educated Hamilton Holt, the managing editor of The Independent of New York City, to solicit and publish some seventy-five autobiographical sketches, sixteen of which later appeared in a single volume, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves (1906; reprinted 1990). Tellingly, the reviewers focused on the contributors who were representative of the four central populations of the great migration, all in stereotypical occupations — a Jewish garment worker from Poland, a Swedish farmer, an Irish maid, and an Italian bootblack — even though Hamilton included alongside the classic types oral histories of such non-European immigrants as a Syrian who clerked in an 'oriental goods' store, a Chinese laundryman, and a Japanese servant, as well as that of an Igorrote Chief (representing the 237,000 surviving Indians).
The first popular series of immigrant novels — The Yoke of the Thorah, Mrs. Prexiada, and several others — treated German Jewish merchants and were published with much fanfare in the 1880s; they appeared to be experientially based and were signed by 'Sidney Luska,' a writer whom almost everyone (including the Jewish American press) took to be a German Jew. In a pattern that would reappear, Luska was unmasked as an Anglo American, Henry Harland. Ernest Poole released his novel about Italian immigrants, The Voice of the Street (1906), under his own name, having hired Joseph Stella, an American-trained artist born in Italy, to provide illustrations; in -384- his preface, Poole admitted to his status as an interested outsider yet wielded the figure of Stella to imply an Italian American seal of approval. The earliest novels written by ethnic insiders, little remembered now, were often investigations focused on the workplace. The title character of the first Italian American fiction, Luigi Donato Ventura's Peppino (1886), was a bootblack befriended by an aspiring writer. Elias Tobenkin presented East Side street peddlers in the first of the Russian Jewish best-sellers, Witte Arrives (1916).
In the teens and twenties, national concern began to shift from life among the foreign workers to whether or not they could or would 'assimilate,' an idea that (like the melting pot itself) vibrated between an enforced Anglo conformism and a more generous sense of achieving sufficient economic and educational mobility to participate in national public life. By this time, many immigrants had in fact climbed from obscurity to prosperity and thus could supply success stories that were reassuring on the question of whether immigrants could 'make it' or not; indeed, they often sang the praises of the United States and of '100 percent Americanism' to loud public applause. The prevailing ethnic genre in terms of sheer numbers was the undisguised and unimaginative ethnic autobiography. These life stories of more 'distinguished' Americans fused Benjamin Franklin's autobiography with the Horatio Alger tales and were given titles indicative of how little open to reinterpretation was 'genuine Americanness': Edward Bok's The Americanization of Edward Bok (1920), Riis's The Making of an American (1901), Angelo Patri's The Spirit of America (1924), Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912), M. E. Ravage's An American in the Making (1917), Edward Steiner's From Alien to Citizen (1914), and Michael Pupin's From Immigrant to Inventor (1923).
In 1894 William Dean Howells caught sight of an early story by Abraham Cahan — a labor organizer and co- founding editor of the Jewish Daily Forward — and encouraged him to produce a fuller narrative. Two years later Cahan published Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, which Howells reviewed alongside another novella, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), as allied portrayals of the customs and domestic tragedies of the migratory proletariat. Cahan's principal achievement was to delineate the growth and evolution of difference within what was too easily taken to be a -385- homogeneous Yiddish-based subculture. Cahan used the device of an immigrant couple growing apart (the novel ends with a divorce) to dramatize divergent philosophies of advancement and cultural accommodation: Jake's assimilation to American consumerism, admirably energetic yet neglectful of the past, versus Gitl's preferences for cautious accumulation and a homelife more respectful of Orthodox Judaism and Yiddish folk culture. Today Yekl is respected as an innovative rendering of the immigrant's perspective (much as it was originally), though it may be better known by the film version of 1974, Hester Street.
Cahan's masterpiece, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), began as a four-part series commissioned in 1913 by an editor at McClure's, who was looking for a muckraking exposé of Russian Jewish success in American business. Cahan agreed to take on the assignment, in part because he was aware of the potential anti-Semitism that could be unleashed if McClure's was to put the assignment in less conscientious hands. With realistic detail reminiscent of Howells, Dreiser, and the European Russian tradition, Cahan tells how Levinsky, a former student of the Talmud, becomes a major garmentmanufacturer worth millions: not only through hard work and ingenuity but also through cynical manipulation of his workers and their faith. Yet Levinsky becomes more sympathetic than his actions warrant as he comes to recognize that he has betrayed Judaism and isolated himself from his people. Undermining the Shylock stereotype, Cahan attributes Levinsky's entrepreneurial energy not to blood but to the internalization of mainstream American values, his success not to inheritance but to innovative applications of modern business skills.
In 1922, Carl Van Doren proclaimed The Rise of David Levinsky 'the most important of all immigrant novels'; a decade later, Albert Halper concurred that it was 'the first and only skyscraper among the early work of Jewish-American writers.' Through the mid-1930s, mainstream critics such as Van Doren and Carter Davidson often praised more popular East Side novelists — including Elias Tobenkin, Konrad Bercovici, and Fannie Hurst — for working in Cahan's shadow. In contrast, critics of Jewish extraction such as Halper and Lionel Trilling favored the more aesthetically ambitious works that began to appear in the late 1920s, including two by German Jewish -386- men of letters — Ludwig Lewisohn's The Island Within (1928) and Paul Rosenfeld's A Boy in the Sun (1928) — as well as Charles Reznikoff's By the Waters of Manhattan (1930).
The most important of the Jewish American headliners of the 1920s was Anzia Yezierska, a sometime schoolteacher and housewife turned creative writer, who between 1920 and 1932 published two collections of short stories and four novels about the trials of Russian Jewish immigrants fighting the economic and social circumscriptions of the East Side. In 1919, her second published story, 'Fat of the Land,' which revisited Cahan's theme of the loneliness of the successful immigrant from the perspective of a Riverside Drive housewife, was nominated Best Story of the Year by Edward J. O'Brien. The story typified Yezierska's most general agenda, which was to challenge what she regarded as the marketplace's sentimentalization of her 'own people.' Throughout her work, she demonstrated that in the United States there had been and still were Jews without money, that the struggle against poverty was always enervating and often futile, and that ties of family and community were being destroyed as self-determination was achieved: 'It's black tragedy that boils there, not the pretty sentiments that you imagine!' one of her protagonists tells an East Side sociologist, who seems to be a compendium of the scholars, social reformers, and literati with whom Yezierska had worked — including John Dewey, Amy Lowell, and William Lyon Phelps (Yale professor and popularizer of Yeats). Yezierska's first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923), while ostensibly a fictionalized account of Rose Pastor's seduction of philanthropist James Phelps Graham Stokes, can also be read as an allegorization of the dangers of ethnic self- marketing.
'Fat of the Land' took up the particular perspective of female immigrants, following in Mary Antin's footsteps (Houghton Mifflin published both Antin The Promised Land and Yezierska first short-story collection, Hungry Hearts [1920]), but with a feminism honed on the issues of the 'new womanhood' of the 1920s. A committed student of Emerson, Yezierska demonstrated how the quest for self- determination drove women beyond the 'uptown' compromises between Old World patriarchy and New World domesticity that most of the men she knew took for granted and to which most of the women she knew — daughters as well as mothers — were un-387- happily resigned. Yezierska's best novel, Bread Givers (1925), looked back at East Side mobility through a feminism that may have been self- referential — in the mid-1910s she left her husband and daughter for rooms of her own — but was tutored as well: it was no coincidence that Bread Givers was published almost simultaneously with The Home-Maker (1924), a brilliantly didactic role-reversal novel scripted by Yezierska's close friend and mentor, Dorothy Canfield.
Bread Givers narrates in the first person the bitter rebellion of young Sara Smolinsky from her tyrannical father, a failed Hebrew teacher and sometime grocer who greedily and disastrously intervenes in the marriages of Sara's three older sisters. After flirting with making an upscale marriage of her own
