Tuesday, 1 July 2008: Jewish-American: Chosen People in the New World. Bernard Malamud, “The German Refugee” (IA 35-46); Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (VA 90-105) [handout]; Sonia Pilcer, “2G” (VA 201-206) [handout]; Eva Hoffman, from Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (VA 219-228) [handout]; Vivian Gornick, “To Begin With” (VA 74-81) [handout]

Objective 2. To chart the dynamics, variations, and stages of the immigrant narrative.

The label of a “Model Minority” is often applied to a new immigrant group that exemplifies or fulfills the ideals implicit in the immigrant narrative.

• A century ago Jewish immigrants were the “model minority,” as their children became well-educated professionals.
• These “ideal immigrants” take advantage of economic and educational opportunities (often associated with music, math, and medicine).
• In terms of assimilation, such groups often assimilate economically and educationally while maintaining ethnic identity in religion and ethnic customs (which may contribute to family stability and low crime rates). This resistance to assimilation imitates a leading quality of the dominant culture (obj. 4).

Eva Hoffman’s “Lost in Translation:  A Life in a New Language”

p. 221              “I want, somehow, to give up the condition of being a foreigner…I no longer want to have the prickly, unrelenting consciousness that I’m living in the medium of a specific culture.”    

p. 222              “My sense of reality, powerful and vulnerable, is in danger of coming under native domination.”

                        “I think my friends often suspect me of a perverse refusal to play along, an unaccountable desire to provoke and disturb their comfortable consensus.  I suspect that the consensus is trying to colonize me and rob me of my distinctive shape and flavor.”

p.226               “…if I don’t want to remain in arid internal exile for the rest of my life, I have to find a way to lose my alienation without losing my self.  But how does one bend toward another culture without falling over…How does one stop reading the exterior signs of a foreign tribe and step into the inwardness, the viscera of the their meanings?”

p.227               “…if I’m not to risk a mild cultural schizophrenia, I have to make a shift in the inner most ways.  I have to translate myself.  But if I’m to achieve this without becoming assimilated—that is, absorbed—by my new world, the translation has to be careful, the turns of the psyche unforced.”

Question:  Why does the narrator find herself in conflict with her American Friends if she falls into the highly educated “model minority” category? 

Bernard Malamud’s “The German Refugee”

p.36                 “Like most educated Germans Oskar had at one time studied English.”

p. 38                “To many of these people, articulate as they were, the great loss was the loss of language—that they could not say what was in them to say.”

p.40                 “In tormented English, he conveyed his intense and everlasting hatred of the Nazis for destroying his career, uprooting his life, and flinging him like a piece of bleeding meat to the hawks.”

p. 41                “His problems, God knows, were real enough, but could there be something more than a refugee’s displacement, alienation, financial insecurity, being in a strange land without friends or a speakable tongue?”

Question:  Some “model minorities,” such as educated Jews fleeing Europe during WWII, did not come to America for opportunity, but for survival.  Does this affect their experience as an immigrant? If so, how?

Objective 2.  To chart the dynamics, variations, and stages of the immigrant narrative.

Basic stages of the Immigrant Narrative

·           Stage 1: Leave the Old World (“traditional societies” in Europe, Asia, or Latin America).

·     Stage 2: Journey to the New World (here, the USA & modern culture)

Stage 3: Shock, resistance, exploitation, and discrimination (immigrant experience here overlaps with or resembles the minority experience)

·           Stage 4: Assimilation to dominant American culture and loss of ethnic identity (departs or differs from minority experience)

·           Stage 5: Rediscovery or reassertion of ethnic identity (usu. only partial)

Character by generation: What are the standard associations or identities of distinct generation?

·        first-generation as “heroic” but “clueless”

·        second-generation as “divided” between traditional identities of homeland or ethnic group and modern identity of assimilated American; bi-cultural and bi-lingual

·        third generation as “assimilated” (Maria becomes Kristen, Jiang becomes Kevin)

Sonia Pilcer’s “2G”

p. 202              “I am named Sonia Hanna, after both of my parents’ murdered mothers.”

p. 203              “My parents learned to speak English, my father got a job in a factory, and my mother a large apartment in Brooklyn, which she kept spotless.”

                        “I forgot my Polish. I was an American girl with no accent.”

p. 206              “Memory is our bogeyman.  In spite of all the injunctions to remember, I am afflicted with selective amnesia when it comes to this war business.”

                        “I knew James Joyce’s birthday, Malcolm X’s death, and the places where Georgia O’Keeffe had lived.  How could I care so little for my parents?”

                        “Yes, I was their seed of life after so much death.  A living monument to their survival, a shrine to their mothers.  But I wasn’t a survivor.”

Question:  Because the narrator has no memory of life before America, she has much in common with second-generation immigrants (though she’s actually a first).  Why does the narrator’s experience as a second-generation immigrant cause her such frustration?

Vivian Gornick’s “To Begin With”

p. 76                “…the Yiddish school I was sent to after my public-school day was over”

                        “…’to understand things,’ I already knew, was the most exciting, the most important thing in life.”

p. 78                “These people had no external nationhood; nothing in the cultures they had left, of the one to which they had come, had given them anything but a humiliating sense of outsidedness.”

p. 80                “In the previous three or four years I had often been in a state of dismay as I felt the weight of simplistic socialist explanation pressing upon my growing inner life.”

                        “the Party organizer came weekly to deliver exhortations and assignments in a language that, increasingly, began to sound foreign to my ears…to be replaced by the language of Melville, Mann, Wolfe, and Dostoevsky now sounding within me.”

                        “Our men, our race, our politics:  dead and dying, lost and gone, smashed and murdered…I was beside myself with youthful rage.  My mother was desperately confused.  My aunt remained adamantly Stalinist.  Night after night we quarreled violently.”

Question:        How does the narrator exemplify both the second-generation immigrant experience and the “model minority” pattern?