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LITR 5831 Seminar in
World / Multicultural Literature
American Immigrant Literature |
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What's special about Jewish American identity and literature?
Jews most successful at gaining economic benefits of immigration and American Dream without giving up ethnic identity.
Problem
of remaining chosen people or becoming like everyone else
Can an immigrant group enjoy benefits of America while resisting complete assimilation?
"Model Minority" immigrant groups may do so for a few generations, may enable or empower upward assimilation
Yekl
1.1
sweat shop
English newspaper, dictionary
Jewish stage
socialist magazine in Yiddish
impromptu lecture
1.2 Boston Yiddish
1.2 well-shaped legs, 1.7 magnificent form
1.8 [non-Jewish features] seemed to join the Jewish faith [smile]
1.12 rabbinical Bernstein looks up from his dictionary > 1.13
"
1.17 the debate
1.19 "My grandma's last care it is who can fight best." [Yiddish > comedy]
1.22 Here a Jew is as good as a Gentile.
1.23
"Why don't you look for the educated ones?"
[1.36]
Just like little children—playing ball! And yet people say
[1.41]
"He thinks that
shaving one's mustache makes a
Yankee!"
[1.50]
Instead of
spending
your money on fights, dancing, and things like that, would it not be better if
you paid it to a teacher?"
[1.51]
Rejoice that you keep
tormenting your books. Much does he know! Learning, learning, and learning, and
still he cannot speak English. I don't learn and yet I speak quicker than you!"
[1.62] At this juncture the boss, a dwarfish little Jew
[1.64] A wild scramble ensued. . . . overjoyed by the certainty of employment for at least another day or two, they departed till that hour.
[1.65] "Look at the rush they are making!
Just like the locusts of
[1.67] malicious pleasure which he took in their eagerness and in the demonstration of his power over the men, some of whom he knew to have enjoyed a more comfortable past than himself.
[1.68]
"As
soon as I get my pay I shall call on the installment man and give him a deposit
for a ticket." The prospective ticket was to be for a passage across the
Atlantic from
1.69 vision of dark-haired woman with a babe
1.70 not even suspected the existence of a name like Jake, being
known to himself and to all Povodye—a town in northwestern
1.73 The broken Russian learned among the Povodye soldiers he had exchanged for English of a corresponding quality
1.73 shocked by the very notion of seeking employment at his old trade in a city where it is in the hands of Christians, and consequently involves a violation of the Mosaic Sabbath [Saturday].
[1.76] Three years had intervened since he had first set foot on American soil, and the thought of ever having been a Yekl would bring to Jake's lips a smile of patronizing commiseration for his former self. As to his Russian family name, which was Podkovnik, Jake's friends had such rare use for it that by mere negligence it had been left intact.
2.7 "I shall get them* over here and begin a new life."
2.10 battle for breath
east side
2.10
metropolis of the Ghettos of the world. It is one of the most densely populated spots on the face of the
earth—a seething human sea fed by streams, streamlets, and rills of immigration
flowing from all the Yiddish-speaking centers of
[2.11] Jews from every nook and corner of Russia, Poland, Galicia, Hungary, Roumania; Lithuanian Jews, Volhynian Jews, south Russian Jews, Bessarabian Jews; Jews crowded out of the "pale of Jewish settlement"; Russified Jews expelled from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kieff, or Saratoff;
[cf. melting pot, African American, Trail of Tears]
[2.12] Nor is there a tenement house but harbors in its bosom specimens of all the whimsical metamorphoses wrought upon the children of Israel of the great modern exodus by the vicissitudes of life in this their Promised Land of today.
speaking all sorts of subdialects of the same jargon, thrown pellmell into one social caldron [cf. melting pot]
2.14 sweatshops > dance hall
2.14 Professor Pellner himself, curly hair more than feet like bears
2.15 air of being engaged in hard toil rather than as if they were dancing for amusement. The faces of some of these bore a wondering martyrlike expression
2.16 his strapping figure towered over the circling throng
2.23 a momentary lapse into Yiddish. English was the official language of the academy, where it was broken and mispronounced in as many different ways as there were Yiddish dialects represented in that institution.
2.33 held up his enormous bullet head as if he were bidding defiance to the whole world.
[2.37] Like the majority of the girls of the academy, Mamie's English was a much nearer approach to a justification of its name than the gibberish spoken by the men.
2.50 dividing the remark b/w both jargons
2.52 recurred to her English
2.56 whole figure seemed to be exclaiming, "Dot'sh a kin' a man I am!"
[2.65]
"To think of a bit of a flea like that
having so much cheek*!
Here is
3.2 since he had
shifted his abode to
3.2 The Jewish quarter of the metropolis, which is a vast and compact city within a city, offers its denizens incomparably fewer chances of contact with the English-speaking portion of the population than any of the three separate Ghettos of Boston.
3.2 his present associates took it for granted that he was single
3.4 certain lingering tenderness for his wife . . . From a reality she had gradually become transmuted into a fancy.
[3.4] where a "shister [Yiddish: shoemaker] becomes a mister [gentleman] and a mister a shister," [multilingual wordplay]
3.4 he had lived so much more than three years—so much more, in fact, than in all the twenty-two years of his previous life [American hypermodernity or future orientation accelerates time]—
[3.6] Neither Jake nor his wife nor his parents could write even Yiddish, although both he and his old father read fluently the punctuated Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Prayer Book. Their correspondence had therefore to be carried on by proxy,3.6
the man who wrote Jake's letters had a standing order to
reply in the sharpest terms at his command that Yekl did not spend his money on
drink; that America was not the land they took it for, where one could "scoop
gold by the skirtful"; that Gitl need not fear lest he meant to desert her, and
that as soon as he had saved enough to pay her way and to set up a decent
establishment she would be sure to get the ticket.
[4.1]
Immigration Bureau of
[4.2] his heart had sunk at the sight of his wife's uncouth and un-American appearance.
voluminous wig of a pitch-black hue
wickedness of displaying her natural hair
naturally dark of complexion
resemblance to a squaw
[4.5] "Yekl!" she screamed out in a piteous high key, as if crying for mercy.
4.6 The contrast between Gitl and Jake was so striking that the officer wanted to make sure—partly as a matter of official duty and partly for the fun of the thing—that the two were actually man and wife.
[4.7] "Oi [woe, alas] a lamentation upon me! He shaves his beard!" Giti ejaculated to herself as she scrutinized her husband.
4.10 kisses imparted the taste of mutual estrangement to both. In Jake's case the sensation was quickened by the strong steerage odors which were emitted by Gitl's person, and he involuntarily recoiled.
4.16 Jake the Yankee, with this bonnetless, wigged, dowdyish little greenhorn by his side!
4.17 She, too, could not get herself to realize that this stylish young man—shaved and dressed as in Povodye is only some young nobleman—was Yekl,
4.19 "Here everything is so different."
[4.21] "They don't wear wigs here,"
[4.25] "Here one does not wear even a kerchief."
4.30 made her look like an Italian woman of
4.35
her first ride on
the day of rest.
4.36 so great was the impression which his dashing manner and his English produced on Gitl, that for some time it relieved her mind and she even forgot to be shocked by the sight of her husband handling coin on the Sabbath.
[4.40] "Don't say varimess," he corrected her
complaisantly; "here it is called dinner."
5.1 Gitl's second Wednesday in
the
little front room which served the quadruple purpose of kitchen, dining room, sitting room, and parlor
"in her own hair, like a Gentile woman."
5.2
I'll get her a hat that will make
5.4 mimesis of woman alone
5.10 her own Yekl and Jake the stranger were by degrees merging themselves into one undivided being
[5.11] It flashed upon her
mind to call upon some "good Jew" to pray for the return of his favor, or to
seek some old Polish beggar woman who could prescribe a love potion. But then,
alas! who knows whether there are in this terrible
5.12 Here everybody says she is green. What an ugly word to apply to people!
[5.14] Meanwhile Jake sat at his machine merrily pushing away at a cloak and singing to it some of the popular American songs of the day.
5.18 Fanny's embarrassment was much greater than Jake's.
5.19 But can it be that he is doomed
for life? No! no! he would revolt, conscious at the same time that there was
really no escape. "Ah, may she be killed, the horrid greenhorn!" he would gasp
to himself in a paroxysm of despair. And then he would bewail his lost youth,
and curse all
5.20 take comfort in the fact of her being a model housewife, undiverted from her duties by any thoughts of balls or picnics.
5.21 Little Joey—for such was Yosselé's name now
[5.62] "Don't speak English. She'll t'ink I don' know vot you’re speakin'," he besought her, in accents which implied intimacy between the two of them and a common aloofness from Gitl.
[6.6] "What is the matter? Speak out! Are you afraid to tell me?" he insisted.
[6.37] "No wonder he does hate you, seeing you in that horrid rag, which makes a grandma of you. Drop it, I tell you! Drop it so that no survivor nor any refugee is left of it.
[6.40] In
[7.1] It was not until after supper time that Gitl could see Mrs. Kavarsky; for the neighbor's husband was in the installment business [bill collector], and she generally spent all day in helping him with his collections as well as canvassing for new customers.
[7.9] "Dot's right! When you talk like a man I like you. And now sit still and listen to what an older person and a business woman has to tell you.
[7.19] All at once Mrs. Kavarsky bit her lip,
her countenance brightening up with a sudden inspiration. At the next instant
she made a
lunge at Gitl's head, and off went the kerchief. Gitl started with a cry, at the
same moment covering her head with both hands.
[7.20]
"Take off your hands!
Take them off at once, I say!" the other shrieked, her eyes flashing fire and
her feet performing an Irish jig.
[7.21] Gitl obeyed for sheer terror.
[7.24]
At last, when all was ready and she
found herself adorned with a pair of rich side bangs,
she was taken in front of the mirror,
and ordered to hail the transformation with joy. She viewed herself with an
unsteady glance, as if
her own face
struck her as unfamiliar and forbidding. However,
the change pleased
her as much as it startled her.
[7.49]
Her unprecedented show
of pugnacity took him aback.