FLUID IDENTITIES: EAST EUROPEAN IMMIGRANT NARRATIVES IN TURN- OF-THE-CENTURY AMERICA

by

Ljiljana Coklin

Faculty of Arts Graduate Program in English

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Faculty of Graduate Studies The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario August, 1999

O Ljiljana Coklin 1999 National Library Bibliotheque nationale 191 of Canada du Canada Acquisitions and Acquisitions et Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques 395 Wellington Street 395. rue Wellington Ottawa ON KIA ON4 Ottawa ON K1A ON4 Canada Canada Your file Volre derence

Our fiJe Notre reference

The author has granted a non- L'auteur a accorde me licence non exclusive licence allowing the exclusive pennettant a la National Library of Canada to Bibliotheque nationale du Canada de reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, pr&er, distribuer ou copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous paper or electronic formats. la forme de rnicrofiche/film, de reproduction sur papier ou sur format Bectronique.

The author retains ownership of the L'auteur conserve la propriete du copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d'auteur qui protege cette these. thesis nor substantial extracts fiom it Ni la these ni des extraits substantiels may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent Ctre imprimes reproduced without the author's ou autrement reproduits sans son permission. autorisation. Dissertation Abstract

I examine turn-of-the-century East European immigrant narratives written by Jewish writers in America (1 900-1 935): Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the

Tenements (1923). Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (191 7), and

Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934). While the "Jewish" identity of the texts is never disputed. I also call these works "East European" narratives, because they invoke the presence of other ethnic groups that left no literary records. Such texts voice the problems of ''the new immigration" in America and therefore occupy an important place in American literature and history. I argue that these texts can be seen as constituting an "immigrant genre," a group of imaginative works that are related to but exist separately from ethnic and postcolonial literatures.

My project begins by situating East European immigrants in the context of the "Europe" and "America" of the time. A comparative analysis of Henry James'

The American Scene (1907) and Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives (1890) examines the presence of the "immigrant spectacle" on the streets of New York and the challenge the immigrant masses posed to the James' and Riis' "American" identities. The remaining three chapters offer readings of immigrant

narratives. My study of Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements examines the problems of the literary representation of a female immigrant and discusses the female American Dream. The chapter on Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky

discusses nostalgia as a screen for the masochistic drives of an immigrant millionaire. My examination of Roth's Call It Sleep sees the immigrant child as a nomadic subject, a form of "political fiction," that helps redefine a migrant identity and the identity of an American citizen.

iii Keywords: immigration, immigrant genre, immigrant narrative, identity, Jewish literature, turn-of-the-century American literature, ethnic literature, James, Riis,

Yezierska, Cahan, Roth. Immigrant Picnic

It's the Fourth of July, the flags are painting the town, the plastic forks and knives are laid out like a parade.

And I'm grilling, and I've got my apron, I've got potato salad, macaroni, relish, I've got a hat shaped like the state of Pennsylvania.

I ask my father what's his pleasure and he says, "Hot dog, medium rare," and then, "Hamburger, sure, what's the big difference," as if he's really asking.

I put on hamburgers and hot dogs, slice up the sour pickles and Bermudas, uncap the condiments. The paper napkins are fluttering away like lost messages.

'IYou're running around," my mother says, "like a chicken with its head loose." "Ma," I say, "you mean cut off, loose and cut off being as far apart as, say, son and daughter."

She gives me a quizzical look as though I've been caught in some impropriety. "I love you and your sister just the same," she says, "Sure," my grandmother pipes in, "you're both our children, so why worry?"

That's not the point I begin telling them, and I'm comparing words to fish now, like the ones in the sea at Port Said, or like birds among the date palms by the Nile, unrepentantly elusive, wild. "Sonia," my father says to my mother, "what the hell is he talking about?" "He's on a bail, " my mother says.

"That's roll!" I say, throwing up my hands, "as in hot dog, hamburger, dinner roll . . . . "

"And what about roll out the barrels? my mother asks, and my father claps his hands, "Why sure," he says, "let's have some fun," and launches into a polka, twirling my mother around and around like the happiest top,

and my uncle is shaking his head, saying "You could grow nuts listening to us,"

and I'm thinking of pistachios in the Sinai burgeoning without end, pecans in the South, the jumbled flavor of them suddenly in my mouth, word less, confusing, crowding out everything else.

Gregory Djanikian

"The fact is that for most exiles the difficulty consists not simply in being forced to live away from home, but rather, given today's world, in living with the many reminders that you are in exile, that your home is not in fact so far away, and that the normal traffic of everyday contemporary life keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with the old place. The exile therefore exists in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival becomes the main imperative, with the danger of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against."

(Edward Said Representations of the Infellectual36)

... for water and meditation, they say, go together ...

(Graham Swift Waterland 13) To My Family

vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am greatly indebted to my supervisor, Martin Kreiswirth, without whose support I would never have gone this far. I thank Marty for sharing his great knowledge, challenging ideas, academic experience, life wisdom, good sense of humour, contagious love of movies, and office with me. His tremendous belief in me as a scholar and his sincere friendship were safe and reliable guidelines through the years of my work on this project. I also want to thank Robert Barsky, my second reader, for his enthusiastic support of a project about immigration, for his contributions to the thesis, and for good spirits in general. The friends I made at Western-Hoi Cheu, Cathy Grise, Michael Bucknor, Kim Verwaayen, Madhur Anand. Sarah King, Andrew Fieldsend, Jelena Jovi&, Mark Masseo, Alshad Lalani-generously shared with me their ideas and insights, impressions about graduate school, and thoughts about life in general and life in London, Ont. Special thanks to Edie Snook, who thought a trip to Cuba was a great idea, read portions of this thesis, and provided a link between me and the outside world in the last few days of working on this project. Thanks to Vesna Raja&, my long- time friend, for her friendship and encouragement, even though she stopped believing in academia. Thanks to Stegik and the Tepif family, especially Milenko, who saw me off to the New World and thought I would make a difference. The completion of this project brings also fond memories of teta Millie, who did not live long enough to see me graduate but who strongly believed in the importance of female education. My deepest gratitude to Seka, my first and best English teacher and most intimate friend, for all her love and belief in me. My words of gratitude, in either English or Croatian, can never match the magic of my first English lesson and the world of difference she so unselfishly opened to me. My brother ~arkowas the voice of reason during my work on the thesis. His wit and pragmatic approach-"get it doneu-were much needed, and they kept my feet firmly on the ground. Last, but not least, thanks to my parents, Ankica and Ranko Coklin, whose unconditional long-distance love was a source of constant inspiration and strength. Their personal and professional trials helped me grow, and I can only hope that this thesis can make up for all the years that we did not spend together. I dedicate this thesis to you, mama i tata, with all my love. Hvala. viii Table of Contents Page

Certificate of Examination ..I - I Dissertation Abstract 111 Epigraphs v Dedication vii * *. Acknowledgments Vlll Table of Contents ix Introduction: lmmigrant Literature i lmmigrant Literature? 5 Locating Fluid Identities 13 1 "America beckons, but Americans repel": East European Immigrants in Tu rn-of-the-Centu ry America How to Treat Immigrants?: American Immigration Policies at the Turn of the Century ... somewhere in between Europe and America ... "Europe" "America" ... somewhere in between ... Literary Voices 2 In the Urban "Theater of Difference": Henry James, Jacob Riis, and the lmmigrant Spectacle In the Company of Strangers: Henry James and Jacob Riis Returning the Gaze: Reading James Reading Immigrants Jacob Riis: The Urban Colonizer Henry James and Jacob Riis Compared 3 Dubious Transgressions: Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements The Case of Anzia Yezierska The Importance of Being Salome When Salome Meets Pocahontas 4 Peddling Nostalgia and Performing the lmmigrant Condition: Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky The Diagnosis: A Divided Man "A Fly in the Ointment": Happiness Interrupted A Work of Mourning? 5 Between Roots and Routes: Henry Roth's Call It Sleep What Does History Say about lmmigrant Children, and What of David Schearl? The Urban Nomad Conclusion Bibliography Vita Introduction: Immigrant Literature

Neither a state nor a fact nor a moral nor a condition to be an immigrant is to be history & You know something about that

(Nabile Fares Discours pratique de I'immigre in \N.Woodhull 7)

Are immigrants history only? Are they to be found in facts, shocking news. and statistics only? Can there be immigrant aesthetics? Is there anything poetic about the immigrant condition? What is the immigrant condition: a nervous condition, a disease. an affect, excess, confusion, hunger, poverty, greed? All of it? Ah, too complicated. Who has the time for that? Fares says: "& You know something about that." Do you? What exactly? - Well, I've seen Titanic. Beautiful film. Oh, and I have this funny neighbor. He works all the time and has a big car. He's from ... oh, I forget where exactly he is from ... doesn't matter... but he's really funny, he...

This study sets out to examine turn-of-the-century literary representations of East European immigration in the United States. Despite the fact that the period (1890-1924) is known as the time of the greatest mass migrations during which almost twenty four million immigrants arrived in America, it has left a precious small number of literary works. In particular, East European immigration to America is a sadly undocumented area that was preserved predominantly in oral tradition, and its fragmented or embellished family stories never found their way to the written word. Poverty, lack of education, linguistic ineptitude, lack of scholarly and literary traditions, lack of leisure time, and the absence of an inspiring literary market have all contributed to a wall of silence that surrounds this period of American history. Focused on the narratives of the "new wave'' of European immigration that arrived from South and East European countries, my project has several goals. First, it offers critical and theoretical readings of East European immigrant narratives in America that have, despite their recent designation as immigrant classics, received insufficient scholarly attention. I will analyze Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923). Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (191 7), and Henry Roth's Call it Sleep (1934). Second, by reading these novels and contributing to the investigation of a rather obscure area of American writing. I want to raise questions about the particularity, location, and status of immigrant literature. What is immigrant literature and how can we define it? Third, the examination of the texts that often blur life writing and fiction inevitably brings into focus the materiality of the experience described. The process of immigration, its complexity, and reciprocal and changing nature, makes it possible to include also in this study non-immigrant and non-fiction works. Henry James' The American Scene (1907) and Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives (1890) record the authors' differing observations of the immigrant spectacle and show how the invasion of the aliens was perceived by some "Americans." My project ultimately wants to problematize the nature of immigrant writing by posing the following question: to what extent have different immigration policies, technological progress, media society, and globalized living changed the experience of immigration and modes of its representation? Therefore, the examination of the nature of immigration through texts that belong to a bygone era means not only critical empowerment of the marginalized narratives, but also an investigation of the adaptability and fluidity of immigration itself.

The rare works from the widely unexplored period of turn-of-the-century migrations to America foreground immigration as a complex and elusive process located at an intersection of numerous disciplines. In order to study immigration, we have to look at history, geography, travel, economics, politics, sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, psychology, and linguistics. An in-between condition, a constant negotiation between binary pairs-the past and the present, the home and the host country, the self and the other, the old and the new- immigration creates no less complex people or literary characters. Immigrants are the economically dispossessed; they are travelers, migrants, refugees, ethnics, aliens. They are not emigres, and they do not voluntarily leave their countries for reasons of political disagreement. They do not live in intellectual or cultural exile.' They constitute economic and cultural margins2 Unlike migrant workers, immigrants are not very when they move, they move in masses, and they look for a safe place. They are defined by arrival: im-migrate as opposed to e-migrate. Therefore, they have to focus on the present, the new reality; they can visit home when things get better. In the meantime, they have to work hard and contribute to the new country. Work is what defines them.

Michel de Certeau has used the in-between state, a specific immigrant trait, to indicate the centrality of the immigrant figure to modern society. Using the example of France, he asserts that the ever-changing codes of communication force one, just like "real immigrants," to both adapt to the new environment and change it according to one's needs (Woodhull 11). De Certeau uses the figure of the immigrant to indicate the change in subjectivity that has become necessary for one to live in a world in which blending standards and values has become a norm. He writes:

[The presence of immigrants] is the indicator and the strategic site of all problems concerning social communication, so much so that in a general report on communication, we have been led to consider the immigrant as its central figure. To express this in the form of a program, one would have to adopt the slogan "we are all immigrants," that is, socio-cultural voyagers caught in situations of transit in which real immigrants are the first victims, the most lucid witnesses, the experimenters and inventors of solutions. From this point of view, immigrants are pioneers of a civilization founded on the mixing of cultures. (quoted in Woodhull 11 ; italics mine)

Although de Certeau, as Winifred Woodhull rightly points out, runs the risk of conflating the difference between "real" and figurative immigrants and of diminishing the complexity of the immigrant status, his argument is significant for two reasons (1 1). It underscores the highly relational nature of immigration and ambivalence as an immigrant characteristic. The relational nature of immigration is predicated on the self-other relationship that this project examines. Immigration is never a one-sided process that affects only "them"; in it "we," as the hosts, have to deal with the newcomers. Much though we would like to disassociate ourselves from "them ," the imagined line of difference between "us" and "them" becomes a point of constitution of identity for both parties. It is inevitable, as Jonathan Rutherford remarks, that the hierarchical language of the West constructs the alien as other, as "the site of difference and the repository of our fears and anxieties" (10; italics mine). Despite our walls, "our" denial of "them," our, often masked, nativist anxiety or indifference, immigration is significant as a dynamic process of interchange and adaptability. The encounter with the other disturbs the center from which one departs, disrupts the sense of self, reveals the absences, denials, and splitting on which one's identity is based (Rutherford 12). Rather than speaking of fixed identities, Rutherford, like Etienne Balibar and Stuart Hall, privileges the term "identifications" because it indicates the relational and processual nature of identities. The discussion of the identity of the Left and its various positions clearly illustrates Rutherford's point:

Identification, if it is to be productive, can never be with some static and unchanging object. It is an interchange between self and structure, a transforming process. If the object remains static, ossified by tradition or isolated by a radically changing world, if its theoretical foundations cannot address that change, then its culture and politics lose their ability to innovate. Its symbolic language can only conjure up the past, freezing us in another moment. (14)

Along with the relational nature of immigration, de Certeau's argument for the centrality of the immigrant figure in contemporary society brings attention to a process that puts newcomers in a precarious, highly ambivalent, and contradictory position. The in-between immigrant condition means that the "aliens" are both subjected to change in the new environment and willing to adapt the new reality to their own needs. They are both inhibited by strangeness and challenged by novelty. Quite paradoxically, immigrants are equally active and passive; they are victims and agents; they elicit compassion, admiration, as well as caution. As de Certeau says, they are both "the first victims" and "the "pioneers" of a new civilization, torn between stasis and progress, paralyzing affect and excessive activity. Immigration is a process of transgressions, reversals, violent clashes, and it brings together progress and regress, affluence and poverty, high and popular culture.

Immigrant Literature?

If immigration is such a complex process, which stamps immigrants with ambiguity, affects both the newcomers and the host population, and calls for an interdisciplinary approach, how can it be represented in literature? Where can one find immigrant stories? Does the experience of displacement and rootlessness inspire textual playfulness, or does the immigrant drive to "make it" enforce a closure on textual representations? Do various immigration policies shape the immigrant experience differently and how are different immigrant experiences reflected in literary production and reception? There has been very little work done in the area of immigrant narratives. What is usually described are the stages of an immigrant story: it starts at home, and then describes the journey, the exhilarating encounter with the new country, and the hardships of living elsewhere. Immigrant literature has a component of travel and migrancy, but, unlike travel literature, it is not entirely about personal awakenings and pleasure. The freedom it describes is a flight from oppression or hardships, so "weight" is its integral component. The experience it describes is socially conditioned, dependent on historical changes and economic cycles, and directed towards a firmly defined destination point. Moreover, although often sentimental, nostalgic, and escapist, immigrant narratives are not just laments over the newcomers' victim status; they often actively, even aggressively, engage with issues of power relations and the construction of immigrant identity. Since very little work has been done to distinguish between various states of exile--emigration, dissident life, immigration, post-colonial relocations--and different ways of travel--migrancy, resettlement, nomadic journeys-it is difficult to locate the curious melange of texts labelled immigrant literature. At the present moment, we can only say that immigrant literature constitutes a subcategory under the wider umbrella of literature of exile and diaspora.

The work of Rosemary Marangoly George is a rare exception since it raises questions of the nature of immigrant literature and argues for an immigrant genre within the larger body of postcolonial literature. In her book, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (1 996). George explains that the existence of the immigrant genre would to some degree lessen the "burdens and constraints that contemporary criticism has placed on the category known as postcolonial literature" (171). She agrees with Barbara Harlow that political and ideological contents should be used for the creation of a genre and suggests that the "immigrant genre" should be centered around "the politics and experience of location (or rather dislocation)" (1 71). Undoubtedly, immigrant literature is a close relative of postcolonial literature and the literature of exile, and it is connected to a particular social phenomenon. It is, as George argues, "born of a history of global colonialism and is therefore a participant in decolonizing discourses" (171). The still uncharted territory of the immigrant genre should be seen in the following:

This genre ... is marked by a disregard for national schemes, the use of multigenerational cast of characters and a narrative tendency toward repetitions and echoes-a feature that is often displayed through plots and cover several generations. Most importantly, the immigrant genre is marked by a curiously detached reading of the experience of 'homelessness' which is compensated for by an excessive use of the metaphor of luggage, both spiritual and material. (171)

George echoes Robert Kroetsch's argument that the "re-telling of stories" in ethnic writing is a "principal way to establish or re-establish narrative coherence in the face of the gap between signifier and ~ignified."~She adds that borderlessness and fluidity mark the genre. George rightly notes that in immigrant fiction migration always flows toward "western" countries and toward metropolitan centers of power (172). The qualitative move for the better and the resulting imbalance of power only enhance the experience of the marginal and make the immigrant "luggageu-homelessness, isolation, loneliness-even heavier (173). In recent years, the phenomena of internationalism and cosmopolitanism have been added to postcolonial literature, and they have significantly enriched the works already "generated by the processes of immigration, migration and exile" (172). As a result, there is an increasing interest in and an expanding market for postcolonial literatures, including immigrant narratives, both of which, as George points out, are literatures that "travel well" (George 172).'

George has every right to be optimistic about the appeal and growth of postcolonial literature. The more relaxed immigration policies at the end of the twentieth century, aiming often toward multiculturalism, which again generates new controversies-exoticization of difference and performative nature of cultural diversity-have made "mainstream" culture aware of alterity, even if it has not gone far enough to help unpack the immigrant "l~ggage."~The remarkable and widely recognized literary accomplishments of postcolonial writers also ensure a growing audience and steady market in which difference is becoming a lucrative commodity and in which the dreams of many inhabitants of the margins may be realized. All of these factors-the more liberal immigration policies in North America, the existing interest in and growing market for postcolonial writers, the need to categorize numerous titles under the heading of postcolonial literature- may eventually lead to the creation of a separate category of immigrant writing and justify George's early call for its institutionalization into a genre.

However, what if there is a literature that is unmistakenly immigrant, written by and about immigrants and that speaks of immigrant travels and travails, but that hardly conforms to Rosemary George's postcolonial definition of new genre? Where do such works belong, and what has scholarship said about them? The literary works under study, turn-of-the-century East European, in particular Jewish, immigrant narratives in America stem from the time of melting- pot, assimilationist, politics in America. The cultural imperative to conform and erase all traces of difference meant that there was no interest in the literary production of the "other." It also meant a small literary market made up of an ethnic community7 and a consuming desire to break the cultural barrier, to reach an "American" audience, and conform to its expectations-by adopting "American" narrative structures (rags-to-riches story in Abraham Cahan, for instance), advocating assimilation, or creating Americanized characters who denounce their roots. "Difference" in these texts is never a site of playfulness or a motivation to explore the richness of alterity. Quite to the contrary, it is always associated with heavy "luggage"; it is drab and gloomy, and it means frustration and trouble. Only assimilation can bring happiness, as Israel Zangwill's famous play The Melting Pot (1909) or Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), show. Written in great urgency to speak out, make their presence known, and reach the audience outside the immigrant ghetto, these texts testify to a lack of time for studious literary craftsmanship. The language is adopted, narrative structure heavily accented, and fictional world foreign. For immigrants who left shtetls and remote villages in backward parts of East and South Europe to settle in New York slums. cosmopolitanism and internationalism remained foreign concepts, reserved for the privileged, who, like Henry James, could be "idle" enough to reflect on the impact and meaning of immigration in America. Busy with survival and anxious to become American, these newcomers were happy that their one-way transatlantic journey was over and that it brought them safely to the Promised Land. Finally, turn-of-the-century literature written by immigrants from the "other" Europe is obviously not associated with former colonies, and, as such, would not qualify for the immigrant genre that Rosemary George proposes. Still, despite all these differences, it is significant to point out that these texts share more than just the topic with more recent immigrant narratives. The turn-of-the-century immigrant narratives are not "just" about relocation and dislocation; they speak the same language of oppression, marginalization, and inferiority, and they center on the heavy "luggage" that they either bring from elsewhere or acquire in the process of creating a new self in a new home.

In order to study turn-of-the-century East European immigrant narratives in America, one has to search for them under several different designations: ethnic, proletarian, realist, immigrant, and Jewish writinga8The Columbia History of the American Novel (1991) includes an entry entitled "Ethnicity in the Marketplace" in which Thomas J. Ferraro discusses narratives of the "new wave" of European immigration as ethnic writing. Probably the main reason for collapsing the immigrant with the ethnic is that ethnic writing, as Ferraro points out in his book Ethnic Passages: Literary lmmigranfs in Twentieth-Century America (1993), is very receptive of the "paradigm of cultural rebirth-'from alien to American"' that is characteristic of immigrant narratives (1). The problem with the designation of turn-of-the-century immigrant narratives as "ethnic" writing is twofold. The word "ethnic" may be misleading since it obscures the reference: which ethnic writing does it exactly stand for? The one of the beginning of the century by the groups-Jews, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, Portuguese--that have long since lost their ethnic prefix and have assimilated into mainstream America? Or, does the designation apply to contemporary ethnic writing by groups that are nowadays constructed in terms of racial, ethnic, or religious alterity? Or, is "ethnic writing" simply a convenient term for the literary output of any minority group, which, at a particular point in time, occupies the margins and performs the uncomfortable role as the racial, ethnic, or religious "other?" The second problem with naming immigrant writing as ethnic literature is that it voices doubts about the artistry of the works. To call something "ethnic" means to designate it as not a part of accepted canon of American "literature." "Ethnic writing" has been associated with low aesthetic quality, little exposure, no power, marginal position in relation to the literary output of the host country, and no particular appeal to scholarship. Apart from "ethnicf' writing, East European writing in America, has also been perceived as "regional," which stamps it further as "parochial, transient, and delusive simultaneously: self-congratulation and public relations masquerading, just barely, as literary art" (Ferraro 2). Ferraro reminds us that the description of immigrant experience has been vagrant itself: it has progressed from "immigrant novel" via "ethnic literature" to the more recent description of "multicultural representation" Therefore, although obviously reflecting social constructions of ethnicity in general, the designation "ethnic" should be used more carefully, and the ten"immigrant literature" may be more precise and appropriate.

Apart from the need to distinguish between "immigrant" and "ethnic" writing, this project faces another challenge in describing the works under study. Most of the texts known as turn-of-the-century immigrant literature, and all of the texts referred to in my study as East European immigrant narratives, were in fact written by one ethnic group-by Jewish immigrants. The problem that imposes itself here and that has occupied me for quite some time is whether I am appropriating "Jewish" immigrant experience and turning it into a "universal" East European one. I based my decision to study Jewish texts and examine East European immigrant experience on the following two reasons: the inadequacy of the term "Jewish literature," and the virtual absence of immigrant narratives by other ethnic groups. As Mark Shechner points out, the term "Jewish literature," used predominantly in the period after the second world war, is gradually disappearing. Just as "Jewishness" no longer exists as a "self-evident cultural identity" in America, so does "Jewish literature" have little justification for a "subdivision" of American literature (191). At the same time, the fact that other ethnic groups produced few, if any, literary works about turn-of-the-century immigration in America makes it necessary to resort to Jewish writers. Unlike other ethnic groups who came to America from East (and South) Europe at the same time, Jews apparently were the only ones who cherished the tradition of the written word and had a potential to develop it into literary writing.'' Stressing the tradition of scholarship among Jewish immigrants, Shechner says that the usual correlation between class and learning did not apply to Jewish immigrants, for "despite their crushing poverty, the immigrants brought with them a rich tradition of literacy and scholarship and the beginnings of secular fiction that needed only translation into modern terms to gain entry into American writing" (1 93). The decision to describe the texts under study as East European instead of Jewish means also that my project intends to go "beyond ethnicity." The discussions of Anzia Yezierska's, Abraham Cahan's, and Henry Roth's novels by no means collapse "Jewishness" into collective sameness with other ethnic groups of the time. I deal actively with the particularity of these texts and the frequently asked questions of Jewish identity. At the same time, I believe that these rare texts written at the beginning of the century can invoke the presence of other ethnic groups, who left hardly any records and whose voices will never be heard. This is not to claim that existing Jewish texts are in any sense representative of the ethnic variety that arrived from the "other" Europe during the same period. These texts are certainly not speaking for all of East European immigrants. Still, it is to suggest that since they shared the common denominator of poverty, near-slavery, and backwardness "at home," the ghosts of other ethnic groups could be seen in some of the tribulations characteristic of the "new immigration": the sea voyage, patriarchal society clashing with progressive American values, cultural displacement, hegemonic power relations, the high-low clash. What they shared most was the experience of urban America constructed out of the living in tenements and on social margins. Although cosmopolitanism and internationalism cannot be associated with turn-of-the-century European immigrants in America, the experience of powerlessness and dislocation shared by many ethnic groups gives texts under study a more-than-local appeal and enables them to address, not to speak for, the cosmos beyond the boundaries of their ethnic group.

Therefore, for the reasons outlined above, I will be referring to turn-of-the- century Jewish immigrant texts studied here as East European immigrant narratives. My insistence on using the term "immigrant" reflects my belief in the need for a designation of a particular genre or for simply grouping together a body of works that deal with immigration, one of the fundamental American experiences. Such a collection of literary texts that deal with immigration would provide a "home" for a lot of works facing complete oblivion, and it would enable us to gain an insight into the history and changing definitions of American immigration and immigrants. Grouped with other texts, turn-of-the-century immigrant narratives would occupy an important place. They could even be seen as precursors to contemporary ethnic writing, since they brought to attention the experience of immigrants. They were not settlers; instead, they were the "othet' that "settled" on the social margins of America. Although I support Rosemary George's call for an immigrant genre, I cannot help wondering whether institutionalization or "canonization" is the right way to deal with these works. For, after all, it may be that literary representations of immigration resist generic closure and are best left dispersed and intervowen into other, more rigidly defined, genres and disciplines. Maybe the ''true" nature of immigrant narratives calls for their fluid existence among disciplines and on the margins of literature.

Locating Fluid ldentities

Apart from some rare exceptions, the study of East European immigrant narratives has experienced significant critical marginalization. In the introduction to Ethnic Passages Thomas J. Ferraro offers a succinct summary of ethnic literary scholarship. In the 1960s, scholars like Leslie Fiedler and Daniel Aaron saw ethnic literature as regional, which meant a sharp division between mainstream and "other" literature in terms of content and aesthetic accomplishment. The 1970s mark the appearance of MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States), a magazine committed to preserving and discussing literature of various ethnic groups. In the early l98Os, scholars like Dorothy Burton SkBrdal, Allen Guttmann, Elaine H. Kim, and Jules Chametzky make significant contributions to the study of ethnic literature, but, as Ferraro points out, these authors were "reluctant to attend to or even admit to the literariness of the texts they studied" (4). The second half of the 1980s marks the appearance of Werner Sollors' "ethnic school" and critics like Mary V. Dearborn and William Boelhower," who pose a challenge to previous "separatist and 'mirror into social history"' approaches to ethnic literature (5). In an attempt to bridge a gap between two antithetical subdivisions of American literature, these scholars are preoccupied with finding and discussing common features. Ferraro describes their method: "Each critic pools together the literatures of old-stock Anglo-Saxon families, of the immigrant descended, and of nonimmigrant minorities as representations of 'America"' (5).12 The two studies dealing with turn-of-the-century immigration that stand out in the 1990s are Ferraro's Ethnic Passages: Literary immigrants in Twentieth- Century America (1993) and Magdalena J. Zaborowska's How We Found America: Reading Gender through East European Immigrant Narratives (1995).13 Although influenced by Sollors' "ethnic school," Ferraro focuses on the literature of immigration and the social mobility of literary figures of immigrant origin. He discusses the American aspects of immigrant narratives without necessarily reading them as indicators of assimilation. Or, as he puts it, this method allows him to study ethnic texts "beyond individual ethnic spheres" without following Sollors' dictum to go "beyond elhnicity" (6). Zaborowska, on the other hand, offers a significant and much needed study of gender in East European immigrant narratives, ranging from Mary Antin's The Promised Land (191 2) to Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (1989). Zaborowska draws attention to an often forgotten female experience of immigration and acculturation and examines subversive strategies of a female re-reading of the masculine rhetoric of the American Dream.14 Building on the work of existing "ethnic" scholarship and particularly on recent work by Ferraro and Zaborowska, this study argues for the need of a more systematic scholarship that would acknowledge the complexity of turn-of- the-century East European immigrant narratives and examine them beyond the confines of the "ethnic" label. My dissertation differs from these earlier studies in that it foregrounds the experience of immigration, which, after all, is the context that these texts have in common and the experience that they can address with confidence and competence (even if some doubt their aesthetic accomplishment). This approach opens up obscure immigrant texts: it gives them voice and authority and enriches the scope of issues that they raise. It also makes them more accessible both to scholarship and to a wider audience, who do not necessarily search for fictive immigrant ancestors. In this way, mid Identities accomplishes two things. Sensitive to the historical determinants and cultural politics of American modernity-rigid assimilationist politics and the highly polarized reality of Americans and immigrants4 offers critical and theoretical readings of immigrant texts and places the texts in the context of "literature." At the same time, each of the four interpretative chapters discusses a particular aspect of immigration-the impact of the arrival of the alien, discrepant realities of a female immigrant, immigrant masculinity in crisis, and cultural mediations of an immigrant child. This means that my project goes beyond the "ethnic school" and contributes to the study of literary representations of immigration, as well as to interdisciplinary examinations of immigration itself. Since each chapter is conceived as a different aspect of immigration, each calls for a different combination of approaches-cultural materialism, postcolonial theory, feminism, psychoanalysis, semiotics. Chapter One offers a brief historical survey of East European immigration to America and examines the way in which cultural and political identities of Europe and America of the time were constructed. It also situates immigrants from the "other" Europe in a transatlantic trafficking between two entities and positions immigrant writing in relation to mainstream American literature. Chapter Two examines the early period of the "new immigration," and it juxtaposes non-fiction works of two observers of the immigrant spectacle: Henry James' travelogue The American Scene and Jacob Riis' reformist pamphlet How the Other Half Lives. This chapter insists on the relational nature of immigration by showing how the presence of the immigrant "other" on the streets of New York calls for redefinition of the identities of the two "Americans." The remaining three chapters are readings of "authentic" immigrant narratives: Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky, and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements explores the nexus of gender and ethnicity. Struggling for self- definition, the heroine is caught in between the stereotypical role of an inferior and subservient ethnic woman and the projected image of herself as a courageous and uninhibited "New American Woman." In an attempt to change patriarchal constructions of femininity, she also learns to redefine marriage as a partnership rather than a vehicle for female social mobility. In Chapter Four, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky brings into focus the complexity of nostalgia as a typical immigrant affliction. Cahan's novel complicates the understanding of temporality in immigrant narratives, and shows nostalgia as a disguise for the masochistic drives of an immigrant millionaire. The chapter argues that stereotypical immigrant melancholy can be manipulated into a screen for the unresolved personal drama that is brought from home rather than acquired in transit. The last chapter, on Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, the token immigrant classic, uses the notion of nomadic subjectivity to describe the process of creation and decreation of the identity of an immigrant child who both grows up and learns to be an American. A perceptive reader, who in the clamor of different cultures and values has to read gaps, silences, and fragmented discourses, the immigrant child learns that the identity of an ethnicAmerican represents a series of negotiations and temporary attachments, constant migrancy, and borderless existence.

A study of immigration and immigrant narratives inevitably revolves around the issues of displacement, (re)location, and (re)creations of identity. It means being in a constant flux, drifting with cultural flows and economic cycles, inhabiting undefined in-between spaces, experiencing floods of emotions and "freezing" in memories. It means being reborn into restlessness and unpredictability. The identities of the immigrants of the "new wave" of American immigration, the identities of the "new wave immigrants" cannot but be perceived as fluid. Caught in a constant flow between ebb and tide, give and take, water and land. Inhabiting waterland. Transgressing, dissolving, renewing, and rewriting themselves. ENDNOTES

1. Priscilla Wald writes in Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995) that unlike "emigre," "immigranttt is defined primarily in terms of arrival, in the state of waiting to be naturalized, turned into a citizen. Moreover, even despite citizenship, immigrant retains an aura of alienism and does not conform to the categories used to define cultural and national identities (Priscilla Wald 252).

2. In her article "Exile," Winifred Woodhull offers a rare differentiation between different groups living in exile. Under the big heading of exile, she distinguishes between emigres and immigrants, who may share the forced emigration, but differ in their struggles (7). Immigrants are identified primarily by their economic hardships and little cultural impact. Speaking on the example of France, she talks about intellectual immigration and groups emigres according to various reasons that brought them to France: "intellectual or cultural affinity" (emigres from West European countries, Canada, US); flight from oppression; political and intellectual reasons (dissidents from East European countries); or cultural, political, intellectual reasons (intellectuals from Third World countries, particularly former colonies) (8).

3. in her introduction to Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1994), Rosi Braidotti distinguishes between the exile, the migrant, and the nomad. She believes that they correspond to "different styles and genres and to different relationships to time" (24). Exile literature is "based on an acute sense of foreignness"; it is "marked by a sense of loss or separation from the home country, which, often for political reasons, is a lost horizon; there is diasporic side to it. Memory recollection, and the rumination of acoustic traces of the mother tongue is central to this literary genre ..." (24). Unlike exile, the migrant is suspended in an in-between state. Migrant literature is about a "suspended, often impossible present; it is about missing, nostalgia, and blocked horizons. The past acts as burden in migrant literature; it bears a fossilized definition of language that marks the lingering of the past into the present" (24). Braidotti addresses postcolonial literature in this context, which differs from "the migrant genre" because "the sense of the home country or culture of origin is activated by political and other forms of resistance to the conditions offered by the host culture" (25).As a result, she writes, "time is not frozen for the postcolonial subject, and the memory of the past is not a stumbling block that hinders access to a changed present. Quite the contrary, the ethical impulse that sustains the postcolonial mode makes the original culture into a living experience, one that functions as a standard of reference" (25). For Braidotti's view of nomadism, see Chapter Five of this study, which discusses nomadic subjectivity in relation to an immigrant child. 4. Kroetsch examines the work of a Canadian ethnic writer Frederick Philip Grove, whose work indicates the gap between the two realities of Canada and Germany. In fact, Grove is an interesting example of an invented immigrant persona. It was recently discovered that he was a "German writer of bourgeois background" rather than a Swedish aristocrat, as he presented himself (65).

5. Arguing for the immigrant genre that would overlap but still exist separately from postcolonial literature, George gives examples of the texts that would justify her call for the immigrant genre. The following texts have taken "the issue of immigration as their central narrative": Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956). Anita Desai's ByeBye BlackBird (1970), Bharati Mukhejee's Wife (1975). Buchi Emecheta's Second Class Citizen (1 974), Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John (1986), Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989), Sara Suleri's Meatless Days (1989), Beryl Bilroy's Boy-Sandwich (1989). George uses M. G. Vassanji's novel The Gunny Sack (1989) in order to explain her argument for the need of the "genre of immigrant fiction" (176).

6. For an intriguing "immigrant" view of multiculturalism in Canada, see Neil Bissoondath's Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1998). Selling illusions is the first work of non-fiction of the Trinidad-born writer residing in Montreal.

7. Priscilla Wald gives a telling example of the difficulty of breaking into the American market. Even much more acceptable authors, like Gertrude Stein, could not get publishers for works that were not of immediate relevance to the mainstream public. Stein's Three Lives, "character sketches," that describe the lives of three marginal women--lower class, black, immigrant-were not attractive to American audience, which constituted the market and demanded works that were "more compatible with the center of power than with the margins of culture" (Wald 240).

8. The few contemporary scholars of this literature refer to the texts variously: Ferraro chooses the term "ethnic," while Zaborowska opts for "immigrant narratives."

9. This broad categorization of ethnic narratives provides Ferraro with a rationale for the choice of the authors and texts he studies in Ethnic Passages. Centering around the figure of an immigrant writer, Ferraro studies Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, Henry Roth's Call It Sleep, Henry Miller's short story "The Tailor Shop," and Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Wamor.

10. Mark Shechner points out that there are two major historical reasons that accounted for the emergence of Jewish literature in America. The first one is a transformation of the Jews from "a medieval to a modern people," the sudden cultural revolution that changed traditional Jewish ways of living (1 93). The second one is the love of the written word, which in modern America assumed a more secular literary tradition.

11. Mary V. Dearborn is well-known for her study Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture (1986) and William Boelhower for Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Serniosis in American Literature (1 987).

12. For a more detailed account of the history of scholarship of ethnic studies, see Ferraro's introduction to Ethnic Passages (1-6).

13. Some smaller contributions to immigrant literature of this period can be found in works like Priscilla Wald's Constituting Americans: CulturaI Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995). Wald examines the pressure for identity formation of some marginal groups in America, such as African Americans and immigrants, and the anxiety that affected narratives written in the process of their collective and individual identity formation. Her approach to European immigrant narratives of the turn of the century is similar to Sollors' ethnic school in that it situates immigrant texts in the context of "mainstream" American writing, namely Puritan texts. Reflecting the tremendous cultural pressure to assimilate, immigrant narratives continued the long tradition of spiritual conversion in American writing, which in some texts, like Mary Antin's The Promised Land, assumed an almost religious quality. Wald writes: the Puritans' Atlantic voyage served as the archetypal moment of Americanization. That voyage constituted an originary moment for a cultural plot onto which European immigrants could superimpose their own journeys to what Mary Antin calls the Promised Land. The prevalence of the verb 'to make' (as in the making of Americans) in these accounts and the conspicuous use of the passive voice to describe the moment of transformation imagine American identity as a bestowal, a construction, but also as a miracle that builds on as it replaces spiritual conversion. The immigrants in many such accounts rehearse the Puritans' miraculous genealogy. As the Puritans descended spiritually, through a rhetorical sleight of hand, from the Israelites rather than the English, so the immigrants adopted a spiritual genealogy from the Puritans. The immigrant may never allude to the Puritans directly; Antin, for example, continually invokes her hero George Washington, the subject of the first published poem, rather than any Puritan ancestor. Yet New England's early settlers are the indwelling spirits who formally and metaphorically legitimate her spiritual conversion to Americanization. (249)

14. Zaborowska studies in detail women writers like Mary Antin, Elizabeth Stern, Anzia Yezierska, Maria Kuncewicz, Eva Hoffman. She also includes a chapter on Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin, which she examines as an immigrant narrative. Chapter One

"America beckons, but Americans repel": East European Immigrants in America1

"America is an idea in our minds. Every generation of new immigrants remakes America in the shape of what they imagine it to be." (Andrei Codrescu Road Scholac From Coast to Coast Late in the Century 193)

This introductory chapter deals with constructions of turn-of-the-century "Europe" and "America" and the context they provide for the identity and literary output of East European immigrants in the United States. The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part constitutes a brief historical survey of the "new immigration" and its reception in America, and a theoretical discussion of the mediary position that East European immigrants occupied in relation to "Europe" and "America" of the time. The second part will focus on the contrast between America's self-creation as a radical and democratic departure from "oppressive" Europe and its paradoxical repetition of the rejected European model of hegemonic relations. I will also situate immigrant (ethnic) literature2in relation to its host nation. My discussion will show that despite the proclaimed ideals of "freedom, democracy and the pursuit of happiness," mainstream America defined itself by the exclusion and denial of the non-W.A.S.P. American "other." However, the strivings towards a fixed definition of American identity have been undermined by the process of immigration itself, which continually confronts the American self with its "other." East, as well as South, European immigrants from the beginning of the twentieth century were constructed as a threatening "other" in the America of the time. The presence of these imported Europeans who had no attributes of "European" identity disrupted the self-styled image of America as a welcoming and benevolent asylum for "the wretched of the world." The fleeing masses of the uncultivated, poor, lower-class East European "other" exposed the calculated rationale behind the turn-of-the-century immigration in America. It made it obvious that the privileges of the American haven, presented as a gift to humanity, functioned rather as a rational and reciprocal exchange of favors. The immigrants bought democracy and freedom in the United States by hard work, their only currency, and by a willingness to melt their cultural, racial and religious difference in the cauldron of the homogeneous American self. The few existing narratives about turn-of-the-century East European immigration are important because they allow us to see how immigration affected both the newcomers and the host nation. These texts also create a specific "other" within the American "global sponge" that speaks about the creation of identity of both the new Americans and America itself (Ruben Rumbaut xvi). As such, they can neither be devalued nor denied.

How to Treat Immigrants?: American Immigration Policies at the Turn of the Century

The tides of industrial change in America at the end of the nineteenth century brought the popularly-called "second wave" of European immigrants to the United States. Impoverished peasants from rural areas of Poland, Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Greece, Portugal, and Ottoman Empire joined "the old immigration" and entered the American scene in astonishing numbers. Those numbers reached as high as twenty three and a half million in the period between 1880-1921 (Alan Kraut 2).3The turn of the century was the time of radical novelties in the United States: America was developing into the most advanced industrialized country in the world, rampant market economy was producing a highly stratified society, and American cities were swelling with immigrants. In the early 1900s, the soaring numbers of newcomers soon became alarming, and shocking reports that foreigners made up to one half of the urban American population provoked public outrage against the unplanned immigration policies (Portes and Ruben 140). Afraid that the overwhelming masses of immigrants would threaten their privileges, the American public started calling for controlled immigration and restricted quotas. Created as early as 1891, the Bureau of Immigration was established to begin to regularize immigration process and bring order into chaotic immigration procedures. Unlike earlier government organizations oriented towards helping immigrants settle in America, the Bureau of Immigration was organized in order to begin to close America's open doors, protecting her from unacceptable immigrants (Kraut 51). A string of increasingly stricter immigration laws soon followed. In 1903, immigrant crowds were screened for beggars, prostitutes, anarchists, and the insane; in 1907, the list of excluded expanded to include "the feebleminded, imbeciles, person with physical or mental defects which might affect their ability to support themselves, those afflicted with tuberculosis, children under sixteen unaccompanied by their parents or legal guardians, and persons who admitted to have committed a crime of moral turpitude or engaged in prostitution" (Kraut 53). In 1917, the Literacy Law required immigrants to be able to read and write in their mother tongues4 While the Literacy Law included for the most part the already listed categories of undesirable newcomers, it was specifically aimed at curbing immigration of peasant populations from South and East Europe. Four years later, in 1921, immigration privileges were further limited by the quota system that allowed entry to only 3% of the number of each immigrant group already living in America (Kraut 176). The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 further decreased new immigration by insisting that the numbers of immigrants allowed to the United States should be proportionate to the percentage, not the raw number, of different ethnic groups living in America (Kraut 176). As a result, huge immigrant masses were gradually reduced, and in the mid-1920s European immigration eventually trickled down to insignificant numbers. The America to which immigrants arrived was a modern country, oriented towards progress, industrialization, market economy, and urbanization. The enormous and insatiable industrial machine constantly needed strong backs and cheap, unskilled labour to keep its plants running. Immigrants, on the other hand, saw in America a possibility for an escape from poverty, prosecution and exploitation, as well as a promise of economic prosperity, political liberty, and religious tolerance (Kraut 11). Surfacing from the obscurity of distant and familiar regions of Europe--from the Pale and beyond-immigrants stepped onto the highly industrialized, hectic, electric urban scene of America. The clash between galloping modernity and the immigrants' static, temporally frozen, feudal-like cultural and political backgrounds was enormous. "Scientists" classified and measured the differences between immigrants and their American hosts in terms of civilization (manners, customs, beliefs), education, class, and intelligen~e.~ Once deemed racially-not ethnically, linguistically, or geographically- different, South and East European immigrants could easily be dismissed as an inferior, intellectually, mentally, socially, and culturally backwards people. It is not surprising then that one of the prominent sociologists and progressive reformers of the period, Edward Ross, comments on immigrants in their best Sunday clothes in the following manner: "They simply look out of place in black clothes and stiff collars, since clearly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind" (quoted in Lawrence Levine, italics in the original 128). Such comments, fraught with nativism, racism and hostility, often provided "scientific" justifications for restricted immigration. One of the reports of the Commission on Immigration justifies reduced numbers of South and East European immigrants by claiming that the new immigrants are "far less intelligent than the old [from Northern and Western Europe].... Racially they are for the most part essentially unlike the British, German and other peoples who came during the period prior to 1880 and generally speaking they are actuated in coming by different ideals" (in Levine 126; italics mine). Looking from the perspective of contemporary immigration in America, it is not difficult to notice shifting perceptions of alterity and the migratory nature of racial and ethnic markers. In American Ethnicity (1 979),Joseph Hraba briefly outlines the difference between ethnicity and race, which has become a convention among sociologists: ethnicity is reserved for different white groups, while race marks nonwhite groups of American population (28)? In contemporary immigration debates, racial labels are used to mark contested, visibly different, immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The hostility with which current immigration problems, such as illegal immigration or immigration from the Third World are dealt with has prompted an equally exclusive responses, like the one of Joe Feagin. In his brief historical overview of American nativism, Feagin brackets all white ethnicities under the broad term of an American, European, white majority which he then contrasts to its racial "others." From that standpoint, Feagin argues that bringing immigrants from Europe has been a calculated effort on the part of the American government to keep America predominantly white and European (14). Nothing can probably be truer than this: faced with a potential "invasion" of the west coast by Asian immigrants, the American government opted for "lesser evil," and opened the door of the east coast to immigrants from remote and less well-known parts of Europe. Although Feagin does not acknowledge the racial discourse as a context within which America dealt with European immigrants at the turn of the century, he cannot ignore the nativist anxiety with which America greeted them. However, despite its reductive nature, Feagin's argument is significant in the sense that it shows how once strong racial differences between immigrants and Americans have "paled" in light of contemporary diversity. Or, his argument indicates how clearly visible racial markers of contemporary, Asian and Latin American, immigrants have replaced the less visible, and nowadays acceptable diversity of European immigrants. In other words, once strong "racial" differences between European immigrants and their American hosts have faded into an ethnicity that has eventually blended with the American mainstream culture. Racial labels attached to a particular immigrant group should be seen as indicators of a native belief that the great socio-cultural, economic, and religious differences of those immigrants represent a challenge and a threat to American society. A direct expression of native anxiety, the discourse of "race" indicates a deep concern of the native population that a particular immigrant group cannot easily integrate and can therefore only destabilize the social texture of the host country. "Race" thus comes to mark an immigrant group that needs to be watched and ultimately linked to restrictive legislation. Cultural policies and immigration laws at the turn of the century reflect well the chaos and fear of national disunity caused by the arrival of different European "races." The main immigration policies of the time resulted in Anglo conformity and assimilation17 the "melting pot," whereas cultural pluralism and transnationalism existed only as theoretical alternatives.

In her article, "Cosmopolitanism, Ethnicity and American Identity: Randolph Bourne's 'Transnational America,"' Leslie Vaughan briefly outlines Anglo conformity as a belief that America was and remains a pure strain of the Anglo-Saxon race. In order to preserve what Madison Grant called "the great race," the state had to insist on homogeneity and like-mindedness (quoted in Vaughan 449). Steeped in the notions of a fixed territory and blood belonging to a cultural tradition, the advocates of Anglo conformity, including Edward Ross, Madison Grant, the author of the notorious The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and Theodore Roosevelt, saw themselves as guardians of the purity of the Teutonic race (450). Their nativism sought the "ritual purification" of American society--the conversion of other races into the Anglo-Saxon one--and it tended to separate those who belong from those who do not (Juan Perea 1). Melting pot advocates are most often seen as followers of St. Jean de Crevecoeur's vision of the American as a new man, a composite identity of different European races. Crevecoeur writes in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782):

The next wish of this traveler will be to know whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans will have arisen. ... What then is the American, this new man? He is either a European, or the descendant of a European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. (658-9)

Although conspicuously absent from Crevecoeur's list of "poor European emigrants," great numbers of the turn-of-the-century South and East European immigrants, including immigrant writers like Mary Antin, Israel Zangwill, or Abraham Cahan, eagerly embraced and practiced assimilation. In fact, Zangwill's extremely successful play gave assimilation its more popular name: "the melting pot." While most immigrants at the turn of the century saw assimilation as a liberation from the oppressive and patriarchal tradition of the Old World, American political figures, like Woodrow Wilson, used assimilation as an effective strategy to eradicate the destabilizing potential of hyphenated identities. In one of his speeches before Congress, Wilson passionately claimed that "Any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic'' (quoted in Vaughan 448).' Welcomed by immigrants and supported by the legislature, the melting pot remained the most widely spread policy of incorporation, the one which helped create the myth of America as a country of open doors and new beginnings. Opposing these two cultural policies intended to eradicate the newcomers' difference, Horace Kallen's anti-assimilationist program existed mostly as an alternative theory at the beginning of the century. Nowadays, however, Kallen's vision of America as a "confederation of European nations and cultures" is credited with having laid the foundation for cultural pluralism in America (David M. Fine 34).' Kallen insisted that the difference and variety that immigrants bring to America should be respected, and he saw them as invaluable contributors that could only enrich American society. The fact that immigrants were allowed to preserve their old, "inner," cultural identity, Kallen did not see as an obstacle to performing their new roles of loyal and committed citizens in a democratic America (Vaughan 451). The isolated voice of Randolph Bourne showed even more respect for immigrant difference than Kallen's cultural pluralism. Bourne argued for transnationalism, a form of "extreme cosmopolitanism" in David Fine's opinion, an openly international alternative to cultural pluralism, according to which immigrants should have dual citizenship (35). Using Werner Sollorsf notions of descent and consent, Leslie Vaughan describes Bourne's belief that a stable cultural identity can be based on the balance between identity of descent (unchangeable, regional stamp) and the identity of consent (the one forged out of law, contract, marriage) (Vaughan 452). In the combination of divided loyalties and multiple perspectives, Bourne saw a tremendous potential for an American nation that could only benefit fram fluid identities and cosmopolitan individuals.'* However, as America's immigration history has shown, Horace Kallen and Randolph Bourne remained for a long time isolated and powerless voices in a turn-of-the century America that insisted on radical erasure, or a gradual melting, of immigrant difference. ... somewhere in between Europe and America ...

"Europe"

The position of East European immigrants in turn-of-the-century America was indeed precarious: they did not belong to either the elitist definitions of Europe or to the populist views of America as an egalitarian country, whose doors are open to everybody. In this section I discuss representations of Europe and America at this time and show how East European immigrants found themselves caught between these two powerful discourses. If we disregard recent efforts to create a united Europe, a legitimate European identity until now has existed mainly as an idea. Paul Valery, the French poet and critic of the turn of the century, is considered one of the "founding fathers of a United Europe," and he addresses the issue of European identity in 1919 (de Madariaga xxxiv)." While a broader political context of Valery's writings is not of particular importance for this discussion, his views of Europe-its identity, power, and relation to the "other"--reflect the spirit of the time. Valery's idea of a united Europe implies that there is a body of commonalities--the myth of the common European culture-shared throughout the continent. It is "the idea of culture, of intelligence, of great works, [which] has for us a very ancient connection with the idea of Europe-so ancient that we rarely go back so far" (31). The amnesia of Europeans that equates culture with European essence operates, as Valery suggests. "beneath consciousness" in the European mind. The exclusive and thus discriminatory politics of European forgetting dehistoricizes the context within which European culture was built by purging it from any alterity, and therefore naturalizing it into an essence, or an ideology (Hebdige 1 1 ; Barthes Mythologies 129). Valery further generalizes when he describes the idealized and superior "European psyche": "a driving thirst, an ardent and disinterested curiosity, a happy mixture of imagination and rigorous logic, a certain unpessimistic skepticism, an unresigned mysticism .. . are the most specifically active characteristics of the European psyche" (32-3). They make the "miracle" of Europe, its "pre-eminence in all fields," possible (31). Two things characterize the fervor of Valery's attempts to define the idea of Europe. On the one hand, it is the sweeping, generalizing motion that dismisses the differences between European nations as superficial or insignificant (all nationalities are reduced to an "average quality of Homo europaeus" 323). On the other hand, even when Valery acknowledges differences within and outside Europe, he presents them only as positive contributions to the greater cause of Europe for which they are wilting to sacrifice their particularities. For the process of creating the totalitarian discourse of Europe, Valery uses an effective metaphor of an "intellectual factory," which functions to transform "all things of the mind everywhere" (314). "Triumphant Europe, born of the exchange of all things spiritual and material" is a machine that transforms "products from the most distant lands" (313). Valery writes:

On the one hand, the new lands of America, Oceania, Africa, and the ancient empires of the Far East sent their raw materials to Europe to be put through those astonishing transformations that Europe alone knew how to achieve. On the other, the learning, the philosophies, the religions of ancient Asia came to nourish the ever alert minds that Europe produced in every generation; and this powerful machine transformed the more or less strange conceptions of the Orient--sounded their depths, and extracted from them their usable elements. (31 4)

In this process of "conversion of material goods into spiritual ones," the European mind "take[s] in everything and transform[s] it into our own substance" (Naas xliv; Valery 325, italics mine). The production of the pure European "essence" ensures the continuation of everything that is distinctly European-- intellectual, cultured, superior. It is, thus, the "Europeanness" that guarantees the high quality of European spirit which in turn provides the basis for the "astonishing superiority" of Europe as the essential European trait (323). And, it is no wonder that Valery sees Europe as a "kind of cape of the old continent, a western appendix to Asia," that looks "naturally toward the west" (312). Jacques Derrida has responded to Valery's views of Europe and to recent changes toward unification in his extended essay The Other Heading (199 1). He argues that Valery's openly centrist and universalist discourse has no relevance for the changing political and economic conditions of contemporary Europe. Europe is now confronted with its colonial past and must deal with a new political map, which includes a number of small nation states in Eastern Europe. While Derrida does not dismiss the "universal" metanarrative of Europe as the narrative in which Europe has written itself, he points out that present changes in Europe as well as the baggage of Europe's responsibility to its colonial past call for inclusion, respect, and responsibility for the "other." They call for the creation of "the other heading." Apart from recognizing the need for the responsibility for a European heritage, Derrida points out also the responsibility for and to the "other" (Heading 44). His argument for double responsibility implies coexistence of the universal (European) and the particular ("less-European" and non-European "other"). Such coexistence of the universal and the particular would dispense with Valery's belief that the value of the intellectual capital of Europe can be conceived in spatial terms: Europe as a "gigantic city," a head, presiding over the rest of the world (Valery 314). Rather, Derrida argues that it should also be seen in economic terms as a "spiritual surplus," the "capital value of spirit" whose constant reinvestment yields only more of the same: European spirit (Naas xlv, xliv). Contrary to Valery's fear that the slightest disunity may lead to an uncompromising end to Europe, Derrida welcomes gaps as a potential for the rise of a new-revised and supplemented-Europe Two things with regard to the revision of the idea of Europe are important for Derrida. It can only be done within the traditional European discourse in which the idea of Europe was initially c~nceived,'~and it has to turn Europe away from its illusion of itself as a self- sufficient and superior whole and open it gradually to both the "less-European" and non-European "other." The particular "crack" in European discourse on which Derrida focuses is the "logic of an example," which for him is inseparable from the politically tainted discourse of the universal. The universal does not mean the apolitical or moral or "good"; rather, it means an expansion or globalization of national hegemony, its displacement on the discourse of cosmopolitanism, and its ultimate presentation as universal (Naas xxxiii; Derrida 47-8; Huyssen 81). In Derrida's words, "in the logic of this 'capitalistic' and cosmopolitical discourse, what is proper to a particular nation or idiom would be to be a heading for Europe; and what is proper to Europe would be, analogically, to advance itself as a heading for the universal essence of humanity" (Heading 48). The exemplarity of the particular is inscribed on a higher plane of the universal, which in turn has the power to convert the exemplarity of the particular into a "universal" law. The uniqueness of the cause empowers the universal discourse and grants it the right to call for sacrifice in the name of universal, exemplary, "good" values. Derrida writes:

... the self-affirmation of an identity always claims to be responding to the call or assignation of the universal. There are no exceptions to this law. No cultural identity presents itself as the opaque body of an untranslatable idiom, but always, on the contrary, as the irreplaceable inscription of the universal in the singular, the unique testimony to the human essence and to what is proper to man. Each time, it has to do with the discourse of responsibility I have, the unique "I" has, the responsibility of testifying for universality. Each time, the exemplarity of the example is unique. That is why it can be put into a series and formalized into a law. (Heading 73; italics in the original) Derrida's critique of "the politics of an example" and Valery's universalist views of Europe indicates the need for the revision of the authority of a "heading," a powerful metaphor, which confers upon European identity its "natural" characteristics of avantgardism, intellectual activity, beginning and commanding (24, 49). The danger of self-perception lies in the following:

Europe takes itself to be a promontory, an advance-the avantgarde of geography and history. It advances and promotes itself as an advance, and it will have never ceased to make advances on the other: to induce, seduce, produce, and conduce, to spread out, to cultivate, to love or to violate, to love to violate, to colonize, and to colonize itself. (49)

Derrida believes that a redefinition of Eurocentrism as the discourse of European identity does not call for a radical decapitation of the European heading. It would simply lock European identity into a binary of reversals without a real potential for its growth. A radical move proves also inefficient in contemporary circumstances in which Valery's formula of European centrality as the fixed "capital of humanity" has been reshaped by technology and science into a hegemonic context of "extreme capillarity of discourses," a "democratic" dispersion of European values in which the "frontiers of antagonism" are no longer visible (36; 42 italics in the text; Laclau and Mouffe 171). This new context intertwines the universal and the particular and it creates an opportunity for an aporia-tension or undecidability-between them. Derrida sees in it a potential for a qualitative change of European identity. The coexistence of the universal and the particular leads toward the rejection of totalitarian essentialism. It also recognizes the existence of the "other1'which succeeds in legitimating its unacknowledged particularity and acquiring the status of a "discursive identity" (Laclau and Mouffe 193; 192). As Derrida puts it, out of this opening "toward the other heading or the heading of the other ... toward the other of the heading" which reaches beyond the modern tradition comes a new duty of the new collective body of Europeans (Derrida Heading 29; italics in the original). The heterogenous new European "we" has to respond both to the call of the inherited and imposed responsibility to the "capitalizing memory" of Europe and to the responsibility to the memory of the "other" that has been excluded and denied in the process of creation of European identity (29; 28). According to Derrida, the revised idea of Europe and European identity means tolerance, recognition, and acceptance of alterity; it dictates "criticizing a totalitarian dogmatism" and cultivating the "virtue of such cn'tique ... [and]... the critical tradition," as well as it calls for the responsibility "to think, speak, and act in compliance with [the] double contradictory imperative" (77-79).As such, the revised idea of Europe carries a democratic, politically potent quality in its tendency to decenter the universal, essentialist discourse and its constitutive capability which it draws from the "cracks" in the social edifice (Laclau and Mouffe 193). The new Europe, suggested by Derrida, is far from being an end in itself. It is only "another border structure, another shore" that provides a basis for subsequent changes in European identity that will grow out of the newly created tensions between Europe and its others, another "patchwork of tensions" that will force Europe to redefine its exclusive and divisive heading (Derrida Heading 29; Ascherson in Schlesinger 179).

"America"

"The melting pot of America was a boiling cauldron of prejudice." (Codrescu The Road Scholar 191)

The discussion of Derrida's critique of Valery's writings about Europe is important because it helps us explain the paradox created in the very constitution of American identity. That in turn provides an explanation for America's treatment of the European "other" that "invaded" its shores at the turn of the century. Unlike Europe, which presents itself as a "discourse of tradition and culture," a "privileged name" for the long, uninterrupted historical continuum, America prides itself on emerging out of a rupture (Etienne Balibar 187). It comes out of a historical discontinuity, a rebellion against the universal English (European) discourse transplanted to the New World (Balibar 187). The law-breaking moment of America's separation from England has a double significance. On the one hand, it represents an instance of departure of the particular (American) from the universal (European) discourse. On the other, it stands for the grounding event of an invention of a new national identity to be converted from an inferior colonial offspring to a politically powerful social formation. In order to justify the illegitimate birth of the American nation and protect its "illegal" existence, the orphaned colonial child writes itself into a legal discourse and defends its appearance as a purely rational act and a well-argued rhetorical construct (Gary Wills xiv). Out of this rational enterprise emerges "The Declaration of Independence," the founding document of the United States, written in "the lost language of the Enlightenment" (xv). It provides protection and authority that legalizes the birth of the United States, empowers its independent existence, and articulates the mission of the new model state. The new country perceives itself as a radical revision, a pragmatic supplement to the unjust heading of the Old World. Richard Kearney points out that Derrida's writings on the foundation and authority of law focus on its legitimating origin and the underlying paradox that the very "first inscription of law is intermingled with illegitimacy" (35). This represents for Kearney an "ethic of impurity ... which refuses all purist claims to some founding unitary absolute" (35). The same principle of legitimation lies at the establishment of every institution (state, legal constitution, university) (35). Their foundation always takes place outside the law that is being founded, as well as outside the law that is being broken. Therefore, the origin of every law or an institution is for Denida "in some sense illegitimate" (35). Similarly, the illegal, "illegitimate birth" of a new nation as the discourse of the particular tainted by radicalism and disobedience carries the marks of an "originary contamination," a disruption of the law of the universal from which it departs (35). The "moment of decision," of breaking away from the existing law, Derrida sees as a "moment of urgency and precipitation ... since it always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it1'("Force" 967). The moment of separation is also a moment of determination that forces the new "illegal" law or institution to lay its foundations, "invent" its identity, and legitimate it in its own legal discourse. Derrida's discussion of the close connection and mutual dependence between "illegal" constitution and discursive (legal) invention often deals with the example of "The Declaration of lndependence." At the moment of signing "The Declaration," the democratic "we" of the American nation did not exist. However, invoking the authority of God which guaranteed their "good faith," the American people both empowered themselves and let the divine agency sign "The Declaration" in their name. The very act of signing "The Declaration" becomes, Derrida contends, a moment of invention of American existence ("Women" 200). Derrida writes:

... the American people did not exist as the American people before having signed the Declaration of lndependence. And it is in signing that they conferred upon themselves the right to call themselves the American people, and the right to sign. It did not exist before the signature. Thus, the scriptor does not exist before the signature. The signature itself, which imposes the law, is in itself a performative act which in a certain way produces its own subject, which gives the person the right to do what he is doing. Here is an enunciation-the Declaration of Independence-wh ich arises with a burst of force before there is even a receiver. Thus there is a gesture which, at the limit, produces the receiver, and at the same time produces the sender. When there is such a gesture, an enunciation, it speaks of indetermination but produces determination. ("Women" 200)

The "indetermination" that Derrida mentions is in the case of American independence a descent, departure, exile from the universal European discourse that confronted the new American nation with the abyss of non-identity. The way out of the danger of non-existence calls for the invention of American identity and its "determination" (legal codification) as the law of the universal. The circumstances in which American identity emerges confirm Etienne Balibar's claim that "identity is neve, a peaceful acquisition," but is "claimed as a guarantee against a threat of annihilation that can be figured by 'another identity' (a foreign identity) or by an 'erasing of identities' (a depersonalization)" (186). Moreover, as any "proclaimed' identity, the new American nation shows not only its anxiety to announce publicly its self-sufficiency, but, in doing so, it also shows the relational nature of its identity "elaborated as a function of the Other, in response to his desire, his power and his discourse" (Balibar 186-7; italics in the original). Derrida further points out that every invention has to "declare itself to be the invention of that which did not appear to be possible" ("Psyche" 60). We can see in this context numerous texts attempting "to persuade mankind ... of the rightness of their [American] cause" (Morton White 10). Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" (1776) is a telling example in which the argument for the defence of "natural" rights of the American people to independence, equality, and liberty is considered so self-evident that the author can offer "nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments and common sense" (708).13 Invention has to enter the public arena in order to confirm its status as an invention and become publicly recognized (28). The "need for public recognition of originality" is of crucial importance since, Derrida argues, it represents a "move from essence to status," which he defines as "an essence considered as stable, established, and legitimated by a social or symbolic order in an institutionalizable code, discourse, or text" (45). The "stamp of reason" imprinted on the invention institutionalizes, solidifies, and "naturalizes" the invention. It also ties it to the sphere of the social that presupposes "a contract, consensus, promise, commitment, institution, law, legality, legitimation" (42; 28). "America" became a democratic country, the property of its people, each of whom was legally entitled to freedom, equality, and American destiny. Americans were united in their "naturaln-"inherent and inalienable rightsn-to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Thomas Jefferson 729). It is without doubt that America represented a great step ahead from monarchic, oppressive, and unjust European systems of the time. Unlike their European counterparts, the American people ceased to be subjects and became citizens, who were perceived as the "sole source of legitimate political authority" (Colin Bonwick 5). However, John Winthrop's "city upon a hill" watched by "the eyes of all people" resembled in many ways Valery's vision of Europe as a "gigantic city," a capital of the world (180). America found itself following the European "politics of an example" which, adapted to the New World, meant extolling a "good example" of "the good people of [the American] colonies" (Jefferson 733). If, as Derrida and Andreas Huyssen argue, the logic of an example means national hegemony displaced onto the universal, then the definition of the essence of "the good people" of America also means institutionalization of the universality of the particular. The inscription of America into the discourse of the universal meant positing a particular "we"-White Anglo-Saxon Protestant-as a fixed centre at the core of the American "good people." The utmost significance of the universal and exemplary WASP Americanism was to function as a firm social glue that had the authority to assimilate the "other1'-transgressive deviations from the American standard. It also had to preserve American homogeneity and guarantee the continuation of the American essence: the "republican, middle class and Protestant principles" (Robert A. Carlson 2). Still, the history of the United States as a continuum of disruptive waves of immigration challenged in particular the turn-of-the-century belief that "diversity leads to disunity" (7).It forced America to confront the imported "other" infiltrating its discourse and reshaping the founding "we" of the American nation (7). In the context of turn-of-the-century East European immigration in America, the preservation of the American "we" called for "Americanization education" (2). Assimilation was believed to be a "remedy for diversity," and it also meant an "imperious demand for individual conformity to societal norms" (2). It is through the process of education that the American nation engaged with the "other" and refashioned the foreigners according to American standards. "Americanization education" provided a controlled guidance of the "other" into an American way of living and secured the presewation of American identity. The insistence on the homogeneity of American society was justified by the nation's special American mission in the world: to intervene

for the highest and most total reasons--to save and transform the world, to give it a new life patterned after [the American one]; to make the world safe for democracy, to free the captives, to bring self-determination to others. (Wills xx)

Since the Americans viewed themselves as "incarnations of the universal" and "privileged agents of historical change," they had "special powers" and a "natural" right to change the "other" (Wills xx). They could demand from the dangerous alterity to erase all destabilizing "foreignisms" and use the educational system to elevate the "huddled masses" and Americanize them (Carlson 5).

The process of "deterritorialization" or dehistoricization of European immigrants in America stripped them of their ethnic heritage and dislocated them from the context of their culture, language, religion, customs, and even personal names (William Boelhower 139). Forcefully freed from their past, the cultural and linguistic disorientation of immigrant masses encouraged state paternalism that placed immigrants under a "victim ideology" (Paul R. Gorman 47-8). Robert A. Carlson examines the reception of South and East Europeans in the United States in his book The Americanization Syndrome: A Quest for Conformity (1987). He also points the importance that America gave to the process of education:

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the American ideology narrowed more explicitly along racial lines and influenced the late nineteenth and early twentieth century effort to Americanize the newly arriving immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The militant Anglo-Saxonism that had helped to reunite North and South now challenged the newcomers as a potential threat to the nation's racial purity. The lack of faith in the heritage of these people made it easy to question their loyalty when World War I and the Russian Communist revolution engendered panic in the United States. In this atmosphere, there arose an educational campaign so intense that Americanization education came to be associated in popular thought almost exclusively with the attempted indoctrination of Eastern and Southern immigrants. (5; italics mine)

The paradoxical fabrication of the same at the turn of the century confirmed the status of "America" as an institutionalized invention, a closed system concerned with its preservation that absorbs otherness and gives it its own shape. Moreover, the shift in America from producing originality to reproducing sameness manifested itself in an imposition of American standards on the non-American "other." The conversion that was exacted from foreigners in the name of a greater cause testifies that "America" itself was no more than a modified repetition of the same. In other words, in spite of the declared American difference and departure from the "oppressive" European system, America resembled its parent, European, discourse (Derrida "Psyche" 51). The "sameness" they shared was an elaborate system of structures of power or, as Balibar calls them, "hegemonic or total' institutions (180). Balibar describes them as being capable,

be it at the price of violent conflicts, of imposing a single 'superior community' on all the individuals who recognize themselves as members of different collectivities (familial, linguistic, professional, local), and thereby conferring a universal ethical 'end' on the multiplicity of practices and exchanges within which these same individuals conceive of themselves as subjects. (1 80)

... somewhere in between ..-

Both "Europe" and "America" at the turn of the century defined themselves within rigid essentialist frameworks that established a hierarchy between them and the "other." The sudden presence of new kinds of transatlantic travellers, the poor peasant populations from backwards parts of Europe, made it obvious that East European immigrants could not identify with either the Europe or America of the time. Valery's definition of a European as a man of culture, tradition, manners, and tastes could not incorporate Europe's internal class and racial "other." In many respects, Europe either welcomed or remained indifferent to the immigrants' departure for America, where they would help create a populist, material, and pleasure-seeking society, a devalued copy of the noble original.I4 In fact, mass emigration of South and East Europeans indicated the reductive nature of the European self-image, whose universal law was based on the particularity of the educated and cultured Western bourgeois man. The eruption of the fleeing masses of uneducated, unmannered, oppressed, and poor people far removed from the light of the European spirit uncovered the social and class frontier within Europe. It made it obvious that Europe, the self-proclaimed cradle of civilization and the spiritual heading of humanity, was ridden with suppressed divisions. The process of mass emigration from Europe disclosed the existence of a spiritless, corporeal European "other" whose materiality could be measured, and as such brought into the market and exchanged with the United States. The American need for cheap industrial labour met European willingness to export its "other," and together they infused the immigrants with an exchange value that fluctuated according to the needs and demands of both Europe and America. Arthur Hertzberg discusses the "push and pull" model as it related to Jewish immigrants. The push element was the "lack of hope in Europe" that made migration a necessity, and the pull factor was the promise of a better life in America. America meant the promise of economic prosperity, religious freedom, and especially in the case of Jewish immigrants, flight from anti-Semitic violence (141). Yet, Hertzberg points out that it was "the poor who were most affected by the lack of opportunity; they were the people who emigrated" (141). Hardly a diversified group, Jewish immigrants were "the masses without the classes" (142). The active European participation in an immigrant trade-off with America dispelled another European myth of itself as a spiritual construct disconnected from the material world. Moreover, the departure of the debased, uneducated. low-class Europeans gave them a paradoxical ambassadorial post that made obvious their plight. It also cast a shadow on the "imagined community" of Europe as a spiritually and culturally unified entity that refused to engage with the gaps inside its "harmonious" creation.

Besides uncovering Europe's dismissal of its internal "other," the transatlantic journey of immigrants from the "other" Europe exposed also the gaps in the American myth of itself as a self-styled invention. America liked to imagine itself as a supplement to the unjust and intolerant Old World from which it had departed. From its very beginnings, America has seen itself as a New Canaan, a Promised Land that would provide a new beginning for "the wretched of the world." As Paine put it in 1776, "This new world hath been the asylum for the persecuted lovers of civil and religious liberty from every part of the world" (710). By insisting on the image of "the great American asylum" that would freely and benevolently open its "Golden Door" to "receive the fugitive," the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free," America presented itself not only as a utopian world sheltered from the turmoils of history, but also as a gift to humanity (de Crevecoeur 658; Paine 714; Lazarus in Perec 67). However, this is not to be seen as a selfless gift to the rest of the world, an irrational force that defies reciprocity and does not expect a countergift (Derrida Given Time 13). Rather, America as a gift to the world should be perceived as a power that asks for a countergift. As such, it inevitably creates a context of exchange, reciprocity, and circulation of interests and commodities and therefore disrupts the idea of itself as a gift, an asylum for humanity. According to Derrida, if something is a donation or a gift, it "must not circulate, it must not be exchanged, it must not in any case be exhausted, as a gift, by the process of exchange, by the movement of circulation of the circle in the form of return or the point of departure. If the figure of the circle is essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic" (7; italics in the original). Contrary to Derrida's claim, the rational, or contractual nature of American "open doors" saw the process of immigration more than just a gift to the "wretched of the world." It was a business transaction with Europe and its "other" and, as such, the importation of immigrants meant a reciprocal exchange of favors. Carlson summarizes the pervading belief in the need for the exchange of favors: "The individual gained much from America, ... and ought to be willing to sacrifice a few of his 'peculiarities' to advance a cause of unity" (6). The contractual nature of the relation with the "other" obliged the American state to "ensure egalitarian conditions for individual interests" as well as it obliged the "other" to conform to the American standard and pay the price for its share of America

(Denise Helly 1?).I5 However, the supposed equality implied by the contractual relation between America and turn-of-the-century European immigrants was deflated by the immigrants' inability to participate equally in an exchange of favors and mutual construction of identities between the signer and the receiver of the contract. As we have seen, Derrida argues that signature is a performative act which invents the signer and determines his or her subjectivity ("Declarations" 10). He shows how the process of signing "The Declaration of Independence" is the ultimate act of invention of American identity. If that is the case, then the process of creation of independent immigrant subjectivity, which takes place in the context of contractual reciprocity with the American government, inevitably fails. The widespread illiteracy among European immigrants of the time prevents them from signing themselves. Unable to create their own discourse or incapacitated to "perform" or invent their subjectivity, the immigrants were ultimately unable to act as equal participants in the process of the exchange of favors. This means that they also could not accept responsibility for themselves in the New World. It is on these grounds that the American government empowered itself with the right to "deterritorialize" immigrants, divorce them from their "valueless" past, and intervene in the creation of their new identity. Probably the best metaphor for the intervention of the American state in the construction of immigrant identity can be seen in the example of the almost standard legal procedure on Ellis Island. Upon the immigrants' arrival to America, it was the government officials who signed the contract with the American government on behalf of immigrants, and, very symbolically, they often did it in the immigrants' new, anglicized names that radically erased their past. The paradoxical act in which American government officials "represented" the silent immigrant voices meant that it was actually the state that spoke for the immigrants and signed the contract with itself. Within this self-directed circle that left the immigrants on its periphery, the American power to give, or provide free existence and opportunity to immigrants, asked for a reciprocal action, a favor in return. The only countergift that immigrants could offer at that point-apart from their cheap labour-was to relinquish to the American state the power to represent them. This in turn further gave America the right to take the immigrants under its patronage and create their new identities. It is thus ignorance, illiteracy, or the lack of "cultural capital" of East (and South) European immigrants that incapacitated them from signing a contract with the American state, that kept them from communicating with it on more equal terms. It is also on this premise that the American state took a protective stance towards immigrants; its paternalism justified the American mission not only to increase the immigrants' cultural capital, but also to do it according to American standards. It is often argued that the transaction of favors between America and its immigrants was cloaked into a narrative of the American Dream. America offered immigrants a vision of an achievable, if deferred happiness. The "good life" in the New World depended on the individual's willingness to work hard, be loyal to America, and trade in its "strangeness." Thomas Kerr sees the American Dream as "one of the most slippery, ingenious and effective tools ever invented for the subversion of other cultures and social structures" (18). The subtlety of this tool lies in the fact that responsibility for the "other1'that the American state initially took upon itself was given back to immigrants in the form of their "duty" to work and achieve and thus assume a new, American, identity. Kerr writes:

Allegiance to the system is clinched by giving each individual a share of responsibility for it. By enshrining individual effort as the most important moving force in society, the story [the American Dream] puts the burden for setting the moral course of the society as a whole on the shoulders of each person, who either chooses to play hard and fair or not. Once they accept this burden as an important part of their own self-image as a free person, each individual gains a great deal of dignity and self-worth, derived from the elevated position that have come to see their own minds as having in the larger scheme of things. (19)

The four big waved6 in American immigration history have provided America with numerous encounters with the "other" and numerous opportunities to redefine its identity. For most of the immigrants America was an asylum, but for only some of them it was a gift. The immigrants paid entrance to America with their work, the only currency they had, "the only property that can be exported duty free, a universally tried and tested stock for the wanderer's use" (Julia Kristeva Strangers to Ourselves 19). Even if their work bought them a licence to be admitted to American society and even if the immigrants succumbed to the illusionary nature of the American Dream that fashioned them as loyal but free and equal citizens, they were often not able to erase the memory of their beginnings, and their slow immersion in the American reality. The impossibility of "absolute forgetting" their transaction with America, as a forgetting that "absolves, that unbinds absolutely and infinitely more ... than excuse, forgiveness or acquittal," annuls again the American myth of itself as a gift (Derrida Given Time 16). The deep and often painful awareness of the high price paid for "the American gift" that is preserved in immigrant I ethnic memory as a part of American memory legitimizes the right of the integrated American "other" to inscribe its difference in the discourse of America, to revise, and supplement it.

Literary Voices

The existence of immigrants within the narrative of America, whether they are immersed in the culture or situated on its periphery, provides a context for a continual challenge to and unavoidable redefinition of preexisting notions of Americanism. That is, their containment within a framework of "Americanness" as a commonality that holds America together does not preclude immigrants from "emptying" that framework from its essence, from decentering its preexisting exemplarity, positivity, and universality, from turning it into Laclau's "empty signifier," a negative commonality open to diversity, difference, and dislocated identities. It is mainly in this power to challenge, to deconstruct the universal discourse from within, and redefine its "heading" that the value of the "other," or, in this particular case, the capital of immigrant literature, lies. Homi Bhabha argues that the modern nation is written from its margins. The discourse produced at the margins is one of dissent, which serves as a "supplement" to the "dominant discourse" (Location 154). Bhabha sees marginal writing as a part of "double-writing," "disserni-nating," or "un-writing" the nation (148):

Counter narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries-both actual and conceptual-disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities. For the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of the anxiety of its irredeemably plural modem space-representing the nation's modern territoriality is turned into the archaic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism. (149)

Bhabha's argument certainly highlights the necessity to unpack, probe, and undermine the "truths" of the host country: "The present of the people's history, then, is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to a 'true' national past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype" (152). Bhabha's argument allows Marjorie George to argue that immigration "unwrites nation and national projects because it flagrantly displays a rejection of one national space for another more desirable location, albeit with some luggage carried over" (186). If deconstructive, destabilizing immigrant voices are located in immigrant, or ethnic, literature, then the value of such narratives cannot be seen only in their exclusive address of enclaves of ethnic readers to which they are often reduced. The role of these often silenced voices should be seen in their highlighting "the ideological background of the traditional canon" and their bringing to surface "the repressed formation that Jameson has called the political unconscious" (Ramon Saldivar 17). David Palurnbo-Liu argues that just like aporetic immigrant identity, the revisionary act of immigrant narratives is faced with a double danger- overdetermination and naturalization (218). In order to base its argument and point out invisible and slippery hegemonic relations, the ethnic narrative is forced to argue for the essence of the dominant discourse "even when suspecting" such strategies (218). At the same time, the process of revision of the dominant discourse presents immigrant narratives with the danger of overdetermination, or essentializing their own discourse. The necessary points of determination or essentialism can be explained as Laclau and Mouffe's "nodal points," or Derrida's moments of determination, a temporary fixity, or Spivak's "strategic essentialism," crucial for decreation of the dominant discourse. The moments of determination are, however, justifiable only under the condition that they ultimately direct their deconstructive practice to their own, temporarily fixed, essence. Another danger for the ethnic narrative is naturalization (and subsequent depoliticization) of its deconstructive literary practice. This happens in the case of the text's inclusion in the American canon under the label of a representative voice from the margins and a mouthpiece of subversion sanctified by the mainstream discourse. Palumbo-Liu explains: [the ethnic narrative] must renounce the lure of the dominant ideology that would accommodate the objectification and thereby containment of minority memory. Even though the dominant ideology may present the ethnic subject with only a subaltern position in history, the ethnic subJect can still be seduced into accepting that place within the grid of hegemonic representation ... Counterposed to this stable but subordinated position in history is the problematic minor narrative, which risks instability in the margins for the sake of a contestive narrative of self, accepting its instability at the price for a dynamic engagement with the dominant. (218; italics in the original) It is within this context of power-related social and literary relations that immigrant narratives should be read. They often express the ambiguous in- between position, from which they are writing and "un-writing" the home, the adopted country, and their own selves. Scholars like Edward Said see in the "outside" view provided by exile a vantage point from which one can speak and work. Connecting exile with intellectual pursuits, Said prefers to see its "pleasures" rather than "luggage" (Representations 43). The slight detachment of the "outside" view contains the possibility of greater clarity, even objectivity, the "double perspective" (44, and "eccentric angles of vision" (43). They break the boundaries of the known and the familiar and venture beyond "the comforts of privilege, power, being-at-horneness" (43-4). Exile provides one with a double perspective and with insight into the processual nature of history, the gradual moment of the birth and construction of a new identity: "you tend to see things not simply as they are, but as they have come to be that way" (45). In many ways, immigrant narratives provide an "outside" view of the process of the becoming of American history, the American nation, and American identity. Despite the "luggageH-danger of intense loneliness, bitterness, fear of criticism and threat of constant outcast position--Said draws on the positive sides of homelessness and uses it as a metaphor for a refreshing novelty and challenge. He writes:

to be marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for an intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still. (47; italics in the original)

If intellectual pursuits are likened to im-le-/migration, travel, and exile and if the movement and flow are to characterize the immigrant experience, immigrant narratives, and immigrant identities, then scholarship of immigration should certainly not stand still. If texts themselves are fluid, then their study can equally be an invitation to transgression, borderlessness, going with the flow, and travelling to new destinations. The chapters that follow provide such instances of travel, to new readings of old texts, to new perspectives on old immigration. ENDNOTES

1. According to Alan Kraut, this was a popular immigrant slogan of the time, when turn-of-the-century immigrants "confronted substantial and escalating hostility in the period 1880-1921, even as urban politicians plotted to capture the immigrant vote and industrialists relished the abundance of cheap, unskilled labor for their factories" (1 48). For more on the history of the "new immigration," see Kraut's The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 7880- 1921 (1982).

2. 1 will be using the two terms interchangeably, especially in my discussion of the works of contemporary critics, who use the term "ethnic." See also when I discuss the use of the terms in Introduction (5-1 3).

3. According to Silvia Pedraza, over twenty seven million immigrants arrived in the United States in the period between 1881 and 1930 (6). It should be noted here that there were also a significant number of immigrants from other European countries, like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England, Germany. They were considered the "old immigration" and most of them followed the already established immigrant communities in America. On the west coast, the numbers of immigrants who came mostly from China and Japan were not that overwhelming due to very strict immigration laws. In her introduction to Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in American History (1W6), Pedraza offers a concise overview of the four waves of American immigration: from early English settlers and immigrants to the immigrants from Latin America and Asia.

4. Alan Kraut briefly describes the literacy test conducted on Ellis Island. Immigrants were shown a card with an instruction in their native language. The card often consisted of a simple sentence, such as "Scratch your right ear." Those who did correctly were believed to be literate (56).

5. Alejandro Portes and Rumbaut G. Ruben write that in 1923 Carl Brigham's study (A Study of American Intelligence) "scientifically proved" that Alpine and Mediterranean races in American immigrants were intellectually inferior to the representatives of the Nordic race (197). The poor results on IQ tests of the second-wave immigrants were never associated with a lack of linguistic competence and cultural familiarity. It was even concluded that bilingualism is an interfering force that causes "linguistic" and "intellectual" confusion (1 97). However, in 1962 the Montreal study done by Peal and Lambert disproved such stereotypical thinking about people of different cultural and linguistic background. According to this study, "balanced" bilinguals can communicate competently in both languages without interference. The more surprising result was that the so called "semi-" or "pseudo-" bilinguals often score better than rnonolinguals on both verbal and non-verbal tests. The results led Peal and Lambert to conclude that since bilinguals have two symbols for every object, they are "emancipated from linguistic symbols-from the concreteness, arbitrariness, and 'tyranny' of words-developing analytic abilities to focus on essentials and to think in terms of more abstract concepts and relations, independent of the actual world" (200). In other words, Peal and Larnbert showed that intellectual performance cannot be measured by culture specific tests and that it is by no means hampered by bilingualism. See 197-207.

6. In The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State (1994), Jeff Spinner discusses in more detail the difference between race and ethnicity. See 1-32.

7.Silvia Pedraza points out three "competing ideologies of assimilation" in the United States: Anglo-conformity, the melting pot, cultural pluralism. While the Anglo-conformity that was prevalent at the turn of the century did not leave any space for diversity and meant unconditional conversion of the "other" to Anglo- Saxons as the real Americans, the "melting pot" insisted that all immigrant groups would come together and "melt (through intermarriage) in a cauldron out of which would come something distinct and new: the American" (8).The most recent policy of cultural pluralism, or multiculturalism, means autonomous existence of different ethnic communities, "each of which is distinct and equal, yet all of which together paint a larger picture" (8).

8. Vaughan also quotes an excerpt from Wilson's first preparedness speeches before the Congress in which he anxiously said: '7here are citizens of the United States ... born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws ... who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life." And, Wilson concluded, they must be "crushed out" (448).

9. As in Crevecoeur, most of these policies retained a strong European bias and were concerned with European nationalities only, often excluding Asian immigrants in their considerations of different immigration policies.

10. In his chapter "From the Melting Pot to the Pluralist Vision" (The Opening of the American Mind 1996), Lawrence Levine offers a brief review of American cultural and immigration policies at the turn of the century. See 105-20.

11. De Madariaga writes in his introduction to the collection of Valery's essays on history and politics that two events "shocked" Valery into an awareness of Europe: the Japanese attack on China (1895) and American attack on Spain (1898) (xxxv). De Madariaga does not fully explain the reasons for the impact of these two wars on Valery; instead, he writes that they seemed to him "full of European resonance" (xxxv). 12. Derrida in this way completely dismisses Valery's escapist argument that displaces the possibility of a "new Europe" onto a different continent. Despite his fears that Europe will succumb to American power, Valery sees the New Continent as the only hope "if Europe is to see her culture perish or wither away" (331). America is entrusted with the continuation of the European tradition because of the successful transfer of "right" European values, or, as Valery puts it, because of a "veritable 'natural selection' [that] has taken place, extracting from the European mind those of its products having universal value" (330). The transplanted kernel of Europeanness wilt give rise to the new, but importantly unchanged. Europe, and it is Valery's great hope that "here and there in the New World there will be minds to give a second life to some of the marvellous creations of unhappy Europe" (331).

13. Some other texts that participated in making public the invention of America are: Jean de Crevecoeur's Letters of an American Farmer (1782). Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The American Scholar," (1837), and Frederic Jackson Turner's "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" (1 893).

14. It should be noted here that Curti Merle and Kendall Birr point out that there was certain resistance to immigration to America in England and Germany, especially among "the state clergy, the official class, the great landlords, and the industrialists" (226). While the priests declared that immigrants faced the "physical and moral degradation" in America, the others were concerned about losing the cheap labor (227).

15. In many instances, the process of immigration was not even seen as an exchange of favors, but a pure meeting of American needs for manpower. Thus, labour shortages induced by the Civil War encouraged immigrants from North and West Europe to come to America, as well as did the closing of the frontier and the rise of industrial and urban centers call for a shift from agricultural to industrial immigration, which meant a subsequent arrival of South and East European immigrants (Curti and Birr 204; 209). Needless to say, all of these transactions were done under the banner of freedom and democracy that America "donated" to the immigrants. Even today, it is possible to see that America finds itself caught in a "cleavage between humanitarian and instrumentalist perspectives" (Deborah Anker 77). On the one hand, the humanitarian impetus behind the asylum policy leaves an open door to all refugees; on the other, it is American foreign policy that has the power to limit the selection of refugees to be given asylum- As a rule, refugees from governments friendly to the United States were hardly ever given asylum rights, which, for instance, explains the great number of refugees from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union during the 1950s and 1960s (77; 79).

16. Silvia Pedraza lists four waves of American immigration: in the first wave, or the "old immigration" (1820-1 880) over 10 million immigrants arrived mostly from northwestern European nations (England, Scotland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Ireland). The second wave (1881 -1 930) is usually referred to as the "new immigration." During that period over 27 million immigrants arrived from northwestern European countries, but also from East and South Europe. Strict laws restricted immigration from Asia (China and Japan) to quite small numbers. The third wave followed the closing of the door to European immigration (1924). This was a wave of internal migration of African Americans, Mexicans, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans from south to north. The fourth wave began after the World War 11, and it "opened the door to renewed immigration to the United States" (9). Most of the immigrants from this period came from Latin America and Asia. Chapter Two

In the Urban "Theater of Difference": Henry James, Jacob Riis, and the Immigrant Spectacle

The arrival of the "new wave" of immigrants to the United States did not result in an immediate literary outpour that recorded the newcomers' experience of displacement, marginality, and acculturation. In fact, it took several decades before the appearance of "the first immigrant classic," Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934). Even Roth's novel received its flattering title in as late as 1957, when Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler "rediscovered" it for American audience and R. W. B. Lewis considered it "incomparably the best" of immigrant narratives (Ferraro EP 88).' However, the period between the late 1880s, the immigrants' arrival, and 1934, the year of publication of Call It Sleep, should certainly not be dismissed as a complete literary wasteland. It is characterized by a gradual increase in literacy and growing textual and literary activities that ranged from letters home to newspapers and fiction. In most cases impressions of immigration, Ellis Island, and New York docks were recorded in an oral tradition,' in personal narratives that have been lost or forgotten over time or that have been passed on new generations in fragments and could now be restored with some difficulty3Although it may be a mistake to make general statements about the range of ethnic writing about immigration to America, it can safely be said that personal stories and letters home, written frequently by professional "letter writers," rabbis, or priests, offered an often distorted, exaggerated and idealistic, vision of America and immigrant life in the slums.4 Ethnic newspapers written in native languages provided a venue for a more critical and polemical view of immigrant reality; life in the New World was no longer described in positive terms aimed to impress those unfamiliar with America.' The emerging ethnic fiction marked a shift from native languages to English. and showed a great desire to define the immigrant identity and the position of immigrants in America. The development of immigrant writing was a very gradual process. David M. Fine's The City, the Immigrant and American Fiction, 1880-1920 (1977) is the most comprehensive study of American fiction about urban immigrant life written both by native-born and immigrant authors6 It offers a detailed description of the stages in the development of immigrant writing. The first East European immigrant texts, written "exclusively" by Jewish immigrants, appear in the 1910s (104).~The texts of the time, including the famous ones-Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (1W8), Mary Antin's The Promised Land (191 2), and Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (191 7)-deal predominantly with the problems of accommodation to and assimilation within the dominant culture (Fine 103). In the 1920s, the focus of immigrant literature shifts to the intergenerational conflict, and the work of Anzia Yezierska, "the most important first-generation woman writer," examines in depth the rift between parents and children, the problems of intermarriage, the second-generation rejection of ethnic identity and its obsessive drive to succeed in America (139-142).8 In the last decade of immigrant writing, the 1930s, the reality of American life (the Depression, growing economic and political problems) impinges heavily on the literary output of the newcomers (142). As a result, David M. Fine points out, the texts of the 1930s, including Mike Gold's well-known novel Jews Without Money (1930), are concerned predominantly with the issue of "survival in the urban jungle" (142). The final decade of literature by the "new wave" immigrants is important because it marks the appearance of some non-Jewish writers, such as the Irish James Farrell (the Studs Lonigan trilogy (1932-34)) and the Italian Pietro DiDonato (Christ in Concrete 1938). It is also characterized by several coming-of-age novels, which, like Henry Roth's Call /t Sleep, describe the experience of growing up as an ethnic-American and explore the traumas of immigrant childhood in urban America (142).' David M. Fine concludes his examination of the development of different stages of immigrant literature by saying that by the 1940s "ethnic and minority fiction" was "well-established in the American canon" (143). The collapse of the opposition between "us" and "them," between ethnic and American literature, meant the disappearance of the texts that dealt primarily with East European immigration in America. Fine's division of immigrant writing into three decades- the 191Os, 1WOs, 1930s-indicates that the years of the 1890s and 1900s constitute a lacuna in literary self-representation of East European immigrants. There were few literary texts written during this "silent1'period due to the immigrants' linguistic ineptitude and lack of articulate and eloquent voices that could humanize and personalize the "amorphous alien mass." It is in this very lacuna, in a void of immigrant voices, literary and otherwise, that I want to situate the current chapter. It examines the way in which two very different Americans-- Henry James and Jacob Riis-observe from safe distance the silent immigrant spectacle in the streets of New York. Surprisingly enough, the encounter with "primitivew-inarticulate, unmannered, and unsophisticated-invaders from obscure parts of Europe will unsettle many of James' and Riis' certainties and will mirror back a startling realization of their own fragmented and alienated selves.

In the Company of Strangers: Henry James and Jacob Riis

On the surface, Henry James and Jacob Riis do not appear to provide much ground for comparison. One was a well-educated Boston Brahmin, a literary giant, an old stock American, and a sophisticated cosmopolitan. The other was a Danish immigrant who worked as a police reporter, urban photographer, popular public lecturer, and social reformer. Their life trajectories crossed the Atlantic in opposite directions. In 1882, Henry James decided to embark on a transatlantic journey and immerse himself in "real" culture, only to return to America as a "visitor" in 1904. His expatriation in Europe added an aura of authenticity to his fiction that was built around the issues of cultural (mis)communication and misplacement of innocent Americans in stifling European parlors. Riis, on the other hand, ran away from extreme poverty in his remote village of Ribe in Denmark, and in 1870, at the age of 21, sailed for a "better life" in America. Once established there, he dedicated himself to the cause of displaced immigrants, and in particular to the betterment of living conditions in overcrowded immigrant tenements. While history remembers James for his in-depth explorations of the intimate world of his characters, Riis is known as a visual social explorer, whose photographs captured the surface of urban America. James remains an embodiment of intellectual nobility, while Riis stands for the rise of the public, the vulgar, and the commercial. Despite their differences, James and Riis share a fascination with turn-of- the-century East European immigrants in America. They are voyeurs, and they are fascinated by the immigrant spectacle. James is a strolling spectator and Riis an urban photographer on a mission to save the poor. They scrutinize the immigrant presence in New York and share a muted vulnerability to the immigrant plight. James is sensitized to immigrants by his unexpected position as a foreigner come back to his home country, while Riis, a successful immigrant turned-proud-American, is determined to help immigrants follow his shining example. In both cases, immigrant crowds are turned into a fascinating voiceless spectacle that mirrors back the identity drama of the two observers. The abject immigrant "other" brings to the fore the recognition of James' and Riis' alienation and displacement as well as it prompts queries about the nature and limits of citizenship and national belonging. In James' case, the observation of immigrants makes him question his place in the rapidly changing world; it forces him to rationalize his long absence from the American scene and makes him wonder what role his work will have in the life of the new American nation. Riis, on the other hand, establishes himself as an indispensable cultural mediator between the "two sides" of the society--the immigrant and the American-in the hope that his dedicated work will help him become a respectable and accepted member of American society. Unlike James, who spends a good portion of his visit to his native New York strolling and exploring the cultural diversity and relating it to himself, Riis, in true immigrant tradition, goes on a mission to improve life in the tenements and "earn" social acceptance and national belonging. The unconscious self- fashioning of the obsewers' American personae that takes place in their works is a reaction to the threat and the challenge that the immigrant "other" poses. Therefore, the presence of immigrant masses on the streets of New York allows both James and Riis to clarify and define their American selves and write their subjective bodies in the space of the American city.

The works that make it possible to discuss these two very different men are James' The American Scene (1 907) and Riis' How the Other Half Lives (1 890). The American Scene is a return-of-the-native travelogue that bridges twenty two years of James' voluntary exile in Europe. Suffused with a recognizable "diasporian hunger for intimacy with [his] home country," the text often "dips" into nostalgic visions of the past (R. Radhakrishnan 212). The revisited charming corners of James' childhood still powerfully evoke the smell of doughnuts on his returns home from school (The American Scene 91). Though sentimental, James is aware that his self-delusional escapes into the "fantasy of the hypothetic rescued identity'' do not bring much consolation (91). The visit to the homeland and the expected triumphant reclamation of roots turn into a disappointing and disorienting arrival of the alien. Instead of welcoming her native son, the literary ambassador whose fiction had immortalized her, the ungrateful America of 1904 undermines the confidence and the privilege of the "repatriated absentee," as James refers to himself, and confronts him with his own extinction. Not surprisingly, James' travelogue is fraught with ambivalence. It oscillates between first- and third-person narration and between opposing notions of home and elsewhere, past and present, patriotism and cosmopolitanism, loyalty and betrayal. The text curiously combines the lost but enviable intimacy with the home country and an embarrassing unfamiliarity with the altered environment. As a result, James' fond memories of the past and lyrical expressions of love for his America give place to angry attacks on the country that has orphaned him. He viciously accuses the new America of self- absorption, self-indulgence, and indifference. With every page, the travelogue becomes transformed into a bitter drama of homecoming in which home no longer feels like home. As David Gervais notices, "remarks that begin by being jovial finish in anger, circumlocution issues in bluntness, what appears mellow and affable usually harbours a sting" (349). James' travelogue reads as a frustrated search for origins whose spent energy could only take him back to Europe, where he died ten years later in 1916 as a British citizen. Quite to the contrary, Riis' missionary pamphlet How the Other Half Lives bursts with enthusiasm, creative energy, and ambition. Riis' "terse and angry" prose, as well as his carefully constructed "objective" photography, document social injustice and call for tenement reform (Hales 179). As Peter B. Hales argues, this goal-oriented text is based on the "aesthetic of effect," and it pulsates with straightfoward statements of cause and cure (216). Fact: Immigrant tenements are overcrowded and dirty; they breed illness, madness, immorality, criminality, and sexual deviance. Cure: If we build "propert1--spacious, light, and clean-homes for immigrants, they will turn into more acceptable citizens. Just like "us," the immigrants will share the familiar values of order, cleanliness, love, understanding, and parenthood (214). Riis finds the remedy for the ills of environmental determinism in extending the lifestyle of middle-class Victorian America to immigrant ghettos. Needless to say, Riis posits himself as a mediator between the two halves of society. It is his own down-and-out immigrant experience that invests him with the authority to speak about immigration. Riis' immigrant past enables him to present himself as a reliable guide who can take middle-class America on a safe journey beyond the urban cultural frontier. Moreover, unlike James, Riis is a man of the moment, willing to take the challenge, and use the new technology in order to explore and represent the world unfamiliar to most Americans. He uses photography and mass produces images of urban immigrants, and he revolutionizes urban photography by expanding its range to the abject urban "other." By drawing attention to immigrants and by showing responsibility and commitment to the immigrant cause, Riis believes he is paying off a debt to the people whose fate he once shared. At the same time, the responsibility of being a self-appointed representative of the immigrant masses is coupled with the obligation to satisfy the expectations of the middle-class audience whose lifestyle he now leads. As a result, the bestseller of 1890, How the Other Half Lives, represents a successful fusion of Riis' concern for immigrants and his commitment to bourgeois America. The text humanizes immigrants and demystifies their poverty and alienism while, on the other hand, its "local colour" subject and rhetoric feed the hunger of the affluent audience for vicarious excitement and voyeuristic sensationalism (Hales 167). Blending the two parts of himself, the past and the present, the disempowered immigrant half and the privileged American half, Riis implies that his life experience represents a successful whole worthy of being singled out as an example.1° As Riis saw it, the blending of different experiences and the resulting cultural homogeneity ensure a better, unified America based on the ideals of brotherhood and democratic humanism. Returning the Gaze: Reading James Reading immigrants

"... [ifl asked why the representation should be required when the object represented is itself mostly so accessible, the answer to that appears to be that man combines with his eternal desire for more experience an infinite cunning as to getting his experience as cheaply as possible. He will steal it whenever he can. He likes to live the life of others, yet is well aware of the points at which it may too intolerably resemble his own." (Henry James "The Future of the Novel" 51)

It may seem highly unlikely that East European immigrants, a despicable and repulsive crowd that overflowed Henry James' native New York, would appear in his work as represented objects with a self-reflexive value. In James' "exploitative" economy of representation based on "stealing" immigrant reality so that he can find points of reference that "intolerably resemble his own," immigrants do not gain much. The immigrants in The American Scene are pitiable but undesirable aliens, a picturesque but embarrassing mass that jams the streets of New York and contributes to the moral and intellectual collapse of the United States. Although driven by his "independent curiosity," James is not tempted to provide insight into the historical, political, or economic background of the immigrant condition. Instead, the immigrant presence triggers off a self- reflexive process that confronts James with alien content in his own self. The encounter with immigrants brings a disturbing realization that unfamiliar "Europeans" are invading his home country and that Europe may not be entirely what he imagined it to be: James discovers in America a strange phenomenon of grim, worried, unsmiling Italians, so much unlike their hospitable compatriots, whom he used to meet on his travels to the south of Europe. He only confirms Caren Kaplan's suggestion that "the poor might look exotic in foreign settings," but the poor at home are often "invisible, uninteresting, or threatening" (44). The immigrants' uprootedness in America becomes a reflection of James' own discomfort and loneliness in his home country, making The American Scene not only a sociological commentary on America," or a slightly unusual "novel of manners," as Helen Killoran reads it,'* but also a deeply subjective self-examination, a quest for meaning and identity that expands into a profound epistemological investigation (Killoran 308). Therefore, the immigrant passages in The American Scene should be read as catalysts for James' sophisticated "doubts and queries" into certainties he took for granted: his notion of home, his American self, and his purpose as an artist.

Unlike Riis who celebrates America's promise of equality, James is horrified by the prospect of America as "the land of universal brotherhood" (AS 119). Long sections of The American Scene are filled with his undisguised nativist anxiety: he detests the amorphous "stuff from whom brothers and sisters are made" (120; italics mine); he knows that "there is no claim to brotherhood with aliens in the first grossness of their alienism" (120); he is afraid that the "abracadabrant" languages spoken in immigrant cafes, the "torture rooms of the living idiom," will distort English into the "Accent of the Future" (139); he mourns the disappearance of the "real" American character that aliens will turn into "the hotch-potch of racial ingredients" (121). He worries that even after successful assimilation, there will remain an "obstinate, unconverted residuum" of alienism that will weaken the "American" identity (124). Henry James, the "alarmed visitor," is repelled by the very thought that he will have to share the intimacy of his home with aliens, and he is appalled by the blatant complacency of the natives, unaware of the destruction they are bringing upon themselves (Gervais 355). Yet, on many other occasions, the sharp edge of James' nativism is softened by his readiness to give in to the pressures of history and reconcile himself to the fact that the children of "ubiquitous aliens" are the inheritors of America. Although repelled by loud immigrant masses, James often contradicts himself and mingles with foreigners on the "densely-packed East-side streetcars" (AS 126). He observes with utter dismay that "foreign as they might be, inducted as they might be," the immigrants feel at home in America "quite with the same intensityt' as he does (131, 125). Fascinated by the spectacle, James tours immigrant ghettos whose excess-overcrowded streets, annoying noises, strange costumes-offends him and he even ventures to Ellis lsland whose "poignant and unforgettable" drama of humiliation stamps him forever (129, 84). The process of serial Americanization at Ellis lsland evokes both empathy towards immigrants and contempt for the dehumanizing nature of the new America:

Before this door, which opens to them there only with a hundred forms and ceremonies, grindings and grumblings of the key, they stand appealing and waiting, marshalled, herded, divided, subdivided, sorted, sifted, searched, fumigated, for longer or shorter periods-the effect of all which prodigious process, an intendedly 'scientific' feeding of the mill, is again to give the earnest observer a thousand more things to think of than he can pretend to retail. (84)

The impact of the visit is dramatic; James returns from Ellis lsland as a different man. He has seen an apparition in his "supposedly safe old house," he has "eaten of the tree of knowledge," and he warns "the unwary" not to visit Ellis lsland (85).Any "sensitive citizen," who "happen[s] to 'look in"' on Ellis lsland will be changed forever (85). James describes the effect on a sensitive American:

He [the sensitive citizen] has thought he knew before, thought he had the sense of the degree in which it is his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien; but the truth had never come home with any such force. ... In the lurid light projected upon it by those courts of dismay it shakes him-or I like at least to imagine it shakes him-to the depths of his being; I like to think of him, I positively have to think of him, as going about ever aftewards with a new look, for those who can see it, in his face, the outward sign of the new chill in his heart. So is stamped, for detection, the questionably privileged person.. . (85; italics in the original)

Conflicting reactions to immigrants in New York indicate a tension in James' response to his native city and his mother country. While initially defensive, dismissive, and unmistakenly arrogant in his view of immigrants,13 James on occasions softens his criticism. He is deeply moved by the inhuman "herding" on Ellis Island, which offends his sense of decency and dignity and makes him sympathize with the plight of the less fortunate. Despite his utter amazement at the changes in America, his snobbish and often racist remarks, James does show an unusual interest in the people on the margins of the society. The shifting responses to the urban "other" make it difficult to map out his position: is he a privileged cosmopolitan, a detached tourist, a concerned patriot, a disappointed native son, an ethical humanist concerned with human dignity and respectability? Or, does his allegiance belong to an undefined space between the two "sentiments" of cosmopolitanism and patriotism?l4James' occasional and unconvincing references to his patriotic feelings justify the view of himself as a cosmopolitan who embodies the contradictions that characterize world citizenship--detachment, control, elitism, egalitarianism, and multiple allegiances.

Recent changes towards the globalization of cultures, economies, and political projects have renewed interest in cosrnop~litanism.'~Critics have offered a significant number of various definitions, and they have examined it in relation to various other political projects-internationalism, nationalism, supranationalism, immigration, universalism, postcolonialism.'6 For the purposes of my discussion here, I will outline briefly only those definitions that help me describe James' ambivalent position. For the defenders of nationalism, cosmopolitanism is most often used to describe detachment and political non- involvement. in her article, "Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity," Amanda Anderson defines it as a "reflective distance from one's own cultural affiliations, a broad understanding of other cultures and customs, and a belief in universal humanity" (267). Comparing modern and postmodern cosmopolitanisms. Caren Kaplan argues that modernist cosmopolitan "distance from cultural identification" takes place in the context of the country - city binary (Kaplan 31). She argues that "the idea of an escape from the nation-state into the cosmopolitan and polyglot city underscores most ideologies of modernism," and that it constructs modernist cities as "utopian refuges from the nationalist conflicts" (30). Drawing on Rob Nixon. Kaplan also points out the modernist belief that "national identity matters only in its distance from a present space and time" (Kaplan 30). This belief in turn redefined "dislocation" into "detachment," a supposed "freedom from ideology," an imaginary liberation from nationalist agendas (Rob Nixon in Kaplan 30). The New York section of The American Scene makes it possible to see Henry James as a "casual observer" and a mobile modernist writer strolling the city streets (1).17 AS James himself suggests, his bitter criticism of the changes in the city can even be seen as an indication of his love for his hometown. But, despite his genuine curiosity and strong emotional response to familiar corners. New York is certainly not a "utopian refuge" for Henry James nor is it "an imagined community" that helps him escape the limitations of a nation. In fact. the changes in the city and the presence of alien masses only defamiliarize the hometown. Except for some childhood memories, there is nothing that links James to New York. Living between Europe and America, James belongs to the world. His cosmopolitanism is purely intellectual and aesthetic, and it transcends the petty and local political problems and trivialities of material existence. Therefore, he can only observe the migration taking place between Europe and America and prefer not to engage with issues that are openly political. His interest in people is apolitical and human(ist).18 He can ultimately choose to leave the environment that enforces on him social awareness that he was more than willing to suspend. Apart from his ability to exempt himself from worldly affairs and disengage himself from political action, James epitomizes the stereotype of a modernist cosmopolitan. As Bruce Robbins writes, that image usually invokes a privileged, predominantly masculine, person whose world citizenship is provided by considerable independent means and associated with "expensive tastes" and a "globe-trotting lifestyle" ("Comparative" 248). James' cosmopolitanism can be seen as a privileged, adventurous exploration of borderlessness, granted by the assumed stability of home. The borderless circulation of money provides a similar lifestyle and supposedly "ideology-free," apolitical way of thinking. However, cosmopolitan non-involvement and dissipation into the universal, the supranational, is not devoid of power, for, as some critics argue, it can be seen as a way of mastering or controlling the world. According to Scott Malcomson, ever since the Stoics, cosmopolitanism, as universal citizenship, has been used "as a license either to withdraw from the world or master it" (233). Henry James uses his detachment as a way not only to absolve himself of any activity or engagement, but also to turn his gaze into a powerful critical tool. His disengaged omnipresent gaze tends to his voyeuristic pleasure-he can observe the silent and hectic immigrant "other" without ever fearing that his look will be returned and that he himself will become an object of "their" gaze and analysis. It is this invisibility, James' own fluid existence and detachment from the life in New York, that empowers his gaze and subordinates the object under scrutiny. Drawing on Donna Haraway, Robbins reminds us that "cosrnopolitanism would seem to mimic capital in seizing for itself the privilege (to paraphrase Wall Street) of 'knowing no boundaries1-which is also the gendered privilege of knowing no bodies, of being, in Donna Haraway's words, 'a conquering gaze from nowhere', a gaze that claims 'the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation"' (Robbins 248). Cosmopolitan detachment that often deflects attention from the self to the other is not just self- effacement but also a disguised mastery through the invisible and unreciprocated gaze. In his travelogue, James fashions himself as an ambivalent fianeur, capable of maintaining distance and remaining invisible while at the same time merging with and examining closely the newly-arrived Americans. However, the impression that James leaves in The American Scene is that his cosmopolitanism is not entirely free from politics and ideology, as he would, probably, like to believe. Despite his detachment and voyeuristic empowerment, James' fascination with immigrants and his ability to empathize with their plight do contextualize and historicize his position. "The casual stroller" is able to go beyond the immigrants' repulsive otherness and see their rustic charm; he is even offended that they are stripped of basic human rights to decency, dignity, autonomy, and respectability. The "secret bond" that connects James with the immigrant "other" can be seen as bridging the chasm between James' privileged travels and the immigrants' journey to a better life. This connection can, in a distant way, represent the egalitarian aspect of cosmopolitanism that Amanda Anderson suggests (268). Even more, it can stand for "inclusionary cosmopolitanism" in which "universalism finds expression through sympathetic imagination and intercultural exchange" (268).Needless to say, there was not even a possibility of intercultural exchange between James and immigrants (although he often talked to Italian immigrants and visited the Yiddish theater). It was, though, James' "sympathetic imagination" that establishes a bond with the alien "othern--the bond based on his identification with immigrants' displacement and foreignness, his imagining their similar disappointing homecoming, and, hypothetically, his longing for everything that world citizenship precludes: ''the comfort of local truths," "the warm, nestling feeling of patriotism," "the absorbing drama of pride in oneself and one's own" (Nussbaurn 15). Could James have found appealing the strength, protectiveness, and bonds of solidarity provided by a tightly-knit ethnic community to which, of course, he was irreducible? The contradictory nature of James' cosmopolitanism-detachment and "sympathetic" allegiance(s), elitism and egalitarianism-is further confirmed by Bruce Robbins' argument that complete homelessness, or cosmopolitanism as utter detachment from political and social institutions, is a myth (250). James' visit to his homeland and his encounter with immigrants seem to exemplify this. James' position as a cosmopolitan can probably be defined in, what Robbins calls, a "density of overlapping allegiances" rather than in "the abstract emptiness of nonallegiance" (250). Therefore, the view of modernist cosmopolitanism so often associated with James should give way to the possibility that in some "mysterious" way he could be connected to history or even, as he himself acknowledged, to the "other side," the obscure, poor, and unsophisticated urban immigrants.

Just as James' response to America and aliens is conflicting and ambiguous so too is the self-portrait that he inscribes in the text. Throughout the New York passages, James presents himself as an aimless, curious, and uninvolved stroller in American reality, a fascinated yet self-effacing spectator of the urban "theatre of difference" (Blair 13). His textual persona is peculiar, as Annette Benert rightly points out: "the book's subjectivity is impersonal ... even its narrator [is] abstracted to a 'restless analyst,' 'restored absentee"' (332).James defines himself by the non-committal practices of walking and observing, and his carefully constructed impersonality and voyeuristic detachment function as indicators of his curiosity and bafflement by the novelty he encounters in the new America. At the same time, his subjective slips, his defeating realization-"You care for the terrible townm--betraythe fragility of his "independent curiosity" and unmistakeably signal his unwanted status as a disoriented foreigner in his home country (AS 108 italics in the original; 129). The activities of walking and observing associated with James and his ambivalence to the environment and his status in New York make it possible to define him as a "flaneur." a "wilfully detached and mobile observer" (Blair 185). In his psychoanalytic study of the relation between subjectivity and urban space, Steve Pile argues that the elusive and transient practice of walking implies a lack of routine and a lack of territory (226). The voyeuristic gaze of the flaneur, although obsessively attracted to objects, remains unfocused, "vagrant," drawn to surfaces and changing appearances (226). The figure of the flaneur harbours a fundamental ambivalence to the "other" that is acted out in a play of proximity and distance (231). The ambivalence of the flaneur results from the fusion of vulnerability and megalomania, insecurity and authority of the "sovereign spectator" (Keith Tester in Pile 230). The practice of fllnerie ultimately becomes a performance "designed to install identity where there is none," an action compulsively drawn to "repeat the experience of alienation, distance and loss; to give satisfaction, where none can be achieved" (Pile 23 1). Henry James' fllnerie-his unattached gaze, invisible strolling, ambivalence towards the crowds-can be seen as his desire to re-live his own experience of marginality, deal with his detachment from his American past, and map out his own site on the American scene. Although empowered by his birthright, which authorizes him to loiter in the streets and inspect his native city with a sense of superiority, James is vulnerable to the claims of American identity. The constant interplay of proximity and distance, fascination and repulsion by the urban immigrant spectacle, defines James as a flaneur who may observe aliens in immigrant ghettos and at Ellis Island, who may be drawn to the ugly and the unrepresentable, who may be walking on the margins, but who can never be of the margins. It is important to define the source of James' vulnerability and his conflicting reactions. The answer that imposes itself is his shaken sense of the American self, but as always with James, such a claim has to be qualified. As he notes himself, the America he knew had turned into the economic capital of the world. It had become a possession of the pragmatic, self-serving common man for whom "one story is good only until the other one is told" (AS 77).If the "new" America is not interested in its past, if it is systematically erasing its "old stories," then where does it leave James and his literary accomplishment? Will America's "monstrous Democratic broom" sweep away James' fiction into oblivion (55)? If, as Hannah Arendt writes, the new America had become "the dream of the lower classes" and the possession of the crowd, then, can Henry James be its authentic voice (Arendt in Maase 157)? James' main source of American identity was his ability to speak on behalf of his country, to recreate and immortalize her in his fiction. Even if he were aware that his "authentic1' representation of misplaced Americans in Europe was his own fiction of America, it was a familiar world and it offered the comfort of home. But, if "his" America was changing, if it was turning into a foreign land, into the realm of the "other," then James no longer had the power nor the authority to represent such America. His control of the country and his sense of the American self were taken away from him. Disempowered and marginalized, James could no longer perform his self-defined patriotic duty. James, an epitome of the late Victorian and early modernist artist, is facing the collapse of his ethical and aesthetic ideals. Turn-of-the-century America no longer allows him to exercise personal commitment by means of aesthetics but rather favors expression through political and economic structures that were entirely unacceptable for him (Art Berman 30). The fact that turn-of-the-century art had to give in to outside-historical, political, economic-pressures, or had to consider new venues, like the entertainment industry, brought fears of the homogenization and devaluation of art as well as concerns for the social status of the artist. Thus, the source of James' ambivalence lies in the fact that the foundations of the American home he built in his fiction were painfully shaken. While James cannot accept the presence of immigrants in America, he is disturbed by the fact that their disfigured language and the ever-present alien element are the seeds of further distortion of his home country. If the consumer America is a perversion of James' America, then the presence of immigrants is an unsettling reminder that the future brings only a further departure from the "original." This again calls to mind the disconcerting thought of the redundancy and futility of his literary accomplishment. It implies the discouraging thought that his fiction will neither assure the continuity of the American intellectual tradition nor will it provide the comfort and stability of home for its rare future visitors, the non-American Americans. In fact, James feared that future generations of Americans would never be able to understand his writing; they would feel disoriented and lost in his house of fiction in the same way James felt uncomfortable in the funhouse of their reality in whose distorted mirrors he could no longer recognize himself.

Jacob Riis: The Urban Colonizer

While James stands passive and overwhelmed by the changes sweeping his country, Jacob Riis pulsates with energy: he actively engages with the flux, investigates the chaotic underside of urban America, lectures about it, and represents it in his photographs and books.lg After seven years of living in immigrant quarters, he makes his way up in the New World and in 1877 becomes a police reporter for the then New York newspaper Tribune. Benefiting from his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt, the then New York City Police Commissioner, Riis achieves significant popularity and success in the affluent New York circles to which he aspires. He greatly contributes to tenement reforms by his "authentic" reporting and impassioned lectures, which both satisfy the middle-class curiosity about the slums and create a sense of obligation towards the less fortunate inhabitants of the city. Riis is relentless in emphasizing the urgency of the battle with the slum. He believes that "conscience [has] joined forces with fear and self-interest" to eliminate the slum (The Battle With the Slum 1). The American people have to realize that they can no longer shut their eyes and wait for the national formula of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to work (BWS 3). As he sees it, there is no compromise in the war with the slum. In it, "we win or perish. There is no middle way" (BWS 7). Riis' mission was premised on the belief that a more decent environment would cure slums of social ills, transform immigrants into desirable citizens, and bring order and coherence into American city life.*' According to his utopian visions, standardized living would result in standardized moral values: it would elevate the common, ennoble the vernacular, and make all Americans embrace the moral universe of the urban middle class (Fried 10). It is undeniable that Riis' work has solidified his place in American history. He deservedly carries the titles of the founder of modern photo-journalism and a committed pursuer of social justice (Bigelow vii). However, Riis' passionate campaign for standardized living reveals a strong assimilationist agenda of his work, aimed both at immigrants and himself. On the one hand, his efforts to improve the standard of living for newcomers mean the immigrants' enclosure in American domesticity and morality2' On the other, the success of his tenement reforms would in turn acquire a "home" for Riis, an opportunity to become a legitimate and respected member of American middle class." Despite Riis' good intentions, it is not difficult to see a close connection between the ideological underpinnings of his zealous advocacy of monoculturalism and his representational politics. Not surprisingly, framing-visual, textual, and cultural-is his favorite technique.

Riis' connection with "low culture" can be seen both in his activism and in his early recognition of the power of the visual. Photography at the turn of the century had quite an undefined status. Being accessible to many, it was considered an inferior and "impure" medium, which blended artistic creativity and scientific precision, subjective image-making and the technology of mass production. Miles Orvell explains the widespread resistance to photography and its culture of replication as a fear of "democratizing luxury and diffusing high culture through imitation of elite forms" (~vi).~~Jacob Riis actively participated in democratizing photography: he revolutionized photographic practices and changed the subject matter of urban photography of the time. As an immigrant, an "outsider to the photographic establishment" who worked unencumbered by the strictures of American tradition, Riis was open to novelty and free to embrace the new medium and experiment with it (Hales 163). Instead of complying with the existing tradition of celebratory, monumental photography, which recorded the rise of industrial America, Riis focused on its flipside. His photographs, as Lewis Fried notes, depicted the city in "various stages of disintegration and dissolution"; they brought to the surface the abject immigrant "other" and the appalling living conditions of "the other half' (Hales 163; Fried 10). As a result, Riis' introduction of photographic records of urban slums is celebrated as a pioneering effort towards reform photography as well as a valuable addition to a more comprehensive American history, which from that time on would have to include and deal with the urban dispossessed. Like his subject matter, Riis' photographic practices were highly unusual. Determined to intervene in American reality, Riis carries the credentials of his immigrant past and aggressively invades immigrant privacy. Emboldened by his familiarity with the gritty side of New York--its dehumanizing filth, stench, and decay--Riis unscrupulously collects the most effective images of the foreign-born poor. He breaks into tenements late at night, flashes the rooms and apparently takes "authentic1' and unmediated pictures of immigrant reality. He makes his way through the crowds of push carts and street peddlers in order to search for the "right" types of aliens, whose images would elicit the "right" kind of response in his audience: shock, compassion, awareness.24Unlike Henry James, who can be defined by the spatial practices of a flaneur, Riis is a complete stranger to fliinerie, to walking, detachment, and ambiguity. Determined to be an American, Riis moves through urban space with the confidence of a conqueror: he runs, jumps, squats, and invades in order to get the "right angle" of urban poverty and eventually eradicate it. If James looks in horror and disgust at the changed city, struggles with his emotions, and hopes to escape from New York, Riis sees the problems of urban America as an opportunity that will allow him to stay in America and become its respected citizen. Despite Riis' contribution to a more democratic urban photography and despite his reformist success-he introduced air shafts into tenements--and his efforts to present his work as a transparent and objective transmission of a life in tenements, it is difficult not to notice that his work is heavily stamped with transgression and aggression (Orvell 93). The authority of Riis' double vision (his status as both an insider and an outsider in American reality) and the supposed objectivity of his camera (an instrument of truth that offered authentic slices of life) commanded veracity of the reports about the "other half." However, in his attempt to be an "objective" and trusted informer and capture the "typical" of immigrant life, Riis aestheticized, staged, and arranged his subject matter (93). His reformist intervention into the immigrant life showed great insensitivity to the immigrants' vulnerability to misrepresentation. Riis appropriated immigrant reality and created images of urban poverty as he deemed necessary. As a resuit of his staging of distress and anxiety and romanticizing of the abject, Riis undercut the immigrants' dignity and presented them as mere objects of pity, powerless victims of cruel environmental conditions in desperate need of help. In his article, "The Performative Dimension of Surveillance: Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives," Reginald Twigg shows the exploitative nature of Riis' visual representation of immigrants. Employing Michel Foucault's notion of power structures embedded in surveillance techniques, Twigg argues that tenement reform literature participates heavily in perpetuating hegemonic cultural discourses by producing and controlling otherness "in terms of manageable categories of race, gender, and class" (305). In the case of Riis' text, Twigg sees the use of documentary photography as a part of a larger enterprise of surveillance, containment, social control, and the imperatives of "Americanization" (307).Never free of ideology, the eye behind the camera invites a particular interpretation. Thus, for Twigg, Riis' photographic gaze displays its power in that it works towards disciplining and assimilating immigrant bodies producing as a result "stable, monologic images" of immigrant reality (309).For instance, Riis' protective, paternalistic approach genders images of immigrants, who often appear in his photographs passive and feminized; or, images of worn-out working women are loaded with the implication that the juvenile delinquency and crime in dysfunctional immigrant families should be linked to the absence of motherly care and supervision (311, 314).

The violence of representation characteristic of Riis' engagement with the tenements is also textual and cultural. Just as Riis frames and contains the pictorial representation of immigrants, so the text of How the Other Half Lives "orders" the chaos of racial and ethnic diversity. How the Other Half Lives is a well-known reform document in which Riis compiles personal impressions, his now famous photographs of the slum, and his sketchy writings about it. Described by David M. Fine as a "guided tour of the city's immigrant colonies, a local color portrait of the ghettos," the book arranges the content in such a way as to win the sympathy for reform (17). Fine remarks that Riis piles "one pathetic case study upon other, punctuating them with indignant outcries often couched in Scriptural rhetoric" (17). Riis may not be a good enough writer to convince with his rhetoric, he may never have developed his reformist zeal into any coherent reform program, and his photographic realism may remain "scattered, disconnected, and impressionistic" (Hales 168). Still, none of these faults can justify the way in which Riis frames immigrants. Arguing that American society is deeply divided and that "the boundary line of the Other Half lies through the tenements," he sets out to describe the tenement reality, framing immigrants in cliches and stereotypes (OH 2). Far from being uninformed, Riis shows full awareness of the diversity of New York City when he writes in How the Other Half Lives that a coloured map of New York nationalities would "show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and more colors than any rainbow"; it would make an "extraordinary crazy quilt" (OH 18-19). Riis groups immigrants into easily manageable, homogeneous clusters of national stereotypes. In his exhaustive catalogue of national characteristics one learns that Italians have to lose their Mediterranean exuberance upon their arrival in America, since in the new country it is perceived as a danger and threat (37).The "ignorance and unconquerable suspicion of strangers" differentiates an Italian from the "order-loving German," "who begins learning English the day he lands as a matter of duty" (37-8). The Irishman is contentious (37), the Chinarnan is "by nature as clean as the catf' (72); Jewish children have an astonishingly strong "instinct of dollars and cents" (84). Although Riis may be seen as attempting to categorize mysterious newcomers and shed some light on the excessive immigrant diversity, his textual representation of immigrants focuses on unification and cultural homogeneity. Despite Riis' awareness of cultural diversity, his project of "delivering" immigrants from poverty and improving their living conditions works at the expense of cultural diversity, which is to be converted into the American standard. Insisting on progress, Riis' tenement reforms advocated acculturation; they aimed at fusing together "groups with diverse ways of thinking, feeling, and acting ... in a social unity and a common culture" vender Zanden in Hraba 29).*'

With Riis, it is not only the pictorial and textual construction that contains his subject matter, it is also the tone and the presence of his own subjectivity that help him "house" the immigrants and translate their experience into an American one. In her study of translation, Tejaswini Niranjana argues that despite their supposed objectivity and invisibility, translators site or locate their own positions as either distanciation, apologia, advocacy, or aggressive prescriptivity (49). The traces of the translators' subjectivity are to be found in prefaces, appendices, and other margins of the text, in the spaces beyond the text. In the translators' seeming exclusion from their work, Niranjana sees constitution and confirmation of the traces of the translators' historicity, which make it possible to present the text as a "unified and transparent whole" (49). A reformer who works as a translator between the two halves of society and a man willing to "translate" immigrant masses to the American standard of living, Riis weaves a strategy for his own empowerment in the text. Excluding himself from the social and political marginality he is representing, Riis inscribes in the margins of his project his own power as a reliable newly-minted American whom both halves can trust. Suppressing asymmetrical, unequal power relations between himself as the mediator, the benefactor, and the immigrants, the silent masses he is representing, Riis is convinced that his moral rectitude and authentic representations merely provide direct and unmediated access to the reality that is by itself transparent but inaccessible to middle class America. Riis' attempt to "deliver" immigrants from poverty and translate them into middle-class American culture ends up in a representational and ideological confinement. His visual and textual stereotyping, arranging, and editing of the slum environment in order to create a desired effect in his lectures at religious and philanthropic societies is simply cultural '"framing" of immigrants and the imposition of a rigid agenda of civilizing, Americanizing, and domesticating the "other" in the metropolis (Fried 3). By providing safe, clean, and decent housing for immigrants, Riis also contains the threat of the "other" and limits it to the familiar living space, which would in turn grant the "other" respect and acceptance. The act of transplanting immigrants from one part of the city to another, the act of turning overcrowded tenements into cheap versions of middle-class domestic space cannot but be seen as a cultivation of American middle-class sameness. Although Riis shows genuine admiration for the bonds of solidarity among immigrants--"The readiness of the poor to share what little they have with those who have even less is one of the few moral virtues of the tenementsw-his civilizing project is aimed at destroying the bonds of the immigrants' tightly-woven communal living and breaking them up into individual families as more manageable social units (OH 128). The dissolution of the amorphous alien masses into individual and isolated families would not only elevate immigrants from their medieval bonds into modern and urban living, but it would allow America to gain control over aliens and forge new, American, bonds (Hraba 31). Riis' intervention into tenement reality raises a question whether the "first contact," the initial cross-cultural communication, can escape the seemingly unavoidable trap of essentializing the "other." It also allows for the possibility of Riis, an outside observer, being equally "framed" and stereotyped by his reformist work and thus considered an urban version of a colonizer or a missionary. It is possible to argue that Riis' involvement with immigrants and the tremendous energy he invested into tenement reform could also stereotype him as a hard-working foreigner, who, in his desire to cover up his own lack, his own outsideness, outperforms the insiders. While containing, civilizing, framing the excess of immigrants' histories, languages, religions, it is Riis' excessive fervor that gives away his own position. As Julia Kristeva has remarked in Strangers to Ourselves, it is the fervent extremism, the consuming intensity that betrays the stranger and reveals the origins of his or her own foreignness, his or her own exile (9). On the other hand, Riis continually reminds the audience that his work is missionary and that it brings a better life to immigrants. However, his homogenizing universalism and his insistence on monoculturalism and univocity also aim at reproducing the American middle-class ideal, which points to the rhetoric of colonialism. Making way for progress, Riis' mission is to civilize, tame, and domesticate the urban jungle in the name of comfort and virtuous living. Working in the urban environment, Riis enacts the colonizer-colonized dichotomy, and in the name of modernity, progress, and technology, converts "aliens" into middle-class American citizens. Therefore, while working within an ethnic framework, Riis in fact reduces class and cultural distance in the name of morality, decent living, and prosperity. The abolishing of distance between American citizens turns America into a happy and prosperous family, and it also flattens social, cultural, and spatial centre-periphery divisions. Riis' missionary agenda-the surveillance of the tenements and the confining visual, textual, cultural strategies-is a scene of continual framings. In the process of transferring immigrants from the periphery to the centre of American society, Riis alters their living environment and cultural habits and carefully "converts" them into acceptable citizens. He frames them into textual and visual stereotypes and offers liberation from the past within the new boundaries of American living. In the process of relentlessly building a house for immigrants, Riis was, in fact, constructing a home for himself. Critics like Lewis F. Fried have indicated that tremendous nostalgia shapes Riis' perception of the American city as a place fallen from the grace of communal life and happiness (1 1). Fried sees in Riis' past, in his memory of the closely-knit society of his native village of Ribe, the seeds of the reformist zeal and Christian humanism as applied to the American city. Riis' New York is a metropolis "fallen from Christian fraternity and stewardship," and his mission is to restore it to a "new city of man" (Fried 11). Unlike James' nostalgia, which becomes an obstacle to living in the present, Riis' memory of the past is a positive, creative force oriented towards the future. By relocating immigrants and reshaping the American city, Riis manages to incorporate his past-the dreams of agrarian family of his native village-into his present and ultimately into the future of the country that he envisions as a prosperous and unified national family. Thus, the traces of Riis' own historicity inscribed in the body of his reformist, ethnographic work point out not only his desire to improve the lives of the new Americans but also to create a home for himself that would combine the memory of the past and the promise of the future.

Henry James and Jacob Riis Compared

The American Scene and How the Other Half Lives allow us to see how Henry James and Jacob Riis posit themselves against the urban spectacle of New York, James' hometown and Riis' vibrant activist arena, and how the presence of immigrant crowds reflects the awareness of their own status as Americans. James' and Riis' movement through urban space, as well as their observation of marginal and exotic immigrant crowds, chart different vantage points from which they speak: James as a forgotten insider, Riis as an intruding outsider. Immigrant masses remain for James a source of America's decline, a seed of its destruction, and an uncomfortable reminder of his own unstable American identity. For Riis, they represent a foundation for a successful American future, a justification of his involvement in American affairs, and a measuring stick of his own success. In the highly polarized world of turn-of-the-century America, any comparison between James and Riis easily falls into a stereotypical opposition: the American vs. the foreign. The native James is characterized by his class privileges-a leisurely walk, tranquillity, and the luxury of contemplation. Riis is defined by superficiality, speed, movement, and a lack of time for reflection and sophistication. Coupled with his hard work and "extravagant expenditure of energy," Riis easily subscribes to the familiar stereotype of an outsider as an upwardly mobile and unscrupulous achiever (Kristeva ST0 19). Moreover, the juxtaposition of James and Riis also creates a tension between time and place, history and geography, art and economy, cultural tradition and discontinuity. If James is a ghost from the past who mourns the disappearance of solid "metanarratives" of tradition, erudition, and culture, Riis is a fresh spirit that picks up American history at the moment at which he finds it. If James is an artist distancing himself from the age of mechanical reproduction, Riis stands for mechanical reproduction, for technology that produces the same countless copies of urban poverty, as well as for cultural strategies that produce identical versions of American citizens. It is the reality of identical living, of the identical claim to belong to America that enrages James and exhilarates Riis. It is the reality of turn-of-the-century America to pose the dilemma: who has the right to "belong more"? The expatriate who takes the right to belong to his country for granted, or the newcomer, an American-in-the-making, whose actions, unrestrained by tradition, build the new country and rush in giant steps towards a better future? Or, whose passport is more valid: the one Henry James based on his birthright, or the one Jacob Riis bought with his dedication, belief in America as it is, and desire to be accepted? The juxtaposition of James and Riis opens up the contentious issue of immigration politics: is it descent or consent, blood or choice, biology or sociology that grants one the right to national belonging? James' and Riis' encounter with the "other" can certainly be seen in terms of its mirroring structure, since both of them project their anxieties, dreams, and expectations onto immigrants. In other words, their works have a deeply self- reflexive quality that voices the crucial element of the discourse of immigration. The encounter with the "other" ultimately confronts us with our own selves, it forces "us," the insiders, to define and impose borders on our own selves. The discomfort of dealing with immigrants, of negotiating with alterity, often becomes a moment of unexpected self-definition. James shirks from that responsibility and dismisses it as superficial typecasting. Riis, on the other hand, grabs it as a unique opportunity to create for himself a secure place in American reality. Thus, immigration, as present in The American Scene and How the Other Half Lives, is a two-way process that affects both "us" and "them" and often leads to the discovery of a new, uncomfortable and unsettling, reality of deterritorialized identities and allegiances. ENDNOTES

1. The acceptance of the novel was based on the text's modernist style and its potential to satisfy the curiosity of American readers about the domestic "other." Also, unlike other immigrant novels, Call It Sleep operates within a '"familiar" modernist framework-influences of Joyce and Freud are recognizable-and that made it easier for mainstream audience to relate to the text. The discrepancy between Roth's and other immigrant novels is reflected in literary scholarship as well. Call It Sleep is one of rare immigrant narratives from the turn of the century that is discussed in other than "ethnic" literary journals.

2. Robert Barsky reminds me here that it is worth noting the following: "The nature of social discourse is such that oral texts are never entirely forgotten. They indeed find their way into the prevailing social discourse at a given time and place, residues of which remain today."

3. An attempt to collect stories that never became public can be seen in Georges Perec and Robert Bober's memoir about Ellis Island. In it they contrast photographs of Ellis lsland at the time when it was overcrowded with immigrants and those from the 1980s which show the Golden Door completely deserted. More importantly, Ellis lsland (1 995) includes interviews with one-time immigrants to America, who relate their experiences of Ellis lsland and have a rare opportunity to share their stories, even after such a long time. The memoir also includes a story of Mrs. Rabinovici, for whom the door to America was closed; therefore, she returned to France and now testifies for a great number of immigrants who were not admitted to America.

4. In "The Immigrant and the American Image in Europe, 1860-1914," a rare examination of European impressions of America at the turn of the century, Merle Curti and Kendall Birr point out the significance of letters that immigrants sent to their families at home. Curti and Birr write that, just like accounts of the returned emigrants, these letters that stressed the superiority of American standard of living proved to be a very effective way of propagating America and its values in Europe (212-20).

5. Abraham Cahan's Jewish Daily Forward is a fine example of an immigrant press that provided a source of information for immigrants and participated actively in the process of acculturation of newly-arrived Americans. For more information on this, see Jules Chametzky's Introduction to the second edition of The Rise of David Levinsky. Sanford MarovitzmsAbraham Cahan (1996) also provides useful information about the significance of ethnic newspapers for immigrant communities. 6. There are several other bibliographies and books that deal with minority writing in America, each of them with a slightly different focus. For instance, Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature: Selected Essays on the European Contribution (1983), edited by Robert J. Di Pietro and Edward Ifkovic, is modeled after Walt Witman's view of America as a "nation of nations" (1). The influence of Werner Sollors' ethnic school is unrnistakeable in the editors' rationale for the book: "Undoubtedly inspired by the raising of black, brown, and red consciousness over the past two decades, members of various European ethnic groups have shown a new interest in their heritage" (1-2). As a result of the revival of interest in European contributions to American literature, the book is divided into the following categories: "Franco-American Literature," "Jewish Literature," Russian-American Literature," "Scandinavian-Literature," "Three South Slavic-American Literatures." Another source of reference is Lillian Faderman and Barbara Bradshaw's "Speaking for Ourselves" in The Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups (1980)' Wayne Miller's Comprehensive Bibliography for the Study of the American Minorities (1976), and Ethnic Literature Since 7776: The Many Voices of America, ed. Wolodymir T. Zyla and Wendell N. Aycock (1978). Edward A. Abramson's The lmmigrant Experience in American Literature (1982) also offers a categorization of European immigrant literature (Scandinavian, Jewish, and Italian).

7. There were a few texts written before the 1910s, and Fine lists them: Edward Steiner's The Mediator (I907), Ezra Brudno's The Tether (I908), Israel Zangwill's The Melting Pot (1908), Some of the texts written during the 1910s were: Mary Antin's The Promised Land (191 2), Elias Tobenkin's Witte Arrives (191 6) and The House of Conrad (191 8). Lawrence Sterner's The Un-Christian Jew (1917). Sidney Nyburg's The Chosen People (191 7), Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). For more information, see Chapter Six "'They Were Americans before They Landed': The Process of Acculturation in the lmmigrant Novel" in David M. Fine's The City, the lmmigrant and American Fiction, 7 880- 7920 (1977).

8. Apart from Yezierska, Fine lists a few other authors of the 1920s: Samuel Ortiz (Haunch, Paunch and Jowl (1923)). John Cournos (trilogy The Mask (1919), The Wall (1921), Babel (1922)), and Ludwig Lewisohn (The Island Within (I928)).

9. David M. Fine points out other novels of the 1930s that deal with immigrant childhood: Hyman and Lester Cohen's Aaron Traum (1930), lsidor Schneider's From the Kingdom of Necessity (1935) (142). He also includes in this group Daniel Fuch's Williamsburg trilogy: Summer in Wiliamsburg (1934), Homage to Blenholt (1936), Low Company (1937), and Meyer Levin's The Old Bunch (1937). 10. Riis proudly displayed himself as an example once again in his autobiography, The Making of an American (1901 ).

11. Annette Benert sees The American Scene belonging to the Great Tradition of American writing, which blends realism and social science. As she puts it, the text allies itself with "realist novels and interpretive sociology, assessing the price of progress, the failure of commercial capitalism to provide anything meaningful for its money" (331). Although recognizing the lack of historical perspective in James' writing, Benert cannot deny the perceptive power of the text, the "hermeneutical eye of the new sociology," which readers encounter on every page (332).

12. Killoran argues that The American Scene can be read as a continuation of the genre of novels of manners that best describe James' fiction. She describes the particularity of James1novels of manners as operating within a framework of "communally shared information unavailable to an outsider but detectable through the process of careful obsewation by a single temperament" (307).Just like his fiction, in his travelogues, James sets up an opposition between the closed circle of insiders and the intruding outsider who is to decipher its codes. In the case of The American Scene, James himself is a code breaker, and it is his own outsideness and the "resulting epistemological sixth sense" that allow "strange surrealistic impressions to emerge" (306).

13. In his introduction to the 1968 edition of The American Scene, Leon Edel defends James against the charges of racism. Critics, like F. 0. Matthiessen, have considered James' descriptions of Jewish and Italian quarters racist. Edel, on the other hand, believes that James' "racist" remarks are simply expressions of his curiosity and bewilderment: "he indulged neither in snobbery nor in condescension; he expressed rather the bewilderment of an enlightened inquirer who asked himself what kind of America would emerge from these grafts upon the land he once knew" (xvii).

14. 1 am drawing here on Kwarne Anthony Appiah, who sees cosmopolitanism and patriotism as "sentiments." He differentiates them from nationalism, which has, he believes, a much stronger political agenda and is therefore perceived as an ideology (92).

15. Cosmopolifics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (1998), eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, is an excellent collection of writings about cosmopolitanism and considerations of its becoming a "viable and alternative political project" (book cover). Martha Nussbaum's For Love of Country (1W6), a collection of responses to her article about cosmopolitanism and patriotism, also offers a wide variety of views on world citizenship. 16. It should also be noted that cosmopolitanism is a flexible term, and that it is increasingly democratized, or becoming a wide-spread notion (Amanda Anderson 267). It is no longer associated only with the intellectual elite, and the difference between a cosmopolitan and an immigrant is gradually disappearing. Scott L. Malcomson argues that in contemporary society it is possible to identify several various cosmopolitan groups: spiritual, anti-imperial and extranational, merchant, entertainment. All of these stem from current trends in economic and cultural globalization. For a more detailed discussion, see Malcomson 238-40.

17. For more about the flaneur and the strategies of walking and realist writing, see John Rignall's Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator (1992).

18. To some degree, Kwame Anthony Appiah's argument for liberal cosmopolitanism and its concern for human dignity can be useful in the discussion of James' ambivalent response to America. According to Appiah, cosmopolitanism blends, or rather includes, several positions; therefore, it is possible that one "can be cosmopolitan-celebrating the variety of human cultures; rooted-loyal to one local society (or a few) that you count as home; liberal-convinced of the value of the individual; and patriotic-celebrating the institutions of the state (or states) within which you live" (1 06).

19. Apart from How the Other Half Lives, Riis also published The Children of the Poor (1 892), The Battle with the Slum (1 902),and The Peril and Presewation of the Home (1903). Riis believed that in a society premised on the ideals of equality and justice, it is unacceptable that tremendous poverty exists amidst plenty, so he wrote books in which he explained the importance of fighting the evils of the slum. In his view, a society with a great deal of poverty cannot be truly democratic nor can it expect people who live in squalor to be patriotic and vote freely (The Battle with the Slum 6-7).

20. In "Ethnicity and American Children," a discussion about immigrant children and the experience of growing up in urban America, Selma Berrol draws on the work of Jeremiah Jencks. Jencks summarized the findings of the U.S. Immigration Commission report of 1911 about immigrant housing problem in his book, The Immigration Problem. Berrol writes, "Jencks pointed out that there was much more congestion in foreign than in native-born households, both white and black. The Commission had found that Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews lived under the most crowded conditions. Thirty-two percent of the immigrant families had three persons sleeping in each bedroom, as opposed to only 18 percent of native-born households. Almost a fourth of the Italians included in the report had made all of their rooms into sleeping rooms. Jencks went on to describe a typical tenement apartment: four rooms of which the rear room was the kitchen, the dining room, and living room, containing the stove, table, chairs, and laundry tub. Many such apartments lacked running water or toilet facilities, which made the families dependent on a privy in the back yard and a pump in the basement" 21. Commenting on Riis' How the Other Half Lives and the importance it attributes to family, Priscilla Wald writes that "although Riis does not advocate miscegenation, he makes the increasingly common suggestion that a family would lead to a home, an investment-literally and figuratively-in the nation, which would motivate the alien's Americanization" (Wald 247).

22. In The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (1997) Keith Gandal argues that Riis' involvement with the slum can also be read in terms of gender. He sees the slums as zones of emasculinization and writes: "It should be added that Riis' ethos of masculine adventure involved an appreciation, in his slum writing and elsewhere, of a male lustiness which friendly visitors and other guardians of Victorian decency would hardly have condoned-and which no doubt insured Riis against any priggishness. He takes obvious enjoyment in recounting street flirtations in How the Other Half Lives, as well as his knight errant's trick of mixing military reconnaissance with 'girl- watching' in Hero Tales. Thus Crane and Riis participate, either personally or vicariously, in what might be identified as three major foci of the turn-of-the- century popular American movement for strenuousness: war, the West, and the slums" (12-1 3).

23. To a great extent, resistance to photography (and by extension to film as an art form) should be attributed to the fear of the emergence of art for the masses by the masses. Despite Riis' middle-class aspirations, his involvement with slums seems to epitomize Walter Benjamin's belief in the revolutionary nature of photographic art. While Benjamin believed that accessibility of photography would change the perception of art in general, Riis' contribution consisted in revolutionizing urban photography-its strategies and content.

24. Miles Orvell's The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 18804940 (1989), a study of urban photography, shows how carefully staged were Riis' photographs. The most telling example is one of an Italian woman with an infant, whose Madonna-like position could not be missed by middle-class audience.

25. In Riis' work it is not difficult to discover, what Vender Zanden considers, the two crucial components of assimilation, integration-desegregation of members of different racial and ethnic groups in terms of residence and social partition- and acculturation-fusion of different groups into a common culture (Hraba 29). Chapter Three

Dubious Transgressions in Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements

The discussion of Henry James' and Jacob Riis' voyeuristic apprehension of the silent immigrant spectacie is an example of an outside, purely visual American view of the imported immigrant other. Despite empathy and disturbing similarities between James and Riis and the immigrant mass, the previous chapter also shows an enormous cultural, class, and "racial" distance between the "two halves" of American society. The uncomfortable silence accompanying the social division will soon be broken by literary voices emerging out of the amorphous mass of foreigners. The following three chapters trace the emergence of the immigrant literary voice. Although I discuss three different novels from three different decades of immigrant writing, I will not adhere to the chronological order of the works. I will discuss Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923) before Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (191 7). Yezierska's fiction demands such an ordering because it is a loud cry, or rather a shriek, that breaks the immigrant silence in a desire to cross "the great divide" and reach out towards mainstream America. If the previous chapter is about the reflective and scientific observation of aliens and American attempts to "house" them in tenements and stifling Victorian morality, Yezierska's work depicts a passionate, almost violent, struggle to escape the ghetto and its confines. But, as the discussion here will show, the way out of patriarchy and backwardness may not be easy and may lead to an enclosure of a different kind rather than toward the road to "freedom." Anzia Yezierska's first novel Salome of the Tenements (1 923) is one of the earliest attempts to deal with representing the complex and shifting identity of an East European female immigrant in turn-of-the-century America. Her efforts to introduce the ethnic woman to an American audience and single her out from the immigrant mass deserve special attention. On the one hand, there was no literary tradition for the presentation of an ethnic woman upon which Yezierska could build her work. On the other hand, she was free to lay the foundations for such a tradition and explore the ways to express the often conflicting features of the ghetto girl: her increasingly liberated sexuality and her patriarchal upbringing. Salome of the Tenements reflects the difficulties Yezierska faced as a writer of female immigrant narratives. In order to empower the ethnic woman from the beginning of the century, Yezierska resorts to the biblical story of Salome. Yet, if we follow Mary V. Dearborn's argument, by the fact that Yezierska's novel is an ethnic American text, it also invokes the presence of the legend of a native American heroine, Pocahontas. The combination of such contrasting myths indicates that the figure of a female Jewish immigrant is slippery and self-contradictory, evading efforts towards definition and stabilization. Not surprisingly, the ethnic woman in Yezierska's text becomes a contested site in which biology and artifice, radicalism and conservatism, images of a noble savage woman and a stylized, decadent seductress. intersect. It is, moreover, necessary to accept the ethnic heroine of Yezierska's text in her ambivalence and resist the temptation to enforce reconciliation of the contradictory facets of her character. The ethnic woman can be both a pristine, self-sacrificial, pre-modern ingenue and a scheming, corrupt outsider, an exoticized, orientalized woman, whose sexuality threatens to destabilize the power structure of gender relations in tu rn-of-the- century America. The representation of an ethnic female as a composite of the opposing myths of Salome and Pocahontas should be read as an indicator of the contradictoriness inherent in the life and social status of immigrant women. Salome and Pocahontas bring out different aspects of an ambitious ethnic woman, who attempts to free herself from the bonds of tradition that tie her to the immigrant ghetto. The identification with Salorne, the pivotal figure of European modernist art and the fin-de-siecle decadent movement, empowers the aspiring tenement girl, who is striving to achieve sophistication, social advancement, romance, and sexual liberation. At the same time, the myth of Pocahontas indicates that the social rise of this deadly seductress gradually degenerates into marital submissiveness and gender and ethnic inferiority. Moreover, marriage to a racially and culturally "superior" American man, as a socially sanctioned vehicle of the rise of an ethnic woman, does not prove to be a viable option for her happiness. The American man exhausts the seductive difference of the ethnic woman and rejects her for the same exotic and excessive characteristics he initially found attractive.' The asymmetry underlying the Pocahontas myth-the betrayal of the ethnic woman and the displacement of her love interest onto a socially less powerful and less prominent man-is not just an aesthetic flaw or an example of gender politics gone awry. It is rather a powerful comment on the contradictory existence of the female immigrant in modem urban America and on the failed ideology of assimilation implied in the female American Dream. While Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements seemingly advocates interracial marriage and supports the assimilationist drive of the American melting-pot immigration policy, it also states that the professed erasure of difference only contributes to the reinscription of rigid ethnic barriers and further ghettoization and marginalization of the immigrant woman. Although Yezierska's text ends with an embrace of ethnic sameness, the new prospects of economic independence, business and romantic partnership suggest the new challenges awaiting the ethnic woman. They also make obvious the necessity to continue the search for the subjectivity of a female immigrant and for the modes of her representation. The Case of Anzia Yezierska

As an immigrant writer with a proto-feminist orientation, Anzia Yezierska and her work are currently experiencing a revival of interest among feminist scholars and audiences. Her unconventional lifestyle-she abandoned her husband and daughter, insisted on a "room of her own," zealously pursued an independent career as a writer and teacher of home economics-have created a reputation for Yezierska as a "visionary foremother." who was, as Ellen Golub believes, "radicalized and politicized before her time" (51). Golub's comment indicates a contentious feminist content in Yezierska's works in which rebellious immigrant heroines are always couched in an uncomfortably patriarchal and restrictive gender framework out of which Yezierska could not foresee a way. Her fiction-in particular the short-story collection Hungry Hearts (1920) and the novels Bread Givers (1925). Salome of the Tenements-abounds with stereotyped characters divided along ethnic lines: cold and reserved Anglo- Saxon men abandon passionate ethnic women, whose insatiable desire and excessive energy stand in the way of their happiness and frustrate their hopes for love and acceptance. Apart from narrative rigidity and repetitiveness, Yezierska's fictional world is perceptively quite limited, for none of her texts, or rather fictionalized autobiographies2written in a limited, self-taught English, reach beyond the immediate experiential world of the author herself (Rose Kamel40). The reception of Yezierska's works has been both celebratory and sceptical (Ferraro "Working" 548). She has been hailed as the "Cinderella of the Tenements," a rags-to-literary-riches heroine, the only ethnic woman invited to Hollywood to write scripts, and the only literary accomplished immigrant woman whose work was filmed (Ferraro 548; Kamel 40).3 Turned overnight into an instant celebrity, Yezierska was expected to write "Uncle Tom's Cabin of the immigrant" and uphold the illusion of an effortless social mobility possible only in America (Dearborn "AY" 114).4 Hollywood packaged Yezierska's successful life story into a sugar-coated, exemplary achievement of the American Dream-the East Side immigrant comes to Hollywood, achieves fame, and becomes rich. The romanticized rise from the tenements was announced by pompous titles, like "From Hester Street to Hollywood," which reinforced the mainstream vision of immigrants as content, successful, and independent Americans (Dearborn "AY" 108, 113). However, Yezierska was uncomfortable with the assigned role of an exotic and extraordinarily courageous female immigrant and dissatisfied with Hollywood versions of reality. She discovered that the studios were not interested in "stories from life" but rather rewrote them to the point of non- recognition, as was the case with her manuscript. So, she returned to the New York ghetto, whose poverty and chaos galvanized her creativity and provided a powerful stimulus for her subsequent literary work (Dearborn "AY" 113). It is rather ironic, as Ellen Golub remarks, that Hollywood's glamour to which all immigrants (and other Americans for that matter) aspired ultimately repelled Yezierska by its opulence, artificiality, and professionalism (51). Its effortless lifestyle dried up her creative juices and the much needed comfort and financial security could not recreate the challenge that only the verve and bustle of the ghetto could provide. Although the tabloids mythologized Yezierska's instant success and delighted in fascinating and profitable details of her encounter with America, her fiction was met with critical scepticism and resistance (Ferraro "Working" 549). Following the success of Hungry Hearts, Yezierska's first novel Salome of the Tenements was dismissed as an unsuccessful and rather "cheap movie" (Dearborn "AY" 114). Having a reputation of an authentic native informant, a "mouthpiece of New York's Jewish East Side," Yezierska was attacked particularly by those who had equal claims to ethnic authority (Ferraro 547-8). Ferraro points out that in 1925, a group of Jewish-American men-Alter Brody, Samson Raphaelson, Yosef Gaer, and Johan Smertenko-berated Yezierska's Bread Givers as "yet another up-from-the-ghetto tract, cartoonish in plot and characterization, assimilationist in drive, anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent" (548). Furthermore, the literary reception of Yezierska's work never existed independently from her image as a "startlet implicated in a tragic love affair with a famous man" (550).' Yezierska's platonic relationship with John Dewey in whose sociological study of Polish Jews in Philadelphia she participated as a translator often attracted more attention than her fiction. It was Yezierska's typical American success and a frustrated and unfulfilling affair with a famous intellectual that received more attention than her work and that allowed some to suspect the authenticity and reliability of the female literary voice from the tenements, which so openly flirted with America and its values. Only recently has Yezierska's literary work been studied as a separate body, free from the author's immigrant persona. While Yezierska's ethnicity, her well-crafted immigrant persona, was raised to the status of sensationalistic fiction, her fiction about the Lower East Side remained firmly grounded in reality. Yezierska found inspiration in her immediate environment, that is, in ghetto stories, her own life, and in movie culture. For the most part, Yezierska's writing is a transparent reconstruction of well-known ghetto stories or biographical fragments from her life. Salome of the Tenements is a combination of both: it is based on the true Cinderella story of Yezierska's close friend, Rose Pastor, an immigrant reporter and a denizen of the tenements who in 1905 married the millionaire Graham Stokes. The novel also carries very strong personal overtones, and its focus on a failed love between a passionate ethnic woman and an overly rational American man resonates with obvious references to Yezierska's affair with John Dewey. In fact, critics, including Mary V. Dearborn, have argued that Yezierska's literary world is populated by fictional counterparts of John Dewey, who engage in affairs with ethnic women and betray them. The resulting failure of an interracial relationship becomes a recognizable and obsessive pattern in Yezierska's fiction to which she continually returns. The particularity of Yezierska's fiction lies in its episodic structure, loose, melodramatic narrative, and highly stereotyped and polarized world of cultural and ethical values. As such, Yezierska's fiction reminds Rose Kamel of the formulaic structure of silent movies Yezierska "must have watched, though she does not mention them" (42). In stock characters populating Yezierska's fictional world-the "heartless factory foreman, landlords, 'charity ladies', aspiring poets with eyes burning like flames, vamps, suffering Jewish mothers and sternly orthodox fathersn-Kame1 sees recognizable traits typed by actors in a GrifTith or Eisenstein film (42). It is quite possible that Yezierska frequented nickelodeons and found inspiration on the screen. Miriam Hansen writes in Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991) that movie-going, although not a prestigious form of entertainment, provided the only unsupervised leisure activity for immigrant daughters. In general, the magic of the movies--the miraculous transformations of people, settings, and situations--had a tremendous appeal on the imagination of the immigrant population, since it projected their fantasies of a better, abundant life possible only through a similar scenario of self- transformation (112). In the case of ghetto girls, Hansen notes that the cinema became a public space that allowed them to experience themselves as independent customers and create alternative forms of collectivity other than those centered on the family (1 18).6 The magic of the movies compensated for the drab reality of the life of immigrant women: poverty, arranged marriages, pressures of success and assimilation, alienation. It also initiated female spectatorship into the fantastic world in which they could become desired sexual objects implicated in a romantic love that conquers all (106-7). Immigrant women were in particular exposed to the Ghetto films targeting Jewish audiences-The Jew's Christmas, Romance of a Jewess-which dealt with intermarriage7and addressed the nature of its conflict (72-3).The Ghetto films, which most female immigrants, including Yezierska, must have seen, situate romance in the context of assimilation and conflate sexuality with ethnicity and melting-pot immigration policy. Assuming that Yezierska was a movie-goer, she must have been familiar with the conventions of the Ghetto films, particularly with their rudimentary, if not simplistic, linearity and elliptical narrative, which assumed that the audience familiar with Jewish marital customs and the problematic of intermarriage could provide the missing links (Hansen 73). Whether it was the silent film or the force of Yezierska's own failed "interracial" relationship that provided a strong influence on her writing, it is often pointed out that her fiction risks originality for the sake of repetition. Yezierska obsessively returns to and explores the topic she obviously could not exhaust: a young immigrant woman tries to "find love and self-fulfilment in a strange land" (Kamel42). In their responses to Yezierska's work, critics seem to balance an awareness of its flaws with an enthusiastic support for its unique elements. Mary Dearborn rightly points out that in Yezierska's work, like in that of most other ethnic writers dealing with interracial marriage, love often gets confused with the attraction for opposites (PD 109). Yezierska's literary works may leave the impression of rigidity and simplistic divisiveness into a series of contrasts. Still, Rose Kamel sees in such divisiveness the special strength and uniqueness of Yezierska's prose (42-3). Susan Hersch Sachs notices that Yezierska's writing is highly dramatic and that its point of view shifts unpredictably but that she is able to sketch the somewhat simplistic binary scheme quite clearly and place her fiction in a contrastive frame of "youth-age, poor-rich, modern-traditional, native- foreign, assimilated-Orthodox. accepted-rejected, isolated-part of community, love-hate" (66). For Ellen Golub, Yezierska's fiction may not match the quality of other Jewish writers of the time, yet she finds it compelling for its unusual directness, boldness, vitality, and insatiability (51). With regards to the narrative structure, critics often refer to its formulaic and elliptical nature, predictability, and stereotyped characters. However, the unusual energy stemming from this work allows Golub to describe Yezierska's fiction as one of "balked desires and lost homes" and her characters as suffering from a permanent sense of alienation and aloneness (Golub 57, 53). Although Yezierska's narratives blur fiction with personal anguish, Kamel suggests that they offer at best "a painful catharsis" and at worst a destabilization of the confidence in authorship, since the reader is continually at the mercy of the text and its unpredictable nature (43-4). Unrelenting and often disruptive energy and smouldering passion are considered to be characteristic of Yezierska's work. The constant yearning of her characters, their unasuaged desire and dynamism are brought in connection with the electricity of living in immigrant quarters and the collective fervour to succeed and create a better life. Edward Said points out the interrelatedness of the outside world and textuality-narrative structure and the construction of characters-and discusses the novel genre as a literary form of nineteenth- century imperialism, or as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society. Said argues that the novel as an incorporative, quasi-encyclopedic form houses both "a highly regulated plot mechanism and an entire system of social reference that depends on the existing institutions of bourgeois society, their authority and power" (Culture and Imperialism 71). This makes it possible to see how the "restlessness and energy characteristic of the enterprising bourgeoisie" become embodied in the characters, whose frustrated adventures are there to indicate limits to middle-class aspirations (71). As a result, the novelistic hero or heroine cannot escape his or her ill fortune. It is their excessive difference and "overflowing energy" that do not fit into the "orderly scheme of things" and that prove to be too disruptive and ultimately doom the characters to failure (71). If one is to apply Said's argument to turn-of-the-century America, then it is possible to see that the excessive energy and a consuming urge to succeed are characteristic not only of the new enterprising bourgeoisie, but also of urban immigrants. They apply equally well to urban immigrants, the powerful new force on the American scene, whose difference permeates the texts they create. But, what if such "foreign" energy, restlessness, and consuming intensity emanate from the work of an immigrant woman? Doubly othered, the ethnic woman and her excessive literary output represent a challenge that needs to be addressed. The abruptness and sentimentality of Yezierska's work have been seen as over-emotional and uncontrollable, and the tone of her prose has been described as angry, irrational, and hysterical, all of which supposedly signified the author's foreignness, her ethnic and gender alterity. These negative features of Yezierska's texts indicate the existing fear of a passionate, irrational, and sexually independent woman, who escapes control, crosses the line of the permissible, destabilizes the "normal" gender relations, and disrupts mainstream culture. In a typical review following the release of Salome of the Tenements, W. Adolphe Robert describes the text as an "orgy of the emotions"; it is "sentimental, illogical, hysterical, naive" (Robert in Dearborn "AY' 122). Robert assumes the incoherence "to be racial, Yet I would hesitate to call it Jewish" (quoted in Dearborn "AY" 122). Dearborn rightly concludes that such a negative reception of Yezierska's work was partly due to the discomfort and nervousness that an immigrant woman unwilling to remain in a picturesque ghetto created in male critics (122).Moreover, condemning Salome of the Tenements-the story of a social ascendancy of a girl capable of "'cashing in' on her uniqueness" and winning the heart of a WASP millionaire-critics were also condemning the immigrant persona, the tabloid fiction of Yezierska's, a successful female immigrant writer that they helped create (122). Yezierska's response to such growing critical hostility and unresponsiveness was to ask for sympathy and understanding for the people whose reality-and fiction-were so different. Defending her fiction from charges of hysteria, Yezierska says that the overemotional attitude and excess of immigrants, as well as her characters, are their inextricable part:

These people in the ghetto are high-strung, inarticulate. They are so hungry for little bits of sympathy, love and beauty; they are like children; what seems to be hysterical or overemotional to Anglo-Saxons in them is a natural state, because they feel so deeply and are not educated enough to articulate their emotions. (Yezienka in Dearborn "AY" 122)

It seems that ignorance and insensitivity for the immigrants' and Yezierska's own chronic condition of "insecurity and loneliness" contributed to the misreading of immigrant narratives (Kame1 42). However, their unusual restlessness, narrative ellipsis, melodramatic plot reversals, and use of characters' frequent emotional outbursts cannot be studied in separation from the authors' immersion in the immigrant world. The analysis of immigrant texts by Yezierska or Mary Antin should not ignore the authors' excessive material and cultural hunger as well as their anger with the ghetto patriarchal tradition, which made it impossible to ignore the American Dream and patiently await for it to happen (Evelyn Avery 52). Female ethnic writers created their fiction just as hastily and passionately as they lived their fragmented and disconnected lives. Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements, although not considered as fine a text as Bread Givers, is in this sense a significant work since the contradictory myths it invokes-Salome and Pocahontas-and the generic blend it creates-realist, the up-from-the-ghetto novel, melodrama-reflect the disruptive rhythm of living and an uncompromising search for the identity of an urban female immigrant suspended between different worlds and clashing systems of values.

The Importance of Being Salome

It is not surprising that Anzia Yezierska chose the myth of Salome to empower her immigrant heroine, Sonya Vrunsky. The centrality of the Salome figure to European painting and literature in the period between the 1860s and the beginning of the World War I made the Salome legend one of the most extensive themes of high Modernism (Anthony Pym 31 I)?Synonymous with the Decadent movement, Salome evoked eroticism, female deceptiveness, taboo, and transgression and came to epitomize femininity and gender politics of the turn of the century (Megan Becker-Leckrone 239). As a representative stereotype of the construction of femininity of the time, the appeal of Salome is probably best summarized in a quote from Joris Karl Huysmans' novel Against Nature: Salome is the "symbolic incarnation of undying lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria ... the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning ... everything she touches" (quoted in Becker-Leckrone 239-240). Linda Saladin sees the persisting construction of the Salome figure as a sexually excessive woman, whose animalistic drives threaten and undermine the cultured and orderly masculine world (20-21).The frequent invocation of the figure is indicative of the growing anxiety and fear of women capable of destabilizing and disrupting the status quo of gender power structures. The collective gender consciousness and lasting fascination with Salome have turned this biblical figure into a fetishized feminine image, or masquerade, an oblique substitution, for the "rebellious female ... attempting to forestall the change" in the socio- cultural setting of the day (21). The Salome figure is a rich composite of interpretations and meanings, many of which have significantly changed the original biblical storyg The interpretations of the Salome myth as they pertain to the analysis of Anzia Yezierska's text include the unavoidable image of a femme fatale, the notion of Salome as a dutiful daughter, and, more generally, ethnic conflict as a background setting for gender drama. As a femme fatale, Salome invokes a rare instance of a powerful and independent woman who, aware of her sexual appeal, has complete control over her seductive body, the performance of her femininity, and the lusting male gaze. Dancing at the birthday feast of her mother's husband Antipas and entertaining dignitaries, including the ascetic and puritanical John the Baptist, Salome's sexual power goes beyond the control of the visual field. She disrupts the voyeuristic pleasure of her audience and acts on her desire by demanding the head of John the Baptist, the arch-adversary of matriarchal, animistic, and incestuous relations at Antipas' court (Knapp 192).1° The fact that it is Salome, not her ineffectual step-father Antipas, who acts establishes her as a courageous and strong-willed woman. The blood on Salome's hands has given rise to a view of her as an insatiable, destructive, and bestial woman, who hungers for revenge and leaves no space for "rational" and civilized compromise. Some critics, like Linda Saladin, have warned that the glorification of femininity embodied in Salome as a femme fatale cannot occur "without leaving a negative sentiment" (Saladin 63). The uncritical use of numerous interpretive layers of the image of Salome does not necessarily celebrate the disruption of patriarchal gender relations. It can rather demonize the image by suggesting that female empowerment inevitably includes cruelty, inscrutability, deceptiveness, scheming, and aggression. For all the fatality concentrated in the image of Salorne, Linda Saladin and Bettina Knapp remind us that she is also a dutiful daughter, who acts on her mother's thirst for revenge, dances before the King, and asks for John the Baptist's head. Although a deadly performer, Salome acts as her mother's tool on behalf of her female and Jewish tradition. Knapp points out that throughout history it was Salome's mother Herodias who has been labelled as "opportunistic, scheming, ambitious, aggressive, envious, debauched, and castrating" (186).Salome, on the other hand, remains nameless in the Bible, and her reputation for cruelty and vindictiveness, which developed much later in the period of over several centuries, was derived from the already established and vilified image of her mother. As Knapp writes:

In patriarchal societies, Herodias and her daughter Salome are paradigms of the Great Mother archetype in her avatar as castrator. Herodias is viewed as a sensual, destructive, heartless mother figure, while Salome, her embryonic psyche still embedded in the archaic folds of her subliminal spheres, is considered to be amoral. A mirror image of her mother as a young girl, Salome functions as a shadow force: a performer, dancer, the instrument of her mother's will. Not only is her ego underdeveloped; she has no identity; her name is not even mentioned in synoptic Gospels. Referred to simply as "the daughter of Herodias," she is a non-person who serves as her mother's appendage (Matt. 14.6.). (179)

The creation of Salome's identity in close connection with her mother's does not necessarily mean that she is a non-person, a mere persona, or a mask for her mother's scheming (Knapp 189). The mother - daughter dyad may indicate a complementarity necessary for a single woman to act on her desires. The image of an archetypal seductress may also be seen as a strong cross- generational bond of love and support between women, which excludes men and relegates them to the status of observers. On the other hand, the interconnectedness and interdependence of a mother and a daughter may be read not only as the daughter's loyal embrace of the female tradition, but also as her embeddedness in and commitment to her ethnic tradition, embodied in the maternal figure. Cory A. Reed points out that the original Salome tale-the story of seduction, dance, and sacrificial death-is seen in terms of a Christian - Jewish opposition which has, as Sander Gilman notes, always represented Jews in negative terms (Gilman in Reed 14-15). Medieval Catholic interpretations of the legend saw the Herod family as treacherous, self-interested people guilty of killing "the very man who baptized Christ" (Reed 14)." The decapitation of the sacred man represents a symbolic killing of the hope of conversion of the Herods, and by extension, the Jewish people; the severing of John the Baptist's head, the seat of reason, reinforces the implied hierarchy between his rational, manly, morally upright tradition and the disorderly, instinctive, and unreliable Jewish race. The ritual killing of the superior, as performed by a woman of an inferior race, conflates once again gender and ethnicity and reminds us that the inferiority of an ethnic woman-subversive emotionalism, irrationality, animalistic drives--remains irretrievably connected to the unstable and unreliable bodily forces .

For Anzia Yezierska, the Salome myth is a rich source of reference that allows her to address the problems of an aspiring female immigrant in a New York ghetto. The image of Salome serves to empower the heroine, Sonya Vrunsky, into an immigrant femme fatale, to address the ethnic (racial) conflict underlying the romance between an Anglo-Saxon man and an immigrant woman, and to show the heroine's reconciliation with her otherness. Yezierska's setting the decadent Jewish princess in New York tenements adds a new interpretation to the Salome myth: it evokes a jarring, discrepant reality of the New World and brings an awareness of cultural and artistic displacements that modernity set in motion. Fusing the high and the low, artifice and primitivism, stylization and spontaneity, Yezierska's Salome operates within the stereotypes of inscrutability, fatality, performative self-fashioning, and eroticized difference. An engineer of her rise, Sonya Vrunsky is a strong woman from the margins, whose determination, cunning, and carefully manufactured "oriental mystery" can seduce even the rational and puritanical Anglo-Saxon man and bring her to the very top of American society. Sonya's American Dream, clearly stated at the outset of the novel, has little to do with her liberation as a woman: she wants to marry a millionaire, and she is willing to endure any sacrifice or hardship to achieve her objective. A marriage to John Manning, ''the man of her dreams," a cold-hearted millionaire and a philanthropist who, for lack of other interests, runs a settlement program and scientifically "converts" immigrants into Americans,'* represents Sonya's deliverance from poverty and racial inferiority (Salome of the Tenements 3). Subjecting gender to the matters of class and race and refusing to question the "radical" nature of marriage as a vehicle for social rise, Sonya constructs her married life as a fantasy that solves all her problems: as Mrs. Manning she would no longer "lose [her] precious hours night after night in such sordid trivialities as washing collars, ironing waists, darning patches in her threadbare suit. As Mrs. Manning, maids would do all this sordid work for her" (12). In Sonya's myopic vision and fervent belief in the possibility of instant social advancement, a marriage to a cultured and affluent man also promises her spiritual rebirth: once she escapes poverty and transcends the drab reality of the material world to which she is confined, her soul will be ennobled, and it will no longer be wasted on "the sordid struggle for food and clothes" (12). Starved for recognition and angry with an exhausting struggle for survival, Sonya is too impatient to consider the ethical aspects of her American Dream and too deprived to ignore the luxuries of life it brings-love, beauty, plenitude, and comfort. Believing in her husband's saintliness and desiring to live an American life, she constructs herself as an uncompromising aspiring vamp, unstoppable in her determination and readiness to invest superhuman efforts into overcoming all obstacles. Throughout the text, Sonya presents herself in highly exaggerated images of fire, energy, and flames: she is "scorching" with intensity (39),exuding "resistless magnetism-feminine mystery" (35). she is a "wild savage" full of electricity, restlessness, and hunger for the "real life" (37). To add to the "unnaturalness" of her condition, Sonya points out that her passionate nature and "erratic" American ambitions have inevitably exacted a rift with her family (84). Her "flares of self-assertion" contrast her overworked, care-crushed mother, and her "untamed wilfulness" is a painful reminder to her religious father of his own sins which, he believes, came as a penance in the form of an unconventional, non-traditional daughter (83). While Sonya's denial of everything conspicuously "immigrant" has made the separation from her orthodox family unavoidable, she explains her unbridled passion, her eccentric sensibility as being deeply rooted in the history of her people. The conflation of the personal and the political, the private and the communal, provides an explanation for the energy erupting in Sonya;-her fire is a culmination of repressed passions of several generations of her religious and downtrodden ancestors. As she describes both herself and the " Weltschmerz of her race" (37; italics in the original):

I am a Russian Jewess, a flame-a longing. A soul consumed with hunger for heights beyond reach. I am the ache of unvoiced dreams, the clamor of suppressed desires. I am the unlived lives of generations stifled in Siberian prisons. I am the urge of ages for the free, the beautiful that never yet was on land or sea. (37) Sonya's impassioned and hyperbolic language establishes her firmly in the long line of ancestors, but it also sets her apart from the family, whose traditional system of values no longer satisfies her desire for freedom. Moreover, the restlessness that characterizes Sonya, as well as the phenomenon of women's deviance in general, can be attributed, as Carla Cappetti suggests, to the shifting norms of modern urban living.13 For young girls like Sonya, whose rebellion corroded communal cohesiveness, modernity signifies a desire for clothes, movies, and "all those objects that consumerism potentially makes available to everyone" (Cappetti 134). It is not insignificant that Cappetti indicates pretty and fashionable clothes, an unattainable goal for poor urban dwellers, as a potential cause for criminality and deviance in young girls. For Sonya Vrunsky, fashionable clothes do not invite transgression only because of their American and deceptively egalitarian appeal; it is rather that she sees them as a strategic tool by means of which she accentuates her sexuality and attracts a millionaire. Mary V. Dearborn sees in Sonya's careful strategizing and her disciplined efforts to get Manning's attention a disturbing military undertone. Her persistence in "stalk[ing] her native-born prey" reminds Dearborn of a series of adventures that have "ironic parallels to a medieval fulfilment-of-the-tasks scheme" (PD 123).

One of Sonya's transgressions consists in charming an aspiring Jewish designer Jaky Solomon (alias Jacques Hollins) into making a suit for her. While fashionable clothes are to satisfy the hunger of the ghetto girl for beauty, they in fact provide an armour-like outfit that she wears on her mission to endear herself to John Manning. For all of Sonya's professed love of beautiful clothes--"the hunger for bread is not half as maddening as the hunger for beautiful clothes"- she shows unflinching pragmatism (ST 23). Attractive clothes are necessary to transform her into an image of purity, innocence, and refined simplicity that Manning sees in her. They are also to help her "mould herself into the form he desired ... [and] act the part he approved" (73). Just as Sonya creates an illusion of refined simplicity by her clothes, she arranges her tenement room in such a way that her rich visitor can only conclude that it "was the setting of a woman of culture and refinement and not of a girl of the tenements" (73).The desire to marry a cultivated and affluent man does not stop Sonya even from getting herself in debt in order to please her man and create an atmosphere of a "tasteful comfort he enjoyed so lightly" (73). Unaware of Sonya's indecent dealings with Honest Abe and her tremendous effort to transform a shabby room into an illusion of a cozy and unassuming apartment, Manning perceives the space as a unique example of unforced, "natural" modesty, innocence, and simplicity. Thus, Manning does not only not see Sonya and East Side for what they are, but he constrains her character within a narrow set of expectations, limiting Sonya to the characteristics he believes she should have. The incongruence between Manning and Sonya is quite easily seen in the description of the furniture Sonya purchases: what she considers a luxury is for Manning an exercise in frugality; her excessive expenditure, her huge financial debt are for him a minimal financial expenditure. The point at which they meet is created on a tremendous imbalance, and the simplicity which impresses John Manning is only a temporary illusion that Sonya creates at the price of great humiliation, dishonesty, and effort. As Sonya herself concludes, "It would have ruined her chance with him if he guessed for a moment the effort, the struggle it had been to meet him on this plane of harmonious beauty" (74). By observing naively how Sonya's attraction and charm lie in her "instinct" to "choose the simple," Manning reduces Sonya to a natural creature, a noble savage who amazes with her natural and inexplicable powers (73-4). Sonya, on the other hand, upholds such a view of herself because the mystery in which Manning envelops her conceals her devious ways, perceived by her friend Gittel as ruthless, calculated, and uncompromising scheming. Moreover, Sonya sees Manning's comment about her instinctive nature as a compliment and a confirmation of her ability to create the desired effect of "spontaneous beauty and simplicity" (74). Sonya creates herself in the desired tradition of a noble savage, an instinctual woman who knows how to "please her man" (74). The self-fashioning of Sonya Vrunsky as a refined tenement ingenue unaware of corruption around her is too fragile a cover for her deviousness: she teases her landlord into painting her room by promising sexual favors and she pawns furniture at Honest Abe's, hoping that, as Mrs. Manning, she will easily repay the debt. Her reckless behavior and unscrupulous investing in her future as a married woman are to be perceived as a sign of Sonya's consuming love and extraordinary determination to succeed in marrying John Manning. However. Sonya's strategies of empowerment-manipulative flaunting of sexuality. scheming use of male desire, calculated projection of an imagined persona-not only construct her as a fatal seductress and earn her a millionaire husband, but they also indicate her profound misreading of the Salome figure she continually invokes. In Sonya's rendition of the legend, a working-class Salome is a ruthless and vengeful woman whose transgressive behaviour equals the immensity of her fervour to rise from the ghetto. In other words, the actions of an ethnic femme fatale remain deeply rooted in and justified by the social context out of which she comes. Sadly enough, in her attempt to undermine the stereotype of rustic, traditional, uncouth ghetto womanhood and create an image of a more emancipated and worldly female immigrant, Sonya inadvertently perpetuates both the male stereotype of an unscrupulous, demonic aspiring woman and the American prejudice against immigrants as treacherous and deceptive people. In order not to turn Sonya into a representative ghetto girl and in order to indicate different ethical standards within the immigrant community itself, Yezierska offsets Sonya's vampish behaviour by her friend Gittel's romantic notion of "love in silence1'(94). Gittel's voice of reason accuses Sonya of aggressive, "dishonest scheming" in her trapping of John Manning. She is a "heartless Salome" not caring whether she gets her man "dead or alive" (95).14Gittel reproaches Sonya for perverting and betraying traditional ways of loving on which they were brought up and for reversing in a simplistic manner gender power structure, which has proven to be antithetical to love: "Just as in old times the cavemen used their clubs to beat the women into submission, so you vamped poor Manning with your crazy flattery" (94). Unlike her friend Gittel, though, Sonya does not perceive her relentless pursuit of happiness as dishonesty; rather, she sees her "deviant" actions as a part of her new right to happiness afforded to her by her new, American, citizenship. She also perceives her actions as extraordinary sacrifices that she, a woman in love, has to endure and that her future husband would rightly see as an expression of her boundless love. Unrestrained by the American tradition to which she, after all, does not belong, Sonya feels free to apply the adopted American credos of individualism, self-reliance, and aggressive pursuit of destiny to her fate as an immigrant woman. Moreover, in a most unusual way, she fuses her perception of the American character with a sense of romance, hoping that her audacious manner would make her desirable and present her in the most American way.

It is, however, questionable to what extent the aggressive sexual behaviour of an immigrant woman can be seen as typically "American." At best, it indicates an idiosyncratic interpretation of American values that allows Yezierska's character to couch her dishonest dealings and "ethnic" persistence in the context of the ruthless competitiveness encouraged in America at the beginning of the century. The implication that successful assimilation is measured by the ability of newcomers to reproduce and internalize the values of modern America may not entirely explain and validate Yezierska's character. The difference of an ethnic heroine who fuses the masculine, "American," drive with her struggle against the patriarchy of the immigrant ghetto aligns her rather with American feminists of the beginning of the century and with their efforts to redefine American femininity. An unusual blend of the old and the new, the American and the "foreign," Yezierska's character bravely challenges gender stereotypes of the time: she actively pursues her love interest, assumes responsibility for her happiness, empowers herself by orientalist images, and turns her eroticized difference into a means of gender strategizing. Such behavior in an ethnic heroine aligns Yezierska's novel with efforts to change the perceptions of American femininity. The difference and unruliness, the disobedience of an excessive and loud, if somewhat unsophisticated, immigrant text actively contributes to the efforts of early American feminists to mark a change from traditional, premodern American womanhood to its urban and modern counterpart. In other words, although neither closely connected nor directly inspired by the work of feminist groups, Yezierska's marginal text should be considered as a dissenting voice that contributes to the destabilization of old perceptions of American femininity.

What brings together Yezierska's novel and American feminists of the time is their reliance on the mythology and topography of the East as a strategy for the empowerment and representation of the New American Woman. The departure of the New Woman from her traditional domestic role, exaggerated in Yezierska's ethnic heroine, needs a geography of the new and unfamiliar world to mark the women's newly-found sense of independence and sexual liberation. Coined in 1894 in England, the term "the New Woman" came to stand for the image of an energetic and independent woman defiant of the constraining Victorian norms of femininity (Rita Felski 146). Elaine Showalter has added to the existing definition of the New Woman a strong insistence on independent sexuality and an opposition to the widespread societal belief that marriage is the woman's only option for a fulfilling life (38). Showalter also adds that the particularity of the New American Woman was her university education, sexual independence, as well as her ability to provoke "intense hostility and fear as she seemed to challenge male supremacy in art, the profession, and the home" (38). Threatening the established (im)balance of power of gender roles, the New Woman was seen as an anarchic political figure, who could destabilize and significantly undermine male position and the society in general (38). Thus, it does not surprise one that the public appearance and growing attention given to the New Woman created great controversy in the media. An editorial in The Ladies Home Journal (1920), a popular women's magazine of the time, stated that men were dismissing the New American Woman for her strange, incomprehensible qualities. She was "impossibly bold, brazen, independent, mannerless, [and] immodest" (Gaylyn Studlar 491). The New Woman was characterized by "self-absorption, fearlessness, unbound imagination and her often monstrous daring," and she was ultimately accused of becoming "mannish, indifferent to home and children, egotistical, avid of power, irreligious, iconoclastic and altogether a most distressing problem to solve" (quoted in Studlar 491). The negative qualities of the New Woman that clashed with the norms of traditional femininity and threatened men's social position found an expression in the widespread, often Hollywood-manufactured, fascination with the Orient in the early years of the twentieth century. As Sumiko Higashi points out, film orientalism was an aesthetic expression of male anxiety about the New Woman and fear of the woman's lavish economic expenditure, hungry consumer desire, and growing sexual appetite (Studlar 490). Gaylyn Studlar acknowledges the validity of Higashi's argument in her article "'Out-Salomeing Salome': Dance, the New Woman, and Fan Magazine Orientalism," but focuses instead on women's appropriation of the East as a means of female empowerment.l5 Studlar argues that faced with negative criticism and the denial of the qualities of the New Woman, the women of the time resorted to images of the sensual, alluring, and dangerously unfamiliar Oriental alterity and hailed it as an effective way of expressing their new, emancipated selves. As she puts it,

if women of the late 1910s and 20s were unsure of their equality, the retreat to orientalism as a site of intensified sensual experience and symbolic otherness permitted the temporary, identificatory assumption of an orientalized subjectivity associated with an economy of libidinal as well as textual excess. (506)

Moreover, Studlar writes that a part of the appeal of the Orient was that it provided a cover for the equally mysterious release of repressed female sexuality and "experiential (orgiastic) intensity" (506).The Orient also appealed by its "aesthetic and emotional intensity and by the fact that it provided comfortable distanciation from everyday reality" (506).

It is no wonder that Yezierska's heroine feels comfortable exploiting the foreign potential in herself and relying on invoking oriental images. Sonya Vrunsky turns her difference into a virtue; she orientalizes and mystifies her sexuality as a powerful tool to gain her "trophy" husband. She clearly sees herself as a fiery antithesis to her husband, and she describes their marriage as a fusion of the races between "the oriental and the Anglo-Saxon," a brave attempt to "find a common language" in a society that is racially, culturally, and economically divided (ST 132). Sonya's image of herself as a ruthless Salome allows her to disregard constraining gender roles on which she was brought up. Her aggressive sexuality and sexual insatiability break down gender, ethnic, and racial binarisms and forefront her body as a means of communication across socially constructed barriers. The metaphor of decapitation of John the Baptist she so freely invokes indicates the capturing of her prey, the "catching" of an American millionaire in an immigrant woman's web of desires and aspirations. Moreover, it indicates the beheading of an austere, ascetic, rational, and controlling male tradition and a simultaneous discharge of the female sphere of senses, jouissance, opulence, and excess. It is in these very terms of alterity and abundance that women at the turn of the century chose to represent their new sense of self. Sonya's undisputable difference-her heightened awareness of her body and calculated use of it-is an instance of a provoking foreign sexuality that contrasted the existing codes of sexual conduct in America. It contributed to the Ill efforts of proto-feminist groups to advocate the image of the New Woman and challenge the gender stereotypes of the time. Magdalena J. Zaborowska points out in a rare study of female immigrant narratives, How We Found America: Reading Gender Through East European immigrant Narratives, that immigrant women in turn-of-the-century America, who were brought up in a "different morality and alien sexual conduct," were considered "loose" and their behavior disgraceful and vulgar (46). The ease with which immigrant women accepted their sexuality was severely criticised even by many puritanical American women who mistook corporeality for repulsive immorality (46). Such a cultural misunderstanding Zaborowska explains by arguing that the closeness of living conditions in poverty and drab immigrant quarters accounts for a different construction of sexuality in immigrant women. She writes:

What the host culture took for signs of promiscuity and lack of restraint in ethnic women were usually traditional ways of sexual conduct. Many peasant women, for example, who became factory workers in America were very open about their sexuality because they had grown up in close quarters and in big families where a girl was witness to nudity, sex, and birth from her earliest years. (46)

The foreign sexuality of immigrant women--her recklessness and dubious morality, consuming passions-were soon taken as a basis for their character traits. Those women were seen as irrational, primitive, unable to control their animalistic drives or check their excessive craving for commodities, and lavish economic expenditure. Yezierska's character embodies all of the stereotypes: she craves nice clothes, she is involved in dishonest dealings with a pawnbroker and her landlord, her passionate abandonment gets her into a debt she cannot pay off, and she turns her courtship into an obsessive battleground. There are instances in which even Sonya herself remarks in her highly exaggerated language that her love for John Manning is merely a "delirium of the senses," a "driving madness" that transforms her into "a driven thing, lost in space, tossing and whirling in a void of pain" (ST 96). The overlapping of sexual and economic markers of femininity Gaylyn Studlar explains as a male fear of being swallowed up, eaten by socially ambitious and hypersensual women whose aggressive sexuality endangers male dominance, consumes male integrity, and highlights male impotence (501). Similarly, in her discussion of Emile Zola's Nana, Rita Felski notices that a growing consumerist ethic among women at the turn of the century brought about the fear of the destabilization of traditional social and moral norms (78). Or, as Felski puts it, perceived in the sphere of sexual relations, "the yearning of the desiring woman manifests itself in an endless 'consumption' of lovers, none of whom can satisfy [the woman's] unfocused yearning for gratification and plenitude" (78). The "foreign" notions of excess, insatiable sexual appetite, and unstable "libidinal economy" allow the female immigrant to challenge patriarchal codes of both her ethnic upbringing and American society and become a significant contributor to the unconventionality and unruliness of the modern, New Woman (Felski 77). Sonya Vrunsky perceives her intensity in positive terms and is able to see herself as a determined woman who succeeds in living out the dream of many female immigrants--a marriage to an affluent man outside of her ethnic community. Such a marriage brings a desired social status, liberates the woman from the constraints of the ghetto patriarchy, and creates an identity separate from the amorphous immigrant crowd in which she grew up. Sonya's story is one of triumph accamplished against all odds; it begins as a story of a non-person, drowned in a ghetto mass, an immigrant from the tenements determined to make her presence visible and mark her existence in separation from the immigrant crowd. At first it was custom-designed clothes that allows Sonya to express her individuality, for she refuses to "put clothes over my body that strangle me by their ready-madeness" (ST 23). Later, as Mrs. Manning, Sonya recognizes her sudden transformation into an individual when she says, "It was a delirious feeling of triumph that she, Sonya, only a year ago a Hester Street nobody, had in one leap made herself the mistress of the Manning house" (ST 120). Therefore, Sonya's story is the one of a liberated, determined, strong-willed, and successful ethnic woman, and it exemplifies the position of an immigrant woman in the 1920s in America as well as contributes to the changing perceptions of American femininity.

It is in particular the figure of the dancing Salome that provides a useful link between the ethnic woman and the New American Woman. Its ambiguous image indicates both the celebration of freedom and the awareness of discipline to which women were to subordinate themselves to achieve even imaginary freedom. In a culture influenced by American concert dance, vaudevilles, lsadora Duncan, the Ballets Russes, and Hollywood versions of the Orient, dance, a sensual ritualized movement, becomes an important signifier of the change in women. It offers a fantasy of an escape from confining bourgeois domesticity: the woman is situated in the realm of pleasure and liberated from her role as a nurturer and caregiver. In Studlar's view, dance functions as an "ideal symbolic merger between middle-class female gentility and contemporary ideals of feminine freedom from bodily and imaginative constraints" (497). It ultimately allows women to create other, transformative identities "convergent with those qualities of the New Woman that disturbed social conservatives" (491). Embraced and celebrated by the female community, dance is, according to Studlar, a liberating activity that releases repression and acts out fantasies of female freedom with "pagan abandon" (491). Paganism, unconsciousness, hysteria, and marginality are the notions frequently associated with female dance, and Felicia McCaren explores them in her article about the American dancer, Loie Fuller. While she writes that dance, as a form of non-verbal communication, is liberating in that it allows the meaning embedded in the body to surface, McCaren also indicates that in the West dance has been perceived in very contrasting ways (748). On the one hand, it is seen as a release of suppressed voices, a transgressive rupture of rational and orderly existence, which is often synonymous with madness, anarchy, and disorder. On the other hand, the elaborate and constraining rules of many dances become a manifestation of order exercised, either through individual or social control of the body (748). As McCaren puts it, dance can be seen as a mediation of the physical excess, a choreographed repression of the emotional and irrational, so that it ultimately merges Ifthe apparent freedom of movement with tremendous physical discipline" (753). Janet Wolff similarly writes in Resident Alien that dance is an ambiguous metaphor and that one has to be careful how to use it in feminist cultural criticism and theory. Wolff acknowledges the appeal of the metaphor of dance, which stands for "an elegant, creative non-linear movement of thought," but she argues against the tendency to see that kind of thinking as "uncontrolled, natural, pre-cultural and/or intrinsically subversive or progressive" (82)- Although Yezierska's text, itself a breathless, energetic body in motion, does not deal explicitly with dance imagery, dance is implied as a complex and conflicting metaphor for the social rise of an unruly female immigrant. Dance in Salome of the Tenements is, however, not a stereotypical metaphor for feminine grace, but a contradictory notion that presents Sonya both as a prototype of the New American Woman and as a female immigrant deeply inscribed by patriarchy. The dance macabre of Sonya Vrunsky, an ethnic heroine who seduces and symbolically "beheads" an American millionaire by "making" him fall in love with her and trapping him in a marriage, is certainly a racially, socially, and sexually transgressive act, engineered by a powerful and ambitious woman. Dance allows Sonya to imagine herself as a liberated and determined woman, who breezes across social and racial barriers into marital safety. Sonya's success, her briefly becoming a Mrs. Manning, leaves an impression of an effortless drifting into short romance, a movie-like happiness, tightly closed in eternal love. The image of dance as a carefree movement, however, enables Sonya to camouflage the sad fact that her dance out of the tenements is not the romantic escape she would like it to be, but a carefully planned mission into which she invests all her time, energy, and money. Sonya's choreographed behavior, her dance of upward mobility merges the illusion of ease with hard work and discipline as well as it brings together the high and the low, the gracefulness of artistic and affluent American circles and the hard work and difficult living in the tenements. Similarly, Sonya is nothing of a romantic movie heroine: not only does her marriage not last, but the ease with which she achieves it is only a self-created illusion that conceals her fear that John Manning will discover the effort she invested into becoming his wife. So, despite the fact that Sonya charms her landlord, the designer Jacques Hollins, and the pawn broker, Honest Abe, in order to blind John Manning with her false simplicity, she realizes that her social dance is only a facade for the tremendous discipline to which she subjects her body and temperament. Sonya's disciplined body, her Salome-like dance, helps place a sophisticated and prestigious modernist art in the marginal immigrant culture and despicable life of the tenements. The biblical figure of Salome, a central image of turn-of-the-century European art, singles out an immigrant woman, an anonymous newcomer lost in the sea of crowded tenements. It also draws attention to her self-fashioning, self-stylization. Sonya's battling against social obstacles in order to win the heart of an American millionaire indicates the artifice of her self-created, contrived persona that helps her rise above poverty and social inferiority. The Salome image in Yezierska's text is significant in many ways: it empowers the heroine, stresses her Oriental mystique and transgressive power as an ethnic femme fatale, and draws attention to her liberated immigrant body which she, paradoxically enough, disciplines in order to enter mainstream American society. To a great extent, Yezierska's character helps define and exemplify the New American Woman: she breaks social, racial, and sexual barriers, and she feminizes American values of independence, self-reliance, and initiative. Sonya is liberated in a sense that she is free to act on her desires, to marry outside her race, and to escape the patriarchal world of her Old World parents. However, while her ethnicity triumphs, her sexuality remains simply a means to leave paternal supervision and "liberate" herself in spousal unity. Sonya's success as an ethnic heroine, her American Dream achieved by exemplary confidence, vigor, and ambition, fails to emancipate her sexually. The desire for a comfortable life with a privileged man and a desire for a romantic love, the ultimate American luxury, remain firmly grounded in the hierarchy of race and gender stereotypes which Sonya, unfortunately, does not outgrow. Thus, the marriage to a rich American man may signify a triumph for the female immigrant, who finds a way out of the ghetto, but, in fact, it represents only a sugar-coated replacement for the constricting familial and communal bonds from which she was trying to escape. It also reinforces the heroine's !nferiority as an ethnic American and a woman. Dance in Yezierska's text, therefore, exists as a conflicting image whose gracefulness and charm simply simulate the "unbearable" ease of living in modern America and obliterate hard work and energy invested into the creation of an effortless and elegant American living.

When Salome Meets Pocahontas

The images of the Orient that emphasize the power of Yezierska's heroine, a provocative and irresistible woman, an animalistic and barbaric femme fatale stalking her prey, are eventually transformed into those of Sonya Vrunsky's dependence and submissiveness. If Sonya initially beautifies and disciplines her electrical and hysterical immigrant body in order to seduce John Manning, she ultimately offers its fertility and exuberance for the salvation of her world-weary, impotent, and emotionally repressed husband. While Sonya's use of the metaphor of Salome indicates her empowerment and participation in the widespread tendency to orientalize the New Woman, her misreading of the myth inadvertently releases the most traditional racial and gender stereotypes. Although Sonya initially prides herself on being an engineer of her social rise, she comes to think of herself as a submissive wife, a rejuvenator, and a bearer of the new American race. Sonya confuses her freedom from the patriarchy and conservatism of the immigrant ghetto with happiness and closure that a marriage to an established American man brings. It is, therefore, Sonya's internalized racial and gender inferiority that tames the stylized and self-willed figure of the fatal Salome and redefines it in terms of biology, nature, and reproductive power. The same Oriental characteristics that empower Salome ultimately disempower her and cast her into another mythic role-the one of the "sacrificial bride," or Pocahontas, as Mary V. Dearborn calls it (Philip Young in Dearborn PD 125). In both cases, either as a powerful and fatal Salome or a submissive, "uncivilized," and instinctual Pocahontas, the image of an aspiring immigrant woman is not more than a myth, or rather a melange of contradictory and incongruent myths. As such, it indicates the difficulty that American women faced both in defining the new womanhood and representing the life of an urban immigrant woman in turn- of-the-century America. As an instance of dubious transgression, the Salome image encourages the notion of radical difference, crucial to Sonya Vrunsky's definition of herself and her marriage. It reinforces a set of racial and gender polarities within which the love story of the immigrant woman unfolds. While the Orient and Salome are exotic, seductive, irrational, lush, and heathen, the American and male traditions are rational, frugal, moral, benevolent, Christian, and just. The sharp contrast of values is essential for Yezierska's heroine because it allows Sonya to package herself as a mysterious and sensuous foreigner who seduces an inhibited American millionaire. At the same time, the intoxicating difference gradually becomes the foundation of Sonya's demise. The difference that initially suits Sonya's designs ultimately leads to a reinscription, rather than redefinition, of traditional femininity. Sonya's insistence on her difference intensifies the rigidity of racial and gender stereotypes and reinforces the hierarchy within which her alterity exists as an inferiority, a lack, and a threat that needs to be eliminated.16 As Sonya Vrunsky makes clear throughout the text, the marital union, which, sadly enough, represents the pinnacle of her aspirations, is based on the jarring contrast between the commonness of "the flaming East Side girl" and the nobility of "her Anglo-Saxon saint" (ST 39). Sonya's emotional intensity, her warmth, directness, and spontaneity gain in importance only as compensatory values for John Manning's "rigid training," "anaemic conventions" (37),and his legacy of "dead ancestors" that have stifled the love of life in him (35). Sonya is a "primitive woman" (35), a self-defined "wild savage," who has a rare potential to change and emotionally ennoble Manning (37). Her excess, her unique ability to provide a "cataclysmic love," is the only possible cure for the man "bound in with centuries of inhibitions" (36). Sonya's exuberance provokes even a highly melodramatic and comical confession from Manning, a rare moment of self- realization that he is a "puritan whose fathers were afraid to trust experience... [and] ... bound by our possessions of property, knowledge and tradition" (37). And the desired change in Manning takes place: "Till now, he had been sterile-- impotent. This woman of the people was the divine finger of God toward the realization of dreams of service as vast as humanity and its problems" (38). As Sonya sees it, her marriage to John Manning advances American assimilationist policy and sends out a strong message of "global" proportions: '@Theircombined personalities would prove a titanic power that would show the world how the problems of races and classes, the rich and the poor, educated and uneducated, could be solved" (38). It is not difficult to see in a love story that unifies the extremes how the ethnic woman functions as an active progenitor of happiness and change in the decadent man exhausted by social conventions and burdened by the weight of tradition. Sonya represents the freshness and exuberance that would change Manning's life, and her special charm radiates with simplicity, directness, uncultivated and untamed primitivism. She is an idea, or, in Manning's words, a "personification of what I mean," a romantic embodiment of poverty at its most pristine, noble, and simple (74). She is a hope of salvation for the world-weary millionaire, "the stimulation he needed," a proof of his utopian desires for a world free of corruption and artifice (75). Manning sees in Sonya a hope for his resurrection, a romanticized version of a pure and pristine woman whose lack of education, manners, and traditional upbringing is forgiven since she is morally and spiritually superior to the ladies of his society. Rather than a complex human being, Sonya exists for Manning merely as a representation, an image of freshness and change. It is her poverty, the fact that she exists outside of consumer culture, economy, and the circulation of money that testifies to her uncorrupted spirituality and sexuality. As Manning explains, "You represent poverty-toil, and it is beautiful, because unveiled by any artifice" (74; italics mine). Manning's search for honest and trusting human relations which, he believes, exist only among "primitive" and uncorrupted people, takes him to the immigrant ghettos of New York, where he runs a settlement project and, paradoxically enough, devotes himself to the eradication of poverty, what he believes to be the very essence of morality and goodness in people. Sonya, on the other hand, is equally blinded, for she fails to see that it is Manning's world-weariness rather than genuine interest in the lives of immigrants that makes him a benefactor on the East Side. Impressed by what she believes is his benevolence and good nature, Sonya glorifies his philanthropic work and scoffs at the designer Hollins' cynical remark that Manning is one of those idle rich men for whom "playing with poverty is more exciting than knocking golf balls" (30). It is Sonya's "hero-worship" and undivided support that energize Manning and endear her to him. Sonya brings all the energy and appeal of a newcomer into her relationship with Manning, and she unselfishly offers her rejuvenating power. She not only accommodates herself to Manning's idea of her as an unspoilt, natural woman, but she also fervently believes that it is her destiny as a woman to nurture and refresh her man and be a source of inspiration and stimulation for one exhausted by tradition, civilization, and social obligations. Thus, Sonya internalizes Manning's patriarchal vision of gender roles and eventually becomes complicit in reinforcing her own inferiority. As it progresses, Yezierska's text gradually degenerates from an assertive, potentially feminist text that strives to outline the changing notions of femininity, to an almost stereotyped female immigrant story of miscegenation. Within the tradition of the "huddled masses," or turn-of-the-century immigrants, Magdalena J. Zaborowska distinguishes between the male immigrant story of economic success and the female one of "miscegenation" in which marriage to an affluent American man figures as the woman's utmost accomplishment (1 9). While a man measures his success in material terms and by his ability to provide for his family, the accomplishment of the female immigrant in America is determined by the social status, reputation, and economic power of her husband. This distinction enables Zaborowska to argue that immigrant women changed the established tradition of a feminized vision of America "as a woman-mother- lover" and substituted for it the myth of an "idealized WASP male" (32). Zaborowska writes that a "mentor-lover replaces the virg in-land myth, since his image embodies the male-dominated host culture that the immigrant [woman] desires to enter" (32). In many ways, a woman's sense of inferiority, constituted and ingrained in the Old World and in the immigrant ghetto, is perpetuated in the New World interracial marriage, which only enhances her economic and social dependence on her husband (46).

It is in this context of the reproducible marginalization of immigrant women that the social rise of Sonya Vrunsky has to be read. Sonya's orientalism is undeniably used as a means of empowerment, but it equally serves as an indication of her tremendous, although masterfully disguised, vulnerability and ingrained sense of inferiority. The power structure of an interracial marriage between an "oriental," or rather orientalized, woman and an Anglo-Saxon man mirrors the one between the ideological constructs of the East and the West. As Edward Said claims, the West, meaning Europe in Said's argument, needed the freshness, the charm and mystery of the Orient as a catalyst for its rebirth (Orientalism 11 5).17 Similarly, in her book Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women 's Writings, Postcolonial Theory (19 9 3), J ul ia V. Emberley sees the Orient as a rejuvenator of the West. Discussing the relations between the First and the Third Worlds and the symbolic debt the First World owes to the Third World, Emberley writes that since modernism "[s]ignifications of the 'Third World' have served as a vessel of 'otherness,' intrigue, curiosity, and exotica to the depleting resources of a First World subjectivity" (5). In Re- Orienting Western Ferninisms (1 998), Chilla Bulbeck expands on Emberley's argument and points out that the Orient provided a "spice" that could enliven the "dull mainstream white culture" and supply a "spiritual wholeness that whites lack (47). Bulbeck further draws on Jennifer Lawn, who argues that by acknowledging the need for alterity and drawing attention to their own lack, "members of a hegemonic group ostensibly abject themselves of an idealized other, while diverting the terms of the debate from material conditions of oppression to their own psychic malaise" (Lawn in Bulbeck 47). Such an abjection of the other, as Bulbeck believes, masks the obvious power relations so that "we" become spiritually, if not economically, inferior to the other (47). The masked power constellation Bulbeck discusses is of great importance for Yezierska's text. It allows John Manning to abject himself from his stifling tradition, expose his own deficiency, and turn his emotional scarcity. his spiritual malady, into a prioritized site of lack that needs to be attended to. It also encourages complacency and reinscription of patriarchal codes in the ethnic heroine, who slips "naturally" into the familiar female role-she sacrifices her needs and devotes herself to nurturing her man. Manning's brave exposure of his lack displaces marital difference from class and economic discrepancies to ones of race and gender. This in turn validates Sonya's difference and its compensatory value. It also subordinates Sonya's bodily and material needs- she wants sexual gratification, marriage, economic security-to Manning's "psychic complexity." The mind vs. body split hierarchy only confirms that his problems are much more substantial than Sonya's earthly ambitions. The exemplary interracial marriage between an immigrant woman and an affluent American man, as suggested by Yezierska's novel, is to promote the melting pot policy of the time and encourage easier assimilation of newcomers. Moved by his love, Manning ecstatically exclaims, "Are we not the mingling of races? The oriental mystery and the Anglo-Saxon clarity that will pioneer a new race of men?" (ST 108). Manning's comment is undoubtedly heavily steeped in essentialism and eugenics. Similarly, Sonya sees herself as a revitalizing energy, and she generously offers reproductive power in order to heal her emotionally exhausted husband. However, instead of the expected bliss and Manning's conversion into a warmer and happier man, Sonya feels increasingly stifled by the world to which she so desperately wanted to belong. She comes to see herself as an "East Side savage forced suddenly into the strait-jacket of American civilizationf' (132). She is an unpredictable "dynamite bomb," and Manning represents ''the walls of tradition constantly menaced by threatening explosions" (132). After living some time with Manning, she realizes that instead of loving her husband, she has been "intoxicating herself with his delusions" of philanthropy and with hopes that she can cure his ennui (138). His reserve is no longer appealing and their differences no longer complementary, and Sonya concludes that "just as fire and water cannot fuse, neither could her Russian Jewish soul fuse with the stolid, the unimaginative, the invulnerable thickness of this New England puritan" (147). The novel consequently ends with Sonya and Manning parting ways, and with Sonya finding a "real" love in a small but comforting circle of ethnic sameness-she falls in love with Jacques Hollins, the designer whose clothes made her feel beautiful and powerful.

It is this unusual and contradictory blend of female empowerment, orientalized femininity, racial complementarity, and flawed romance that allows Mary V. Dearborn to read Yezierska's text as symptomatic of the Pocahontas myth. In fact, Dearborn suggests that the myth of Pocahontas be considered a generic story for female immigrant narratives. As she points out, Pocahontas, the "first American ethnic woman," stands for one of the founding myths of America and brings to our attention an ethnically mixed marriage between a white male and exoticized ethnic female (PD 5-1 0). Our knowledge of Pocahontas is also veiled in mystery: since she does not leave any authentic traces, her silence turns the story of an ethnic woman into a representation that reaches us through the mediation of the colonizing white men, the brief narrative of captain John Smith and various unauthentic pictorial representations.18 Pocahontas' story of interracial marriage draws attention to three important things: it brings out differences between an ethnic woman and her husband, indicates a tension between the woman's sexuality and her ethnicity, and treats the woman's difference as her inferiority and lack. Pocahontas is a brave predecessor of ethnic heroines; she is a fiery, passionate, resourceful ethnic woman ready to sacrifice her own tradition and submit sexually and culturally to the superior white man (10). Dearborn reads Pocahontas' story as one of female sexuality trapped in the "prison of ethnicity"; in other words, ethnic inferiority is internalized and projected onto a gendered one (10). As a result, the ethnic woman finds it "natural" to sacrifice her difference and her cultural heritage for the sake of a reserved and rational American. However, America's original fairy tale is even further flawed, for the American man, initially drawn to the ethnic woman's difference, ultimately finds her alterity excessive and abandons her for the very characteristics that he initially found attractive (10). In Pocahontas' case, she saves the life of captain John Smith and falls in love with him, but after Smith rejects her, she settles for a marriage with John Rolfe, a man of lower stature, who consoles her and provides stability (10). The obvious displacement of affection onto another man Dearborn sees as a "big aesthetic flaw" in the story of Pocahontas, but she also points out that despite the obvious asymmetry, the myth has been embraced in its ambivalence and preserved until the present time (97). Out of the many parallels that can be drawn between Anzia Yezierska's novel and the myth of Pocahontas, silence is certainly one. It is not a characteristic of Sonya Vrunsky, or Yezierska's novel itself. Sonya may share some features with Pocahontas-she is intense, emotional, strong-but she is neither quiet nor passive. Instead, she is noisy, direct, unsophisticated, annoying, and obsessed with the man who, she believes, is ideal for her. However, despite her determination and courage, Sonya is also submissive and she succumbs to the idea of the superiority of her husband's civilization, to his idealism and unrealistic visions of her and their marriage. What most aligns Sonya's story to the Pocahontas myth is the notion of difference that loses its initial appeal and becomes the grounds on which the white man, Manning, rejects her. After Manning discovers Sonya's debts and artifice-the creation of charming simplicity amidst poverty-he accuses her of dishonesty, of "plotting and scheming," of all the sins of the women of his society whose love interests were driven by greed for money and power. The discovery of Sonya's "dishonest" past, or rather Manning's sudden awareness of the reality of her life, triggers off an avalanche of prejudices and stereotypes that he has suppressed since meeting her. He accuses her of failing to be the last hope for pure and unspoilt femininity, and his accusations turn Sonya's extraordinary characteristics into their exact opposite-impurity, dishonesty, corruption, lying. In many ways, Sonya is guilty of shattering Manning's illusions about womanhood, so he punishes her by stripping off the aura of difference that he himself attributed to her. In the end, Sonya becomes again "one of the Ghetto millions," a true representative of her irrational and untrustworthy race (ST 41). The special charm of the ethnic heroine is exhausted, and the characteristics that made her so attractive to an affluent American man become the very same ones that repulse him. Sonya's exotic appeal is turned into a dangerous and repulsive taboo and ultimately rejected.

The tension between exoticism and taboo has been discussed by critics like Dorothy M. Figueira and Roger Celestin. In The Exotic: A Decadent Quest (1994). Figueira examines exoticism through Gadamer's hermeneutical concept of Bildung. Believing that exoticism is based on the principle of recognition, she argues that the appeal of exotica is in that it allows a moment of self- estrangement. Moreover, in the process of self-estrangement, the striving subject completes the circle and recognizes that the initial strangeness is an aspect of the Self; therefore, self-estrangement becomes a necessary aspect of self-recognition (12). Figueira singles out in particular "world-weary" people or "those who have lost faith" since for them exotica is especially appealing: they "seek a new system of belief in the exotic, they travel farther from home than the ordinary seeker for Self or Truth" (13). In the context of Western adventures in and explorations of the East, Figueira notes that travels into the Other may have resulted from a desire of the declining West to rejuvenate itself and search for the "spiritual or aesthetic vitality and elan of the East" (14). But, reaching out for alterity has a circular structure; the search for the Other ultimately confirms and validates the safe return home (14). Thus, the exotic is a paradoxical and "conflicting contestation of the existing order," and the "subversive character of the exotic" that keeps reemerging is continually written back into the established order whose boundaries it destabilizes (17). Roger Celestin argues similarly to Figueira and sees exoticism as a way for the subject of a powerful, dominant culture to counter that culture in the very process of returning to it (3). Exoticism allows one to step outside of one's subjectivity or home, but the movement out only results in the "inevitable negotiation with a dominant discourse, with Home" (4). The alterity of exotica functions as a catalyst that exposes the strained dialogue one has with home; "it is as if this extreme foreignness required a rhetorical and stylistic surplus, a straining that simultaneously emphasized the workings of this particular mode of representation" (4). The attraction to exoticism puts the desiring subject in a precarious situation: the subject is torn between "the gravitational pull of Home, the Same, the familiar, the dominant, and the individual subject's dissident desire for another place, an outside--an outside that simultaneously embodies desire and destabilizes the desiring subject'' (4). The pull outside that forces one to leave or escape Home creates a rift between an individual and a culture, and at the point where the rift becomes dangerous, one has to either step out of the culture and follow the exotic or denounce it (2). It is this moment of decisiveness that is important not only for exoticism, but also for female immigrant narratives, including Anzia Yeziers ka's novel, in which exoticism plays such a prominent role. At the point at which the exoticized, or orientalized, ethnic heroine becomes too alienating and too subversive, she has to be sacrificed. The ethnic woman's tempting foreignness is projected as negative-her vivaciousness turns into hysteria, freshness into primitivism, passion into irrationality-and for the sake of preserving the peace and stability of the world of the domineering male figure, the woman's exotic appeal is turned into a taboo and ultimately rejected. The love story of a poor immigrant woman and a rich American man replicates the workings of exoticism, and once the initial hunger for difference and self-estrangement is satisfied, the interracial marriage bound to build a new American race collapses under the burden of cross-cultural misunderstanding. As a result, both parties retreat to the safety of their own worlds. In the case of Yezierska's novel, John Manning remains within the safe walls of his traditional, although unsatisfying, upbringing, while Sonya Vrunsky finds satisfaction in her career as a designer, decides to live independently, and falls in love with Jacques Hollins, an aspiring young designer whose commitment to work and persistence have helped him make his way out of the tenements.

The end of Yezierska's novel offers a firm closure: it rejects difference as an invitation to the unknown and establishes the characters in the close and safe circles of their ethnic, cultural, and religious sameness. Belonging to the genre of sentimental novels, Yezierska's text complies with the requirements of the genre and ends with a sudden and quite implausible, turn of events.lg Ridden with guilt, John Manning "(re)discovers" his love for Sonya, feels ashamed of letting her go, and begs for her affection. In a role reversal that follows, he becomes a "savage East Sider" hungry for love and Sonya becomes a powerful and proud Salome strong enough to revenge the man who let her down, humiliated her, and destroyed her illusions about upper-class people whose company she sought (ST 183). After Sonya rejects him, Manning retreats to his world while Sonya makes ambitious plans for a trip to Paris and devotes herself to building a promising business partnership with Hollins. The victorious ending of Yezierska's moral fable confirms Sonya's belief that love and passionate abandon are the values to be cherished. The novel leaves the reader with an impression of Sonya's superiority: she is able to reject without remorse the weeping American man for whom she was once ready to sacrifice everything-to even "pluck the moonbeams out of the moon" (107). Yezierska's novel thus ends with a celebration of the courage of an ethnic woman capable of rejecting the world of affluence, romance, and luxurious American living. The impact of such an ending on a primarily ethnic and working- class audience was twofold. The novel allowed the audience on the very margins of society to gain vicarious access to the world of affluent America-its glamorous and expensive lifestyle, gilded interiors, and sophisticated intricacies-and it also sanctioned and affirmed their own social position, since it enabled them to condemn and dismiss the decadent world of American society as morally and ethically inferior.*' Yezierska's novel therefore suggests that the social rise and fall of the ethnic heroine be read affirmatively. Even after being rejected as excessive and threatening by her American husband, the ethnic heroine redeems herself. The final impression of the ethnic woman is one of a triumphant figure who shows rare qualities of maturity, wisdom, and integrity: she is able to dernystify the patriarchal construction of herself as a sacrificial and inferior "other" and find happiness "at home," by embracing her own, socially inferior but comforting and promising, tradition. While Salome of the Tenements, a narrative of empowerment and maturation of a female immigrant, leaves the reader with the impression of triumph, stability, and the peace of mind the ethnic heroine achieves, it is difficult to ignore the undercurrent of conservatism that runs through its final pages. The novel ends with a finclosure, with female desire being contained and tamed in a pragmatic, conventional marriage, and with a rhetoric of stern moral condemnation that criticizes reckless escapades and irrational cravings for the other. Yezierska's text, therefore, reads as a curious blend of progressive and conservative forces that constantly undermine and contradict each other. Salome of the Tenements introduces and promotes protofeminist tendencies of the turn of the century-it helps define the New Woman, empower the ethnic heroine, feminize the myth of a self-created American man, and show female desire as a transgressive force that destabilizes socially created barriers. At the same time, it reinscribes patriarchy and conservatism by sanctioning the ethnic woman's submissiveness to the culture and tradition of her socially and economically superior partner and by perpetuating the myth of an ethnic woman as an elixir of life and inspiration for her world-weary American husband. The presence of such contrasting forces in Yezierska's text can be explained, in part, by the generic conventions of melodrama, which require a dualistic portrayal of the world and sudden, often unconvincing, reversals of fortune. While textual conventions may have shaped the story, the changing notions of American femininity and cultural and geographic displacements of modernity also have to be accounted for in the creation of such a volatile and restless text. Yezierska's novel indicates that a female immigrant in tu rn-of-the- century America is a subject in the making, so slippery and unexplored that it easily slides from the myth that empowers it to the one that traps it into ethnicity and patriarchy. While still depending on myth as a way covertly to address and articulate the changing notions of femininity, the efforts to chart out the emerging subjectivity of an immigrant woman bear the stamp of contradictions underlying modernity itself. Turn-of-the-century society-commodity culture, mass migrations, melting-pot immigration policy-gave rise to the phenomena of ethnic ghettos, economic mobility, jarring clashes of cultures and ideologies, and the appearance of immigrant narratives whose characters strive to balance conflicting and paradoxical aspects of their lives. Therefore, it does not surprise one that Salome of the Tenements yields itself to contradictory interpretations. Nor does it surprise one that Yezierska' novel is both a celebration of new American femininity and a critique of assimilationist politics in turn-of-the-century America. ENDNOTES

1. This represents the essence of Mary V. Dearborn's argument that aligns ethnic heroines to the myth of Pocahontas.

2. Aside from those mentioned above, Yezierska's works include a short story collection Children of Loneliness (1923) and noveis Arrogant Beggars (1927), AII I Could Never Be (1932), Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950).

3. In 1920 Samuel Goldwyn bought the screen rights to Yezierska's collection of short stories Hungry Hearts and made a film of the same title.

4. In Ethnic Passages, Ferraro devotes a chapter to Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers and in the introductory part briefly demystifies the easy social ascendancy that Hollywood wanted to project. A child immigrant renamed "Hattie Mayer," Yezierska and her family lived in the neighborhood of Hester Street, where she "worked the pushcarts and the garment shops, encountering English in the streets, at the factories, and under less-than-ideal conditions of night school" (549). For more biographical detail on Yezierska's growing up on the Lower East Side, see Carol B. Schoen's Anzia Yezierska (1982) or Louise Levitas Henriksen's account of her mother's life entitled Anzia Yezierska: A Writer's Life (19 8 8).

5. Although an affair links Yezierska's name with John Dewey, it was her literary work that led Yezierska to meet Israel Zangwill, the author of the famous play The Melting Pot Her reputation as a female immigrant writer also allowed Yezierska to visit Europe and meet people like George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, and Gertrude Stein (Ferraro EP 547).

6. For additional information about immigrant women and film, see Chapter Ill, "City Lights: Immigrant Women and the Rise of Movies," in Stuart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen's important work on mass-mediated culture of modernity, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (I992).

7. Although these films dealt extensively with the reality of intermarriage, the institution seemed to have remained only a fictitious one. In 1912, the percentage of interracial marriages in America did not exceed 1.17% (Hansen 73).

8. In his article, "The Importance of Salome: Approaches to a Fin de Siecle Theme," Anthony Pym discusses the pervasiveness and importance of the Salorne legend in European art. He even includes a chart of "strong" versions of Salome as they appear in various artists, such as Mallarrne's dramatic poem Herodiade: Scene (1 869), Henri Regnault's (1870) and Gustave Moreau's paintings (1876), Oscar Wilde's play Salome (1894)' Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations to Wilde's play (1894), Richard Strauss's opera Salome (1905), or W.B.Yeats' dance drama A Full Moon in March (1935). See 314-1 5.

9. Arguing that artists have exploited and distorted the events and characters of the original myth of Salome and Herodias "to suit their own psychological, sexual, religious, esthetic, and literary needs," Bettina L. Knapp examines the historical background as well as the earliest versions of the legend and offers an intriguing reading of the relationship between Salome and her mother, Herodias.

10. For more information about the hostiiity between Herodias and John the Baptist, see Knapp's essay, or Cory Reed's article "Dirty Dancing: Salome, Herodias and El retablo de las maravillas," in which she, among other, writes that it was John the Baptist's public denunciation of the Herodias - Herod Antipas's illegal marriage and adultery in the family that turned Herodias against him and resulted in his murder (12).

11. Reading against the Catholic tradition, Reed shows that the Herod family acted as a mediary between the Jews and the Christians and that their authority as a Jewish family was supported by Rome (15). Herod's distrust of the Jews and his fear of their uprising, which led him to imprison John the Baptist, was later recast as a persecution of the Jewish people and reinterpreted as a Christian - Jewish opposition (15).

12. In his introduction to Yezierska's newly-issued novel, Gay Wilentz describes settlement houses and outlines the politics of reformist movements in the late 1890s arid early 1900s. The settlement houses were schools, resembling today's continuing education centers, which educated immigrants about America and equipped them with the tools to succeed. Run and supported by liberal reformers like Jane Addams and John Dewey, and influenced by Social Darwinism and the belief that immigrants could be "'scientifically' trained to adhere to society's demands for social order," the settlement houses were liberal versions of the centres for assimilation of America's ethnically diverse population (xiv). David M. Fine indicates that the settlement house movement encouraged immigrants to retain what was best in their backgrounds and adopt what was best in the native tradition (26). For more information about the settlement house movement and the literature inspired by it, see chapter I[, "Reformers, Americanizers, and Cosmopolitans: The Case for the lmmigrant," in David M. Fine's The City, the Immigrant and American Fiction, 1880-1920. 13. Cappetti examines in particular William Isaac Thomas' sociological study of female deviance and urban maladjustment and focuses on Thomas' book The Unadjusted Girt With Cases and Standpoint for Behavior Analysis (1W3), which followed his co-authored groundbreaking work in urban sociology, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (19 18-20).

14. In her angry outburst, Gittel schematically but quite accurately summarizes the history of Sonya's affair with Manning: "You stop a man in the middle of the street, and begin to call him 'Benefactor of humanity,' 'Savior of your soul,' so he had to invite you to lunch. Then you storm a Fifth Avenue store and get another strange man to dress you up from head to foot like a Delilah; then you vamp a landlord; hypnotize a helpless Honest Abe; turn the whole world upside down to get the setting for your man. And if you did catch on him, it's only because you're a heartless Salome and you don't care if you get your man dead or alive, as long as you get him" (ST 95).

15. As she puts it, Studlar wants to go beyond the definition of Orientalism as a mere "aesthetic counter to vulgar materialism," so she argues that it was the American women of the time who enthusiastically advocated and appropriated Orientalism (491). She particularly discusses the counter-culture of women's fan magazines, which embraced Hollywood Orientalism and turned it into a means of empowerment and escapism.

16. There is an instance in the text which suggests that Sonya's insistence and reaffirmation of difference is to be blamed for the collapse of her interracial marriage and for her lack of belief in her husband's humanist project. Manning reproaches Sonya for her scepticism, her unwillingness to believe that "human love and democratic understanding" can bridge all "social chasms": "Why do you constantly emphasize differences which you and I both know to be false? I am giving up my life to prove my belief in the brotherhood of man," he continued with hurt pride. "The elimination of all artificial barriers is my religion. And you harp constantly on class differences, as if you wanted me to lose faith in my work" (120).

17. It is interesting how relative the markers "East" and "West" appear here. Unlike in Said's argument, in Yezierska's text, it is the orientalized "other Europe" that functions as the "East" in America.

18. Dearborn uses Pocahontas' silence as a powerful metaphor for the artistic output of the ethnic woman, which she sees as a "tradition of mediation" (33). As Dearborn convincingly argues, literary works of immigrant women reach the audience only after the mediation of various male figures-"editors, publishers. friends, authenticatorsw-who leave their traces in female narratives. The male figures "educated, polished, corrected, structured, changed, proofread and eventually alienated from their source" the ethnic woman writer's ideas (33). Therefore, Dearborn sees a patronizing attitude and patriarchal structure not only in the content of the stories but in the editorial work to which the texts of inexperienced ethnic writers were subjected. l nspired by Dearborn's argument, Magdalena Zaborowska reads female immigrant narratives, including Salome of the Tenements, in the "tradition of mediation" and pays special attention to male and editorial interference in the texts of ethnic women.

19. Rita Felski writes about the characteristics of the genre of sentimental novels, such as characters lacking psychological complexity and personifying moral absolutes, a stereotyped and dualistic world, the rhetoric of extremes, of hyperbole, emotionalism, sensationalism, exaggeration (122). In terms of structure, melodramatic novels, and Felski studies in particular the work of the English popular author, Marie Correlli, are characterized by a "chain of dramatic confrontations, rapid exchanges of fortune, implausible coincidences and exotic tableux, concluding in a suspense-filled denouement" (122). The characters are also vaguely outlined; they are often "allegorical and emblematic, embodying quintessential aspects of human nature rather than psychologicaliy individual characters" (122).

20. Rita Felski comes to a similar conclusion in her discussion of the psychological and social functions of the sentimental novels of Marie Correlli. Felski writes: "On the one hand, by reading such novels [the working-class and lower-middle-class readers] could indulge vicariously in those sumptuous commodities, glamorous environments, and aristocratic lifestyles which otherwise remained beyond their reach, partaking in an imaginary experience of luxury and pleasure. On the other hand, the framing of such depictions by a rhetoric of moral condemnation sanctioned their own class position, allowing them to gain comfort from the affirmation of their modest way of life as ethically superior to that of the idle and immoral rich" (124). Chapter Four

Peddling Nostalgia and Performing the Immigrant Condition: Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky

"And where history does not undermine and set traps for itself in such an openly perverse way, it creates this insidious longing to revert. It begets this bastard but pampered child, Nostalgia. How we yearn-how you may one day yearn-to return to that time before history claimed us, before things went wrong. ... How we pine for Paradise. For mother's milk. To draw back the curtain of events that has fallen between us and the Golden Age." (Graham Swift Waferland 1 36)

"If you want people to think well of you, do not speak well of yourself." (Pascal)

As this study moves from a female to a male immigrant story of social rise, the tone and mood change significantly. The energy, passion, exuberance, and excess that characterize Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements give way to the melancholy brooding, longing, and passivity of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1 91 7).Yezierska's electrifying, impatient, elliptical novel is about the struggle of an ethnic woman to achieve the American Dream, break the confines of the tenements, and liberate herself from patriarchy. Cahan's elaborate and slow Bildungsroman of David Levinsky is about the ennui, pain, and suffering of one who becomes an immigrant millionaire. Yezierska's novel is about action; Cahan's is about affect. Her text is an angry outburst against racial and gender injustice; his is a confession of a lonely and sensitive man. The female immigrant is aggressive and masculinized in her urge to succeed; the male immigrant is feminized-emotional, static, and vulnerable. In Cahan's text, the all-consuming struggle to assimilate is not a priority; the male immigrant appears to be able to achieve all the dreams of Yezierska's protagonist: success, money, privilege, and freedom from ethnic confines. All he needs is determination. Although a comparative study of gender in male and female immigrant narratives is an area that needs to be explored, it will not be the focus of my discussion here. Rather, this chapter examines the close connection between nostalgia and immigration and the various purposes to which "immigrant" nostalgia can be put. The Rise of David Levinsky, written during the 1910s. belongs to the group of East European immigrant narratives that explore acculturation and the foreigners' contribution to America (Ferraro "Ethnicity" 385). Cahan's rags-to-riches story differs, though, from those of its contemporaries in that it investigates the psychological aspect of the American Dream and emphasizes the high price-unhappy personal life-paid for "making it" in America. In fact, excessive emphasis on male suffering makes this work particularly interesting. Success is not met with self-congratulation and pride but rather with self-criticism and doubt. Quite uncharacteristically for literary characters of the time who celebrate their assimilation, the immigrant millionaire in Cahan's novel suffers from chronic nostalgia and decides to "tell it all"- to expose the dark side of success and publicly display his pair^. In this confession about the emptiness of the American Dream, the powerful and accomplished figure persistently diminishes his notable achievements. The highly unusual narrative strategy of self-deprecation and self-denigration does not quite turn out to be what the narrator (Levinsky himself)' would like it to be-a modest apology for affluence. a sincere call for compassion for this tortured and doomed man prone to constant subversion of his public persona. Instead, this is a story of a man who empowers himself through his supposed vulnerability and who uses his pain in order to draw attention to himself and "sell" his story. One is to take with great caution the instability created by the narrator's self-denigration.* This deeply divided man, who somehow "manages" to become one of the leading businessmen in the garment industry, presents himself as a victim of circumstances, doomed to unhappiness and subjected to a merciless immigrant fate. He feels that his uprooted existence is to be blamed for the failures in his private life: his bachelorhood, broken dreams of education, loneliness, and acute sense of homelessness. But there are too many gaps and inconsistencies in Levinsky's narrative to accept his self-representation at face value. The world of David Levinsky is not the valley of tears fraught with pain, powerlessness, and self-destructive ambivalence he would like us to believe it is. It is, instead, a highly deceptive construction in which nothing is what it seems to be. Levinsky is an agent rather than a victim; he derives pleasure rather than pain from his immigrant condition; he is content rather than unhappy with his life. His "devastating" immigrant condition becomes a mere performance, and his nostalgia is a rhetorical strategy to manipulate the reader, a convenient tool to conceal the narrator's "true" masochistic nature. I will use "Coldness and Cruelty," Gilles Deleuze's study of masochism, to show that it is not immigrant f~tebut Levinsky himself who denies his happiness. Levinsky certainly is an unfortunate immigrant for whom "dissatisfaction" has become an "organic habit," but he is also a cunning businessman ready to market his nostalgia. He is also a masochist, whose behavior-refusal of happiness, disavowal of fulfilment, and despoilation of opportunities--can never bring satisfaction or closure (RDL 262). Therefore, Levinsky's melancholy has little to do with immigration; it is a condition that is imported from "home" and not acquired upon his arrival to America. He simply uses his immigrant present as a convenient context to give a name to his nostalgia, to justify and mask his own choices, to be liked rather than despised by the reader, and to shift responsibility for his "unhappiness" from himself to his torturer-immigrant fate.

An important work of turn-of-the-century East European immigrant literature, Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky is an example of an ethnic novel aimed at a mainstream a~dience.~This means that the author had to consider the question of genre very seriously since, as Thomas Ferraro writes, ethnic texts written with an American readership in mind had three major genres to choose from: autobiography, the social science treatise, and fiction in the realist tradition ("Ethnicity" 382). Very frequently, immigrant writers resorted to "undisguised and unimaginative ethnic autobiography," which represented a cross between Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and Horatio Alger's stories of "ragged" little boys who achieve the American Dream (385).4 In most cases, the immigrant novel is situated between "populist autobiography and hard-core sociology," and, as Ferraro argues, it has two goals: "to exercise authority of personal experience, yet to make the story speak to a group history; to reach a considerable public, but to reveal to them unexpected, often unhappy, truths" (382).Cahan's novel is a fine example of a blend between autobiography and sociology. It is also a successful combination of the immigrant narrative and the American realist novel of social rise. The blending of the two genres in Cahan's text draws attention to the fact that the process of Americanization had a great impact on the nature of literary works of the time. The authors of these works usually blended the "foreign" content (the immigrant experience and its issues of cultural dislocation and acculturation) with an already existing literary form, the novel of social rise. The similarity between the ethnic (immigrant) and realist novel of social rise is based on the celebration of the opportunity for social mobility that America granted both to immigrants and poor Americans. As a result, the social rise of a resourceful and ambitious young man (who happens to be an immigrant) and his journey from the social margins (as well as from the Russian town of Antomir) to financial triumph makes it possible to read Cahan's text as both a "classic study of immigration and success" and a "genre piece ... an exemplary treatment of one of the dominant myths of American capitalism-- that the millionaire finds nothing at the top of the heap" (Sam Girgus 66; Isaac Rosenfeld 260). In this second capacity, Cahan's novel can be seen as working in the tradition of American realist writers, such as Theodore Dreiser, W. D. Howells, or Upton Sinclair.' Apart from the content and form, the immigrant novel and the novel of social rise often also share the nostalgic mood and "it's-lonely-at-the-topt' rhetoric. Once the character achieves success, which is, needless to say, always material, he longs for "supposed past simplicities" (David Lowenthal 21): "primitive" existence, and the irrevocably lost "age of innocence." In the texts of upward mobility, nostalgia of an aging millionaire indicates a discrepancy between the stable past, when one could enjoy "simplet' things like friendship, love, happiness, and loyalty, and the present, which despite its glamour, means chaos and disillusionment. Since The Rise of David Levinsky is both an immigrant novel and a novel of social rise, the nostalgia present in it is very complex. On the one hand, it is a "stereotypical" immigrant homesickness, a paralyzing force that freezes immigrants in the memory of elsewhere and turns the past into an often fictionalized, utopian alternative to the fractured present. David Levinsky makes numerous references to his longing for his mother and his hometown Antomir, making it obvious that his melancholy inclination stems from a diasporic existence. Nostalgia is an integral part of narratives of immigration and diaspora and most frequently invokes compassion for the sensitive and unfortunate immigrant, who struggles to overcome loneliness, duality, and disorientation in the new country. On the other hand, nostalgia in Cahan's novel can be seen as part of the "Rosebud syndrome," named and popularized by Orson Welles' film Citizen Kanee6Very frequently in narratives of upward mobility the protagonist looks back from the hard-earned position of luxury, success, and dominance and desires to (re)possess the long lost innocence and uncorrupted dreams (Robin Wood 670). In Cahan's novel, the rich Levinsky glorifies his poor beginnings and innocent dreams of America, and he sadly concludes that the road taken may not have been the right one. Nostalgia associated with social rise is often an apology for "making it," a public excuse for greed, and a belated realization of the intrinsic emptiness of the American Dream (670). A strong ideological charge is characteristic of the "Rosebud syndrome" since it represents, as Robin Wood argues. a "very convenient assumption for capitalist ideology" (670). While capitalism promotes success and wealth as primary social and individual values. it often creates self-critical narratives that publicly denounce the high price of economic triumph achieved at the expense of private life. The unhappy and disillusioned millionaire discovers in old age that money corrupts and that power is not everything (670). Rather than a genuine critique of inner workings of capitalism, the Rosebud syndrome functions as a "shadow ideology" (670). In the millionaire's selfdestructive criticism, one is to learn that true happiness resides in communal values and the preservation of the status quo. which should be maintained at any cost. Even if one "happens" to be poor or living in oppressive conditions, one should fear change, for it only brings destruction and turns one into a hungry person, who will never again find peace. The unhappy and lonely millionaire can testify to that. Nostalgia of an unhappy millionaire can hardly be perceived as a genuine mourning for the loss of innocence; it is. indeed, as Wood argues, a hypocritical preservation of the existing power relations of capitalist economy (670). The "shadow ideology," or the Rosebud syndrome, may then be seen as the key to the connection between the business world, conservatism, and nostalgia. If nostalgia is such a slippery term, if it is conducive to manipulation, and if it is the disease from which David Levinsky suffers, then it is necessary to investigate the nature of Levinsky's nostalgia and the uses to which he puts it. Levinsky makes it obvious that the immigrant millionaire yearns for his boyhood in Russia and longs for his poor beginnings in America, and he suggests that we read his confession as an "apologia of a driven but irresolvably divided man" (Sanford E. Marovitz AC 139). Moreover, Levinsky presents his condition as a rather serious one: he confides that the "real" Levinsky can be seen far from the bustle of the market and the public male scene. In this narrative of excessive male suffering we find that Levinsky is a disempowered and disadvantaged immigrant and that his life in the diaspora both feminizes and infantilizes him. Immigration, as he explains, stands in the way of his masculinity: living in the diaspora, he becomes overtly emotional; he has no control over his destiny; he has to re-learn and un-learn his habits in order to adapt to the new environment; being a bachelor, he cannot be a provider and protector; he misses his mother; he yearns for the past and regresses into childhood. In fact, childhood becomes his escape, a protective realm, in which he can, once again, be a poor orphan, loved and protected by his mother. Therefore, it is the immigrant fate that is to be blamed for Levinsky's excessive nostalgia, which then becomes a symptom of his unfortunate condition: feminized, moody, prone to suffering, deprived of masculinity, and forced to regress into boyhood. Needless to say, one is to approach Levinsky's self-presentation-his nostalgia and the purposes to which he puts it-with great caution.

The Diagnosis: A Divided Man

David Levinsky's life story opens with a favorite pastime of the lonely and melancholic millionaire: a nostalgic look back on his youth. Although reminiscing about the past from a vantage point of affluence and success, Levinsky's narrative throbs with a sense of loss and personal dissatisfaction, and it laments the misfortunate trajectory of his immigrant life. Emotional and spiritual emptiness are the essence of David Levinsky, who constructs himself as an unhappy, impotent, and deeply divided man. He sketches his self-portrait as a rich, melancholy millionaire, who often reflects on his past in a "superficial and casual way" (3). The life of one of the leading men in the American garment industry may seem satisfying, but it is an expensive illusion concealing a deep chasm between his public persona and his private life. Levinsky is divided between an "outer self" conducive to constant metamorphoses and an "inner," "true" self that has remained "precisely the same as it was thirty or forty years ago" (3). More specifically, Levinsky suggests that it is a contrast between his masculinity, publicly displayed and aggrandized by his aggressive quest for economic power, and his inner, static and hidden, reality of a fragile and frightened orphaned boy. He leaves no doubt that his essence is to be found in his boyhood, and he dismisses the accomplishments of his public, masculine self as an unstable outer shell "devoid of significance" (3). Besides drawing attention to the imbalance within him, Levinsky leaves many cues to the way he perceives the two sides of himself. The "outer" self is a masquerade of Americanness and an endless string of miraculous metamorphoses that have transformed an immigrant greenhorn into a progressive American citizen. Levinsky loses his side-locks, puts on presentable "American clothes," and learns to take himself seriously-to think of himself "as a 'Mister' without being tempted to laugh" (102).With his rise to elite business circles, Levinsky masters complicated table manners: he can order and enjoy "aristocratic American" food, converse confidently on a variety of "appropriate" topics, and smoke the right kind of cigar in a "special American way of smoking" (329; 326). Rare moments of self-recognition remind Levinsky of the tremendous energy and effort that he has invested into creating this American persona: discovering the social significance and uses of the "unsmiling smile," researching extensively about smoking "without a foreign accent," or taming his impulsive, "distressingly un-AmericanmTalmudic gesticulations by forcing himself to speak with his hands in his pockets (130; 327). It is not surprising that Levinsky is dismissive of his outer self. PJthough it offers a possibility of liberation from the past, Levinsky tells us that his American self feels like an alien construct that he has learned to bend and shape in order to adapt to each new circumstance. He perceives his outer self as a series of grotesque histrionic transmutations, mere performances of the self devised to help him assimilate and advance socially. His bitter remark "We are all actors, more or less," or his claim that a formula for success is simply a capability for a "convincing personation," suggest that his outer self is no different from any of his fashionable garments designed to attract attention and hide imperfections (194). Both his American profession and his American self share the same dynamic premise of multiplicity and transience, constant mutability and fluctuation, and an enormous theatrical quality. What Levinsky finds most disconcerting is the realization that in the myriad roles he is forced to perform, he has lost his true self. While Levinsky's histrionic "outer" self is initiated and measured by parameters of progress, inconstancy, and the fluctuating American market, his "inner" self is a well-protected and sanctified private realm whose growth is arrested in the frozen and static image of himself as an orphaned boy. In contrast with his outer, transformative side, which shows tremendous flexibility and willingness to keep up with the American environment, his "inner" self remains locked in time and place. It stays at "homeu-in the past and across the ocean. Rigid and immobile, Levinsky's inner self refuses to immigrate to America; it remains a passive, fictive, and mythic realm of his boyhood, the "dearest days" of his life in Russia, Antomir, and his mother's home (3).Thus, Levinsky's life story moves in two opposite directions: his "outer" self speeds towards an unpredictable future and further transformations while his "inner1'self pulls him back into a nostalgic, regressive, and repetitive discourse of the same. Levinsky's discrepant split condition indicates that his self-drama lies in his inability to find a balance between the two opposing sides of his life he names his "inner" and "outer" selves. Since nostalgia colors Levinsky's memories, his representation of his boyhood in Antomir is also distorted by his chronic yearning. His "inner" self is just another fictive realm, which he increasingly embellishes with time. It is only after years of denying his roots, during which he was trying to Americanize himself, that Levinsky is able to embrace his past as it is and admit to himself that his childhood leaves a legacy of loneliness, deprivation, yearning, and unfulfillment. His boyhood is stamped with a chronic sense of lack and loss. He loses his father when he is less than three, and his mother is killed by a hostile Gentile mob in an attempt to protect her adolescent son. The father's absence, or rather, his ghostly presence, affects Levinsky in the following way: I scarcely remembered my father, yet I missed him keenly. I was ever awake to the fact that other little boys had fathers and that I was a melancholy exception; that most married women had husbands, while my mother had to bear her burden unaided. In my dim childish way I knew that there was a great blank in our family nest, that it was a widow's nest; and the feeling of it seemed to color all my other feelings. (4-5)

Levinsky's childhood means scant meals, financial deprivation, lack of paternal presence, the identity of an orphan, and the resulting exclusion and intolerance in cheder (religious school). It also means an exceedingly close relationship with his self-sacrificial mother, who is ready to forsake her own happiness, and her life, for the benefit of her son's well-being. He also develops a great sensitivity to his mother's plight, her efforts to provide for his school: "She had to struggle hard for our scanty livelihood and her trials and loneliness came home to me at an early period" (4). The young David makes feeble attempts to restore the missing male figure in their little household, but that only brings frustrations and disappointment when he fails to do so. After years of living in America, the impressions of hardship wear off, and Levinsky suddenly discovers a love for Antomir that colors his memories with a distinctive romantic glow. The town is aestheticized, condensed into a "mere poem" while a vicarious "Antomir atmosphere" and "something iike a family spirit" are established in Levinsky's factory (324; 378). Apart from organizing the Levinsky Antomir Benefit Society, the nostalgic businessman carefully gathers his l'fellow-townspeoplet' in his shop: "Everything bearing the name of my native place touched a tender spot in my heart. It was enough for a cloakmaker to ask me for a job with the Antomir accent to be favorably recommended to one of my foremen" (378).Levinsky himself notices that the quality of his yearning has changed and that his middle-age sentimentalizing of the past has replaced fits of acute pain of a homesick youngster: Compared to the thoughts of home that had oppressed me during my first months in America, my new visions of Antomir were like the wistful lights of a sunset as compared with the glare of midday. But then sunsets produce deeper, if quieter, effects on the emotions than the strongest daylight. (379)

The older Levinsky revises his past by drawing on his selective memory and emotional distance from the past, and he gradually transforms the initially disturbing images of his childhood ("dusky rooms," the neighbors' "violent quarrels," sharp "odors of sheepskin and paste") into his weakness (8). He comes to perceive his fragile inner self as "wretched boyhood," which appeals to him "as a sick child does to its mother" (4). It is no coincidence that Levinsky constructs his childhood memories into an image of a vulnerable and insecure infant in need of protection. If the "inner" self is his true self, then Levinsky, no doubt, makes it clear that he prefers to see himself as a fragile little boy. He projects the perception of himself into adulthood and uses it "strategically." His immigrant condition turns out to be a convenient context for the preservation of the image of an orphan-he has no parents, no mother country, no mother tongue; this melancholy millionaire searches for protection and sees himself as a "desolate soul" "still rniss[ing] my mother" (239). What is even more peculiar is that his friends also perceive the aging businessman, who has proven business shrewdness and adaptability to volatile laws of the market and American !i\ring, as an orphan. His bachelorhood is equated with orphanhood, and concerned friends encourage Levinsky to ease the pain by getting married. Levinsky's friend Nodelman notices that Levinsky's bachelorhood is not an ordinary one, so he suggests an arrangement that sounds more like an adoption than a marriage:

You are not a happy man, Levinsky. ... You feel more alone than any bachelor I ever knew. You're an orphan, poor thing. You have a fine business and plenty of money and all sorts of nice times, but you are an orphan, just the same. You're still a child. You need a mother. Well, but what's the use? Your own mother-peace upon her-cannot be brought to life until the coming of the Messiah, so do the next best thing, Levinsky. Get married and you will have a mother--for your children. It isn't the same kind, but you won't feel lonesome any longer. (358)

Nodelman suggests a protective maternal shield that would provide a cushion for Levinsky's crippled emotions and his painful memories of the mother. It is a replica of a mother-child relationship that Levinsky should enter rather than a reciprocal companionship of two adults. Such a state would not provide or initiate any growth in Levinsky; it would only be a comfortable, but static repetition of his "happy childhood days," which would leave the memory of the mother unscathed. A surrogate reminder of the past, Levinsky's marriage would supply the vicarious presence of the mother that would have a soothing effect and ease the pain of his loss. The fact that Levinsky's friend notices the particularity of his bachelorhood simply reinforces the image Levinsky was trying to create, that of a vulnerable and doomed little boy in search of maternal protection rather than a grown-up looking for a companion. The marriage becomes a way for Levinsky "to end his rootless, homeless, alien existence" (Marovitz "Secular" 26). Levinsky also suffers from pangs of acute homesickness. Even travelling on the road as a successful businessman "full of energy, full of the joy of being alive," Levinsky would feel homesick for New York and such thoughts would bring back the realization of his rootless and orphaned state. He would often feel that "I have no home anywhere, that my mother was dead and I was all alone in the world" (325). On another occasion, he would admit that his homecomings to New York from business trips would assert his desolation and his homelessness "rather violently" (357). Although he was "pulsating with activity and with a sense of triumph," and obviously "enjoying life in a multitude of ways," "at the bottom of my consciousness I was always lonely" (357).These violent contrasts and switches of mood are brought up to mark Levinsky's abruptness, his irrational emotional responses. These violent acts are a way in which Levinsky switches from one extreme to another, from a success to a failure, from Antomir to America, from the pursuit of education to the career of a garment manufacturer. Loneliness is his constant condition in which he feels abandoned by his mother whose image keeps coming back at moments of acute unhappiness. The continual reminders of his loneliness sound like the laments of an emotionally arrested boy, whose mother's death leaves him "all alone in the worldt1(325). Levinsky's lack and losses are considerable, and it would be inaccurate to dispute them. However, the problem lies in the manipulation of his loss, his longing, and his image as an orphan. He presents himself as a victim of merciless immigrant fate that conspires against him and leaves him powerless. As he tells us, "fate ordained otherwise," and the dispirited and crushed Levinsky can only sigh and nostalgically remark after each of his failures: "To this day I regret it" (509). Since it is fate that arranges his life, Levinsky persistently reminds us that he had no choice but to sacrifice the development of his "inner" self--dreams of education, commitment to his Jewish roots, a happy family life-- for the sake of survival in the cruel American environment. Levinsky's narrative skilfully suggests that he is therefore to be exempt from the responsibility for his failures and that all of them should be attributed to his immigrant condition. While immigration undoubtedly contributes to many of his troubles- loneliness, sense of displacement-numerous narrative slippages reveal that Levinsky is not a powerless victim at the hands of a tormenting immigrant fate but rather an active agent of his destiny. By recounting his admirable social rise, Levinsky inadvertently makes it obvious that he is a capable, aggressive, and cunning man, and he fails to convince the reader that he is so disempowered by his immigration to America that he lacks determination to change things standing in the way of his happiness. Instead of fate, it is Levinsky himself who arranges significant events of his life in such a way that their outcome is either irreversibly frustrated or that their long-desired completion is indefinitely postponed. Instead of being forced by an unfavourable fate to deny his present, it is Levinsky himself who forces disavowal on the events that threaten him with change. Levinsky's ultimate pleasure lies not in the achievement of happiness but rather in the hurtful process of resistance to closure, in the active reproduction of a suspenseful awaiting for happiness. It does not surprise us then that "fate" interrupts all of Levinsky's moments of potential happiness and turns them, just before their completion, into a new challenge, a new disavowal, and-a new yearning. Levinsky's predicament, that has little to do with immigration, is that he yearns for yearning and that each desire generates a new one. By displacing the blame for his melancholy onto the immigrant condition and diasporic consciousness, Levinsky frees himself from the responsibility for the course of events in his life. He hides his manipulative nature behind the image of a vulnerable orphan, and he gets away with his own deviousness. The image of an orphan is a tactic that gains Levinsky a supportive and forgiving audience. Since he cares about his good image, then, if judged, friends and readers of his sad life story will be more inclined to be forgiving in the case of a vulnerable orphan than in the case of a reckless, manipulative, and self- destructive businessman. Levinsky's nostalgia is also a screen for his masochistic drives. Under the guise of indefinite nostalgic yearning, Levinsky is able to maintain the "perverse" pattern of his life--to interrupt or prevent the fulfilment of yearnings and fuse the pleasure of waiting with the pain of disavowal. Masochism in Levinsky's case is not just sexual; it applies to all aspects of his life--he yearns for things (wife, education) that he cannot have or he prevents them from happening. Therefore, it is not the fury of fate, Levinsky's imagined tormentor, that conspires against his happiness and functions as a castrating force; it is rather Levinsky himself who derives pleasure from continual deferral of happiness and who ultimately speaks, as Gilles Deleuze puts it, "through the mouth of his tormentor" (Deleuze "Coldness" 22). Moreover, Levinsky's insistence on his status as an orphan and his constant invocation of his mother are not just meaningless escapist strategies. They indicate the importance of the maternal figure for understanding his psyche and the course of events in his life that replicate the pattern of pain and pleasure in the established relationship with his mother. The mother, thus, becomes an "interpretative structure" for Levinsky, who remains deeply incorporated in the maternal sphere and who thinks and acts from within the memory of his mother (Mary Jacobus 6). The examination of Levinsky's relationship with his mother clarifies the loss he is mourning-his mother and their relationship. It helps us understand the close relation between nostalgia and masochism in the grown-up Levinsky and learn that nostalgia in Levinsky's case is not just an immigrant ailment but a condition brought across the ocean.

"A Fly in the Ointment": Happiness Interrupted

Levinsky's story makes it obvious that his mother is a defining character of his past and that it is through the maternal imaginary only that one can access his divided inner self. Gilles Deleuze writes that the good but demanding and punishing oral mother is the one who "generates the symbolism through which the masochist expresses himself' ("Coldness" 63). Levinsky's obsessive return to the past and his tendency to map his initial experience of masochism onto other events in his life makes it possible to read his autobiography through Deleuze's study of masochism. In "Coldness and Cruelty," Deleuze examines the difference between sadism and masochism, based on the aesthetic characteristics of the texts in which they appear. He insists that inadequate research has been done on the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, including his novel Venus in Furs (1870), which Deleuze studies in detaiL7 His study is significant since it represents a redefinition of the Freudian model of masochism that focuses on the relationship between the father and the son. Unlike Freud. Deleuze foregrounds the importance of the maternal figure and argues that the main characteristics of "feminine" masochism are denial of masculinity, men's willing submission to the powerful woman, and the constant deferral of fulfilment that is both pleasurable and painful. Such a reversal of Freud's principle of masochism has been welcomed by feminist critics, who have followed Deleuze's lead and applied his work in various other areas: Kaja Silverman uses it in her discussion of male subjectivity and Gaylyn Studlar makes it a starting point in her discussion of the production of visual pleasure in classical Hollywood film. Deleuze's emphasis on the maternal figure makes his study essential for understanding the workings of David Levinsky's inner self and his manipulative use of nostalgia. There are several key features of masochism that Deleuze points out that are significant for the discussion of Levinsky and his disguised masochistic drives: the centrality of the maternal figure; the reversal of stereotypical gender roles; male conferring of power on the female figure that results in his own "feminization" and creates a pleasurable sense of powerlessness and regression to childhood; man's parthenogenetic rebirth as a "new sexless man," born out of woman only; the obsessive return to the image of the ldeal maternal figure arrested in her power and perfection; and an exciting and suspenseful waiting for the eventual reunion with the Ideal maternal figure. The examination of the relationship between David Levinsky and his mother sheds light on the paradigm that he replicates throughout his adulthood. It also dispels the myth of Levinsky's victimhood and indicates that he even benefits from his immigrant condition and uses it as an excuse for his irresponsibility to himself, his mother, and the Jewish community, all of whom he lets down.

The Importance of the Mother and the Absence of the Father

Masochism, as Deleuze explains it, represents a reversal of stereotypical gender power relations. Unlike Freud, Deleuze situates masochism in the pre- Oedipal phase and believes that it confers tremendous power and significance upon the oral mother. The power of the oral mother comes from her simultaneous existence as an object of desire and a controlling presence for the helpless child (Studlar 606). Gaylyn Studlar reminds us that the mother's power resides in "first things," in her numerous symbolic functions (606). The oral mother is an "active nurturer, first source of love and object of desire, first environment and agent of control" (Studlar 609). She is an all-powerful figure, who lacks nothing and who is revered and fetishized for her very difference. As it is often argued, the power of the oral mother lies in the very things that the male lacks-the breast and the womb (Studlar 608-9). Therefore, masochism, as discussed by Deleuze and expanded on by feminist critics, subverts gender power relations. The oral mother is confirmed in her role of an idealized but punishing woman, both "dangerous and comforting," the good mother and "the controlling agent" (Studlar 605). While masochism asserts the mother's power, it feminizes the masochist, who is willing to submit to the powerful female figure rather than to the desire to possess he? Apart from the aggrandizement and empowerment of the female figure, masochistic relationship means a paradoxical exclusion of the father, the "normalizing" power that intervenes into the "alliance of mother and child" (Studlar 609). In a masochistic relationship, the father is degraded and deprived of all symbolic function (Deleuze 64). He is not only physically absent, but masculinity in general is denied; the son in this way "expels" the father and is punished for his likeness to him (Studlar 606). Silverman argues that in feminine masochism, masculinity is disavowed in order to deal with the mother. The heterosexual male also "prefers the masquerade of womanliness to the parade of virility" (Silverman 60). Deleuze writes: "what is beaten, humiliated and ridiculed in [the son] is the image and likeness of the father's aggressive return" (66).In other words, the mother is invested with the phallus and expected to occupy the father's position of power and privilege. Thus, the masochist can be seen as investing power, authority, and privilege in the maternal rather than in the paternal figure, which in turn destabilizes the masochist's own paternal legacy and undermines his masculinity (Silverman 60).

The portrayal of Levinsky's childhood indicates the centrality of his nameless mother, who works hard to educate her son as a Talmudic scholar: "She toiled from eighteen to twenty hours a day, so that she often dozed off over her rolling-pin from sheer exhaustion" (RDL 51). Levinsky's closeness with his mother implies his identification with her sacrifice and her sexuai and financial deprivation. The mother channels all her desires into the prospects of her son's promising future as a scholar. She also inadvertently lays out the masochistic principle; she experiences happiness vicariously, through the successes of her son and through waiting for their better days. In an attempt to form a bond of solidarity and to re-unite with his mother, Levinsky replicates her self-discipline, rigor, and sacrifice. Little David's sacrifice consists of his denial of strong bodily sensations, his abstinence, and his dedication to the affairs of the mind. That is the only way in which he can ease his mother's pain, which he feels so intensely. Although he knows that religious study is a wrong profession for him, he persists in achieving good results in school. He knows that the sight of him pouring over prayer books is a source of great happiness for his mother. As the narrator says:

It did her heart good to see me read the holy book. As a result, I was never so diligent as I was at the hour when I expected her arrival with the dinner-pot. Very often I discovered her tiptoeing in or standing at a distance and watching me admiringly. (33)

Little David is ready to perform the image of himself as a scholar, knowing that that is the only way to acknowledge his mother's struggles and reward her aspirations. The son's desire to please his mother (through self-denigration and devotion to Talmudic studies) and his ultimate failure to do so (he knows he will never become a Talmudic scholar, and he never does) create an early behavioral model that Levinsky brings with him to America and that he replicates long after his mother's death. Apart from being an object of desire whom little David tries to please by fulfilling her expectations and internalizing her pain, Levinsky's mother sets an unachievable ideal in her role as a protectress. In an attempt to shield her son from the wild Gentile mob, she is stoned to death. In her tragic death, the mother becomes a powerful figure and an unattainable ideal: she both gives life to her son and gives up her own life in an attempt to protect him. Her death becomes the ultimate gift that she bequeaths to her son, who often perceives the memory of the dead mother as a burden. It brings a realization of Levinsky's "failure," for he realizes his own inability to fend for himself, his dependence on the mother from whom he incurs self-sacrifice, as well as his inability to live up to the expectations of his masculine role and protect his mother. The father, on the other hand, plays an insignificant role in Levinsky's upbringing. "Keenly missed," the father exists as an absence that does not interfere with the relationship between mother and son. The father in Levinsky's story is physically missing, and the paternal figure is virtually absent from the son's memories, fantasies, or childhood stories. Masculinity is, indeed, a problematic sphere for Levinsky, who does not grow up into a responsible father or a protector. Instead, the adult Levinsky cultivates the image of himself as an orphaned and sensitive boy, powerless and dependent on the strong, self- sacrificial mother. His bachelorhood only intensifies this image, for Levinsky's failed marital designs prevent him from assuming the role of an authoritative and domineering patriarch. Yet, if not a patriarch, Levinsky becomes a millionaire, a successful achiever of the American Dream. While his action, cunning, and accomplishment in the public sphere signify quite strongly his masculinity, Levinsky constantly undermines his achievements by drawing attention to his sensitivity, emotions, moodiness, and melancholy predisposition. Sentimentality and affect come to define Levinsky, who has ever since his childhood been prone to yearning, to "causeless, meaningless melancholy" (37). Even as a boy studying the Talmud, he was either in an "exalted state of mind or pining away under a spell of yearning and melancholy" (37). Levinsky, thus, gives many indications of his troubled masculinity. He grieves publicly for his mother and his home and laments his immigrant fate. The masculine image of an empowered immigrant is undermined by his suffering, chronic yearning, unhappy bachelorhood, and identity as an orphan.

Rebirth

Masochism is characterized by disavowal and suspension, and pleasure is derived in waiting for the desired incestuous reunion with the mother (Deleuze 33). Still, a part of the pleasure residing in masochism is connected with "rebirth," with the process in which the father's role is obliterated, sacrificed, "beaten." As a result, the masochist can become a "new man"; he can assume a new identity as the "new sexless man." The second birth is significant in that the masochist is born out of the woman only; the paternal figure is absent, its symbolic power denigrated, and masculine legacy disrupted (100). Deleuze writes: "This is why castration, and the 'interrupted love' which represents castration, cease to be an obstacle to or a punishment of incest, and become instead a precondition of its success with the mother, since it is then equated with a second, autonomous and parthenogenetic rebirth" (100). He also adds:

The masochist practices three forms of disavowal at once: the first magnifies the mother, by attributing to her the phallus instrumental to rebirth; the second excludes the father, since he has no part in this rebirth; and the third relates to sexual pleasure, which is interrupted, deprived of its genitality and transformed into the pleasure of being reborn. (100) Notions of (re)birth and childhood have often accompanied migrations in general and migrations to America in particular. The complex image of rzbirth that Americans like to associate with their arrival in the New World blends together rich, mythological and colonial, symbolism. It invokes the association with biblical mythology and justifies the Adam-like conquest and domestication of the wilderness into a garden. It emphasizes the youth and courage of the New World offspring, who can live independently of Europe, history, and the past, and it suggests very strongly the innocence of the brave new nation. R. W. B. Lewis has summed up the metaphor for innocence and new beginnings that has become a part of American national identity. "The American Adam," the new, reborn man, stands for a

radically new personality, the hero of new adventure: an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his unique and inherent resources. (5)

In nineteenth-century American novels, Lewis detects a strong masculine trait that celebrates individualism, freedom, and adventurism of a male Adamic hero; yet, Lewis also points out that this forceful and energetic thrust forward has a melancholy side, which manifests itself in the literary works of the time as a brooding sense of loneliness, romantic regression to a child-like state, or a relentless search for paternity. Not just characteristic of early settlers and the frontier spirit, images of childhood and rebirth are often connected to more recent immigration, but they do not always stand for the promise of new beginnings. In the discourse of the host country, the child imagery frequently becomes a derogatory metaphor that is used to degrade and infantilize newcomers. The immigrant difference is equated with lack. Nativism is often expressed in the portrayal of immigrants as helpless child-like adults, whose linguistic incompetence and social and cultural disorientation mark them as inferior and incomplete.

There is no doubt that R. W. 8. Lewis' definition of the American new man can be applied to David Levinsky. He is a resourceful hero, who builds his garment industry with passion and enthusiasm. He grasps the opportunity of self- fashioning that America offers him and explores new aspects of his self; he certainly discovers his astute commercial sense and a skill for running a competitive fashion business. Although a proud and successful businessman in the true "American" sense, Levinsky is at the same time an immigrant from the "other1'Europe, who has to be born again into another language, another culture, and who tends to escape to childhood memories and the protective maternal sphere. Unfamiliar with the language, manners, and opportunities offered in the new country, he perceives himself as a "new-born babe in possession of a fully developed intellect" (RDL 86). What is, however, characteristic of David Levinsky is that he embraces the reversal to childhood encouraged by his immigrant condition. Regression to boyhood sanctified by the life in the diaspora provides a socially acceptable explanation for perpetuating the phantasy of himself as a little boy in need of his mother. The rebirth that the Levinsky's story fosters is associated primarily with his mother rather than with immigration to ~rnerica.'Paradoxically, it is the fiction of Levinsky's mother, her mythic stature in an inspiring narrative of love and courage that becomes instrumental for his conversion into an American businessman. Upon his arrival in America, Levinsky meets Mr. Even, a well-to-do Jewish immigrant and accidentally discovers the potency of the tragic story that acquires him financial support: "I told him [Mr. Even] of my mother's violent death, vaguely hoping that it would add to his interest in me" (RDL 100). To Levinsky's delight, the story provides him with his first American clothes and enough money to start a small peddling business and pay the barber, who cuts off his sidelocks and thus marks a symbolic break with his past. Never questioning the ethics of his use of the memory of his mother, he delights selfishly in the attention that it grants him: "I was thrilled to find myself in the lime-light of world-wide publicity. I almost felt like a hero" (100). The story is indeed marketable and Levinsky assumes the role of an orphan in a hostile foreign world and manipulates the emotions of his compatriots, who take pity on the unfortunate young man. Identifying himself shamelessly through his heroic mother-"I'm the son of the woman who was killed by Gentiles, in Antornit'-- he exploits the emotional appeal of the tragic story, turns it into a profitable commodity, and exchanges the memory of the mother's self-sacrificial act for a vehicle of his advancement in American society. With his mother's help and her martyr-like stature, Levinsky becomes a new man, an immigrant who rejects his background and becomes not just a secular American, but a cunning and ruthless businessman. The dead mother's body becomes once again a provider of a new life, of Levinsky's transformative and greedy "outer" self. The caring mother does not abandon her son even in death. As Levinsky himself notes: "It seemed as if she were taking care of me from her grave. It seemed, too, as though she had died so that I might arouse sympathy and make a good start in Americat' (103). Levinsky's story makes it obvious that his immigrant condition and masochistic drives work together to encourage the phantasy of his parthenogenetic rebirth from the woman only. Being born twice, having two opposing identities, Levinsky deftly manipulates them, and his immigrant condition allows him to be both a virile and powerful American businessman (who buys love easily) and a feminized and melancholy immigrant (who remains single and lonely).

Disavowal and the Frozen Ideal, Victimhood and Agency

According to Deleuze, the feminized masochist behaves in his sexual life and in his fantasies as a woman and he is willing to impersonate femininity--to desire like a woman and to assume female identity (56). In the inclination of the male masochist to impersonate femininity and in his willingness to submit to the powerful female figure, Deleuze sees the masochist's desire to reunite in a symbiotic relationship with the mother. It is in the disavowed, interrupted, and frustrated yearning for a reunion with the mother that the intense pleasure resides. The state of frozen suspense is a characteristic closely associated with masochism: the masochist arrests the idealized image of the female "torturer" in his mind in the same way as he himself is arrested in a suspenseful awaiting of pleasure. Deleuze uses the metaphor of ice to indicate the frozen, arrested female image in the masochist's fantasy. However, the association of coldness, Deleuze stresses, is misleading since it does not mean a negation of feeling but rather a disavowal of sensuality (52). As he says, buried under the ice is "supersensual sentimentality" that "radiates as the generative principle of new order" (52). Coldness functions as both "protective milieu and medium, cocoon and vehicle": it protects "supersensual sentimentality" as an inner life and expresses it as external order, as wrath and severity (52). The divisiveness indicated here can easily be seen in the polarization of Levinsky's identity: his emotional, soft, feminine inner self vs. his cunning, cruel, and calculated outer self. The disguised supersensuality is disavowed and arrested at the moment of suspense and anticipation for the union with the mother in whose frustrated outcome the intensely desired but elusive pleasure resides. Finally, it is important to point out that the deferral of pleasure in masochism is not incurred by the powerful phallic woman; rather, it is the masochist himself who arranges things in such a way that he inflicts pain on himself. The exalting love for the punishing woman who interrupts the pleasure and thus "castrates" the masochist allows him to perceive himself as a powerless victim at the mercy of an authoritarian woman who tortures him. But, Deleuze reminds us, it is the masochistic hero himself who shapes the woman for the part to torture him, and it is he who, in the guise of a victim, "speaks through the mouth of his torturer, without sparing himself' (22). With time, Levinsky's mother turns into a magnified, fictive, larger-than-life figure, who lacks nothing and who sets an unattainable ideal. The closeness and the special bond between the mother and the son is based on a matrix of sacrifice, denial, and masochistic deferral of pleasure that Levinsky replicates throughout his life. The pattern of masochistic postponement of fulfilment or of interrupted pleasure is best illustrated in the two major frustrated ambitions in Levinsky's life-his marital plans and intellectual pursuits. Levinsky repeatedly curses the immigrant fate that has ordained him to be a lonely and unhappy bachelor and that has spoiled his dreams of education. Instead of a being a Talmudic scholar, Levinsky becomes a wealthy owner of a huge garment business; the "temple" of his intellectual aspirations is destroyed and replaced by the "mansion" of his business career. However, much though he tries to shift the blame for his unhappiness from himself onto his immigrant fate, Levinsky offers abundant examples to show that he is not a cursed immigrant. Instead, he is an active agent of his destiny, who deftly stages deferral of pleasure and prevents his own happiness. Levinsky is neither a passive melancholic nor a victim of an immigrant fate awaiting helplessly a new distress. Rather, he is the engineer of his rise in America and a mastermind of numerous yearnings that never bring closure to his dissatisfactions and traumas. Although highly selective and somewhat discreet, Levinsky's narrative makes it obvious that he leaves "a long string of female companions, professional and otherwise, behind him" (Marovitz "Secular" 22). Although Levinsky never has an "ordinary" relationship--his are either clandestine or never consummated-women do play an important role in his life. Apart from his mother, there is Matilda, a Russian girl who buys him a ticket for America and encourages his dreams of education; Mrs. Levinsky, his mother's namesake and his first American landlady whom he intends to seduce; Gussie, a plain factory girl, whom he plans to marry if she agrees to provide for his education; Dora Margolis with whom he has the most intimate relationship; the Orthodox Miss Kaplan, ready to raise a traditional family; the socialist Anna Tevkin who ignores him; the nameless Gentile girl whom he cannot marry on account of her different religion. Levinsky's adulthood in America is marked by three major love affairs- with Dora, Miss Kaplan, and Miss Tevkin-which represent three different ideas of femininity and of the New York Lower East Side (Marovitz AC 150-1). As Marovitz writes, "Dora symbolizes sacrifice for the family, Fanny [Kaplan] embodies traditional Judaism and authority, and Anna represents art, socialism, and Zionism--'the whole intellectual Lower East Side"' (AC 151). For his personal life, the three major affairs have the same function: they represent Levinsky's escapes from his orphan state (Bonnie Lyons in Marovitz AC 150). While we never meet the numerous women whose quarters Levinsky frequents, his two American affairs-with Dora Margolis and Miss Anna Tevkin-can illustrate well the nature of Levinsky's romantic pursuits: either his strong desire for the woman's despoilation or his longing for love that can never be requited. Dora Margolis is Levinsky's finest conquest and the ultimate mother figure. An unhappy wife to a rude womanizer and a dediczted, sacrificial mother, Dora evokes memories of Levinsky's mother and instantaneously captures his imagination. What endears Dora to Levinsky is her noble suffering in a loveless marriage and her readiness to and contentedness with experiencing happiness vicariously through her daughter: "it was not given to me to be happy ... I have no right to be happy. Lucy shall be happy. ... Her happiness will be mine, too. That's the only kind I am entitled to" (RDL 300; 301). Dora's denial of her entitlement to happiness--she has to "choke with [her] own hands" the newly found love, she believes it is her duty to stay in an unhappy marriage (she burns the flowers that Levinsky buys for her and forbids him to ever show her such attention)-- constitute the source of Levinsky's attraction to her. Her tragic predisposition revives the memory of his mother and the values that Levinsky associates with her: denial, masochism, sacrifice, vicarious experience of happiness through children, and the refusal of her own entitlement to happiness. Marovitz rightly remarks that Dora is an embodiment of "the nobility of life" that could be found among East Side immigrants (AC 147). Dora's "benignity and profound suffering contrast sharply with Levinsky's hypocrisy and materialistic aims," and, Marovitz argues, Cahan's compassionate portrait of Dora "accentuates Levinsky's cold, calculating manipulation of her, her husband, and virtually everyone with whom he enters a relation, personal or commercial, in his egocentric drive for conquest" (AC 147). The relationship with Dora has an additional appeal: since Dora is married and Levinsky boards in the Margolis household, their love has to be clandestine. As such, their affair becomes a thrilling adventure, since it also means a betrayal of friendship and a breach of trust. Levinsky enters Dora's home as a friend of her husband Max, who takes pity on the lonely and homeless young businessman and unsuspectingly opens the door to the orphan Levinsky. The setup in the Margolis household-a loveless marriage, absent father, suffering mother--allows Levinsky to assume his role as an orphan, who punishes the absent father for the neglect of the good mother with whom the son identifies but whom he is not entitled to have. The scenario is all too familiar to Levinsky: it means seduction and theft of the mother from the absent father and disloyalty to the failing paternal legacy. As easily as he gains the trust of Dora's husband, Levinsky endears himself to Dora: he presents himself as a sensitive and melancholy man, who understands Dora's aspirations to become a mannered American lady and helps ease her suffering. As Marovitz puts it, he woos her "with a combination of tenderness and circumspect deviousness, intending soon after their introduction to take her as his mistress" ("Secular" 25). Levinsky describes the affair with Dora in the following words: "I idolized Dora. It seemed to me that I adored her soul even more than I did her body. I was under her moral influence, and the firmness with which she maintained the distance between us added to my respect for her. And yet I never ceased to dream of and to seek her moral downfall" (RDL 291). Right from the beginning, Levinsky presents his interest in Dora as a thrill of despoilation, a mission that starts out with the prospect of ruination that could not bring about the fulfilling relationship that Levinsky supposedly wants to have. Rather, the courtship of Dora is the conquest of a good mother and an exercise in masochism. According to Levinsky, it is Dora who breaks off their relationship and leaves him heartbroken. Dora's unexpected strength and determination turn her suddenly into a punishing mother, who insists on her decision with "iron-clad finality" (302). Dora "smites" Levinsky with "sudden cruelty" (311); he is "on the brink of a physical collapse" and abandoned "to the tortures of my helpless love" (312). Quite mysteriously, Levinsky fails to remember that it was his arrangements with the marriage-broker that made Dora decide on the outcome of their relationship. Instead of providing an explanation, Levinsky focuses on his victimhood: the "steady gnawing" pain comes to him "as an old acquaintance," and he yearns for Dora more than ever after she rejects him (31 1). Although suffering from the "dull pain" "nibbling" at him, Levinsky says that he is not only secretly happy to be out of that relationship, which was starting to bore him, but that there is also pleasure associated with his suffering: "There is pleasure in this kind of pain. it was as though I were two men at once, one being in the toils of hopeless love and the other filled with the joy of loving, all injunctions and barriers notwithstanding" (312). Levinsky's relationship with Dora, as his most intense and meaningful relationship, makes it obvious that despite his claims, he lacks genuine interest in marriage and demonstrates a deep fear of c~rnmitment.'~ Levinsky's hopeless infatuation with a much younger Miss Tevkin provides an even more telling example of his ambivalence and masochism. The middle- aged Levinsky describes Miss Tevkin as "the supreme desire of my being" (482) and his love for her as "madness" and "religion" overpowering his previous "infatuations" (482).11 A new challenge, a slightly more difficult situation, the infatuation with Miss Tevkin requires extensive research about her father, a famous poet, whose friendship eventually opens the door to the Tevkin family. Again, Levinsky gains the trust of the whole family, but apart from the surrogate home, the intellectual circles of the Tevkin household bring an unpleasant awareness of Levinsky's own spiritual death, of his broken ties with the Jewish community, and a reminder of the betrayal of his scholarly ambitions. In the Tevkin household in which "each adult in the family worshipped at the shrine of some 'ism,"' including socialism and zionism, the bourgeois Levinsky could not but help feel "wretched" (RDL 474). Out of place in the household of comrades. Levinsky's comments "missed fire" (474), and he puts up with Miss Tevkin's young siblings, who ridiculed him as "Mr. Capitalist" or the "money-bag" and asked him for various contributions (479). Feeling awkward and misplaced, Levinsky still hopes that Anna will return his love; therefore, he has "no strength" to discontinue his visits although each of them leaves him "dejected and forlorn" (475). instead of distancing himself, Levinsky prolongs his agony and self- destructively keeps visiting the Tevkins. As he says, "I hated and dreaded that world as much as ever and I dreaded Miss Tevkin more than ever, but, moth-like, I was drawn to the flame with greater and greater force. I went to the Tevkins' with the feeling of one going to his doom" (469). Even after Miss Tevkin declines his marriage proposal and marries another man, Levinsky still burns with passion for her. Rejected, he yearns more intensely and still dreams of marrying her. It is in this obviously futile adoration of Anna that Levinsky prolongs his unhappiness, and Girgus sees his "penchant for hurting and punishing himself' in the fact that Levinsky prefers to be in a hurtful situation rather than start a new, potentially more promising one (83). All of Levinsky's relationships are predicated on a self-destructive pattern according to which he venerates women who invoke the memory of the mother-- her sacrifice for him or her purity. Levinsky's paradoxical combination of pleasure and pain is made possible by the fact that he chooses women who are unsuitable for him, who "for one reason or another will not or cannot satisfy his need" (Marovitz "Secular" 27). As Rosenfeld notes, Levinsky is "drawn to women he cannot have. They are either hopelessly above his rank in wealth, sophistication, and culture, or married and faithful mother-surrogates, or simply not interested. The women who do find him attractive simply fail to move him" (262). The centrality of the memory of the mother, the loving but hurtful relationship, is reenacted in all of Levinsky's affairs. The memory of the mother may seem to interfere with Levinsky's emotional life, but Levinsky himself is the creator of "interrupted" love that cannot last and be satisfying. The constant deferral of happiness becomes a way of deriving pleasure and reenacting the memory of the mother. It also becomes a manner in which Levinsky supposedly punishes himself for failing to satisfy the mother and for betraying the promises of education and commitment to his Jewish roots that he made to her.

Deviousness and a "penchant for hurting" also characterize Levinsky's choice of career. His fashion empire is built on deceit, lies, and the theft of designs from rival designers. Just like his love affairs, Levinsky's business is based on the same principle of deferral and suspension. Levinsky again explains that it was the need to survive in America that forced him into business rather than pursue his dreams of education. At the beginning of his cloak trade, Levinsky deludes himself that his business is only a temporary step toward his education. He attributes his desire for a business career to the case of "spilt milk and damaged silks," his public humiliation before his co-workers, and the resulting burning desire to revenge. The story of revenge that prompted him to go into business is, as Isaac Rosenfeld notes, simply a rationalization of a sudden unpredictable turn in his career and a refusal to admit that he had already made a decision not to continue his studies (263). Rosenfeld rightly points out that Levinsky would never have entered the business "had it not been necessary to sacrifice something-in this case his desire for learning" (263). Levinsky again sets himself on a path that is from its very beginnings premised on doubt, wrong-doing, and guilt. After he finds himself safely in the pull of the market, Levinsky sadly realizes that his academic ambitions are frustrated, that the "temple" of education has been destroyed, so that he can only remark with a great deal of nostalgia that all he has left are "vague yearnings and something like a feeling of compunction which will assert itself, sometimes, to this day" (RDL 21 5). At the same time, the very fact that he has to sacrifice something-his studies, promises to his mother and to Matilda-is a challenge for Levinsky. The joy of adventurously experimenting with something new, which he actually wants, is coupled with suffering pangs of guilt and disloyalty. The combination of happiness and discontent, pleasure and suffering, proves itself to be a defining feature of Levinsky's character that manifests itself in all of the aspects of his life. Levinsky's failed romantic relationships and his frustrated dreams of education are colored by a tremendous nostalgia that seems to indicate his grief and guilt about the unfortunate course his life has taken. His melancholy predicament suggests an image of a powerless man in affect, who is at the mercy of an immigrant fate that conspires against him. However, Levinsky seems to be behind all of his failed relationships, and such a disguise relieves him of the need to ever grow up and face the responsibilities of an adult. Levinsky himself chooses women and stages relationships in such a way that they denigrate his masculinity, inflict pain and suffering and yet maintain hope in a suspenseful anticipation of possible happiness. His yearnings can never be complete; they can only generate a new disavowal, a new yearning. Levinsky remarks that there is always a "fly in the ointment of my happiness" (447). The string of failures in Levinsky's life can also be seen in a series of punishments for his supposed guilt: he blames himself for his mother's death; he betrays, publicizes, commodifies, and trivializes the memory of the mother in order to secure his advancement in the Gentile world; he breaks his promise to his mother that he would become a Talmudic scholar. It is almost that disguised as a punishing woman, Levinsky "punishes" himself with constant unhappiness and ravaging melancholy. He reenacts and reproduces the feminine sphere within which he was raised; he has internalized his mother's asceticism and sacrifice, her masochism and victimhood, and her pattern of life as a series of deferred gratifications. Such a "feminine" position denigrates the paternal influence, denies his masculinity, and privileges the maternal law that aligns Levinsky with his mother. The masquerade of nostalgia and the performance of the feminized immigrant ultimately allow Levinsky both to empower himself and to preserve the image of himself as a helpless orphan craving for protection and love of his mother. Levinsky can ultimately be seen as a "wandering soul," who, as Daniel Weber notes, represents a "profound portrait of modern hornelessness" and for whom "not even the promised land of America can provide a familiar, heimisch resting place" (740).

A Work of Mourning?

Sam B. Girgus has described David Levinsky's narrative as a "perfect model of impotence masking itself as powert' (78). The contentious relation between power and impotence in Levinsky's case makes it possible to see his narrative from a different perspective, as power masking itself as impotence. Although Levinsky exposes his weaknesses, displays his pain, and denudes his "inner" self, he does not convince one that he is a victim of circumstances. It seems more that he is satisfied that unfortunate events brought him to America and grateful that his immigrant fate freed him from all of the commitments that he otherwise would probably have had to make. Discussing the "undercurrent of sadness" in Levinsky's life and his "excruciating homesicknesst' (RDL 325, 103), Marovitz similarly notes that the "essential problem inheres in him, not in American freedom or corruption" (AC 162). Rosenfeld also recognizes Levinsky's agency when he says that Levinsky is not "merely the result of what has happened to him, but on the contrary, the events in his life are predetermined, in large measure, by what he has already become" (262).And Susan Kress adds, "The new world only seems to be new; the old traps merely appear in different guises" (35). This is, however, not to say that the tragic events of his life-death of both parents, poverty, immigration to America, struggle to survive in a highly competitive and hostile environment-did not contribute to Levinsky's suffering. But for the most part they function as socially acceptable (since historically determined) excuses for the breech of promises to his mother and Matilda, for his bachelorhood, rejection of the Jewish community, and for his success built on business instead of on intellectual pursuits. The immigrant condition and especially nostalgia as its symptom are a handy explanation for his lovelessness and the fact that after all his travails and transformations he remains a "hopeless captive of his own old self' (Sanford AC 162). The discussion of Levinsky's nostalgia, as a screen for masochism, makes it possible to see the similarities between the two. Both masochism and nostalgia allow for regression in time and posit the maternal image as the focal point. While masochism anticipates a reunion with the maternal, nostalgia mourns its loss. For some feminist critics, Julia Kristeva especially, the return to infancy, the maternal, pre-Oedipal imaginary is an indication of ontological nostalgia. The yearning for the maternal is a frustrated search for "first things," for beginnings, origins. Mary Jacobus writes that mothers and myths of origins have the same function: "to remind us that something is always lost in stories of the constitution of the subject, whether we call it the body or an undivided self' (16). Jacobus also adds that nostalgia itself is a form of "retroactive reconstruction," which never reaches fruition (2). Still, it should be noted that the privileging of origins, the call of primacy associated with the myth of beginnings, does invoke the danger of elitism and purism. For the most part in Levinsky's case, the maternal image means comfort, protection that provides the security and stability of home. Apart from temporal dislocation and the maternal image, nostalgia and masochism share a certain paralysis or "freezing" of people and places in time and place (in nostalgia), or an arresting of the image of the torturess and the masochist in a moment that combines awaiting and suspense, pleasure and pain. Nostalgia and masochism are also expressions of ambivalence toward fixity and closure. In both, completion is fictive and imaginary, and the pain and pleasure associated with them arise from incompletion, "interruption," in- betweenness, from the anticipation of the reunion with the mother, the past, the "true" self. They are predicated on longing for the times that are, as David Lowenthal points out, "safely, rather than sadly, beyond recall" (27). Such a premise hides the paradox of both nostalgia and masochism: while intensely yearning for the past, for the things beyond reach, nostalgics and masochists do not want completion. They are predicated on perpetuating desire, on yearning for yearning (Susan Stewart 23). Moreover, the desire for a reunion can never be realized since the nostalgic seeks "the absence," which in turn creates deferral and another desire and as such points to a lack of closure and fixity (23). Lowenthal writes similarly that nostalgics do not yearn for "the past as it were or even as we wish it were"; rather, nostalgics yearns for "the condition of having been with a concomitant integration and completeness lacking in any present" (29). The final trait that nostalgia and masochism have in common is empowerment through seeming weakness. Just as the masochist is only apparently powerless, so is nostalgia a weakness that implies courage and strength associated with the work of mourning. J. M. Fritzman explains it in the following way: "... nostalgia possesses another, more radical and originary, sense. It is the weakness of nostalgia that makes possible the courage of the work of mourning. The work of mourning always is an exercise in nostalgia. There can be no question of arguing that nostalgia is weak only in appearance, and actually is strong. Rather, nostalgia's weakness is its strength" (167). Moreover, arguing that nostalgia is linked with the sublime, Fritzman explains that nostalgia, just like masochism, combines both pain and pleasure. On the one hand, "Nostalgia is a remembering that induces pain-pain at the memory of a halcyon past" (169). On the other hand, Fritzman says,

there is pleasure in nostalgia, a delight in the recollections that occasion anguish ... This is a pleasure in the thought's ability to transcend facticity. Nostalgia is possible through the ability to imagine alternative possibilities ... The pain of memory occasions pleasure precisely because the remembrance of things past is painful. For this pain is itself a sign that the past may not be a destiny, that the present might be contingent, and that perhaps the future need not be a nightmare. (170-71; italics in the original)

It may be difficult to imagine a discussion of the sublime in relation to David Levinsky, but it is certain that the combination of pain and pleasure, impotence and power, victimhood and agency are at work in his life and in the story that he tells us. His narrative, like his life, is stamped with ambivalence, and it is not quite clear why he goes to such lengths to tell some very personal details and to display his pain so publicly. What is the purpose of this narrative of displacement, and why does he think that an American audience would listen to the laments and a heart-breaking story of an immigrant millionaire? Levinsky's narrative may be seen in the context of diasporic living, which is conducive to storytelling, to reordering and rearranging one's new life, new identity, new story. In his discussion of Caribbean cinema Stuart Hall has indicated that the diasporic condition "gives rise so profoundly to a certain imaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to return to 'lost origins', to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning" ("Cultural" 236). Nostalgia, the illusional quality of the return to the beginning, is not only an integral part of life in the diaspora, but it is also a source of a rich aesthetic experience: "like the imaginary in Lacan-it can neither be fulfilled not requited, and hence is the beginning of the symbolic, of representation, the infinitely renewable source of desire, memory, myth, search, discovery" (236). Nostalgia may be the driving force behind Levinsky's storytelling. Although he may not be artistically minded, it may be that "telling it all" has therapeutic and redemptive qualities. Philip Burnard and Paul Morrison discuss the confessional nature of self-disclosure, and drawing on 0.T. Jaffe, they argue that a narrative of self-disclosure can have the effect of "self-renewal," of regaining the sense of self, or of self-acceptance (79). Levinsky's story may be redeeming in that he finally succeeds in putting his life narrative together, and the process of creating it, possibly writing it, may represent a rare opportunity for him to engage in the kind of "intellectual" pursuit that he so unfortunately had to sacrifice. Levinsky as narrator may have had a change of heart during the writing of his autobiography, which makes it possible to read it as a book of advice for the "greenhorns," young and naive immigrants "fresh from the boat." The story of an accomplished but deeply divided and unhappy man may be a strong warning against the perils of a life in exile. Furthermore, the narrative can be seen as a public apology for his affluence and a desire to get social approval and acceptance. It may also be seen as an apology for the betrayal of everything dear and sacred-he traffics with the sacred memory of his mother or employs the workers from his hometown only because they are non-unionized cheap labor. Or, Levinsky's fiction may be seen as the home that he was searching for, a home for "homeless wanderers," who find a "true home" "not in houses but in writing" (Trinh Minh-ha in Jansen 105). Writing in this case becomes a search for the self, for home as a possible "working definition ... where one best knows oneself' (Nigel Rapport and Michael Dawson 9). If writing is often a search for the self, and if that self is deeply divided, it may be difficult to write a narrative that is not conflicting. As a success story, Levinsky's narrative is particularly characteristic of this problem. Pamela J. Benoit points out the challenge of balancing self-praise with arrogance, and she indicates that such stories are an important aspect of self-presentation and are therefore crucial to interpersonal communication (1). She claims that self- presentation of personal success represents an "exquisite interpersonal accomplishment," which usually helps situate a "successful identity" ... within "competing goals of self-enhancement and modesty" (1). Modesty and humility may be intentions of David Levinsky, but he fails to convince the reader. Sanford Marovitz remains highly sceptical of Levinsky's narrative, which he calls a "putative confession" (AC 152). In a remote way, Levinsky's storytelling can even be seen as a search for his roots. Isaac Rosenfeld explains the ambivalence in Levinsky's text in essentialist terms. He argues that the story is "Jewish" in conception since it consists of an "extended commentary on a single text" and in that sense reminds one of the Talmud (259). The dialogic structure of Levinsky's text may indeed be traced to his early education in chederand his desire to apply it to his narrative. While it is negotiable whether the story bears resemblance to the Talmud, it is certainly the case that the text consists of a series of counterpoints: the narrator brackets his success with expressions of unhappiness, fusing success with failure, satisfaction with corrosive analysis, and he juflaposes self-confidence with insecurity, pride with guilt and shame, pleasure with pain. It is in this self-denigration, in this vacillation between extremes that we can see the appeal of storytelling for Levinsky. Levinsky's narrative technique may simply be an extension of his masochism. The dismissal of success can be a way of creating disavowal and deferring self-affirmation. By creating another instance of interrupted pleasure, Levinsky may just be "postponing" the affirmation of his success. Therefore, the expressions of the unreliable narrator- his self-denial, self-inflicted pain, and destabilizing self-criticism-may simply be a game that he has been playing throughout his life and now extends to the reader. The narrator may be toying with the expectations of the audience, wondering whether they would uncover his motivations and the pleasure that the game gives him. Apart from the enjoyment derived from his rhetorical skill which, he believes, masks his masochism and deceives the reader, Levinsky's self-torment and exposure of his weaknesses allow him to control and manipulate the reader's response. The reader is inclined to take pity on this tormented soul, to be compassionate and forgiving of the man who so publicly denounces and diminishes his accomplishment. Ferraro argues that the reader discovers the rift in Levinsky's personality and learns about the means by which Levinsky achieves success-hard work, "ingenuity," and "cynical manipulation of his workers and their faith"; yet, Ferraro believes, Levinsky redeems himself in the eyes of the reader and becomes more sympathetic by virtue of the fact that he "comes to recognize that he has betrayed Judaism and isolated himself from his people" ("Ethnicity" 386). Ferraro's description of the audience's reaction to Levinsky's story may be exactly the impression that Levinsky wants to create. Such a response would mean a confirmation of Levinsky's efforts to mask his deviousness and play a game with the audience. It is significant to remember Deleuze's argument that masochism is based on an aesthetic and dramatic suspense, which, rather importantly, places the reader on the side of the victim and forces the audience to identify with him. David Levinsky's narrative may simply be one of his ploys, another deception, that forces the reader to empathize with the character and suspend critical judgment, especially if Levinsky himself is both asserting and criticizing himself and his choices. Or, in other words, he may be taking pleasure in making his success public and inflicting pain on himself by exposing his mistakes, weaknesses, and wrong choices. We should also not forget that the rise of David Levinsky, as told by Levinsky himself, is an "it's-lonely-at-the-top" narrative and, as such, does not fail to provide a nostalgic look back of a successful businessman. The "Rosebud syndrome" is situated at the conclusion of the story, when Levinsky confides: "I can never forget the days of my misery" (RDL 530). At the height of his success, this unhappy millionaire is ready to trade his present for the past. He yearns for the days when he was "struggling and squirming and constantly racking my brains for some way of raising a hundred dollars" (525). The successful businessman would even trade lives with a poor but educated immigrant, who can contribute culturally or scientifically to the new country. He is quite convinced that he "should probably have made a better college professor than a cloak- manufacturer and should probably be a happier man, too" (529). He would be much happier "as scientist or writer," in which case his solitude would be justified: at least it would have been invested in creativity or productive energy, the absence of which in his business makes his loneliness burdensome (529). After a while, all of Levinsky's yearnings-for an academic career, for home and a settled married life, for a return to boyhood and poverty-sound like the conventions of an immigrant story, and Marovitz sees them as mere rhetorical constructs. They are simply "a rosy illusion to which he pays homage with words alone, whereas practical power and self-gratification are Levinsky's real concerns" ("Secular" 32). Levinsky's story is not just one of self-denigration; it is also an expression of the glorified success of an American capitalist of immigrant origin. As such, it needs to conceal deviousness, greed, and the constant hunger generated and perpetuated by capitalism. It is not difficult to believe that Levinsky brings his business sense even to his narrative. He knows. or his "business intuition" tells him, that he needs a mystery in order to make his story interesting, to "sell" it. The story of a garment manufacturer who comes from an obscure town in Russia and succeeds in America may be in places too linear, too flat, and too foreign to appeal to a non-immigrant audience. If, as Lowenthal suggests, references to the past are used to establish a "mystical connection" with the "great and ennobling heritage,"'2 Levinsky is in some difficulty, for he has none of that (Lowenthal in Bennett 10). He needs to repackage his past and make it more marketable. And, what better investment than a sentimental story of the love of a son for his self-sacrificial mother? Levinsky's "outer" self knows that vulnerability is powerful in that it weakens criticism and invites identification, so he designs a profitable and fascinating concoction of misery and success. While power appeals, vulnerability disarms. Levinsky may even be a precursor of the marketability of nostalgia, and he may even have envisioned Lowenthal's statement that "Nothing nowadays sells so well as the past" (22).Still, David Levinsky is not a merchant on a grand scale. That title goes to Citizen Kane. If Kane's Rosebud mystery is such that it still haunts the imagination and makes a profit almost fifty years after the film's release, then David Levinsky's story of an unhappy immigrant is a good example of nostalgia-peddling.13 The story of David Levinsky is a typical immigrant narrative: it talks about a nostalgic and divided man trying to find a balance between the past and the present, here and there, the old and the new, immigrant and American. Yet, Abraham Cahan's novel represents a significant contribution to the body of East European immigrant writing in turn-of-the-century America. It allows a demystification of the notion of nostalgia that is automatically linked with immigration. The text shows that the immigrant condition provides a convenient excuse for the "lack" or "luggage" that is brought into the host country rather than acquired in the hurtful process of dislocation. In The Rise of David Levinsky, the nostalgia of the suffering immigrant is a careful construct, which disguises the immigrant's masochistic drives. This in turn relieves the protagonist of responsibility for his actions and decisions in the new country and provides an opportunity for a regressive, self-indulgent state in which affect becomes a protective (and lucrative) entity. Therefore, "immigrant" nostalgia is a complex sentiment, whose many faces and many uses are yet to be discovered. Or, as Simon Signoret has nostalgically remarked, even "nostalgia isn't what it used to be" (Signoret in Fritzman 168). ENDNOTES

1. In my analysis, I will be referring to Levinsky as the narrator of the text rather than Abraham Cahan.

2. Some critics, like Eric Homberger, choose to read Levinsky's self-deprecation and sense of guilt as typical of Jewish culture. In particular, Homberger examines ambivalence in the work of Abraham Cahan and Michael Gold. On this, see "Some Uses for Jewish Ambivalence: Abraham Cahan and Michael Gold ."

3. For biographical information on Abraham Cahan, see the following: Jules Chametzky's Introduction to second edition of The Rise of David Levinsky (1993); the First Chapter, "The Life: From Russian Student to American Man of Letters," in Sanford Marovitz's Abraham Cahan; or the fourth chapter, "A Convert to America: Sex, Self, and Ideology in Abraham Cahan" in Sam B. Girgus' The New Covenant: Jewish Wiifers and the American Idea. All three authors follow Cahan's immigration from a village in Lithuania to New York and his initial socialist leanings that later turned into bitter and rather conservative critique of communism and Stalinism. Apart from his fiction (the novella Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), The Rise of David Levinsky (191 7), and the short story collection The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories of Yiddish New Yo& (1898)) Cahan is best known for his successful editorial work for the Jewish Daily Fonvard, which he started in 1903. His bold refashioning of the paper-use of "plain," accessible Yiddish; introduction of Americanisms, for which he was often criticized; the choice of topics of immediate concern to wide readership-turned the paper into "the most influential and widely read Yiddish-language newspaper in the world" (Chametzky xi). The success of the newspaper established Cahan as an important figure in the ethnic Jewish community (xi). He participated in the acculturation of the community and made a significant contribution to the promotion of Jewish-American literature. Cahan is remembered for The Rise of David Levinsky and for the fact that his novella Yekl, was turned into a film, Hester Street (1977), that deals with turn-of-the century immigration.

4. Ferraro provides the titles of a number of stories of "distinguished" Americans that fused the influence of Franklin's autobiography and Horatio Alger's rags-to- riches tales: Edward Bok's The Americanization of Edward Bok (I920), Jacob Riis' The Making of an American (1 901), Angelo Patri's The Spirit of America (1924). Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1 912), M. E. Ravage's An American in the Making (191 7). Edward Steiner's From Alien to Citizen (1914). Michael Pupin's From Immigrant to Inventor (1923) (385). 5. Critics often note the similarity between Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky and Howells' The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). They also point to Howells' warm welcome of Cahan's novel and his involvement in its favorable reception. Howells wrote a review in which he "hailed Cahan (along with Stephen Crane) on the first page of the New York Worlds literary section as 'a New Star of Realism"' (Chametzky "Introduction" xii).

6. Sam Girgus compares Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky with F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. In the two novels, he finds similarities in the myths of America, the characters' visions of what America means to them, and their use of the importance of landscape as a symbol of America (73).

7. At the end of his essay "Coldness and Cruelty," Deleuze summarizes his study of masochism and provides a detailed list of differences between sadism and masochism, based on aesthetic properties of Sade's and Masoch's works; see "Coldness and Cruelty" (1 34).

8. It is the willingness of the masochist to submit to the powerful woman that allows Studlar to expand on Laura Mulvey's discussion of visual pleasure in classical narrative cinema and argue that visual pleasure is derived not only from the spectator's desire to control and possess the woman (sadistic voyeurism) or disempower her by turning her into a fetishized object to be looked at (fetishistic scopophilia). Drawing on Deleuze, Studlar argues that visual pleasure in classical Hollywood film is also derived from the masochistic desire of the male spectator to submit to the power of the female figure.

9. Sam B. Girgus mentions the idea of rebirth in The Rise of David Levinsky and argues that Levinsky's rebirth is accomplished through unhappy women like Dora Margolis, whose misery emphasizes "the importance of giving people the opportunity to create their own futures" (74). Quite significantly, Girgus also points out that Levinsky's change in America means his deterioration. His "transformation in the New World garden seems more diabolical than miraculous. He becomes The Great Levinsky, a grotesque perversion of the American dream whose enormous economic success leaves him feeling homeless. Like Gatsby, he is without any real sense of identity or place as he comes to embody the corruption of the myth that brought him to America in the first place. As Levinsky the immigrant is transformed into the Great Levinsky the giant of the cloak and suit trade, we see the myth of regeneration and new life transmogrified into the 'gospel of success'. Levinsky represents a Jewish version of the rags-to-riches myth in America in which success and power are values in and of themselves" (74-5).

10. Susan Kress has remarked that all of Abraham Cahan's works, including The Rise of David Levinsky, show ambivalence towards marriage: "In Cahan's fiction, the terrors of being unmarried are balanced against the claustrophobia of the married condition" (26).

11. The fact that he names his passion for Matilda, his Russian love and Dora "infatuations" diminishes the importance of these two women in comparison with Miss Tevkin. It also questions Levinsky's ability to define his emotions and recognize love when, and if, he actually feels it.

12. Lowenthal, in fact, refers to 'ttradifionalists"who see tremendous importance on relying on history and heritage. Susan Bennett aptly uses Lowenthal's argument in her discussion of the current interest in staging Shakespeare.

13. The idea for "nostalgia-peddling" comes from David Lowenthal's essay "Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't." Lowenthal refers to recycling of English heritage as "heritage-peddling" (23). Chapter Five

Between Roots and Routes: Henry Roth's Call It Sleep

"The children of the immigrants had no role models. They resented the traps into which they had been born, and they were angry with the powerless fathers who could not liberate them. They had no choice but to liberate themselves, as Jews and as Americans." (Arthur Hertzberg Jews in America 184)

"8eing a nomad, living in transition, does not mean that one cannot or is unwilling to create those necessarily stable and reassuring bases for identity that allow one to function in a community. Rather, nomadic consciousness consists in not taking any kind of identity as permanent. The nomad is only passing through; slhe makes those necessarily situated connections that can help herlhim to survive, but slhe never takes on fully the limits of one national, fixed identity. The nomad has no passport-or has too many of them." (Rosi Braidotti Nomadic Subjects 33)

The quotation from Arthur Hertzberg's Jews in America (1997) indicates the topic of this chapter: an immigrant child and the process of acculturation. Not too many fictional or critical works examine how life in the diaspora impacts on an immigrant family. They also tend not to explore deep enough how living in a foreign country affects the immigrant child: the process of the creation of identity between an ethnic home and a dominant culture. Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1934) is a coming-of-age novel that explores the changes in an immigrant family and the struggles of an ethnic child to chart out his identity. I will discuss the process of identity creation of the main protagonist, little David Schearl, through his "reading" practices. Although Stephen J. Adams argues that Call It Sleep is the "noisiest novel ever written" in the clamor of clashing languages, cultures, and beliefs, much is left unspoken. The noise often overrides the gaps and silences in David Schearl's education, view of the world, communication with his family, and people he meets. I will, therefore, read the child protagonist as a perceptive reader of numerous gaps and silences in the narrative of his dysfunctional immigrant family. He also reads avidly the world outside of his home, which presents him with a multitude of clashing traditions, cultures, languages, and value systems. David's reading practices-his blurring of different traditions, languages, and religions-enable him to create his own linguistic universe, a unique narrative in which he will try to define himself. Rather than generalize about the growing up of urban immigrant children, my discussion will consider immigration as a particular context that allows for the existence of a number of disruptive and interfering discourses. The additional challenge of living in the diaspora means that one has to learn how to read and interpret a multitude of discourses and eventually inscribe one's own subjectivity into them. My reading of Roth's novel follows the reading strategy of David Schearl: it mixes facts with fiction. This chapter provides historical information about the impact of life in the diaspora on an immigrant family. I will then discuss David's reading strategies and finally present him as an example of a nomadic subject: he is defined by many exploratory travels and non-linear movements among various discourses, cultures, traditions, and languages. He has the freedom to play with them and combine them in new, unpredictable ways. While doing that, he temporarily sutures himself into those discourses and forms temporary attachments before he detaches himself again and continues journeying to another fixed point, another moment of suture, or creation of a temporary identity. Bearing in mind that nomadic subjectivity is a "political fiction," I will draw on the work of Rosi Braidotti and Stuart Hall and speculate to what extent nomadic subjectivity and immigrant identity can be connected. If immigrant identity is revised in the process of migration and if it can be perceived in terms of a nomadic subject, then how does that new identity affect the host country? And, can it also mean new ways of belonging to the host country and new ways of defining citizenship? What does History Say about Immigrant Children, and What of David Schearl?

Like most sociological, historical, and reformist texts about immigration, Selma Berrol's article "Ethnicity and American children" acknowledges the central role that immigrant children play in the acculturation of their families. Turn-of-the-century America and its melting pot immigration policy were based on the belief that acculturation and Americanization of immigrant children meant almost automatic (even if partial) parental acceptance of the American way of living. Cultural and linguistic training of children who were to grow up into Americans was therefore given special emphasis. The insistence of American educationists on the acculturation of children has prompted John Bodnar to argue that educational reformers of the time were gradually transforming childhood from "the private preserve of the family and household ... into a responsibility of the state" (1go).' Bodnar writes that educators' insistence on compulsory attendance turned schools into centers for cultural recruitment, or "incubators of social and cultural conformity" (191). The educator's pressure also transformed children into an effective tool of state immigration policy, which considered immigrant youth indispensable to "national destiny, economic prosperity, and a harmonious social order" (191). Not surprisingly, under the pressure of educational reformers and social workers who intruded into settlement houses and immigrant family life, parents were asked "to relinquish control over their progeny to agents of the state and the new order of industrial capitalism" (19 1). The fact that Bodnar connects the demands of a capitalist economy with immigrant youth suggests a redefinition of the children's social role and a humane tendency to replace child labor with a progressive orientation towards compulsory education. It should not be forgotten at any point that labor was a part of the coming-of-age experience for the majority of immigrant children in America. Selma Berrol recalls a survey done in 1905, which indicates that foreign-born white children constituted "the largest proportion of the national child labor force" (Berrol 349). Illegal child labor was supported both by the employers and the children's families: it was encouraged by the employer's greed and desire to pay lower wages for unskilled and less arduous jobs, as well as by the need of immigrant families for additional incomes (349). While girls worked in the garment industry or stayed at home to help mothers and be surrogate caregivers to younger siblings, boys worked as peddlers, bootblacks, messengers, newsboys, and wood gatherers (348-9).' The success of educational reformers, which was closely related to the American immigration policy of the time and the "new order of industrial capitalism," consisted in introducing compulsory education and relieving children of labor. The only problem was that the emphasis on American education meant the undermining and loosening of tight family bonds among immigrants: it generated a fear of the loss of ethnic identity. To such a threat, immigrant parents responded by enrolling their children in both the public school system, which equipped children with linguistic and cultural skills necessary for their future in the mainstream society, and religious or cultural institutions, which provided a link with the past and guaranteed the continuity and stability of parental values (Berrol 348). The assirnilationist drive freed ethnic children from physical labor and expectations to contribute to family income. However, the children still faced a double responsibility, to their parents and to the new country. Immigrant children were expected to acknowledge and support their parents' efforts to retain their ethnic identity. At the same time, they were encouraged to introduce their parents to the American system of values and gradually "reeducate" and "convert" them. With time, it became obvious that immigrant children were perceived both by their parents and the state as the vehicles through which "foreign" language and culture entered, or invaded, ethnic homes.3 The uncomfortable role of cultural mediation between ethnic home and America that immigrant children were expected to perform created a great imbalance within the immigrant family power structure. On the one hand, the American school system empowered the children by providing modern, New-world education, promising a bright future, and turning them into responsible cultural missionaries. On the other hand, the children's missionary power was frequently undermined at home by the fact that they were, after all, children, emotionally and materially dependent on their parents. Moreover, as Berrol indicates, the messages the children were receiving from the two sides were almost diametrically opposite: at schools, settlement houses, or in the streets, immigrant children learned that they should give up their "'backward' Old World language, customs, and dress and become Americans." while at home it was obvious that their nostalgic, uprooted, and insecure parents "clung to the old customs" in an attempt to preserve their cultural identity and pass it onto their children (Berrol 356). The fact that parents were unfamiliar with American society and its educational system often accounted for intolerance and intergenerational conflicts between immigrant children and their parents. The children's response to the gap in which they found themselves--the "school" interpretation of American values and the "home" vision of the host country upheld by their parents-was various. Drawing on the work of the sociologist Irwin Childs, Berrol points out three responses of first- generation immigrant children to intergenerational conflict: linguistic and cultural identification with the family, apathy (a passive, "divided" life between private, ethnic identity and public, American one) and rebellion, a refusal to be associated with the culture of the parents (359). Thz new social role of immigrant children had an impact on the structure and "natural" order of child-parent relations in immigrant families. The imbalance was reflected in undermined parental authority and in the children's premature burden of responsibility to reeducate and guide their parents through American society. As a result, the frequent loss of respect for parents, who could not be Americans and occupy respectable positions in society, and the children's task of cultural mediation made it exceedingly difficult for the children to deal with the pains of their own identity formation. The role reversal in immigrant families, children parenting their parents, may be an act of empowering immigrant children since the parents had to rely on their children's interpretation of the new society and on their guidance through the unfamiliar land of American cultural and linguistic systems. lnfantilized and robbed of dignity, immigrant parents often existed as impotent and merely symbolic parental figures, who lacked knowledge and experience to assist their children in growing up in a foreign country. Children often felt alone and abandoned in their efforts to find their identities. They struggled both with the foreign cultural system, the world of adults, and. more specifically, with the complex world of their parents, including the mysterious "home" elsewhere, to which their parents often retreated. In Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (1 996),R. Radhakrishnan provides a more contemporary example of a rift in an immigrant family. He records a conversation with his son and his peers and discusses the way the two generations experience life in exile. Speaking particularly about "authentic" ethnicity in diaspora, Radhakrishnan discusses a discrepancy between the way parent and child perceive ethnic life, and he realizes his own inadequacy as a parent fully to comprehend the experience of growing up in a foreign country. He finds out that the younger generation is resistant to his idealistic belief in the double allegiance of the first generation of immigrants who are both Americans and Indians. Instead, the children point out many markers of difference that are attached to them. Lacking the experience of growing up in another country, parents find it difficult fully to comprehend or respond to the problems that children are facing (206). Isolating in particular the issue of race, Radhakrishnan writes: "the fact was that the parents had not gone through similar experiences during their childhoods. Although the home country is indeed replete with its own divisions, phobias, and complexes, the racial line of color is not one of them. Thus, if the formulaic justification of parental wisdom is that the parent 'had been there before,' the formula does not apply here" (206). Radhakrishnan stresses that the discrepancy in lived experience of the diaspora between parents and children is not simply a generation gap. He indicates the complexity of an immigrant family by pointing out the need for cross-generational communication and learning as a way of not only alleviating living in the new country, but also of preserving the continuity and integrity of a family. He writes:

The problem here is more acute than the unavoidable 'generation gap' between students I young adults and teachers Iparents. The tensions between the old and new homes create the problem of divided allegiances that the two generations experience differently. The very organicity of the family and the community, displaced by travel and dislocation, must be renegotiated and redefined. The two generations have different starting points and different givens. This phenomenon of historical rupture within the 'same' community demands careful and rigorous analysis. The older generation cannot afford to invoke India in an authoritarian mode to resolve problems in the diaspora, and the younger generation would be ill advised to indulge in a spree of forgetfulness about 'where they have come from'. It is vital that the two generations empathize and desire to understand and appreciate patterns of experience not their own. (206)

Radhakrishnan's discussion of the difficulties facing an immigrant family is significant since it points out the particular circumstances in which an immigrant child experiences the new world and in which a parent has to deal with undermined parental authority. What makes turn-of-the-century immigration especially conducive to the changes in family structure is the fact that the gap in education and experience of the new culture was much more exaggerated than it is today. An additional example of a change in turn-of-the century family structure is provided by Hertzberg, who discusses in particular changes in a Jewish family. He points to the destruction of the authority of the father, who fails to provide for the family, protect them, and preserve the patriarchal role he occupied at home. On the other hand, the lack of interest of the younger generation in religion contributed further to undermining of paternal authority and the investment of the mother with power and influence. The invention of the "Jewish mother" and the need to redefine the traditional family are therefore closely connected with the experience of the New World (186). The mother became a significant figure during the time of the mass migration, and since she often worked, the changed economic status made her a decisive factor in matter of children's education and their protection (186). The changes in immigrant family structure finally mean that immigrant children face an additional responsibility for mediating between home and host country. Immigrant children often miss parental supervision, and that makes it difficult for them to articulate their identity out of a melange of various conflicting worldviews. On the other hand, life in the diaspora provides greater freedom to explore various traditions and cultures and to come to terms with the fact that home is no longer a stable reference for immigrant children and that they often have to rely on their own exploratory, disconnected, and nomadic, journeys between the old and the new.

Henry Roth's kunstler novel Call It Sleep4explores the American childhood of David Schearl, an Austrian-born, Jewish immigrant boy, who discovers the process of reading, of decoding multiple and complex cultural signs, as an important adaptation and survival strategy. David wanders through myriad incomprehensible and seemingly unaccepting discourses, such as the complicated world of his parents-their mysterious past, anger, loveless marriage-his disturbing relationship with his father, the mysterious world of sexuality, the street culture of his peers, or his education in a "regular" school and in a cheder, a Jewish religious school. Although these aspects of David's life are very different, they all create a sense of frustration, a sense of lack or inadequacy, that David has to overcome: at home he is struggling with the disturbing idea that he may not be his father's son and that he has to divide his mother's attention with his father; in cheder, he is going through growing pains while trying to comprehend the sacred; in the street, he is attempting to decode his own behaviour and that of his peers and avoid accusations that he "neveh hengs oud wid nobody" (CIS 176). David's response to the various linguistic, cultural, and psychological conflicts is an intense desire to overcome difference, compensate for his lack, and suture himself into discourses that initially seem incomprehensible and self-contained. He searches for a language that would accurately represent his experience of the world and wants to achieve, what Diamant calls, "imaginary at-homeness" (346). While David's visual explorations of the city are a part of his learning experience, his sensitivity to language is stressed by the way he experiences a new part of the city into which his family moves. He remarks that the move from Brownsville to the Lower East Side meant a rather shocking shift from a peaceful world of images to a loud and disorderly melange of words:

For David it [the Lower East Side] was a new and violent world, as different from Brownsville as quiet from turmoil. Here in 9th Street it wasn't the sun that swamped one as one left the doorway, it was sound-an avalanche of sound. There were countless children, there were countless baby carriages, there were countless mothers. And to the screams, rebukes and bickerings of these, a seemingly endless file of hucksters joined their bawling cries. (CIS 143)

David's initiation into the sphere of the aural suggests his transition to a world of words that replaces his quiet observations in Bro~nsville.~The violence and incomprehensibility of his new life announces David's impending struggle with the symbolic system and his active search for new means of expression through which he can define himself and his new experiences. This coming-of-age novel is characteristic of immigrant narratives of the 1930s in that it foregrounds the hardships and responsibilities of an immigrant child. As Elaine Orr notes, the novel evokes various marginal positions; it brings to the fore "urban working class landscapes, violently modeled juvenile interactions, memories of painful migration and 'naturalization"' (210). Although immigration figures as a wide backdrop to the novel, the text predominantly focuses, as Orr rightly points out, on male working class immigrants, whose lives are presented as a series of displacements and awkward adjustments to the new environment and new definitions of ma~culinity.~Still, despite its masculine bent, the novel differs quite significantly from texts with a strong naturalist tendency, as for instance Anzia Yezierska's collection of short stories. Hungry Hearts, or Pietro Di Donato's novel Chrisf in Concrete (1938). Di Donato's novel, in particular, offers a very sombre view of the immigrant childhood and describes a premature growing up of the oldest son in an impoverished Italian family. The son has to replace his deceased father as a bread-winner of the family and offer emotional support to his grieving and overworked mother. None of the existential and naturalist drama of this kind takes place in Call It Sleep. We never see the Schearl family struggling financially, although there is always a fear that David's father may lose a job and that the family may have to move to poorer quarters. David, moreover, is a sensitive child, whose drama lies in reading the complicated world of home, cheder, adults, and peers. Living in the Schearl household means living in an emotionally repressed world in which little is communicated and in which there is always the danger of the eruption of David's father's violence. Thomas Ferraro describes the shattered relationships in David's family as the classic Oedipal triangle. It exemplifies

a lone male child, terrified of sex yet driven to an increasingly hallucinatory probing of his parents' troubled sexuality; the father economically and culturally disenfranchised, prone to impotence and a compensatory paternal rage, feeling increasingly isolated from wife and child; the mother betrayed in her marriage, turning vengefully to the affection of the son, exposing him to the ultimate divergence of his awakening desire and her growing need. (EP 88)

As a child, David finds it difficult to disentangle himself from the "vicious circle of paranoia," filial ingratitude, emotional blackmail, and guilt-inducing neglect in which his father locks him (Ferraro 100). It also becomes obvious that all of the domestic problems-the family's long separation before they reunite in America, suspicions about David's paternity, lack of communication-are heightened by the experience of immigration, by the family's struggle to adjust to the world that is so enormously different from everything they knew or experienced prior to their arrival in New York. Although David is not expected to work and help his father support the family-we see him only once delivering milk with his father-he is not entirely free from the responsibility expected from an immigrant child. He is aware of the adults' cultural disorientation, and especially of his mother's linguistic isolation. One of the duties that he assumes is the responsibility of guiding his mother and Aunt Bertha through the urban He functions as a substitute for the absent male fiaure in charge of a confined female world. David's mother seems to exemplify the life of many immigrant women of the time. Her arrival to the New World did not change significantly the conditions of her living. While in the old country she lived within the borders of a shtetl, in America she finds herself constricted by her linguistic inadequacy to an ethnic area, an immigrant, Jewish ghetto. Genya herself comments on the small space within which she lives: "Within this pale is my America" (CIS 33). Confined to an ethnic ghetto, Genya can only leave it with the help of her husband or her son. If left on her own, she has to depend on visual memory and material markers:

I know there is a church on a certain street to my left, the vegetable market is to my right, behind me are the railroad tracks and the broken rocks, and before me, a few blocks away is a certain store window that has a kind of white-wash on it. ... In fact, were they even to wash that window, I might never find my way home again. (33)

Genya thus remains dependent on the men in her household for orientation and survival in the foreign world, and she remains a background figure who is defined by the two men in her life: she is Albert's marital companion whom he brings to America, as arranged by her father, and she is David's devoted and loving mother. There are many occasions that indicate little David's isolation and his parents' inability to respond to the complexity of the world around him. While his father is always absent and they can never communicate well, David is aware of his mother's vulnerability in America and, especially, of her awkward malfunctioning in the public sphere. At home, the mother is the protector, the soother, the caregiver, who is occasionally and lovingly reminded of the meaning of "American" things, like porridge: "My teacher said it was oatmeal with farina, you give it to me in the morning." -- "Yes, yes. You told me" (39). In those rare instances when David's mother can be seen outside of the home, her unfamiliarity with American society puts her in an equally vulnerable position to David's. When David gets lost after counting telephone poles, it is Genya who comes to the police station to pick him up and save him in time from his father's rage. But, paradoxically enough, the protection she offers does not feel sufficient, for she herself speaks less English than David. All Genya can do in the police station is thank the policemen humbly in a mixture of English and Yidd ish--"Tmanksso viel!"-and embarrassingly ask for the permission to leave, "Er- ... Herr-Mister. Ve--er-ve go?" (106). Although Genya takes David safely home, the impression is that she herself is equally, if not more, vulnerable and disoriented than her son and that her role as a strong and reliable parent is undermined by the fact that in the police station she is equally excluded from the male world of authority, whose language she cannot speak. Therefore, in the traditionally polarized world of male public activity and female private subservience, David's mother remains the silent other, who lives in the shadow of her violent husband and for the protection of her highly sensitive son. David's role as his mother's reliable guide may to some extent be connected to his responsibility as a keeper of family secrets and a mediator between mother and father. There is hardly any conversation in the Schearl household. In fact, David is encouraged to become an active participant in perpetuating silence as the main mode of communication between his parents. Both mother and father ask David to participate in the discourse of the unsaid; they want him to keep secrets of their mysterious pasts, lies, and fears. Even his loving and protective mother suggests that certain things are best left unsaid in order to preserve peace at home. Therefore, by recognizing moments that cannot be shared with other family members, David learns that it is a part of his responsibility to preserve relative harmony in their household. He also learns to read silences and use a certain freedom they provide to resort to his imaginative reconstructions of events that he cannot fully comprehend. David's tense relationship with his father is aggravated by the pressure for complicity under which his father places him. Allowed to catch a glimpse of the dark sides of his father's character, David is expected to keep to himself the secrets of the incomprehensible adult world and deal with them on his own. On one of the occasions when David's father loses his job due to his violent behaviour and near-killing of a co-worker, it is David who goes to pick up his father's clothes and ask for money from the manager. David's presence in the manager's office creates disbelief, and it provokes a comment about the appropriateness of such a task for a boy, "The idea, sending a kid his age on an errand like this" (27). Such a comment also suggests his father's cowardice and implicit wrongdoing hidden behind his absence from the scene. The incident becomes a chilling revelation of the father's violence that cannot be contained in the family. It asks that David accept and live with the image of his father as a potential killer, and David has only a few minutes to sort out his emotions, hide his terror, and suppress any sign of knowledge of the incident before he meets him: So that was how his father quit a place! He held a hammer in hand, he would have killed somebody. David could almost see him, the hammer raised over his head, his face contorted in terrific wrath, the rest cringing away. He shuddered at the image in his mind, stopped motionless on the stair, terrified at having to confront the reality. But he must go down; he must meet him; it would be worse if he remained on the stair any longer. (27)

David is asked to be complicit in the secrecy that surrounds his father's impulsive and destructive nature. The utter horror of his discovery cannot be shared with anybody, not even his beloved mother, "David never said anything to anyone of what he had discovered, not even to his mother-it was all too terrifying, too unreal to share with someone else" (28). Even his mother participates actively in fostering responsibility on David. Just as his father reveals his dark sides and asks for David's silence, so does his mother put him in a situation in which he must act more mature than he is. In an episode of non-verbal communication between mother and son, David is expected to obey, if not fully comprehend, his mother's secret desires and act accordingly. It is the visit of Luter, his father's foreman and only friend, whom David openly dislikes, that prompts his mother to act strangely and implicate David in her affairs. Luter comes to seduce David's mother and he hopes to send the boy to the store to get an icecream, but his mother sends a secret sign by touching David's leg under the table. The little boy is expected to decode her gesture: does his mother want him to accept or refuse Luter's attractive offer? "Beneath the table a hand gently pressed his thigh. His mother! What did she want? 'I don't like it, he faltered. 'I don't like ice cream.' The fingers of the same hand tapped his knees ever so lightly. He had said the right thing" (44). Present at the seduction scene in his mother's kitchen, David is again implicated in the world of adults and expected if not to understand the coded language of potential lovers, then to comprehend his mother's hints and act according to her wishes. Unable to grasp fully what is happening to him. David relies on his imagination to supply the missing links so that his fanciful metaphoric interpretations provide temporarily satisfying answers to his queries. Reminding one of the scene in which David goes to his father's workplace to collect the money and clothes. this time again David is invited to secrecy, since his mother thinks that there is no need to "even tell father" that Luter came (46). Caught between his mother and father, David becomes an imperfect mediator in the communication channel between his parents, in the discourse of repressed desires and incommunicable secrets. In many ways, David becomes a depository of secrets that he does not understand; thus, he is burdened with a responsibility that surpasses him and that he will not be able to contain within himself.

One of the most telling examples of David's attempts to read his parents' incomprehensible behavior and mysterious pasts is his overhearing the conversation between his mother and her sister, Aunt Bertha. Partly in Polish, partly in Yiddish, the mother's story comes in disconnected pieces. Indeed, the Polish segments of the story are entirely inaccessible to David. Yet, even when his mother finally starts speaking in Yiddish, David is too immature to understand all the implications of the conversation. He finds out that his mother had an affair with Ludwig, an organist in a local church, before she married David's father. That enraged her father, who spoke of a "benkart," an illegitimate child that might come out of the affair. As a result, his mother was married to his father, who then left for America. Hidden in the corridor, David listens to the story and gains an access to the distant past in which his parents are still locked. But the story that he gets is a melange of languages that convey the events in snippets, which David then connects on his own.

He would sit here and wait. He'd give them their last chance. If they didn't know where he was, perhaps they'd speak in Yiddish again. ... The significance of what she said still continued to be fragmentary. ... (199)

"Must see him..." The words and phrases pulsed out as before. "Comfort ... On the church step ... She held both ... Fluttered her parasol ... Ogled him like a lamp ... Lace, elegant ribbons .. But old, as I say ... Gave her no thought ... Finally ... And parted ... Crossed her path . . . He followed . . . Waited among the trees .. ." (199)

Pretend he had just been looking out all this time, that he hadn't heard. Yes. But now he knew. What? Had anything changed? No. Everything was the same. sure. Didn't have to get scared. What had happened? She liked somebody. Who? Lud--Ludwig, she said. A goy. An organeest. Father didn't like him, her father. And his too, maybe. Didn't want him to know. Gee! He knew more than his father. So she married a Jew. What did she say before? Benkart, yes, benkart in belly, her father said. What did that mean? He almost knew. Somebody said-who? Where? Gee! Stop asking! (205)

While David hears the better part of the story, he misreads the section about the "benkart," believing that he is an illegitimate child of a church organist in Poland. The joy of overhearing the conversation of adults and finding out about his mother's secret is coupled with his sense of triumph. The completed story of his mother's secret affair finally gives meaning to the picture that his mother loves. The cornfield in the picture in the kitchen comes to stand for his mother's love of another man and for David's great "discovery" that, after all, he may not be the son of an angry Albert Schearl.

Many critics have pointed out the importance of the process of reading for David's comprehension of the world around him. Reading is for David often a frustrating experience in which he is left to his imaginary interpretations. The meaning is elusive, and he learns that gaps created between words and meanings, signifiers and signifeds, are spaces for his own interpretative strategies. In the Schearl household, David is encouraged to read, but he is not expected fully to comprehend or interpret events. Thus, family events are to remain signs only, representative but divorced from their semantic content, and he is left without any support in the reading practices through which he will also try to define himself. The separation of signification and semantics can certainly be frustrating because it creates a sense of instability and arbitrariness of meaning, a sense of anarchy, especially for a child eager to attach meanings to the things and events around him. It makes it difficult to position oneself in relation to the meanings of elusive and changing discourses. On the other hand, the separation of meanings and signs opens up creative potentialities and allows imagination to fill in the gaps. "A young boy in a new world," David must "invent" himself and he does so through his reading practices (Adams 53). David's reading practices come to resemble his experience of construing Hebrew, the "strange and secret tongue" of God. He was taught to read Hebrew quickly and expressively, but without understanding (CIS 21 3). David can "read" from the "sacred book," he can recognize signs, and phonetically communicate them, but he still does not understand them: "He happened to be bright enough to avoid punishment, and could read Hebrew as fast as anyone, although he still didn't know what he read. Translation, which was called Chumish, would come later" (220). While waiting to learn Hebrew and talk to God directly, David comes to associate the fragmented and disconnected pieces from "the blue book," such as "lightt' and "burning coal" with his interpretation of God. His association of "light" with divinity will lead at the end of the novel to his near electrocution. In search of his purification, David nearly kills himself by inserting a metal milk dipper into the electric trolly track. Thus, his reading of Hebrew can be seen as emblematic of his reading of the world: it is very perceptive and skilful, but its language is finally elusive. It remains a chain of unidentifiable signs whose mysterious meaning he supplements with his vivid imagination. Most critics of Roth's novel have acknowledged the importance of language, its apprehension and mastery, for David Schearl's growing up, or, more importantly, for his "emerging sense of self and growing awareness of his relations hip to his surroundings, his culture, and Jewish tradition" (Naomi Sokoloff 321). In an article which compares Call It Sleep with Hayyim Nahrnan Bialik's and David Shahar's narratives, Sokoloff points out how linguistic mastery brings the boy of each story in touch with sacred texts. That encounter is, according to Sokoloff, significant for two reasons. It forces the child protagonist to account for and reconcile the differences between his own experience and that of his sacred and formal religious training. It also brings an awareness that initiation into the symbolic order, learning to read, means coming to terms with the limitations of verbal symbols (321). The point at which we see David is significant. He is to be introduced into the system of signs and meanings, and they will in turn shape and order his experience. The moment of introduction into the symbolic means a balancing point between playfulness and the limitations that the written word in Hebrew or in English would impose. This shifting point from the spoken to the written word becomes a painful experience of textual linearity as well as of the arbitrariness of meaning associated with linguistic signs as a system to which the child is initiated (322). Sokoloff's argument points out the boy's struggle to balance the discrepancy between the signifier and the signified and his efforts to communicate his own experiences of "mystery, awe, or wondertf(322). David Schearl, as Sokoloff points out, struggles with the inadequacy of the linguistic system to capture and represent his experience^.^ He asks a lot from language since little information is supplanted at home and since his life in a multilingual and multicultural environment makes him aware of the limitations of language and the resulting "rift between word and world" (325). What needs to be added to David's crushing discovery of the inadequacy of language as a signifying system is the particularity of his reading. His reading is not only fragmentary, but also eclectic, additive, and non-discriminatory. David lacks commitment to historical or cultural exactness and he is aware of the absence of parental guidance through the complex world in which he lives. As a result, he feels free to combine various discourses or rely on his imagination to fill in the gaps in order to create and stabilize his own moral universe. David resembles a non-linear, erratic reader, who breaks down the conventions of cultural mediation and signification and who freely combines the real and the fictive, the visual and the textual, the adult and the childish. Living between various cultures and traditions and having little, if any, parental assistance in discovering the complicated world adds to the confusion of immigrant children like David Schearl. They were trying to create a niche for themselves in the conflict between the public America:: sphere end their ethnic homes. The discourse that David creates is a melange of fragments that he gathers from experience, imagination, speculation, expectation and then combines in an erratic and discordant way. The polysemous urban space of New York presents him with a challenge that needs to be addressed; he has to find a way of differentiating and possibly reconciling the thickly layered world of signifiers around him. Just as linguistic code-switching is a way of dealing with his multiple linguistic universe-English, Yiddish, Polish-and multiple subject positions, so does switching between various symbolic systems and resulting sign conversion become a way of understanding the complicated world in which he lives. For instance, since his education in cheder does not provide a much desired definition of God, David feels free to combine his own vision of God-"light," "burning coalsw-witha convincing explanation about .a magic rosary, offered by his Polish friend Leo Dugo~ka.~David thus mixes various religions and takes liberty to supply new, if seemingly illogical and contradictory, meanings to various signifiers that he discovers in the city. The semiotic practices of David Schearl, an immigrant child, should be seen in the context of his growing up in a foreign country. As a result, his coming-of-age experience provides him with his own explanations of his complex reality and leads towards the creating and positioning of his subjectivity. David is trying to decode for himself the already existing ideological and cultural meanings that belong to often conflicting signifying systems and that he comprehends only partially. His combination of various discourses results in the creation of his own language, of his own grammar of living in America that offers, even if false, a sense of safety and solidity. In the particular case of the Torah and the rosary, the mixing of religious, Judaic and Christian, systems of values with the addition of his mother's pagan tales of the devil, allows David to have his own, eclectic and unconventional, access to the spiritual (Sokoloff 330). It is, as Sokoloff points out, the pluralism of America that allows David his eclectic spiritualism (330). At the same time, American pluralism is also what accounts for the lack of religious guidance and for the absence of a morally and ethically stable or "homogeneous cultural" environment (330). The numerous discourses provide both frustration and jubilation, a lack and a plenitude, and David has to rely on his own means to comprehend the world around him and create it as a stable and secure entity (330).The fact that the meaning is culturally determined creates a sense of frustration which David compensates for by creating new, highly personal and subjective meanings.

It is this imaginative, or imaginary, aspect of David's comprehension of the world that Naomi Diamant stresses in her discussion of the linguistic aspects of Roth's novel. Diamant sees metaphor as a powerful key ten in this "semiotic bildungsroman," which allows David to forge his own meaning by mixing the known with the unknown (337). Metaphor signifies the imaginative aspect of David's view of the world and the eruption of his individuality, the inscription of his subjectivity into already existing discourses. It indicates David's reliance on imagination, which helps him fill in numerous gaps in his understanding of the unfamiliar environment, supplies explanations when adults and the environment fail to provide them, and creates an imaginative barrier that protects him against incomprehensible actuality (345). What is also important about Diamant's argument is that she sees David's "semiotic initiation" not just as an acquisition of the capacity to decode signs. She notes that David's efforts are aimed at psychological and cultural belonging, or reaching a state of "imaginative at- homeness in his environment" (346). Diamant's argument can be seen as exhibiting David's desire for assimilation, or for the creation of an identity that could exist independently and potentially reconcile the reality of confusing and conflicting messages at home, in the street, and in school. Similar to Diamant, Wayne Lesser believes that Call It Sleep can be read as a negotiation between one's individual and social experience, one's private life and one's membership in a community, of reading the silence at home and the noise on the street. More specifically, Lesser sets out to demonstrate how "the process of cultural identification functions within the narrative's struggle amongst its deconstructive and productive impulses" (158). In other words, he examines the way in which the story of personal-cultural identity functions within particular aesthetic and tropological conventions and the way in which this story is related to the reader. For Lesser, Roth's novel is a narrative of a boy's semiotic initiation-recognition, interpretation, and manipulation of signs, whose symbolic power he interprets in such a way as to find "the codes of conduct, value, and belief crucial to his physical and psychological survival" (159). Lesser reads David's attempts to establish a sense of security and an organized system of values to help him cope with the unfamiliar and volatile world as a failure. And, as he points out, the greatest devastation comes with the discovery that his mother, ''the single stable entity of his world and the foundation of his attempt to organize the rest of his experience," had a secret past and that she, too, becomes a source of his uncertainty and plants doubts about his identity as Albert's son (165). While it is certain that the discovery of his mother's secret affair with a church organist further destabilizes David's perceptions of the already complex and unreliable world, it does not prevent him from constructing meaningful explanations of the phenomena around him. These meanings, created for a particular moment and out of a need for explanations, may be subjective, but they succeed in creating an illusion of a functional and liveable world.

The Urban Nomad

David's reading and interpretative strategies are not geared only towards the creation of his own linguistic, cultural, and moral world. They are done with the intention to create a sense of belonging. His "semiotic initiation" is closely connected with the process of the construction of identity of an immigrant child. David's wanderings through the streets of New York and his reading of the world of America, of his home, and chedermake him a part of the picturesque immigrant crowd that Henry James observed and that Jacob Riis photographed. However, although David reads the world around him just like James, he is not a flaneur, ambivalent to the world he watches. David is characterized by an intense desire to belong, create a sense of closure, and stabilize the meaning of the signs he reads. However, his erratic, inconsistent readings of numerous discourses can create only temporary moments of belonging, moments of suture'' in which he emerges as a subject in a particular discourse. Kaja Silverman explains the concept of suture as an attempt to "account for the means by which subjects emerge within discourse" (199-200). The moment of belonging, of creating an imaginary plenitude, is only temporary. It is replaced by a new sense of lack or inadequacy, which calls for another insertion into discourse, another brief moment of constitution of the subject. Suture, as Silverman and Stephen Heath argue, is a never-ending process whose ceaselessness--constant construction and reconstruction of the subject- provides one with subjectivity, or at least with the effect of its stability (215). Suture is a process of constant creation and recreation of subjectivity by textual strategies; it represents a chain of reinscriptions in the signifying system. David Schearl's erratic readings of the world provide such brief moments of belonging that are replaced by new moments of rupture or lack. Therefore, David's initiation into the flow of discourses in which he creates temporary attachments, moments of belonging, or imaginary plenitude makes it possible to read him as a nomadic subject. He travels from one point of suture (or closure) to another without necessarily establishing continuity between them. David's world, the melting-pot reality of turn-of-the-century America, provides a variety of contrasting cultures, languages, and religions. He experiences them as texts that he needs to read, but the fast succession Judaism and Catholicism, childhood and adulthood, street and school only causes confusion. In order to compensate for a sense of frustration, he supplies his own interpretations. David's readings of God, his mother's past, silences between his mother and father are all examples of moments of suture in which he announces his subjectivity by the practices of reading and interpreting. The particularity of David's vacillation between multiple sets of contrasting values is that each of them creates a sense of lack, and in turn David desires to overcome that lack by suturing the "wound" and reinscribing himself into the various discourses. Lack and plenitude are the two contrapuntal points between which the story of David Schearl shifts, and it is in this process of constant vacillation that he grows and emerges in discourse. The novel opens with David's tears of anguish: he is in an unknown world: his mother carries him through dense immigrant masses on the boat from Ellis Island to New York, and he faces his father's rage and rejection for wearing so distinctly foreign outfit. The sense of frustration, difference, and lack is carried over from the prologue to the opening of the novel. We find the six-year old David in the comforting interior of his mother's kitchen, but it is difficult to ignore his sense of not belonging and frustration as he struggles unsuccessfully to reach the kitchen sink and get a glass of water. It is very significant that the only way in which David can interpret this incident leads him to a rather disheartening conclusion that "this world had been created without thought of him" (CIS 17). David's impression of hostility toward the world around him indicates at the very outset of the novel that he perceives the world of adults as unfamiliar. It is also the strange world of industrialized America in which he does not feel welcome- the oversized furniture excludes him-his needs are not met, his life is complicated, and he has to struggle in order to assert himself:

He was thirsty, but the iron hip of the sink rested on legs tall almost as his own body, and by no stretch of arm, no leap, could he ever reach the distant tap. Where did the water come from that lurked so secretly in the curve of the brass? Where did it go, gurgling in the drain? What a strange world must be hidden behind the walls of a house! But he was thirsty. "Mama!" he called, ... (17)

Thus, David's first impression outlines several important things about his character: David is struggling hard to grasp the things that remain so stubbornly out of his reach; he has to depend on the help of his doting and beloved mother; he is curious about the world around him; and he feels abandoned and alienated. The first image of David identifies him with his futile struggle with the incomprehensible and unreachable adult world, and it confirms his strong sense of isolation and deficiency. There are numerous moments of suture throughout the text, as when David needs a rosary and its "magic" to create for himself an explanation of divinity. The two do not only indicate his mixing of Judaism and Catholicism, but they also bring together the images of the two fathers that David believes he has: his angry Jewish father Albert and the mysterious Gentile church organist from his mother's past. One of the telling examples of David's initiation into American discourse is his use of a patriotic song to protect him from his fear of death (after seeing a funeral) and from his fear of the dark hallway through which he has to pass. On the way to the safety of his mother's embrace, David needs to make "a noise" in order to dispel his fear. As Adams argues, the noise in the novel is often used as an expression of empowerment, and there is no question that the noise will defeat David's fear of darkness. He sings a song that guides him through his fear and provides a safe way up to his mother's kitchen:

Make a noise. Noise . . . He advanced. What? Noise. Any. "Aaaaah! Ooooh!" he quavered, "My country 'tis of dee!" He began running. The cellar door. Louder. "Sweet land of liberty," he shrilled, and whirled toward the stairs. "Of dee I sing." His voice rose in a shriek. His feet pounded on the stair. At his back, the monstrous horde of fear. "Land where our fodders died!" The landing; he dove for the door, flinging himself upon it-Threw it open, slammed it shut, and stood there panting in terror. (62)

Adams notes an irony in David's choice of a song that empowers him because the "land where David's forefathers actually died, of course, is not America, but the Old World" (50). Adams further sees an explanation for such a choice of a song in David's "oedipal wish for his father's death" (50). While that may certainly be the case, it is also not insignificant that the first "noise" that crosses David's mind is an American heroic song. His fear is resolved by the invocation of a patriotic song that he learned in an American school. The example does not need to be interpreted only in terms of David's relationship with his father. It can represent a moment of suture of the little boy into the discourse of America, which he acquires with education that can protect him from his fear of death and darkness. America is there to bring closure, offer comfort; American fathers will protect him from his fears and compensate for his sense of lack.

As critics have argued, David is in search of a resolution, of a world of stable meanings that would bring answers to his queries. But, as the book unfolds, there are always new events that create instability and frustration. After the episode on the stairs in which David successfully dispels his fear of darkness, there are numerous moments of rupture: David loses his way while counting telephone poles, he mispronounces the name of his street, and he is ignorant about the life of other immigrant peaple, like his Polish friend Leo. All of these are instances of David's private learning and growing up, as well as of his initiation into the discourse of America. The existence of a flow of clashing cultures, traditions, or systems of values that he perceives as texts that he needs to read, makes it possible to see David as a nomadic subject. He will not, as some critics argue, arrive at a world of lasting values, but he will shape his identity as a nomadic subject in a series of "attachments" to discourses.

Caren Kaplan examines briefly the nomad figure in Questions of Travel: Postmodem Discourses of Displacement (1 996),a study of travel and mobility in contemporary theoretical discourses. Kaplan defines the nomad in terms of geography and ideology. The nomad is ''the one who can track a path through a seemingly illogical space without succumbing to nation-state andlor bourgeois organization and mastery" (66). The nomad represents "a subject position that offers an idealized model of movement based on perpetual displacement" (66). In the case of David Schearl, nomadic subjectivity and nomadic thought can be seen in his state of not-belonging entirely to any particular discourse that he encounters. David's mind is fluid, fast-changing, and cumulative, and he easily blurs undifferentiated images. Rosi Braidotti discusses nomadic subjectivity in more detail in her book Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (1 994). Working in a feminist framework, she uses nomadic subjectivity to discuss borderless living in a globalized society and to present it as a model for feminist thought and practice. She acknowledges that nomadic subjectivity is a myth or "political fiction," but she embraces it as a unique figuration, which combines transitoriness with responsibility or, as she puts it, it represents "blurring boundaries without burning bridges" (4). Applying nomadic subjectivity to feminism, Braidotti writes: The nomadic tense is the imperfect: it is active, continuous; the nomadic trajectory is controlled speed. The nomadic style is about transitions and passages without predetermined destinations or lost homelands. The nomad's relationship to the earth is one of transitory attachment and cyclical frequentation; the antithesis of the farmer, the nomad gathers, reaps, and exchanges but does not exploit. (25; italics mine)

Braidotti argues very strongly for the need of a balance between transitoriness and belonging, rootlessness and rootedness. She finds compromise in "transitory" attachments, in brief moments of suture, of negotiation, of enunciation after which the nomadic subject detaches itself and continues its motion. The incessant motion and flow of experiences do not, however, mean the erasure of all traces, a breakdown of communication that may be associated with "lines of flight" characteristic of a nomad. Instead, Braidotti highly values the nomad's "ability to flow from one set of experiences to another"; such interconnectedness or "flow of connections" is not necessarily a series of appropriations, but it rather stands for "transitions between communicating states or experiences" (5). Drawing on Deleuze, Braidotti affirms that "nomadic becoming is neither reproduction nor just imitation, but rather emphatic proximity, intensive interconnectedness" (5; italics mine) . Although this "intensive connectedness" represents momentous belonging, enunciation in the discourse, an impression of a stable identity, it does not mean irresponsibility, another flight. Braidotti insists that being a nomad does not necessarily mean homelessness; it is rather characterized by the fact that the nomad is able to create a "home" everywhere (16). She writes:

The nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kind of subject who has relinquished ail idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts, and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity. The nomadic subject, however, is not altogether devoid of unity; hidher mode is one of definite, seasonal patterns of movement through rather fixed routes. It is a cohesion engendered by repetitions, cyclical movements, rhythmical displacement. (22)

Embodying contradictions and balancing opposites-rnigrancy and attachments, wanderings and belongings-a nomadic subject proves to be a useful model for reading the diasporic experience of the immigrant child in Roth's Call It Sleep. Life in the diaspora, cultural and linguistic displacement, and changing family structure all account for the increasing mobility of Roth's protagonist. David Schearl is mobile and free to explore the new world through which his parents cannot guide him. At the same time, he desires to find his own interpretations of that world and to form "temporary attachments" to various cultures and traditions. How is one then to interpret the end of the novel, David's sleep, or his "vision of God," after he nearly electrocutes himself in search of purification? Critics have provided various readings. Those arguing exclusively from linguistic and psychoanalytic positions have read a modernist closure to the novel's end: David reconciles himself with his father, the Oedipal complex is resolved, and he enters the symbolic order. It is the emerging of the subject in language that induces the reproduction of the discourse and puts closure to David's erratic wanderings among discourses. The moment of David's attainment of grace is often read as a moment of the enunciation of the subject, of suturing the familial wound-resolving the Oedipal complex-which automatically means a resolution and definition of subject positions in relation to other discourses-the resolution of his parents' immigrant past. his growing up in America, transgressions of his faith, disrespect of his parents' customs, and his loneliness.

Ferraro suggests that the father's embrace of David at the end of the book represents the comfort that David, caught in the Oedipal dilemma. was craving (120).11 In that sense, David manages to heal the familial wound: at the end of the novel, the father is the one who rushes to the drugstore for the ointment for David's burned foot, and the father's involvement does suggest the healing of shattered family relationships. But, Ferraro also points out that one cannot easily interpret the end in terms of closure since the father's reaction distances him from the circle of mother and child, and he again assumes his public role of a provider and protector of the family (122). It is important to add here that even if the novel's end is read in terms of the establishment of the father-son relationship and the confirmation of masculinity in both Albert and David, it is done at the expense of the maternal sphere. Like David's story of his mother's supposed death, as Elaine Orr calls it, an "overkill" of a character who is subdued and silenced throughout the text and who never acts as an independent and alive subject, so does the end of the novel add to the mother's separation and exclusion from the scene of subject formation (Orr 220). As many critics suggest, David's sleep at the end of the novel can be read in many different ways. Thomas lnge sees the novel only as a modernist text, which cannot be compared with James Joyce's works. Such an aesthetic comparison leads lnge to read David's sleep at the end of this "portrait of an artist as a young man" as an undefined state, an epiphany that fails to bring either salvation or understanding (48). On the other hand, Wayne Lesser's reading of Roth's text in the context of self-enclosed narrative strategies projects the notion of closure and limits David's experience of the world to his linguistic mastery. "Sleep," for Lesser is

a metaphor for an undetermined metaphor and might well denominate Davey's failure to accomplish any victory by design, the haziness of all that has transpired, or the feeling of equanimity allowing him to drift off to sleep. Having exhausted the possibilities of finding a controlling social system, Davey here confronts his epistemological dependence upon the system of language itself-a system he now realizes will not enable him to name his relation to the alien 'world outside'. (168)

The sleep here is a trope of escape of "personal-cultural identity" that can fully exist only in the "world outside" the experiential one and that can potentially be recreated only as a linguistic category (176). While Lesser makes an important point by indicating that the "world outside" is a text, his reading of the novel's end tends to limit David's experience to textuality, and it does not fuliy acknowledge David's agency, his efforts to deal with the world around him and his attempts to create a meaningful system of values that would help him understand and identify himself. Lynne ~ltenberndis more ready to entertain the possibility of David's agency. She indicates that being "called" sleep, the state of sleep at the end of the novel does not imply forgetting but rather a "state of reverie that lets [David] recall and evaluate images drawn from all his brief conscious life" (685). Unlike Lesser, who limits David's experience to language, Altenbernd's reading of the religious aspects of the novel presents the end as more uplifting. For Altenbernd, the novel closes "not in paralysis and defeat, not in the death of the artist, but in serenity, in liberation from the tyranny of the hostile father, the domination of an adoring mother, and the terrors of the unknown" (685). Altenbernd's reading of the novel's end indicates David's struggle and his efforts to deal with the world of adults. Thomas lnge's argument is similar to Altenbernd's, pointing out David's agency, his drive to change things and invest them with meaning. Surrounded by the unfamiliar world of adults, melting-pot America, the city, or in lnge's words, by "blasphemy, corruption, crime, fear, and misunderstanding," David Schearl "seeks purification," a way out of his childhood confusion into a non-existent ideal world that would provide answers to his incomprehensible reality (47). Jeffrey Saperstein goes a step beyond agency to a claim of personal and communal identity formation, and he describes David's sleep in terms of a dilemma between his emerging from his "recessive shell" or remaining a "disoriented foreigner" (47). Saperstein clearly indicates that David's search for identity is not only a quest for paternity or a search for a way out of the Oedipal maze, but he adds a social dimension to it; he sees the end of the novel as David's immersion in the new society, his maturation and growth into an American citizen. The uncertainty and confusion of David's identity come from the fact that he is presented with a variety of choices the new environment offers to him: he can embrace the Jewish or Catholic faith, choose to be an American or an immigrant, the son of the grim and angry Albert or the mysterious organist from a village in Austria. David's sleep at the end of the novel may be seen as a victory over the father or his successful search for God; it can also be seen as a reconciliation with uncertainty and an ability to embrace the world-flawed, complicated, imperfect-as it is. However, it certainly does not indicate David's regression to passivity, and the new, nameless condition, the "it" of his sleep. It may, after all, indicate, Saperstein believes, his developing ability to "filter and thus order the flux of his American experience" (48). As Saperstein writes, the end of the novel, the state of sleep that does not bring a clear resolution, certainly does not have to be perceived as a failure on David's part and thus does not have to mark Call It Sleep as an unsophisticated version of a Joycean text. If aesthetic comparisons with other modernist texts are put aside, it is possible to argue, as Naomi Diamant successfully does in her discussion of various linguistic universes in Roth's text-authorial, narrative, experiential-that it is futile to expect a conclusive ending. The novel follows three years in the development of a six-year old boy; at the moment when we leave him, at the age of nine, he has not matured and his epiphany cannot be a clearly defined vision. Viewing the ending as a provisional one, Diamant provides two possible meanings to it. On the one hand, "sleep" is a temporary "absence of a metaphorical vocabulary to describe the visionary encounter it has just survived." and on the other, it is a "return to the tabula rasa," Keatsian "negative capability," a blank surface that receives events that can only later be interpreted (354; 343). Although "the tabula rasa" may not best describe David's condition, Diamant makes two important points here. She stresses the notion of indiscriminate absorption that has been associated with David and she reads David's sleep as inconclusive. Her argument for openness at the end of the novel is important because it does not limit David and his complex reality to only one discourse-the relationship between the father and the son. It, therefore, does not halt nor bring a closure to David's "erratic" mind and his nomadic wanderings among various discourses. David is a nomad in terms of his journeys between the fixed points, which are temporary stops, or temporary moments of rest. Therefore, it may be possible to read "sleep," the final image of the novel, as a moment of "resting" from the intense suturing process in which David continually finds and "loses" his sense of self. As Saperstein points out, David's new condition is nameless, and it indicates that "sleep" itself may be just a new lack, a new deficiency, a new absence that will eventually inspire new wanderings. The sleep can thus be seen as a short break, a brief moment of alliance, rather than affiliation or allegiance, in the continual process of creation and decreation, "deterritorialization" and "reterritoriaiization" of David's subjectivity. In other words, David's sleep can be seen as an intermediary stage that prepares him for new searches. Moreover, his sensitivity to language, his tendency to subvert, dislocate textual and cultural meanings, and empty the discourses of their fixed semantic content may represent his potential to continue and pursue his uncharted, erratic trajectory. The moments of lack, movement, or the playful rearrangement of reality can ultimately be seen as jubilant moments that privilege freedom and the possibility of existing in between systems of signs, signifying chains, or already established discourses. If David believes that the world is a text, then he certainly exists as a nomadic subject, who continues his journeys after his temporary attachments.

The "in-between" state of sleep is probably the most appropriate way in which to finish a story about a restless child protagonist who is curious about the world in which he lives, who discovers it on his exploratory journeys in an attempt to inscribe himself into various "texts," and who is written into his position of an immigrant by history. If, as Roland Barthes writes, the modern city is "the place of our meeting point with the other," then New York at the turn of the century provided ample examples of alterity ("Semiology" 97). Apart from meeting images of "huddled masses" or aspiring "vampish" tenement girls or melancholy millionaires, immigrant children certainly represented a part of the "immigrant spectacle" that so fascinated Henry James and Jacob Riis. David Nasaw has commented similarly that New York, like other American cities of the beginning at the century, was a "city of strangers" and that most of its inhabitants were born or raised elsewhere (195). Nasaw further contends that it was only the children in the city who were not strangers since they were "native to the city" and had "no memory, no longing, no historic commitment to another land, another way of life" (195). It is certainly true that immigrant children acculturated quickly, but it would be far-fetched to claim that they could so easily step outside of their ethnic environment and exist as free-floating individuals. Immigrant families were under pressure to preserve their structure in a foreign country, and they had to deal with a foreign culture that children were bringing home. Moreover, tied to their ethnic families whose lifestyles they were expected to follow, immigrant children undoubtedly grew up with a strong sense of history, which they often experienced vicariously through the stories of their parents. Thus, immigrant children in turn-of-the-century America grew up with a sense of alienation from their parents' "real home" and a sense of difference and marginality in the host country. Their story is therefore the one of a complex and multiple search for meaning, stability, and commitment, and it is worth recording, as Selma Berrol points out, because it comprises both the pains of coming of age, "growing up in America," and those of acculturation, or growing up to be American (368; italics in the text). Berrol goes so far as to refer to immigrant youth as "marginal men," and she describes their existence between two polarities as being "one foot in their parents' world and the other in American society" (356).The story of the coming of age of an immigrant child includes initiation into the world of adults and the world of American values. In both cases, the children have to learn to read incomprehensible linguistic or cultural signs and decode them in order to create a space for themselves in a multitude of overlapping and often contradictory discourses. Roth's Call It Sleep offers a series of readings of urban ethnic difference filtered through the consciousness of an immigrant child protagonist. It also presents immigration as a succession of displacements and "temporary attachments." Moreover, "nomadic subjectivity" seems to be an appropriate "political fiction" to describe the complexity of the growing up of immigrant children, who have to balance the home and the world outside and who have to deal with the complexity of various cultures existing outside of their home. As a nomadic subject, little David Schearl has to learn that he has "no passportffand "too many of them," no allegiance and a multitude of them, no roots and multiple roots (Braidotti 33). Radhakrishnan suggests that roots multiply in the diaspora and that the new generation will have "many roots and many pasts," each of which will come as a result of a series of negotiations (213).

It is at this point appropriate to remind ourselves of the fact that Michel de Certeau sees immigrants as "socio-cultural voyagers" and as "the first victims, the most lucid witnesses, the experimentors and inventors of solutions" of a "civilization founded on the mixing of cultures" (quoted in Woodhull 11). His argument makes it possible to see that the immigrant condition, or the condition of a life in exile to embrace mobility is not only a sign of lack, but also a site of definition. As Stuart Hall writes, identity is created out of a flow that brings only temporary affiliations or allegiances:

I use 'identity' to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to 'interpellate', speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourse, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be 'spoked- Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. ("Introductiont' 5-6)

Hall further argues for a "strategic" or "positional" identity which always happens within discourses; in modern times they are "increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of change and transformationH(3). The necessary historicization of identity means for Hall taking into account increased mobilization and the effect that cross-cultural living has on the creation of identity:

Though they seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continue to correspond, actually identities are about questions of using the resources of history, language and culture in the process of becoming rather than being: not 'who we are' or 'where we came from', so much as what we might become, how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves. ldentities are therefore constituted within, not outside representation. They relate to the invention of tradition as much as to tradition itself, which they oblige us to read not as an endless reiteration but as the 'same changing game' (Gilroy, 1994): not the so-called return to the roots but a coming-to-terms-with our 'routes'. They arise from the narrativization of the self, but the necessarily fictional nature of this process in no way undermines its discursive, material or political effectivity. ("Introduction" 4)

Not just victims, immigrants are also, as de Certeau says, "inventors." As they need to invent themselves, they inevitably change and help re-invent the tradition(s) into which they temporarily inscribe themselves. The question that finally comes to mind is whether Hall's definition of identity and Braidotti's of nomadic subjectivity can have any political dimension, or is it simply "fiction," a handy metaphor. Maybe the "harbingers" of a "new civilization" can share their condition with "the other half' and maybe they can change the still rigid forms of belonging? Chantall Mouffe's work on radical democracy seems to provide an alternative. She argues that citizenship itself has an identity that is conducive to change and redefinition, and she believes in more democratic forms of society that will see citizenship

as a form of political identity that is created through identification with the political principles of modern pluralist democracy, that is, the assertion of liberty and equality for all. By that I understand the allegiance to a set of rules and practices that construe a specific language game, the language of modern democratic citizenship. A citizen is not in this perspective-as in liberalism-someone who is a passive recipient of rights and who enjoys the protection of the law. It is common political identity of persons who might be engaged in many different communities and who have differing conceptions of the good, but who accept submission to certain authoritative rules of conduct. ("Democratic Politics" 37)

Whether or not immigrants can help define a new identity of citizenship is highly speculative at this point. But, the impact that they leave on the host country is undeniable. In terms of turn-of-the-century East European immigrants in America, the discussion of David Schearl's reading practices becomes a powerful metaphor. David learns to read the multiplicity of cultures around him, as well as he learns to "go with the flow" between various traditions, cultures, languages, religions. Unlike his predecessors, who were "written into" immigration records at Ellis Island, David is in the process of learning how to negotiate his identity and inscribe himself (temporarily) in the discourse of the Promised Land. ENDNOTES 1. For more information about the education of immigrant children at the beginning of the century, see, for example, Joseph Hraba's American Ethnicity (1979), John Bodnark The Transplanted: A History of lmmigrants in Urban America (1985), Alan M. Kraut's The Huddled Masses: The lmmigrant in American Society, 7880-1921(1 982),which provide a historical and sociological overview of immigration at the beginning of the century. Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut's comprehensive study of contemporary immigration in America, immigrant America: A Portrait (1996) also offers an excellent and very useful discussion of children's roles in the process of acculturation. See in particular chapter 7: "Growing up American: The New Second Generation."

2. David Nasaw's comprehensive study Children of the Cityr At Work and At Play (1985) is an excellent source of information about children in American cities in the first decades of the twentieth century. Elliott West's Growing Up in Twentieth- Century America (1996), which does not deal exclusively with immigrant and ethnic children, also provides a very useful information about children in America. The first two chapters of his book address in particular various aspects of children's reality in prewar urban America-from play and living conditions to the responsibility to contribute to the financial situation of their families.

3. In an interesting sociolinguistic study of language switching. Barbara Alexander Pan points out a clearly defined intergenerational division of cultural duties in contemporary bilingual families. Most middle-aged contemporary immigrzn! pzrmts perceive their children as the ones who bring the unfamiliar world to their homes. Significantly enough, the parents perceive themselves as gate keepers of home language and culture, who are, unlike their own parents, willing to negotiate between cultures and conduct bilingual communication (316).

4. In "Oedipus in Brownsville: Parricide, a House Divided, and Call It Sleep," a chapter in his book Ethnic Passages, Thomas Ferraro provides an overview of the history of the reception of Henry Roth's novel, "one of the most neglected books" in the postwar period, as Alfred Kazin and Leslie Fiedler named it (88). Ferraro pays particular attention to Roth's departure from the immigrant realism associated with the work of Abraham Cahan, Mike Gold, Anzia Yezierska. What distinguishes Roth from other immigrant writers is his ability successfully to combine his mastery of high modernist narrative techniques and the influence of James Joyce, Eugene O'Neill, T. S. Eliot with ethnic content, or the "politics of ethnic agenda," as Ferraro calls it (90); see 87-94.

5. A nice example of David's visual semiotics, of a careful reading of the nuances and subtle changes in his environment, can be seen in the description of a visit that has such a strong impact on his father. When Luter visits them, David notices with great wonder how Luter's presence affects his father's behaviour. In Luter's company, his father relieves and suddenly becomes capable of creating a comfortable and cordial atmosphere; David perceives that his father "uncoil[s] warily like a tense spring slowly released" (CIS 31). Such an unusual and almost uncanny, "unreal" sight of his father laughing and acting as an amicable host prompts a series of questions which make it obvious that both David and his mother are impotent in the sense that they fail to relieve and change the father for the better, "Why did Luter need to look that way to make his father speak? ... Why had no one else ever succeeded in doing that? Why not his mother? Why not himself?" (32-3). David's observations raise again myriad questions to which he is unable to find satisfying answers.

6. Orr points out that the Depression era in which the novel is set is a reinscription or "remythologizing of male agency" in the sense that the need for able-bodied men to work deepened the gap between men working in the public sphere and women staying at home and tending for children (210).The Depression, in Orr's view, becomes an "exaggerated instance of American gendering" which reaffirms the division of the immigrant family along patriarchal gender line and corrodes immigrant masculinity by indicating the disorientation of male immigrants in the new society and a failure to provide for the well-being of their families (210).

7. David's guiding of Aunt Bertha through the museum is quite comical since she does not respect American difference and persistently maps her own experience of the world on everything new she encounters. But, Aunt Bertha, portrayed as rather vulgar and rash, is different from David's mom, and she soon enters a more public sphere: she works and later on runs her husband's candy store.

8. Sokoloff talks in particular about David's urge to articulate and explain to himself the flash of electricity which he likens to the vision of God and which he is not able to express easily in words.

9. Thomas Ferraro discusses Oedipal drama in Roth's novel and points out the importance of the set of contrasting discourses--Orthodox Judaism and Catholicism--characteristic of the world of David Schearl. As Ferraro puts it, David balances himself between the formal, cheder, education in Judaic guilt and the informal, street one in Christian redemption, that he receives from his Polish friend, Leo Dugovka (Ethnic Passages 89). Lynn Altenbernd also discusses the religious aspect of the novel in her article, "An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep." She argues that the "birth-of-a-hero" myth on which, she believes, the novel is based derives both from Jewish and Christian traditions.

10. 1 rely here on Kaja Silverman's discussion of suture, which she discusses in relation to classical Hollywood film. Suture is a way in which the subject emerges in a discourse. In film studies, Silverman contends, the transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic s replicated in the short-reverse shot structure, which expose the initial plenitude of the visual field (shot) only to uncover in the reverse shot the limitation or lack of the vision of the viewing subject. Thus, the illusion of the ruptured, castrated imaginary plenitude, and the unpleasure opens the wound which the subject sutures over with a "complex signifying chain." a film narrative in the case of the spectator (Silverman 202). Believing that suture is closely connected to the concept of Althusserian interpellation, Silverman points out that the order established after suture invokes the original order, which was only temporarily disrupted. However, Silverman stresses that the enunciation of the subject in the symbolic order is not an isolated experience; in fact. once achieved, it is only further displaced by the new shot-reverse shot structure, by the renewed awareness of lack and the need for the new suture process.

11. Walter Allen believes in David's reconciliation between himself and the world, and Leslie Fiedler argues that David's "intended sacrifice redeems no one" (EP 118-1 9). Roth credited David with "a 'triumph' of 'intent': 'The triumph he feels in the end was that he made the attempt, even though it is a failure"' (1 19). Ferraro indicates that Roth's explanation was a compromise between two contrasting opinions. Conclusion

Ethnic literatures often display generational differences. Whereas writers of the first generation are wont to respond to conditions in the old country and loss of an old way of life ... second-generation writers concern themselves with identity problems and the contrasts between the ethnic group and the mainstream. The third generation often draws closer to the first and seeks to rediscover its roots or recover older life-style. As Rose Basile Green observes, even the genre may change over time. In an early phase, the writings of an ethnic group are often expository (history, descriptions, and political reports, for example), but they may become creative later on. (Robert J. Di Pietro and Edward lfkovic Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature 12)

This study has examined turn-of-the-century East European immigration in America and offered new critical readings of some of its representative literary works: Anzia Yezierska's Salome of the Tenements (1923),Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). and Henry Roth's Call It Sleep (1 934). It also provided the historical and theoretical contexts for the migration of the "huddled masses" from the "other" Europe (1880-1 924), and it stressed the relational nature of immigration. Therefore, I included a discussion of the impact of the "new immigration" on the host country and compared Henry James' travelogue The American Scene (1907) with Jacob Riis' reform pamphlet How the Other Half Lives (1890). The work on this project has led me to believe that there is a need for a category of texts called "the immigrant genre." Such a genre would provide a context and forum for literary works that otherwise might only remain in a narrow circle of "ethnic" readership and scholarship. Furthermore, I believe that a more comprehensive study of immigrant narratives would greatly contribute to American literary studies because it would bring attention to immigration as a central American experience, and it would examine more closely the myth of the new beginnings on which America is founded. My project gives a voice to the early works of the new Americans at the turn of the century. Although it deals with American modernity and its rigid definitions of national and cultural identity and exclusive immigration policies, the issues that it raises are relevant to American society at the century's end. The aspects of immigration that I discuss-dislocation, negotiated identities, nostalgia, nomadism, female immigrant identity, changes in immigrant family structure-- address also current investigations of borderlessness, globalization, and transculturation. The comparison of immigrant texts from various periods in American history testifies not only to changing immigration policies in the United States, but also to different perceptions of the notion of difference that is fundamental to immigration and to America itself. While "difference" was defined in hierarchical and essentialist terms at the beginning of the century, Jonathan Rutherford reminds us that this is not always a call for divisiveness. Instead, difference can be a foundation for other, more accepting cultural politics:

We can use the word difference as a motif for that uprooting of certainty. It represents an experience of change, transformation and hybridity, in vogue because it acts as a focus for all those complementary fears, anxieties, confusions and arguments that accompany change. But as an approach to cultural politics it can help us make sense of what is happening: it can be a jumping-off point for assembling new practices and languages, pulling together a diversity of theories, politics, cultural experiences and identities into new alliances and movements. Such a politics wouldn't need to subsume identities into an underlying totality that assumes their ultimately homogeneous nature. Rather it is a critique of essentialism and mono-culturalisrnl asserting the unfixed and 'overdetermined' character of identities. The cultural politics of difference recognises both the interdependent and relational nature of identities, their elements of incommensurability and their political right to autonomy. (10)

Rutherford suggests that the notion of difference that served as a foundation for the cultural politics of exclusion and denigration should be turned into a formative principle for a new, more progressive, accepting, and tolerant social makeup. In such circumstances, immigration would need to be redefined, and immigrant narratives would create a slightly different fictional world and cast of characters. Nowadays, immigration in the United States is significantly different from what it was at the beginning of the century. The quick exchange of information, immigrants' knowledge of the language of the host country, transferrable and employable skills, and education make the process of adjustment quicker. The journey itself, an important part of immigration to America, is shortened and the long anxious anticipation of a new life is replaced by crowded airport terminals and fast "lines of flight." "America" still represents a refuge for many who are seeking political and religious freedoms; it is still a country of opportunity for economic prosperity; and immigrants try to find many legal and illegal means to enter it. Still, there are growing numbers of immigrants, who come to the United States for professional and entrepreneurial reasons. An increasing number of immigrants do not support the stereotype of the uneducated, impoverished "huddled masses," learning to speak the foreign language and anxious to assimilate. While the host country still attaches markers of difference to immigrants, urges for their quick incorporation, or simply exoticizes their difference, immigrants no longer have to be silent about their experience. Therefore, there is an increasing number of immigrant narratives that bring attention to the experiences of arrival and new beginnings as, for instance, Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989), Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Wamor (1976), Ernesto Galarza's Bario Boy (1971), Oscar Hijuelos' The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Cristina Garcia's Dreaming in Cuban (1992). These texts are eloquent voices of present perspectives on immigration, which may be faster, but which still retains its "luggage." As Edward Said says, the illusion of proximity in the contemporary world represents a new challenge and calls for new constructions of "home":

The fact is that for most exiles the difficulty consists not simply in being forced to live away from home, but rather, given today's world, in living with the many reminders that you are in exile, that your home is not in fact so far away, and that the normal traffic of everyday contemporary life keeps you in constant but tantalizing and unfulfilled touch with the old place. (Representations 36)

Given the fact that recent immigrants to the United States have a potential to speak about their experiences and knowing that the new times bring new definitions of immigration and new challenges, there is much to be expected from immigrant narratives that would offer fresh "eccentric angles" on America and its reception of the "other." The active literary production of newcomers to America will also ensure that the study of ethnic and immigrant literature be contemporaneous rather than retroactive. Despite the changing nature of immigration, the complexity of the now distant and different turn-of-the-century immigration in America calls for further scholarship and provides a challenging aesthetic field. The end of the century is a time for a nostalgic look back, which brings a growing interest in turn-of-the- century America. The immigration of that time is represented in recent texts like E. Annie Proulx's The Accordion Crimes (1 996) or Elana Dykewornon's Beyond the Pale (1997), or it is preserved in "blockbuster" movies, such as Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather trilogy, or James Cameron's Titanic (1997). The revival of interest in turn-of-the-century immigration in America has also led to the recent reconstruction of Ellis Island, the main port of entry to the United States (1892 - 1954). Finally, this fascinating period also persists in the imagination of an immigrant scholar, for whom this project can be a moment of "attachment" not only to academia or Canadian society but also to the experience of immigration, whose travails and pleasures speak across languages, borders, and time. Works Consulted

Abramson, Edward A. The Immigrant Experience in American Literature. Elvet Riverside: British Association for American Studies, 1982. Adamic, Louis. A Nation of Nations. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944. -. Two-way Passage. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941. Adams, Stephen J. "7he Noisiest Novel Ever Written': The Soundscape in Henry Roth's Call If Sleep." Twentieth Century Literature. 353 (1989): 43- 64. Aldridge, Alfred 0. Thomas Paine's American Ideology. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1984. Alland, Alexander, Sr. Jacob A. Riis: Photographer and Citizen. Millerton: Aperture, Inc., 1974. Altenbernd, Lynn. "An American Messiah: Myth in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep." Modem Fiction Studies. 35:4 (1989): 673-87. Anderson, Amanda. "Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity." in Cheah and Robbins. 265-89. Anker, Deborah. "US. immigration and Asylum Policy: A Brief Historical Perspective." In Defense of the Alien. Vol. 15. Ed. Lydio F. Tomasi. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1991. 74-85. Appel, Rene, and Pieter Muysken. Language Contact and Bilingualism. London: Edward Arnold, 1987. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. "Cosmopolitan Patriots." Cosmopol~tics:Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 91-1 14. Armstrong, Tim. "The Electrification of the Body at the Turn of the Century." Textual Practice. 5:3 (1991): 303-25. Avery, Evelyn. "Oh My 'Mishpocha!' Some Jewish Women Writers From Antin to Kaplan View the Family." Studies in American Jewish Literature. 5 (1986): 44-53. Balibar, Etienne. "Culture and Identity (Working Notes)." Trans. J. Swenson. Rajchrnan 173-96. Barrish, Phillip. "'The Genuine Article': Ethnicity, Capital, and The Rise of David Levinsky." American Literary History. 5:4 (1993): 643-62. Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. -. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1972. -. "Semiology and the Urban." The City and the Sign: An lntroduction to Urban Semiotics. Ed. M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos. New York: Columbia UP, 1986. 87-98. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), Inc., 1983. Baym, Nina, et al., eds. The Norfon Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 1. New York: W. W. Norton 8 Company, 1994.2 vols. Becker-Lecrone, Megan. "Salome: The Fetishization of a Textual Corpus." New Literary History. 262 (1995): 239-60. Benert, Annette Larson. "Monsters, Bagmen, and Little Old Ladies: Henry James and the Unmaking of America." Arizona Quarterly. 42:4 (1 986): 33 1-43. Benoit, Pamela J . Telling the Success Story: Acclaiming and Disclaiming Discourse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Berlant, Lauren. The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 199 1. Berman, Art. Preface to Modernism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994. Berrol, Selma. "Ethnicity and American Children." American Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook. Ed. Joseph M. Hawes and N. Ray Hiner. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985. 343-75. Bhabha, Homi. "Freedom's Basis in the Indeterminate." Rajchman 47-61. -. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Bigelow, Donald N. Introduction. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New Yo&. By Jacob Riis. New York: Hill and Wang , 1962- vii-xiv. Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Bodnar, John. The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. Boelhower, William. Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Bonwick, Colin. The American Revolution. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984. Braidotti, Ros i. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory-. New York: Columbia UP, 1994. Bridenbaugh, Carl. The Spirit of '76: The Growth ofAmerican Patriotism Before Independence. New York: Oxford UP, 1975. Bosniak, Linda S. "'Nativism' the Concept: Some Reflections." Perea 279-99. Bulbeck, C hilla. Re-Orienting Western Feminisms: Women's Diversity in a Postcolonial World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. Burnard, Philip, and Paul Morrison. Self-Disclosure: A Contemporary Analysis. Aldershot: Avebury. 1992. Burns, Allan. "Henry James's Journalists as Synecdoche for the American Scene." The Henry James Review. l6:l (1 995): 1-17. Cahan, Abraham. The Rise of David Levinsky. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. Cappetti, Carla. "Deviant Girls and Dissatisfied Women: A Sociologist's Tale." The invention of Ethnicity. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 124-57. Carlson, Robert A. The Americanization Syndrome: A Quest for Conformity. London: Croom Helm, 1987. Celestin, Roger. From Cannibals to Radicals: Figures and Limits of Exoticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Chametzky, Jules. Introduction. The Rise of David Levinsky. By Abraham Cahan. New York: Penguin Books, 1993. vii-xxviii. Codd, John. "Making Distinctions: The Eye of the Beholder." An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieo: The Practice of Theory. Ed. Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes. Houndmills: Macrnillan, 1990. 132-59. Codrescu, Andrei. Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late in the Century. New York: Hyperion, 1993. Coward, Rosalind, and John Ellis. Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject. London: Routledge, 1977. Crow, Dennis. "Geography and ldentity: Living and Exploring Geopolitics of Identity." Geography and Identity: Living and Exploring Geopolitics of Identity. Ed. Dennis Crow. Washington, D.C.: Maisonneuve Press, 1996. 1-39. Curti, Merle, and Kendall Birr. "The Immigrant and the American Image in Europe, 1860-191 4." The Mississippi Valley Historical Review. 37 (1950): 203-30. Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. Dearborn, Mary V. "Anzia Yezierska and the Making of an Ethnic American Self." The Invention of Ethnicity. Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. 105-23. ---.Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender and Ethnicity in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. de Certeau, Michel. "Walking in the City." The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993. 151-60. de Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. Jean. "Letters From an American Farmer." Baym 657-681. Delanty, Gerard. "The Frontier and Identities of Exclusion in European History." History of European Ideas. 22:2 (1996): 93-1 03. --. Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1995. Deleuze, Giiles. "Coldness and Cruelty." Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher- Masoch. Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty and Venus in Furs. Trans. Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translation and Foreword. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. de Madariaga, Salvador. Introduction. Hisfory and Politics by Paul Valery. Trans. Denise Foiliot and Jackson Mathews. Ed. Jackson Mathews. Vol. 10. New York: Pantheon Books, 1962. xxi-xxxvi. Derrida, Jacques. "Declarations of Independence." New Political Science 15 (1986): 7-1 6. -. "Deconstruction and the Other." Dialogues With Contemporary Continental Thinkers- The Phenomenological Heritage. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. 105-26. -. "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority." Trans. Mary Quaintance. Cardozo Law Review. 1 1: 5-6 (1990): 919-1 045. --. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. --. "Psyche: Inventions of the Other." Trans. Catherine Porter. Reading de Man Reading. Ed. Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 25-65. -. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. --. "Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida." Men in Feminism. Ed. Alice Jardine and Paul Smith. New York: Methuen, 1987. 189-203. Diamant, Naomi. "Linguistic Universes in Henry Roth's Call It Sleep." Contemporary Literature. 27:3 (1 986): 336-55. Dietrichson, Jan W. The Image of Money in the American Novel of the Gilded Age. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1969. Di Pietro, Robert J., and Edward Ifkovic. Introduction. Ethnic Perspectives in American Literature: Selected Essays on the European Contribution: A Source Book. Ed. Robert J. Di Pietro and Edward Ifkovic. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1983. 1-14. Dirlik. Arif. "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism." Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 501-28. Djanikian, Gregory. "Immigrant Picnic." Poetry 174:4 (1999): 187-88. Doane, Janice, and Devon Hodges. Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. New York: Methuen, 1987. Emberley, Julia V. Thresholds of Difference: Feminist Critique, Native Women's Writings, Postcolonial Theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." Baym 1021-1 033. Evans, J. Martin. America: The View From Europe. San Francisco: San Francisco Book Company, Inc., 1976. Ewen, Stuart, and Elizabeth Ewen. Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Feagin, Joe R. "Old Poison in New Bottles: The Deep Roots of Modern Nativism." lmmigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant lmpulse in the United States. New York: New York UP, 1997. 13-43. Felski, Rita. The Gender of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Ferraro, Thomas J. Ethnic Passages: Literary immigrants in Twentieth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. -. "Ethnicity and the Marketplace." The Columbia History of the American Novel. Ed. Emory Elliott. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 380-406. -- . "'Working Ourselves Up' in America: Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers." South Atlantic Quarterly. 89:3 (1990): 547- 8 1 . Ferrell, Robyn. "The Passion of the Signifier and the Body in Theory." Hypatia. 613 (1991): 314-29. Figueira, Dorothy M. The Exotic: A Decadent Quest. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Fine, David M. The City, The Immigrant, and American Fiction, 1880-1920. Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1977. Fischer, William C, David A. Gerber, Jorge M. Guitart, and Maxine S. Seller, eds. Identity, Community, and Pluralism in American Life. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Fried, Lewis F. Makers of the City. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Fritzman, J. M. "The Future of Nostalgia and the Time of the Sublime." CLIO. 23:2 (1993): 167-89. Gallop, Jane. "Reading the Mother Tongue: Psychoanalytic Feminist Criticism ." Critiqual Inquiry. 13.2 (1 987): 3 14-29. Gandal, Keith. The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Gatens, Moira. Imaginary Bodies: Ethics, Power and Corporeality. London: Routledge, 1996. George, Rosemary Marangoly. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Gervais, David. "Deciphering America: The American Scene." The Cambridge Quarterly. 18:4 (1989): 349-362. Gilbert, J. "Mass Culture and the Romance of American Pluralism." Kroes 24- 34. Girgus, Sam B. The New Covenant: Jewish Wn'fers and the American Idea. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Golub, Ellen. "Eat Your Heart Out: The Fiction of Anzia Yezierska." Studies in American Jewish Literature. 3 (1983): 5 1-6 1 . Gorman, Paul R. Left Intellectuals and Popular Culture in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Gorodensky, Arlene. Mum's the Word: The Mamma's Boy Syndrome Revealed. London: Cassell, 1997. Gottdiener, M., and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, eds. The City and the Sign: An lntroduction to Urban Semiotics. New York: Columbia UP, I986. Hales, Peter B. Silver Cities: The Photography of American Urbanization, 1839- 7915. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1984. Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 222-37. -. "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity." Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 173-87. --. "lntroduction: Who Needs 'Identity'?" Questions of Cultural Identity- Ed. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage Publications, 1996. 1-1 7. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Haug, Frigga. Beyond Female Masochism: Memory, Work and Politics. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. London: Verso, 1992. Haviland. Beverly. Henry James' Last Romance: Making Sense of the Past and the American Scene. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Hayward, Susan. Key Concepts in Cinema Studies. London: Routledge, 1996. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. New York: Methuen. 1979. Helly, Denise. "The Political Regulation of Cultural Plurality: Foundations and Principles." Canadian Ethnic Studies. 25:2 (1993): 15-35. Henderson, Mae G. "lntroduction: Borders, Boundaries, and Frame(work)s." Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Mae G. Henderson. New York: Routledge, 1995. 1- 32. Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: A Wn'tefs Life. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988. Hertzberg, Arthur. The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter A History. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Hodge, Robert, and Gunther Kress. Social Semiotics. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Hodge, Robert, and David Tripp. Children and Television: A Semiotic Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986. Holder, Alan. Three Voyages in Search of Europe: A Study of Henry James, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960. Homberger, Eric. "Some Uses for Jewish Ambivalence: Abraham Cahan and Michael Gold." Between 'Race' and Culture: Representations of 'the Jew' in English and American Literature. Ed. Bryan Cheyette. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. Howe, Irving. "The Self in Literature." Constructions of the Self Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992. 249-68. Hraba, Joseph. American Ethnicity. Itasca: F. E. Peacock, 1979. Inge, M. Thomas. "The Ethnic Experience and Aesthetics in Literature: Malamud's The Assistant and Roth's Call It Sleep." The Jouma/ of Ethnic Studies. 1:4 (1 974): 45-50. Jacobs, Jane M., and Ruth Fincher. Introduction. Cities of Difference. Ed. Ruth Fincher and Jane M. Jacobs. New York: The Guilford Press, 1998. 1-25. Jacob us, Mary. First Things: The Maternal lmaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1995. James, Henry. The American Scene. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1968. -. "The Art of Fiction." The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957. 23-45. --. "The Future of the Novel." The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1957.48-59. Jansen, Stef. "Homeless at Home: Narrations of Post-Yugoslav Identities." Migrants of identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Ed. Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson. Oxford: Berg, 1998. 85-110. Jefferson. Thomas. "The Deciaration of Independence." Baym 727-33. Kalogeras, Yiorgos. "Producing History and Telling Stories: Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men and Zeese Papanikolas's Buried Unsung." Singh 227-44. Kamel, Rose. "'Anzia Yezierska, Get Out of Your Own Way': Selfhood and Otherness in the Autobiographical Fiction of Anzia Yezierska." Studies in American Jewish Literature. 3 (1983): 40-50. Kap Ian, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodem Discourses of Displacement Durham: Duke UP, 1996. Kearney, Richard. "Derrida's Ethical Re-Turn." Working Through Denida. Ed. Gary B. Madison. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993. 28-50. Kennedy, John F. A Nation of immigrants. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1964. Kerr, Thomas D. Chasing the American Dream: The Beauty and Morality Inherent in a More Intelligent Society. Commack: Nova Science Publishers, 1996. Killoran, Helen. "The Swiftian Journey of Henry James: Genre and Epistemology in The American Scene." The Henry James Review. 13.3 (1 992): 306- 14. King, Ross. Emancipating Space: Geography, Architecture, and Urban Design. New York: The Guildford Press, 1996. Knapp, Bettina L. "Herodias/Salome: MotherfDaughter Identification." Nineteenth-Centwy French Studies. 25:1-2 (1 996-1997): 179-202. Kostash, Myrna. "Ethnicity and Feminism." In the Feminine: Women and Words Conference Proceedings. Ed. Ann Dybikowski et al, 1985. 60-2. Kraut, Alan M. The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society, 7 880- 1921. Arlington Heights: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1 982. Krcss, Susan. "Women and Marriage in Abraham Cahan's Fiction." Studies in American Jewish Literature. 3 (1 983): 26-39. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. -. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Kroech, Robert. "The Grammar of Silence: Narrative Pattern in Ethnic Writing." Canadian Literature. 106 (1985): 65-74. Kroes, Rob. "Americanisation: What Are We Talking About?" Kroes 302-318. -. "The lrnage of Europe in America." Europe From a Cultural Perspective: Historiographies and Perceptions. Ed. A. Rijksbaron, W. ti. Roobol and M. Weisglas. The Hague: Nijgh & Van Ditmar Universitair, 1987. 121-31. Kroes, Rob, R. W. Rydell, and 0.F. J. Bosscher, eds. Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe. Amsterdam: VU UP, 1993. Laclau, Ernesto. "Power and Representation." Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993. 277-96. -. "Universalism, Particularism and the Question of Identity." Rajchrnan 94-108. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony & Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. Trans. Winston Moore and Paul Carnmack. London: Verso, 1985. Lane, James B. Jacob A. Riis and the American City. Port Washington: Kennikat Press, 1974. Larsen, Eric. "Writing and Nostalgia: Hiding in the Past." New England Review. 5:4 (I983): 461-77. Lepenies, Wolf. Melancholy and Society. Trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Lesser, Wayne. "A Narrative's Revolutionary Energy: The Example of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep." Criticism. 23:2 (1981): 155-76. Levenberg. Diane. "David Levinsky and His Women." Midstream. 27:7 (1980): 51-3. Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964. Lowenthal, David. "Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn't." The Imagined Past: Histow and Nostalgia. Ed. Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1989. 18-32. Lyons, Richard S. "'In Supreme Command': The Crisis of the Imagination in James's The American Scene." The New England Quarterly. 554 (1982): 517-39. Maase, Kaspar. "'Halbstarke' and Hegemony: Meanings of American Mass Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany During the 1950s." Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe. Ed. Rob Kroes, R. W. Rydell, and D. F. J. Bosscher. Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993. 152-70. -. "A Taste of Honey: Adorno's Reading of American Mass Culture." European Readings of American Popular Culture. Ed. John Dean and Jean-Paul Gabilliet. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. 201-1 1. Mahar, Cheleen, Richard Harker, and Chris Wilkes. "The Basic Theoretical Position." An introduction to the Work of Piere Bourdieu: The Practice of Theory. Ed. Richard Harker, Cheleen Mahar and Chris Wilkes. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990. 1-25. Malcomson, Scott L. "The Varieties of Cosmopolitan Experience." in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins 23345. Mann, Paul. "Masocriticism." Substance. 23:3 (1994): 3-29. Marovitz, Sanford E. Abraham Cahan. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. -. "The Secular Trinity of a Lonely Millionaire: Language, Sex, and Power in The Rise of David Levinsky." Studies in American Jewish Literature. Ed. Daniel Walden. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982. Mason, Peter. Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other. London: Routledge, 1990. McCarren, Felicia. "The 'Symptomatic Act' Circa 1900: Hysteria, Hypnosis, Electricity, Dance." Critical Inquiry. 21 :4 (1 995): 748-74. Melucci, Alberto. The Playing Self- Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Miller, Toby. The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodem Subject. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1993. Mouffe, Chantal. "Democratic Politics and the Question of Identity." Rajchrnan 33-45. Naas, Michael B. Introduction. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas. Bloornington: Indiana UP, 1992. vii-lix. Nasaw, David. Children of the City: At Work and At Play. Garden City: Anchor Press I Doubleday, 1985. Nicolaus, Mills. Introduction. The Era of the Golden Venture: Arguing Immigration: The Debate Over the Changing Face of America. Ed. Mills Nicolaus. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 11-27. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Strucfuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Nussbaum, Martha C. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Martha C.Nussbaum with Respondents. Ed. Joshua Co hen. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Oates, Joyce Carol. "Imaginary Cities: America." Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Ed. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1981. 11-34. Olwig, Karen Fog. "Epilogue: Contested Homes: Home-Making and the Making of Anthropology." Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement. Ed. Nigel Rapport and Andrew Dawson. Oxford: Berg, 1998. 225-36. Orr, Elaine. "On the Side of the Mother: Yonnondio and Call It Sleep." Studies in American Fiction. 21:2 (1993): 209-23. 0 well, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Paine, Thomas. "Common Sense." Baym 707-14. Palumbo-Liu, David. "The Politics of Memory: Remembering History in Alice Walker and Joy Kogawa." Singh 21 1-26. Pan, Barbara Alexander. "Code Negotiation in Bilingual Families: 'My Body Starts Speaking English."I Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 16:4 (1 995): 3 1 5-27. Pedraza, Silvia. "Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America." Pedraza 1- 20. Pedraza. Silvia. and Ruben G. Rumbaut, eds. Origins and Destinies: immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1996. Perea, Juan F, ed. Introduction. Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant impulse in the United States. New York: New York UP, 1997. 1-1 0. --. "The Statue of Liberty: Notes From Behind the Gilded Door." Perea 44-58. Perec, Georges, and Robert Bober. Ellis island. Trans. Harry Mathews. New York: The New York Press, 1995. Pile, Steve. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. London: Routledge, 1996. Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Posnock, Ross. "Henry James, Veblen and Adorno: The Crisis of the Modern Self." Journal ofAmerican Studies. 21 :I (1 987): 31 -54. Pressman, Richard S. "Abraham Cahan, Capitalist; David Levinsky, Socialist." Styles of Cultural Activism: from Theory and Pedagogy to Women, Indians, and Communism. Ed. Philip Goldstein. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. 134-51. Pym, Anthony. "The Importance of Salome: Approaches to a Fin de Siecle Theme." French FoPJ.~~!.?4:3 (1 989): 31 1-22. Radhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Rajchman, John. The ldentityin Question. New York: Routledge, 1995. Reed. Cory A. "Dirty Dancing: Salome, Herodias and El Retablo de las Maravillas." Bulletin of the Comediantes. 44:1 (1 992): 7-20. Rignail, John . Realist Fiction and the Strolling Spectator. London: Routledge, 1992. Riis, Jacob A. The Battle With the Slum. Montclair: Patterson Smith, 1969. -. How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New Yo*. New York: Hill and Wang, 1966. Robbins, Bruce. "Comparative Cosmopolitanisms." Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 246-64. -. "Modernism in History, Modernism in Power." Modernism Reconsidered. Ed. Robert Kiely. Assisted by John Hildebidle. Cam bridge: Harvard UP, 1983. 229-46. Rosenfeld, Isaac. "America, Land of the Sad Millionaire." Breakthrough: A Treasury of Contemporary American-Jewish Literature. Ed. l~ingMalin and Iwin Stark. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.259-66. Roth, Henry. Call It Sleep. New York: Bard Books, 1973. Rubin, Steven J. "Style and Meaning in Mary Antin's The Promised Land: A Reevaluation." Studies in American Jewish Literature. 5 (1 986): 3543. Rumbaut, Ruben G. Prologue. Origins and Destinies: Immigration, Race, and Ethnicity in America. Pedraza xvi-xix. Rutherford, Jonathan. "A Place Called Home: Identity and Diversity in Postmodern Difference." Identity Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 9-27. Sachs, Susan Hersh. "Anzia Yezierska: 'Her Words Dance with a Thousand Colors."' Studies in American Jewish Literature. 3 (1983): 62-67. Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House, 1994. --. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1979. -. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London: Random House, 1994. Saint-Martin, Fernande. Semiotics of Visual Language. Bloornington: Indiana UP, 1990. Saladin, Linda A. Fetishism and Fatal Women: Gender, Power, and Reflexive Discourse. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Saldivar, Ramon. "Narrative, ldeology, and the Reconstruction of American Literary History." Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and ldeology. Ed. Hector Calderon and Jose David Saldivar. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 11-20. Saperstein, Jeffrey. "Roth's Call It Sleep." Explicator. 46: 1 (1987): 47-8. Schlesinger. Philip. Media, State and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities. London: Sage Publications, 1991. Schoen, Carol B. Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne Publishers. 1982. Seremetakis, C. Nadia. "The Memory of the Senses, Part I: Marks of the Tran sito ry ." The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis. Boulder: Westview Press, 1994. 1-18. S hechner, Mark. "Jewish Writers." Haward Guide to Contemporary American Writing. Ed. Daniel Hoffman. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1979. 191- 239. S howalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990. Silverman, Kaja. "Masochism and Male Subjectivity." Male Trouble. Ed. Constance Penley and Sharon Willis. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. 33-66. --. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983. Singer, David. "David Levinsky's Fall: A Note on the Liebman Thesis." American Quarterly. 19:4 (1967): 696-706. Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, eds. Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1996. Sokoloff, Naomi. "Discoveries of Reading: Stories of Childhood by Bialik, Shahar, and Roth." Hebrew Annual Review 9. (1985): 32142. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicifyr Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. -. "lntroduction: The lnvention of Ethnicity." The lnvention of Ethnicity- Ed. Werner Sollors. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. ix-xx. Spinner, Jeff. The Boundaries of Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality in the Liberal State. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. Sp ivak, Gayatri C hakravorty. In Other Worlds: Essays in CuItural Politics. New York: Routledge, 1988. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1984. Strinati, Dominic. An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1995. Studlar, Gaylyn. "Masochism and the Perverse Pleasure of the Cinema." Movies and Methods: An Anthology. Ed. Bill Nichols. Vol. 2. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 602-21. -- . "'Out-Salomeing Salome': Dance, the New Woman, and Fan Magazine Orientalism." Michigan Quarterly Review. 34:4 (1995): 487-51 0. Swift, Graham. Waterland. London: Pan Books, 1992. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper Perennial, 1984. Tuerk, Richard. ''The Youngest of America's Children in The Promised Land." Studies in American Jewish Literature. 5 (1986): 29-34. Turner, Bryan S. "A Note on Nostalgia." Theory, Culture 8 Society. 4:l (1 987): 147-56. Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." Frontier and Section. Englewood, Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961. 37-62. Twigg, Reginald. "The Performative Dimension of Surveillance: Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives." Text and Performance Quarterly. 12.4 (1992): 305- 28. Valery, Paul. History and Politics. Trans. Denise Folliot and Jackson Mathews. Ed. Jackson Mathews. Vol. 10. New York: Pantheon Books, 1962. Vaughan, Leslie. "Cosmopolitanism, Ethnicity and American Identity: Randolph Bourne's 'Trans-National America."' Journal of American Studies. 25:3 (1991): 443-59. Wald , Priscilla. Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Warren, Kenneth W. Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Washington, Bryan R. The Politics of Exile: ldeology in Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and James Baldwin. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1995. Webb, Ruth. "Salome's Sisters: The Rhetoric and Realities of Dance in Late Antiquity and Byzantium." Women, Men and Eunuchs: Gender in Byzantium. Ed. Liz James. London: Routledge, 1997. 11948. Weber, Daniel. "Outsiders and Greenhorns: Christopher Newman in the Old World, David Levinsky in the New." American Literature. 67:4 (1995): 725-45. Weeks, Jeffrey. "The Value of Difference." Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. 88-1 00. West, Cornel. "The New Cultural Politics of Difference." Rajchman 147-171. West, Elliott. Growing Up in Twentieth-Century America: A History and Reference Guide. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1996. White, Morton. The Philosophy of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford UP, 1978. Wills, Gary. Inventing America: Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. Garden City: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1978. Winner, Irene Portis. "Ethnicity, Modernity, and Theory of Culture Texts." Semiotics of Culture. Ed. Irene Portis Winner and Jean Umiker-Sebeok. The Hague: Mouton Publishers. 1979. 103-48. Wolff, Donald. "Jamesian Historiography and The American Scene." The Henry James Review. 13:2 (1992): 154-71. Wolff, Janet. Resident Alien: Feminist CuItural Criticism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Wood, Robin. "Ideology, Genre, Auteur." Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. 5th ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 668-78. Woodhull, Winifred. "Exile." Yale French Studies. 82 (1993): 7-24. Wyszkowski, Charles. A Community in Conflict: American Jewry During the Great European Immigration. Lanham: University Press of America, 19 9 1. Yezierska, Anzia. Salome of the Tenements. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995. Zaborowska, Magdalena J. How We Found America: Reading Gender Through East European Immigrant Narratives. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995.