IMMIGRATION

Introducing her story collection Children of Loneliness (1923), the immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska (1885–1970) remarks, "I saw that America was a new world in the making, that anyone who has something real in him can find a way to contribute himself in this new world" ("Mostly about Myself," p. 142). She contributes through writing, declaring, "the moment I understood America enough to tell her about herself as I saw her—the moment I began to express myself—America accepted my self-expression as a gift from me, and from everywhere hands reached out to help me" ("Mostly about Myself," p. 142). Beside these optimistic reflections, Yezierska's texts also uncover the challenges immigrants confronted, as the "loneliness" in her title implies. While immigrant texts often celebrate American opportunity, they contain much greater complexity, as critics have observed. Thomas Ferraro hails immigrant writers' artistic accomplishments, citing a "self-transformation" process through writing that may engage literary currents such as modernism yet does not necessarily entail cultural assimilation. William Boelhower recognizes a "demythification" process whereby the immigrant writer exposes an "underside" to a formerly idealized America. Indeed, turn-of-the-century American immigrant writers struggled to reconcile ideals and disillusionment as they recorded the lives of America's newest citizens. Yezierska, along with many turn-of-the-century immigrant writers, addresses several common themes of immigrant challenge: experiencing racism and discrimination, seeking education, negotiating intergenerational conflicts, defining gender roles, and finding fulfilling work.

RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION

Many American hands reached out to halt rather than to help immigrants, particularly eastern European Jews like Yezierska. From the late 1870s until the early 1920s, record numbers of immigrants arrived in the United States, mainly from eastern and southern Europe, countries such as Poland, Bohemia, Slovenia, and Italy. From 1900 to 1910 alone, 9 million arrived, exceeding immigration in any previous decade by 3.5 million. They found a limited welcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited entry of all Chinese except for merchants, scholars, diplomats, tourists, and teachers and prevented Chinese from becoming citizens. Increasingly restrictive quota laws adopted in 1921, 1924, and 1929 virtually eliminated immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Anti-immigrant agitators often cited undesirable immigrant cultures to justify restrictions, but anti-immigrant worries actually centered on race. The literary scholar Walter Benn Michaels argues that "culture" served as a cover for race, an exclusionary "way of preserving the primacy of identity while avoiding the embarrassments of blood" (p. 13). In his influential book The Passing of the Great Race (1916), the amateur anthropologist Madison Grant (1865–1937) describes immigrants as radically different from native-born, Anglo-Saxon Americans in physical appearance, religion, language, and customs, all factors he considered racial. As the historian John Higham explains, "nativists" such as Grant, who aimed to preserve America for those "native" to the United States, considered southern and eastern Europeans remote from Anglo-Saxon forms of government. The sociologist Edward Ross complains in 1914, "Now we confront the melancholy spectacle of this pioneer breed being swamped and submerged by an overwhelming tide of latecomers from the old-world hive" (p. 282). He argues that immigrant races would weaken the nation, bringing inferior hereditary traits and promoting the "race suicide" of established Anglo-Saxon Americans.

Contemporary periodicals ranging from the popular Saturday Evening Post to the middlebrow North American Review to the more intellectual Atlantic Monthly voiced racially based, anti-immigrant fears. Writing for the Atlantic in 1896, Francis Walker, commissioner general of immigration, condemned recent immigrants.

They are beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us. They have none of the ideas and aptitudes which fit men to take up readily and easily the problem of self care and self government, such as belong to those who are descended from the tribes that met under the oak-trees of old Germany to make laws and choose chieftains.

Phrases such as "struggle for existence" and "descended from the tribes . . . of old Germany" reflect scientific theories that "non-Anglo-Saxon races" progressed too slowly. Politics, the "ideas" Walker cites, become a product of racial "aptitudes," and thus he dubs new immigrants inherently incapable of democratic participation. Immigrant writers needed to disprove racialist claims such as Walker's.

Walker, "Restriction of Immigration," p. 828.

However, Ross and other nativists represent only one strain in a vigorous debate. The philosopher, educator, and immigrant Horace Kallen (1882–1974) refutes Ross in his 1915 essay "Democracy versus the Melting-Pot": "What troubles Mr. Ross and so many other Anglo-Saxon Americans is not really inequality; what troubles them is difference" (p. 219). Declaring such "difference" nonhereditary, the anthropologist and immigrant Franz Boas asserts in his 1911 The Mind of Primitive Man, "There is no close relation between race and culture" (p. 196). Moreover, Boas also proclaims the independent value of various cultures as well as races, rejecting a ranked order for either. The scholars Nancy Leys Stepan and Sander Gilman identify a "critical tradition" among writers from groups "stereotyped by the sciences of the day" (p. 74), and this defensive posture responding to scientific racism characterizes turn-of-the-century immigrant literature. For instance, in her 1914 book They Who Knock at Our Gates, the Russian immigrant writer Mary Antin (1881–1949) protests: "What have the experts and statisticians done so to pervert our minds? They have filled volumes with facts and figures, comparing the immigrants of other days, classifying them as to race, nationality, and culture. . . . Granted that Sicilians are not Scotchmen, how does that affect the right of the Sicilian to travel in pursuit of happiness?" (pp. 9–10).

Depending on class and region, the nativists that Antin and other writers faced expressed their views through print media, political agitation, and even violence. Chinese in the western United States faced harassment, expulsion from towns, and even massacres from the 1850s into the 1880s. The Chinese immigrant writer Sui Sin Far (Edith Maud Eaton, 1865–1914) captures such incidents in her fiction, particularly the story "Her Chinese Husband" from the 1912 collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance, a story that details the happy married life of a white woman and Chinese man cut short by his violent murder. Sui Sin Far's work contrasts with what William Wu has termed "yellow peril" fiction by such writers as Jack London and Frank Norris, which reinforced anxiety about "uncivilized" Chinese immigrants. Such fiction stereo-typed the Chinese as inscrutable, wildly excitable, and unintelligent (though sometimes unusually intelligent), with heartless husbands and women slaves. Typical plots involved Chinese invasions, revenge, lasciviousness, and opium addiction. Besides exposing anti-Asian violence, Sui Sin Far wrote to overturn race stereotypes of the Chinese by offering both fiction and journalism that provided multidimensional pictures of Chinese character. Her essay series The Chinese in America, which appeared in the 1909 Westerner magazine, offers a broad readership a sympathetic exploration of Chinese American family life, holidays, work, food, religion, and customs.

Immigrant writers often express awe over American educational opportunity. In her autobiography The Promised Land (1912), the Russian immigrant Mary Antin conveys the magical quality education held, when she recalls the day her father brought his children to school for the first time.

All three children carried themselves rather better than the common run of "green" pupils that were brought to Miss Nixon. But the figure that challenged attention to the group was the tall, straight father, with his earnest face and fine forehead, nervous hands eloquent in gesture, and a voice full of feeling. This foreigner, who brought his children to school as if it were an act of consecration, who regarded the teacher of the primer class with reverence, who spoke of visions, like a man inspired, in a common schoolroom, was not like other aliens, who brought their children in dull obedience to the law; was not like the native fathers, who brought their unmanageable boys, glad to be relieved of their care. I think Miss Nixon guessed what my father's best English could not convey. I think that she divined that by the simple act of delivering our school certificates to her he took possession of America.

Antin, The Promised Land, 1997, p. 162.

Besides exclusion and attack, immigrants endured other indignities, as the Italian immigrant writer Constantine Panunzio (1884–1964) recounts in his autobiography, The Soul of an Immigrant (1921). Though never guilty of any crime, Panunzio landed in jail three times; the third time, he was arrested for sitting on a park bench. Expecting an armed and dangerous Italian, others at his school mistook his comb for a knife. Panunzio ultimately overcame this discrimination and other "stumbling block[s] to assimilation" (p. 205) to succeed in school and in his career as a minister. In their attempts to assimilate successfully, immigrants confronted the prominent racial thinking that defined them as inferior. However, they might actually attempt to negotiate their way into its privileged levels. Matthew Frye Jacobson observes that "certain groups undergo a process of racial redefinition as shifting social and political circumstances require" and that "varying systems of 'difference' can coexist and compete with one another at a given moment" (p. 140). Immigrants could occupy what Jacobson terms a "probationary white" status on their way to fuller acceptance. Early in Yezierska's novel Salome of the Tenements (1923), the immigrant protagonist Sonya Vrunsky declares: "The Anglo-Saxons are a superior race to the crazy Russians. The higher life is built inch by inch on self-control. . . . They're ages ahead of us. Compared to them, we're naked savages" (p. 68). Sonya seems to have absorbed the nativist theories of Grant and Ross, but she also seems to perceive a racial/cultural mobility possible as she pursues marriage with the Anglo-Saxon philanthropist John Manning. Her apparently "probationary" status could solidify through her marriage; however, Yezierska has her heroine gradually reject this racial schema to instead "be what's inside of me" (p. 131). Though Sonya finally rejects a racial philosophy that demands that she remake or deny her identity, Yezierska illustrates the difficult choices immigrants faced within a racially hostile environment. In addition, her character's sudden reversal illustrates well a pattern Werner Sollors cites in ethnic writing: "Raising and thwarting initiation expectations, feeding the gullibility of readers and then pulling the rug from under their feet, or ironically undercutting the image of a presumably stable relationship between in-group and out-group are among the weapons in the rich arsenal of ethnic writers" (p. 252). In their often ambiguous and multilayered texts, immigrants challenged American conceptions of immigrant race and culture.

EDUCATION

In both fiction and nonfiction, immigrant writers chronicled efforts to gain American education, which became an elusive goal for some. The title character of Abraham Cahan's (1860–1951) novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) reaches financial success but largely by abandoning the "Temple" of his dream of higher education. Actually achieving education could also cause problems, such as alienation from family. In Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925), Sara Smolinsky chooses to pursue her studies, leading her Orthodox Jewish father to disown her. She also carries guilt over denying time away from studying to visit her mother. Despite such complications, educational achievement remained an important standard of success for many immigrants. In his autobiography A Far Journey (1914), the Syrian immigrant Abraham Rihbany views college education as a vital way to "relate myself to the higher life of America" (p. 253). Finding greater acceptance in preparatory school, Constantine Panunzio realizes there that he wants to become a citizen. For him, education represents the essence of America, the means for developing an "American consciousness" (p. 179). Education seemed to hold an almost mystical power. Immigrants often lacked the opportunity for sustained schooling in their native lands, but in America many school opportunities existed. Moreover, immigrants viewed education as a means to recast themselves as Americans.

The work of Mary Antin, a Russian immigrant from the Jewish Pale of Settlement, often revolves around immigrant education. Intellectual prowess and academic enthusiasm play important roles in her autobiography, as critics note. For example, William Proefriedt argues that Antin undergoes parallel processes of education and assimilation. Antin unfolds her own educational progress as an eager learner who began publishing at an early age, but she also celebrates the intellectual accomplishments of other immigrants. Addressing the pattern of immigrant achievement also allows Antin to critique racialist thinking. In her proimmigration treatise They Who Knock at Our Gates, Antin momentarily enters the mind of a native-born American: "The children of the foreigners outclass our own! They who begin handicapped, and labor against obstacles, leave our own children far behind on the road to scholarly achievement. . . . Is there a special virtue in their blood that enables them to sweep over our country and take what they want?" She explains simply, "It is a special virtue, yes: the virtue of great purpose" (pp. 129–130). Illustrating that playful quality in immigrant writing that Sollors notes, Antin responds to the predictable question of whether race or "blood" explains immigrant achievement, employing a subtle irony to shift the focus: "Purpose" is not an element of "blood," but diligence is definitely an immigrant "virtue." Race fades into the background, with only immigrant determination and effort bringing success to promising new citizens.

A prominent figure in New York's Jewish community, Abraham Cahan, who like Antin fled the Russian Pale, also emphasizes immigrant education to reduce the perceived threat from immigration. In an 1898 issue of the Atlantic, Cahan describes many Jews denied education in his homeland who complete studies in the United States to become doctors, dentists, and architects. Much like Mary Antin, Cahan underscores intellectual prowess to encourage goodwill toward immigrants, demonstrating that they will contribute important resources to their adopted nation. He counts the Russian Jewish immigrant "among the most ambitious and the quickest to learn both the written and spoken language of the adopted country, and among the easiest to be assimilated with the population" (p. 131). The historian Lloyd Gartner observes that public school became "the symbol and guarantee of Jewish equality and full opportunity in America" (p. 9). Cahan describes immigrant Jews flocking to public day and evening schools, which do not exclude them, and many also tutoring their fellow immigrants. Cahan, who became a longtime editor of the Yiddish daily newspaper the Forward, also acknowledged the role of journalism in schooling the immigrant in American customs, English language, and library use. While not all immigrants attended college or even progressed far in secondary schools, Cahan attests to significant numbers gaining formal education and an overall enthusiasm among immigrants to learn as much as possible.

The Serbian immigrant Michael Pupin (1858–1935) illustrates well this passion for education: he not only achieved high degrees but also helped to reform American education itself during his career. His autobiography, From Immigrant to Inventor (1923), traces his educational experiences from independent study and night courses at Cooper Union to undergraduate study at Columbia to graduate work abroad at Cambridge. Pupin merited a full scholarship to Columbia and succeeded so well in school that native-born students sought him as a tutor. Pupin consistently served others through his education, applying his own knowledge and abilities to enhance American life. While inventing the electrical resonator and developing other technologies, Pupin also helped to reinvent the American educational system. As an engineering professor at Columbia, he promoted more rigorous science courses with increased hands-on lab work to prepare the next generation of inventors. Immigrant literature established immigrant education not only as an ideal for the immigrant but also as a benefit for the entire nation.

INTERGENERATIONAL CONFLICTS

Israel Zangwill's (1864–1926) The Melting-Pot, the 1909 British play that established a catchphrase that many still use to imagine immigrant America, presents a quintessential conflict in the immigrant experience: alienation of one generation from another. David Quixano escapes an anti-Jewish pogrom and lands in America, where he falls in love with the Russian immigrant Vera Rivendal. His uncle rejects him for allying with a Russian, a member of the group that has persecuted David's people. David defies his uncle until he discovers that Vera's father actually started the pogrom that killed his family. Torn between his lover and their families' histories, David ultimately embraces Vera and stands by his declaration, "Each generation must live and die for its own dream" (p. 147). This idea became as much a part of American immigrant literature and thought as the concept of a melting pot of races and cultures. Negotiating histories, traditions, and expectations, newer generations of immigrants often clashed with their elders. Parental authority came into question in a new environment where rules seemed ever changing and multiple influences affected children. Priscilla Wald observes that the "strangeness of parenting one's parents is a common theme" of writing by women immigrants and those from "any culture perceived to be in need of 'Americanization'" (p. 191). Her comment suits men immigrant writers too.

Cahan's 1898 story "The Imported Bridegroom" illustrates several parent-child conflicts as two generations struggle to define their cultural identities in America. Asriel Stroon has largely abandoned his Orthodox Judaism and allowed his daughter, Flora, to have an American public school education, piano lessons, and her own library. However, later in life he determines to regain his piety and rethinks his parenting decisions, rebuking Flora for reading a "Gentile" novel while he prays. Asriel's sudden change of attitude confuses his daughter, who feels increasingly isolated from him. Hoping to reform his daughter and please God, Asriel "imports" a religious scholar from Russia as a bridegroom for Flora. The plan fails when the bridegroom chooses secular learning and socialism, rejecting both Asriel's religious program and Flora's scheme to make him a medical doctor. Cahan leaves this father alienated from both children and the young people disconnected from each other.

Sara in Yezierska's Bread Givers similarly chafes under the rule of a traditionally religious father. While her father arranges profoundly unhappy marriages for his other three daughters, Sara refuses this fate, leaving home to work her way through college and become a public school teacher. The dean of her college groups her among the "pioneers" (p. 232), but Sara's father sees her as a betrayer. Even with her new independent life she can never separate herself completely from her tyrannical father. Yezierska leaves an ambiguous ending to the novel, with Sara and her husband inviting her impoverished and sickly father to live with them. Sara finds that her father imposes an "old burden" that "dragged" her back (p. 295); however, she also acknowledges that she has inherited his strong will, which motivated her to establish her career. Critics are divided on the novel's resolution. Sam Girgus proposes that Sara ministers to her father out of strength, not weakness, that she has become a self-made woman. Carol Schoen similarly argues that Sara has created a working amalgam of traditions in this ending. However, Gay Wilentz asserts that the ending offers no successful synthesis of old and new traditions and that Sara has regressed into the old order. Magdalena Zaborowska concurs that traditional patriarchy ultimately reigns, with both Sara's husband and father ending her newfound independence. However one reads Yezierska's conclusion, she has captured well the intense intergenerational struggle many immigrants confronted and their difficulties in finding a satisfactory resolution.

While Cahan and Yezierska document the increased tension between domineering parents and rebellious children, other texts illustrate different approaches to intergenerational conflict. In her 1912 autobiography The Promised Land, Mary Antin reveals that her parents exerted far less parental control, perhaps because they themselves had abandoned many religious traditions. However, their struggles to earn a living and their perplexity over how best to Americanize their children also help determine this detached approach. Perceiving the "boundless liberty" that neighboring parents seemed to allow, the Antins followed suit (p. 213). Their children did encounter more varied cultural influences, but only as the parents relinquished the "throne of parental authority" (p. 213). This resulted in an "inversion of normal relations" that Antin retrospectively views ambivalently as her parents' "sacrifice" (p. 213). Sui Sin Far's parents (the Eatons) also distance themselves from certain conflicts, relying on their children to determine their own way. In her autobiographical essay "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian" (1909), Sui Sin Far discusses how other children verbally and physically abused her and her siblings because of their mixed racial background. While the Eatons comfort their children after these incidents, they avoid interfering directly to protect them. Sui Sin Far laments that since neither parent is biracial, they cannot understand the situation fully. She notes, however, that they seem to take greater interest in each children's "battle" than they reveal (p. 219). Quite likely the Eatons hoped that this parenting approach would strengthen their children for more challenging racial battles in the future.

GENDER ROLES

As the discussion above suggests, many immigrant conflicts over issues such as education and parenting involved gender ideas. Immigrants encountered new gender behaviors, demanding that they re-envision themselves, their spouses, their interests, and their opportunities. While it might be easy to imagine that America transformed immigrant gender conceptions, perhaps offering a feminist haven for women immigrants, the reality was much more complicated. Many authors reflect a synthesis of gender ideas occurring for the typical immigrant—a combination of old and new traditions synthesized to provide personal fulfillment. In addition, men's and women's experiences of immigration often differed greatly, and they struggled to communicate with one another about their experiences. For instance, in the novel Giants in the Earth (1927), by the Norwegian immigrant O. E. Rölvaag (1876–1931), Per Hansa finds homesteading in the Dakota Territory stimulating, imagining that wheat grains jump with life, while his wife, Beret, experiences depression, fearing that the family will become "savages" in an untamed environment. Failing to communicate effectively about their expectations, this couple finds their relationship steadily deteriorating. Offering a "critique from the margins" model, Magdalena Zaborowska discusses immigrant writers' gender-role critiques, which extend from old to new country patriarchal practices. As immigrant writing shows, both rural and urban women faced unique challenges in America, such as negotiating unstable gender definitions, seeking greater independence, and combating sexual exploitation.

Contradictory gender expectations could lead to tragedy, as Sui Sin Far demonstrates in her story "The Wisdom of the New." Like many immigrants, the Chinese husband in this story preceded his wife to America, in this case by seven years. The husband, Wou Sankwei, has adapted to America culturally in many ways, developing platonic friendships with a woman philanthropist and her niece. However, he makes little effort to help Pau Lin, his newly arrived wife, adapt, and he spends more time with his women friends than he does with Pau Lin. Despite his open conversations with the educated American women, he denies that his wife can develop intellectually or culturally: "The time for learning with her is over" (p. 47). While he attempts to maintain a more traditional Chinese marriage, wherein his wife cannot question his motives or share open communication with him, he continues very different relationships with his women friends, conversing freely with them and treating them as peers. Isolated and upset, Pau Lin further entrenches herself against any cultural change, fearing that she has lost her husband's affection and respect and that American ways will contaminate her young son. Too late, Sankwei recognizes his inconsistent treatment of the women in his life, for his distraught wife murders their son, believing that she has "saved" him from the "Wisdom of the New" American culture (p. 47). In this story Sui Sin Far emphasizes not the woman's failure to adapt but rather her lack of opportunities to learn about new cultural possibilities and different types of relationships between men and women. Pau Lin only experiences displacement by the other women in the story, not camaraderie.

In contrast to Wou Sankwei, Abraham Rihbany (1869–1944) adjusts more successfully to new gender roles. Initially he finds American women's "prominence in domestic and social affairs. . . . a strange and unnatural phenomenon," since he is accustomed to Syrian women being silent partners (p. 259). Open affection between spouses also distresses him. As he continues to socialize outside of the Syrian community, he observes that these novel relations between spouses promote a "harmonious" family and decides that "true civilization" arises from "equal rights" (pp. 260–261). Much like Rihbany, the Japanese immigrant Etsu Sugimoto (b. 1873) at first perceives an alarming clash over gender traditions. In her autobiography, A Daughter of the Samurai (1925), she explains that she gradually understands the common ground between Japanese and American women; women in both countries are "volcanoes" of understated power (p. 202). She fascinates her American-born neighbor with the story of the Japanese island of Hachijo, where women perform traditionally male duties such as making laws and cultivating rice, while men handle child care and washing. While Sugimoto becomes more comfortable reevaluating long-held traditions, she discovers that immigrants and native-born American women share many gender ideals and, ultimately, that neither America nor Japan yet has achieved gender equality.

Sugimoto's "volcanoes" erupt throughout immigrant literature, as immigrant women assert new independence. Yezierska's heroine in Bread Givers, Sara, dramatically establishes her rights in a pivotal battle with her father. When her father tries to forbid her from moving out on her own, she declares, "In America, women don't need men to boss them" (p. 137). Pitting her will against patriarchal authority, Sara affirms her rights to make her own decisions over housing, a career, and marriage. Sui Sin Far offers a similar example of an immigrant woman who finds greater freedom in America, away from a family that constricts her. Sui Sin Far's "The Story of Iso" supports "Americanization" in marriage customs and overall gender relationships. In China, Iso's family disapproves of her, a "talking woman," who speaks her mind too freely and flouts feminine conventions (p. 117). She resents her household duties, refuses to worship ancestors, and criticizes her arranged fiancé, disgracing her family. Iso eventually finds relief in America, for "in China, 'The woman who talks too much' is called by us 'The new woman'" (p. 119). Along with their native-born counterparts, immigrant women tested the boundaries of gender traditions, striking out into new territory literally and figuratively, and immigrant literature celebrates these changes.

However, immigrant women and other ethnic women faced persistent obstacles to obtaining such liberation. Both Yezierska and Sui Sin Far acknowledge the sexual exploitation that hampered immigrant women's efforts to reach greater independence. In "Leaves from the Mental Portfolio of an Eurasian," Sui Sin Far reports confronting a naval officer who tries to seduce her, imagining that her Asian background makes her more receptive. Shenah Pessah, the protagonist of Yezierska's story "Wings," has a similarly demeaning experience. She becomes infatuated with the sociologist John Barnes, who kisses her passionately but then ignores her for days, while she pines away in confusion. The disillusioned Shenah Pessah realizes later that Barnes has taken liberties with her because he does not view her as "a lady alike to him" (p. 16). She sees that like many American men, Barnes follows different rules with the ethnic woman, treating her as sexual prey. While immigrant women struggled to shake off the chains of "Old World" patriarchy, they found that "New World" men threatened their progress in other ways.

Some "New World" men formed more serious relationships with immigrant women, but this type of interethnic relationship also brought challenges. In Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements, Manning emphasizes disturbing elements in his relationship with the immigrant Sonya, viewing their romance as a "mingling of the races. . . . The oriental mystery and the Anglo-Saxon clarity that will pioneer a new race of men" (p. 108). As Horace Kallen has noted, this racial amalgamation theory essentially reinforced Anglo-Saxon American identity to "improve" immigrants and their descendants. Sonya gradually realizes that the union, rather than evolving as a loving relationship, will degenerate into a scientific experiment. As Mary Dearborn observes, Sonya's relationship evokes Yezierska's own turbulent relationship with John Dewey, a reformer of Anglo-Saxon origin. Sonya wavers between attraction to and repulsion from her lover's ideals, wanting to be like him and wanting to retain her own unique qualities. For Manning, Sonya seems attractive as a mysterious, passionate, "primitive" woman, yet he suppresses the very expressiveness that draws him, to "raise" her into "civilization." Manning tries to limit her social life in order to reform her in his image. Zaborowska suggests that Sonya even attempts to suppress her sexuality to avoid appearing an oversexed ethnic woman. While the false distinctions between the Anglo-Saxon and the eastern European immigrant collapse in the narrative, the expectations they construct ultimately doom the marriage. Although gender became more flexible in America, immigrant writers reveal that enacting satisfactory gender roles still proved difficult, particularly for women immigrants.

WORK AND SUCCESS

If a strong work ethic involving patience, perseverance, and eventual reward characterized America's beginnings, this ideal equally characterized immigrant America at the turn into the twentieth century. By all accounts many hardworking immigrants strongly benefited the national economy. O. P. Austin, chief statistician in the Department of Commerce and Labor, reported in 1904 that immigrants contributed significantly to national wealth, particularly where they concentrated themselves, a finding that the historian Thomas Muller confirms. However, unfamiliar with American customs and language and needing work quickly, many immigrants accepted the most modest jobs in factories, manual labor, and petty retail. Racial prejudice also sharply limited opportunities, as immigrant writers emphasized. For instance, Mary Antin relates how prejudiced employers refused to hire her father due to his "Jewish appearance" and "imperfect English" (p. 229). Immigrant writers portrayed these challenges but also demonstrated inspiring career successes. While immigrants defined working success variously, definitions of achievement typically involved not only material success but also moral and creative growth as well.

One writer who found success not only as an author but also as an editor and publisher is Edward Bok (1863–1930). Embodying the Horatio Alger image of rags to riches, he worked odd jobs in youth, later networked with important mentors, and finally rose to prominence in the magazine publishing world, eventually narrating his progress in an autobiography. In The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After (1920), Bok suggests that immigrants may work harder than the typical native-born person, taking nothing for granted. He works his way up from window washer and delivery boy to stenographer to editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. Along the way this entrepreneur forms pivotal relationships that influence his progress, even keeping an autograph collection featuring such literati as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Louisa May Alcott. In Bok's definition of success, community service matters significantly. Having benefited from many mentors, he too hopes to assist others, for instance by establishing a scholarship program for his magazine employees. As Bok illustrates, immigrant writers define success as much more than monetary.

Abraham Cahan examines immigrant career success from a different angle in his well-known novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Levinsky becomes a self-made man, rising in New York's garment industry to become extremely wealthy. However, Levinsky loses much in the process, abandoning his religious faith, giving up a college education, and avoiding meaningful personal relationships. He even chooses to exploit other immigrants for his own personal benefit, thwarting his employees' efforts to unionize. Cahan invites readers to view Levinsky's economic rise as a personal decline. Sanford Marovitz aptly describes the novel as "a moral tale that illustrates how not to live" (p. 139). Levinsky himself summarizes his life: "There are cases when success is a tragedy" (p. 529). This immigrant narrative examines closely what success entails and finds business accomplishment alone inadequate and sometimes at odds with moral and personal growth. Cahan's novel reminds readers that true career success occurs on multiple levels.

Anzia Yezierska's novels illustrate that immigrant career success need not even contain the dramatic financial gain that Bok and Levinsky enjoy. At the end of Salome of the Tenements, Sonya becomes a fashion designer who provides inexpensive but beautiful clothes for working-class women. This career offers a steady salary but more importantly provides a satisfying creative outlet and community contribution. Likewise, Sara of Bread Givers finds a rewarding career as a public schoolteacher with a modest salary. Both women achieve a professional balance that enables them to develop their talents while also helping others, an immigrant ideal that authors such as Bok, Pupin, and Panunzio also emphasize. Having transcended racism, gained a solid education, differentiated themselves from their parents, and forged professional lives, Yezierska's heroines indeed offer a compelling model for immigrant success. Turn-of-the-century immigrant writers showed that immigrants needed to overcome many obstacles, and understanding those challenges only makes their achievement more laudable.

See alsoAssimilation; Chinese; Jews; Labor; Migration; The Rise of David Levinsky; Social Darwinism; Socialism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Antin, Mary. The Promised Land. 1912. Introduced by Werner Sollors. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Antin, Mary. They Who Knock at Our Gates: A Complete Gospel of Immigration. Boston: Houghton, 1914.

Austin, O. P. "Is the New Immigration Dangerous to the Country?" North American Review 178 (1904): 558–570.

Bok, Edward. The Americanization of Edward Bok: The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After. New York: Scribners, 1920.

Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. 1917. Introduced by Jules Chametsky. New York: Penguin, 1993.

Cahan, Abraham. "The Russian Jew in America." Atlantic (July 1898): 128–139.

Cahan, Abraham. Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New York. 1896, 1898. Introduced by Bernard G. Richards. New York: Dover, 1970.

Kallen, Horace. "Democracy versus the Melting-Pot." Nation (18 February 1915): 190–194; (25 February 1915): 217–220.

Panunzio, Constantine. The Soul of an Immigrant. 1921. New York: McMillan, 1922.

Pupin, Michael. From Immigrant to Inventor. New York: Scribners, 1923.

Rihbany, Abraham. A Far Journey. Boston: Houghton, 1914.

Rölvaag, O. E. Giants in the Earth. 1927. New York: Harper, 1955.

Sugimoto, Etsu Inaqaki. A Daughter of the Samurai: How a Daughter of Feudal Japan, Living Hundreds of Years inOne Generation, Became a Modern American. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1925.

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Sui Sin Far. Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Other Writings. Edited by Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

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Lori Jirousek