1 PERSONAL CONTINUUMS: THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION AND FICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF ABRAHAM CAHAN, ANZIA YEZIERSKA, AND HENRY ROTH Neil Andrew Steinberg Department of English University College London November, 1991 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London. ProQuest Number: 10609158 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10609158 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 2 ABSTRACT The title of this thesis, "Personal Continuums: The Autobiographical Fiction and Fictional Autobiographies of Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Henry Roth", suggests that there is a significant pattern in the work of all three writers which lies in the close literary connection between their autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiographies. The phrase "personal continuum" was used by Roth to describe his attempt to regenerate himself as a writer thirty years after the publication of Call It Sleep. It is a useful expression because it describes all three writers* search for some form of continuity or connection between fiction and autobiography. Although the details vary, Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth all experienced a degree of literary success with their autobiographical novels, followed by a period of artistic silence, which they all managed to overcome by regenerating themselves as writers through highly fictionalized forms of autobiography. Aside from Chapter One, which introduces Cahan’s work and compares Cahan*s The Rise of David Levinsky to William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, the chapters alternate between an analysis of each writer’s fiction and autobiographical work. The juxtaposition of chapters on Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth’s fictional work with chapters on their autobiographies has the effect of mirroring two particular autobiographical genres as well as two distinctive periods in each writer’s life. Thus, the organization of the thesis into pairs of chapters which alternate between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography helps to highlight the process of dialectical self-analysis which preoccupied all three writers. In Chapter Three, Chapter Five, and Chapter Seven, I treat Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth’s autobiographical narratives respectively as a continuation of their previous work, thus revealing a "personal continuum", or in other words a form of narrative continuity with their personal and literary pasts. Dedicated in loving memory to Stephen Steinberg 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my thanks to David Trotter for his continual support and advice during the research and writing of this thesis. I am also indebted to Dan Jacobson at University College London, and to Chris Bristow and John Kerrigan at Cambridge University. Many thanks to the Heinrich Hertz Stipendium for its generous financial support. This thesis would not have been possible without the help of the staff at the British Library, University of London Senate House Library, the Senkenberg and Amerikanistik Libraries in Frankfurt, the Mu gar Library at Boston University, and the Bailey/Howe Memorial Library at the University of Vermont. My special thanks go to Henry Roth for allowing me to interview him. Finally I would like to thank Ekow Nelson, my parents, and especially my wife, Maike Braun, for their unwavering support. 5 Contents A b s tra c t 2 Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 6 PART I : Abraham Cahan 11 Chapter One: Onto the American Scene 12 Chapter Two: Abraham Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky 43 Chapter Three: Abraham Cahan’s B le te r F u n M ein L eben 77 PART I I r Anzia Yezierska 123 Chapter Four: Versions of the Self: The Fiction of Anzia Yezierska 124 Chapter Five: Anzia Yezierska’s Red Ribbon On a White Horse. My Story 162 PART III : Henry Roth 191 Chapter Six: Shifting Polarities in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep 192 Chapter Seven: A Shifting Landscape: The Search for Continuity and Regeneration in Henry Roth’s Later Work 234 Conclusion 267 Appendix I: An Interview with Henry Roth 271 Appendix II: A Letter to the Editors of The New York Review of Books 277 Bi bliogra phy 280 6 INTRODUCTION The title of this thesis, "Personal Continuums: The Autobiographical Fiction and Fictional Autobiographies of Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierska, and Henry Roth", suggests that there is a significant pattern in the work of all three writers which lies in the close literary connection between their autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiographies (a term I shall define below). The phrase "personal continuum"1 was used by Roth to describe his attempt to regenerate himself as a writer thirty years after the publication of Call It Sleep. It is a useful expression because it describes all three writers* search for some form of continuity or connection between fiction and autobiography. Although the details vary, Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth all experienced a degree of literary success with their autobiographical novels, followed by a period of artistic silence, which they all managed to overcome by regenerating themselves as writers through highly fictionalized forms of autobiography. I have limited my study to these three writers since their work is, in my opinion, the most noteworthy of the first generation of Jewish-American writers in English. Like Allen Guttmann in his study, The Jewish Writer in America, I have avoided discussing the pre-1882 literature of Jewish-American writers of Sephardic or German descent, since it was the post-1882 wave of immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe which resulted in the creation of the Jewish-American community and literary tradition as we know it today.2 That Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth are all Jewish, emigrated to the United States, lived in New York’s Lower East Side, spoke Yiddish as their mother tongue, but wrote almost exclusively in English, underlines the shared literary, historical, and cultural sources of their writing. And I think that it is safe to claim that their work is representative of the literary concerns, themes, and problems of the first-generation Jewish-American writers who wrote in English. 1 Roth also used the phrase "private continuum", Shifting Landscape, p. 260. I prefer to use the phrase "personal continuum" in the title since it expresses the fact that each w riter’s "private continuum" became an a c c e s s ib le , "p erso n al continuum" when they overcame their writing block and managed to write again. 2 Allen Guttmann, The Jewish Writer In America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 12-13. 7 Aside from Chapter One, which introduces Cahan’s work and com pares Cahan’s The Rise of David Levinsky to William Dean How ells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham, the chapters alternate between an analysis of each writer’s fiction and autobiographical work. The juxtaposition of chapters on Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth’s fictional work with chapters on their autobiographies has the effect of mirroring two particular autobiographical genres as well as two distinctive periods in each writer’s life. Thus, the organization of the thesis into pairs of chapters which alternate between autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography helps to highlight the process of dialectical self-analysis which preoccupied all three writers. It is interesting to note that just as Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth’s fiction becomes increasingly autobiographical as the twentieth century unfolds, their autobiographies become progressively more fictional. In fact Roth described his "second n o vel", Mercy of a Rude Stream, as a "mixed bag", since he uses his diaries from 1938-40 as a starting point, but then shifts into a highly fictionalized narrative— hence my use of the term "fictional autobiography". I do not want to venture that this pattern of self-discovery and regeneration through autobiographical fiction and autobiography described above is totally unique, setting the genre of first- generation Jewish-American novels and autobiographies completely apart from other twentieth century English or American writers or genres, but merely to show how the pattern develops in their individual work. Therefore, in addition to being a critical analysis of first-generation Jewish-American fiction and autobiography, this thesis is also a study of each writer’s personal literary development. What I have attempted to do is to isolate and analyze a noticeable pattern in the fiction and writing experience of Cahan, Yezierska, and Roth. I have used this pattern to illuminate both their earlier fictional and later autobiographical work, thus providing new readings of their literary works. Those readings have been informed by my perception of them as writers and individuals, rather than by any single critical approach, theoretical or otherwise. In the end, it became apparent that autobiography motivated as well as dominated their writing. However, I found it increasingly difficult to distinguish between their fictional and autobiographical work. This confusion, or rather fusion, of the two genres is built 8 into the idea of a "personal continuum", since for each writer continuity requires an overlapping of autobiographical fiction and fictional autobiography. Although the wave of Jewish immigration to the United States has been studied extensively from a sociological point of view, a thorough critical study of the literature produced by this first generation of Jewish-American writers has either been neglected or characterized by continual misinterpretation and misreading of key texts.