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“The Hope for the Better”: Immigrants in Jewish American Literature Ezra Cappell

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“The Hope for the Better”: Immigrants in Jewish American Literature Ezra Cappell “The Hope for the Better”: Immigrants in Jewish American Literature Ezra Cappell The Steerage, 1907 Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864–1946) Photogravure on vellum; 12 11/16 x 10 3/16 in. (32.2 x 25.8 cm) Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933 (33.43.419) Immigrants in Jewish American Literature 3 It is only through an act of forced immigration that the Jewish people can become a nation. God tells Abram: “‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee. And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and be thou a blessing’” (Genesis 12: 1-2). While this might be the first immigration story in Jewish literature, it certainly isn’t the last. Some of the most iconic Jewish poems and prayers are immersed in migration stories, either by divine edict or by the evil decree of ancient rulers. In the twelfth century, for example, living in Spain, Yehudah Halevi pens his most iconic poem, a lyric suffused with the split reality of the life of an immigrant. As Jonathan Rosen says in his foreword to a collection of Halevi’s poems that was recently published, “Halevi was born in Spain at the height of its Golden Age, but though he was celebrated as a master of the poetic forms of this most poetic era, enjoying wealth and fame as a poet, physician, and sage, in 1140, then in his late sixties, he turned his back on Spain and sailed for Crusader-ruled Palestine” (1). Here is Halevi’s poem, “My heart is in the East”: My heart is in the East, and I am at the ends of the West; How can I taste what I eat and how could it be pleasing to me? How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet Zion lies beneath the fetter of Edom, and I am in the chains of Arabia? It would be easy for me to leave all the bounty of Spain— As it is precious for me to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary. (21) This idea of being split in two—of being physically in one place while dreaming of another—is deeply connected to the Jewish experience. When discussing Jewish exile and immigration there are a number of possible topics to consider: what constitutes a homeland (and leaving a homeland) for people who have spent millennia being uprooted from one country after another? Is home a physical place or is it a shared culture? Is it adherence to a shared set of beliefs? For those without land, can a language constitute a home for the displaced and uprooted? For generations of Jewish people, the 4 Critical Insights Torah, the Hebrew Bible, and its thousands of commentaries and holy texts, constituted a portable homeland for a people dispersed throughout the nations of the world. Towards the beginning of his Holocaust memoir, Italian Jewish writer and chemist Primo Levi watches the mourning rituals of a group of Jews from Tripoli who had moved to Italy and were now about to be transported by cattle car to Auschwitz. They all gather together to light yahrzeit1 candles for themselves: “We collected in a group outside their door and we experienced within ourselves a grief that was new for us, the ancient grief of the people that has no land, the grief without hope of the exodus which is renewed every century” (16). This duality and split has continued to be a hallmark of the literature that immigrants and the children of immigrants created in America. It is, therefore, fitting that when we speak of American immigration literature we think immediately of the Jewish experience on these “alien shores.” Between the years of 1881 and 1924, when the United States passed anti-immigrant legislation, over two million Jews emigrated from the pale of settlement in Europe to the “goldena medina,”2 to the promised land of America. Writers like Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan, and Henry Roth all made immigration their theme and the source of their art. Jewish American immigrant writers dramatized the tremendous promise of the new world; their novels and memoirs highlight the relief of newly-arrived people who have left behind the seemingly endless discrimination and anti-Semitism of life in Europe, a life often defined by violence and pogroms. Yet these narratives, even while giving voice to the great promise of America, also concurrently dramatize the crushingly difficult lives the immigrants faced upon re-settling in America. Most of the Jewish immigrants, who made the journey in the steerage compartment of steamships, settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan—a neighborhood composed of the poorest tenement buildings in NYC that by the 1890s was swarming with waves of Italian American, Irish American, and Jewish American immigrants all competing for air and light in a neighborhood that was the most densely populated place on Earth. Immigrants in Jewish American Literature 5 Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant himself, attempted to educate the upper- and middle-classes about the horrors of the Lower East Side and the plight of immigrants in America. In 1890, he published his most well-known book of essays and photographs, How the Other Half Lives, and in his chapter titled “Jewtown,” he describes the Jewish section of the Lower East Side: The tenements grow taller, and the gaps in their ranks close up rapidly as we cross the Bowery and, leaving Chinatown and the Italians behind, invade the Hebrew quarter. So thoroughly has the chosen people crowded out the Gentiles in the Tenth Ward that, when the great Jewish holidays come around every year, the public schools in the district have practically to close up. Of their thousands of pupils scarce a handful come to school. Nor is there any suspicion that the rest are playing hookey. They stay honestly home to celebrate. There is no mistaking it: we are in Jewtown. It is said that nowhere in the world are so many people crowded together on a square mile as here. The average five-story tenement adds a story or two to its stature in Ludlow Street and an extra building on the rear lot, and yet the sign “To Let” is the rarest of all there. Here is one seven stories high. The sanitary policeman whose beat this is will tell you that it contains thirty-six families, but the term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues. In this house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In Essex Street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold a “family” of father and mother, twelve children and six boarders. The boarder plays as important a part in the domestic economy of Jewtown as the lodger in the Mulberry Street Bend. These are samples of the packing of the population that has run up the record here to the rate of three hundred and thirty thousand per square mile. The densest crowding of Old London, I pointed out before, never got beyond a hundred and seventy-five thousand. Even the alley is crowded out. Through dark hallways and filthy cellars, crowded, as is every foot of the street, with dirty children, the settlements in the rear are reached… Life here means the hardest kind of work almost from the cradle. The world as a debtor has no credit in Jewtown. Its promise to pay wouldn’t buy one of the old hats that are hawked about Hester Street, unless 6 Critical Insights backed by security representing labor done at lowest market rates. (Riis 128-129) The very best of the immigrant writers make an attempt to balance the great promise of America, a land built upon founding documents guaranteeing equality and liberty for all, with the harsh reality of a poverty-laden existence filled with back-breaking manual labor and the anguish of dislocation, which defined the immigrant experience for so many. Yet for the immigrant writer, these challenges are balanced by unique aesthetic possibilities. As Eva Hoffman, a Jewish writer who as a young girl emigrated from Poland in 1959 to Vancouver, British Columbia, suggests: For the immigrant writer the process of coming to know a new world involves the attempt to imagine and to enter into other subjectivities, and the subjectivity of another language. At the same time, literature more than perhaps any other form of human activity can give us insight into other subjectivities, fates, and lives. (246) So, given the many nationalities that came to America in great numbers, why is it that we turn to the Jewish American experience as somehow being representative of the larger multi-ethnic group that collectively make up “the immigrant class”? The Statue of Liberty might provide us with an answer. When the Statue of Liberty rose in New York harbor, it was meant as a symbol of nationalism. Yet a few years later, once the immortal words of Emma Lazarus, a Jewish American poet and descendent of immigrants to America, wrote her poem “The New Colossus,” and once those words were inscribed on the base of “Lady Liberty,” the public began to connect the Statue of Liberty with immigration and, more specifically, with Jewish American immigration. Immigrants in Jewish American Literature 7 A small boy shows his parents the Statue of Liberty from Ellis Island U.S.
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