your working for the Union Pacific Railway!” (Iron Horse 1924)   There are some scenes that show that the different immigrant groups did not get along well.  The group that seemed to get the most discrimination from the other immigrants were the Italians.  The other immigrants were calling the Italians “lazy”.  There are no “palaces of soap” for the immigrants in this movie.  They are shown to have good hearts, but none of them are going to succeed in their lifetimes.  Now that the railroad is built and the two main characters (white, non-immigrants) have a happy ending, the immigrants will have to go their different ways and find jobs again. 

            The lifestyle of the Puerto Rican immigrants is depicted in the short story “Silent Dancing” by

Judith Ortiz Cofer.  A movie / play that corresponds well with Puerto Rican immigration is West Side Story by Jerome Robbins.  “Silent Dancing” is told through the eyes of a young girl watching the adults around her.  West Side Story does not have adults in it, except for the pharmacist and the Police Officer, Krupke.  In the story of “Silent Dancing” the father wants the family to assimilate, but the mother fights assimilation. In the movie, the Puerto Rican teenage girls want to assimilate into Americans, but the Puerto Rican boys do not want to assimilate and do not want the girls to assimilate either. They sing a song on the rooftop of their ghetto apartment building with girls singing about the virtues of living in America, while the boys sing about the things they do not like about America.  The female cousin in “Silent Dancing” is looked down upon by the other Puerto Rican women because she has assimilated and would never want to go back to Puerto Rico.  She does not want to become a humilde like the girls who have just come from Puerto Rico. In West Side Story, the other Puerto Rican boys and girls want the character of Maria to stay a humilde even though she wants to become American girl.  The character of Anita has already assimilated somewhat and has learned the great American virtue of hypocrisy.  Anita is not a humilde and would not have made a very good humilde.  However, she expects Maria to become a humilde and “stick with her own kind” even though she is already seeing an American boy.   In “Silent Dancing”, the cousin is sent back to Puerto Rico as punishment for her sins.  Maria is punished much more for her sin of attempted assimilation.  She has to deal with the deaths of both her brother and her lover.  She teaches the two warring gangs to stop fighting and get along, but it comes at a very high price. 

            In 1963, director Elia Kazan created a movie called America America that tells the story of his uncle’s journey to America.  The uncle, Stavros, does not get to America until the very end of the movie.  The entire movie explores his journey to get to America.  He leaves his home in Turkish occupied Greece to go to Constantinople for a business opportunity for his family.  Stavros has dreams of going to America and works degrading jobs to save up the money to get there.  Everyone whom he works with calls him “America America” because thoughts of going to America consume him.  He gives up a life of luxury that he could have had in Constantinople, but instead chooses to go to America to work as a shoe shine boy in New York.  This movie does not parallel any one of the stories or poems, but rather, could parallel a number of them.  Most of the stories tell of what happens after coming to America, but they do not go into much detail of what came before.  The desire of these characters in the stories to come to America is very great, but the reasons why they come are barely mentioned or skipped over.  The story of Elia Kazan’s uncle is poignant because it tells of his struggle to just get to America, even though he will have just as hard of a struggle once he gets there. It is almost as if his story could then become “Soap and Water” or “The English Lesson” once he fulfills his dream of coming to America. 

 Charlie Chaplin began having problems with the American government after he made a film in 1917 called The Immigrant.  It showed immigrants being roped of like cattle on the ship, rude immigration officers, and extreme poverty and hunger.  He was the first person in film to really show the plight of the immigrants and how they were treated once they got here.  Ironically, it started a process that ended with him getting kicked out of the country several years later.  The films made about the experience of American Immigrants show the plight of the immigrants and also that assimilation is not always a good thing.  Just as a novel written in a foreign language loses something when it is translated into English, the same can be said for the immigrants and their culture.  When they want to become Americans, they must first lose their culture.  The immigrant tradition is very important in film and in literature.  It is important for immigrants to retain something of their culture through these works, and it is important for assimilated Americans to remember that somewhere back in their own histories there are immigrants.

The immigrant experience is summed up quite effectively in

the lyrics of a song by The Pogues, an Irish band:

Thousands are sailing / across the western ocean / for a land of opportunity / that some of them will never see / fortunes are failing / again across the ocean / our hearts are cold / our spirits free / we’ll break the chains of poverty.” (The Pogues 1987)

            Works Cited List

The Jazz Singer. Dir. Alan Crosland. Perf. Al Jolson, May

McAvoy, Warner Oland ,and Eugenie Besserer. Warner Brothers, 1927.

Good Morning Babylon. Dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani.

            Perf. Vincent Spano, et al. Vestron, 1986.

The Iron Horse. Dir. John Ford. Perf. George O’Brien, Madge

            Bellamy, Cyril Chadwick, Will Walling, et al. Fox

            Studios, 1924.

West Side Story. Dir. Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise. Perf.

Natalie Wood, George Chakiris, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, et al. MGM/UA, 1961.

America America. Dir. Elia Kazan. Perf. Stathis Giallelis,

            Frank Wolff, et al. Warner Brothers, 1963.

The Immigrant. Dir. Charles Chaplin. Perf. Charles Chaplin,

            Edna Purviance, et al. Mutual, 1917.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. 3^rd ed. New York: 

Persea, 1999

Papaleo, Joseph. “American Dream: First Report.” Unsettling

            America. Ed. Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer

Gillan. New York: Penguin, 1994. 88.

Cofer, Judith Ortiz. “Silent Dancing.” Visions of America.

            Ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling. New York: Persea,

            1993.179-186.

Sinyard, Neil. Silent Movies. New York: Brompton, 1990.

Mack, Daniel. Service/Song Archive. 17 August 1999. 16

April 2002 http://www.netspace.org/~dmacks /shira/archive-index.html.

The Pogues. If I Should Fall From Grace with God. Stiff/WEA             International, 1987.