Thursday, 22 June 2006: Jewish-American: Chosen People in the New World.

Text-objective discussion leader: Sharon Lockett

Review:  Objective 2:  "Model Minority Label"

·        Take advantage of economic and educational opportunities (often associated with music and math)

·        Assimilate with respect to jobs, education, but not religion and customs (disinclination to assimilate fully imitates dominant culture)

·        May be contrasted with "problem minorities"

·        Current example:  Asian Americans 

·        Used as argument against affirmative action

Jewish-American--Chosen People in the New World

 The Jewish-American "Model Immigrant":

·        Take advantage of economic and educational opportunities (often associated with music and math)

·        "Careful assimilation"--assimilate with respect to jobs, education, but not religion and customs (disinclination to assimilate fully imitates dominant culture)

·        Educated/Literate/Thinkers/Philosophers--sophisticated use of language

·        Professional

·        Interested in art, literature, humanities

·        Multi-lingual

·        Liberal tendencies

·        Communists/Capitalists

·        Labor/ Management

Objective 4:  Dominant Culture Traits--What kind of culture do immigrants assimilate to?

·        Separate, detached, disconnected

·        Unmarked, invisible, "generic"

·        Restrained, cool, calm (as opposed to "spice" of ethnicity)

·        Resist others' attempts at assimilation

·        Private/Individual

·        "Slippery"--hard to peg

"Lost in Translation"--Eva Hoffman

The Model Immigrant/Dominant Culture Prototype:

"Careful Assimilation"

·        p. 226:  "how does one bend toward another culture without falling over?"

·        p. 227:  "a true translation . . . happens by slow increments, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase"

Education:  Literate/Arts/Music/Philosophy

·        p.219:  "I'm walking across Harvard . . . just come out of a class on Victorian aesthetics . . . meet some friends . . . and exchange bits of literary gossip and personal analysis . . ."

·        p. 219:  "I spent [a year] at the Yale Music School . . ."

Liberal Tendencies

·        p. 223:  M.A.F.: "You with your liberal quibbles . . ." 

·        p. 221: "My misfortune is . . . to notice the subjection to collective ideology where I should only see the free play of subjectivity." 

The Dominant Culture:

Detached

·        p. 223:  M.A.F.:  "Don't get so upset, this was a Hungarian movie.  You don't have to be loyal to all of Eastern Europe."

Resists Others' Attempts at Assimilation

·        p. 222:  "my demurrals are often greeted with plain silence, as if they don't need to be entertained"

·        p. 222:  "my interlocutors stare at me . . . they explain , , , where I'm wrong"

Invisible/"Slippery"--Hard to Peg

·        p. 221:  "'the Culture'--that weird artifice I'm imprisoned in"

·        p. 221:  "I cease seeing the face of one person, and start throwing myself again the wall of an invisible, impregnable, collective force"

·        p. 225:  "the codes and conventions are still up for grabs"

Discussion Questions:  In her essay, Hoffman claims:  "I want to reenter, through whatever Looking Glass will take me there, a state of ordinary reality." (p.221)

1.  How does this "Alice in Wonderland" perspective drive the theme of her essay?   What does it say about her immigrant experience?

2.  What does she mean by "ordinary reality"?

"To Begin With"--Vivian Gornick

The Model Immigrant/Dominant Culture Prototype:

Labor

·        p.74:  "Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class"

·        p. 75:  "my father stood upright on the floor of a dress factory on West Thirty-fifth Street . . . with a steam iron in his hand for thirty years"

·        p.77:  (speaking of friends) "He . . . drove a bakery truck. She was a sewing-machine operator . . . that one over there was a plumber"

Labor vs. Management

·        p. 74-75:  "Papa worked hard all day long . . . My  uncles owned the factory"

Literate/Intelligent/Thinkers--Sophisticated Use of Language

·        p. 77:  "Every one of them read the Daily Worker, The Freiheit ("Freedom"), and the New York Times religiously"

·        p. 76:  "Oh, that talk!  That passionate, transforming talk . . . the richness of their rhetoric . . . the intensity of their arguments"

·        p. 76:  "'to understand things" . . . was the most exciting, the most important thing in life"

·        p. 77:  "Ideas were everything . . . they became thinkers, writers, poets"

Communism

·        p. 78:  "The people in that kitchen had remade the family in the image of workers all over the world . . .  in the image of the Communist Party . . . Utopia in the image of the Soviet Union"

·        p. 79:  "The instrument of consciousness for them was Marx . . . and the Communist Party" 

Discussion Questions: 

1.  In her essay, Gornick cites Italian novelist and journalist Ignazio Silone as having felt "'Like someone who has had a tremendous blow on the head and keeps on his feet, walking, talking, gesticulating, but without fully realizing what has happened.'"   

How does this quote relate to the immigrant narrative?  the "model immigrant"?  the dominant culture?

2.  In each of these two narratives, the author mentions involvement in philosophical or political arguments with friends and family.  Ultimately, these disagreements lead to division instead of understanding or reconciliation.  What does this say about their roles as model immigrants or dominant culture prototypes?