On the other hand, we are reminded of what motivates Paul: we are treated to his mastering of the bricklaying craft, to his prideful support of the family, to his passionate participation in the family rites of the Catholic calendar, and to his sexual initiation. The Book-of-the-Month Club — by 1939 the most influential institution in the middlebrow press — chose Christ in Concrete as its main selection over what was then judged to be a more predictable, more ideologically tainted protest novel, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
DiDonato's reviewer in The New Republic was Jerre Mangione. Mangione had made his way out of working-class surroundings to Syracuse University, was currently serving as national editor of the Federal Writers' Project, and would later join the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1942, he released Mount Allegro, subtitled 'A Memoir of Italian American Life.' MountAllegro was set among a network of extended Sicilian families in Rochester, New York, where the construction market was more hospitable to the skilled than in DiDonato's New Jersey. It was narrated by a boy about the -400- age of Paul, Gerlando Amoroso, who unlike Paul enjoyed moderate security, including the luxury of school. Mangione jettisoned most of the darker sides of the immigrant experience to explicate the comshy; munal life that centered on the Amorosos' dining room table: storyshy; telling, operatic quarrels carried over from the Old World, the sexual intrigues of two generations, innovative shortcuts to serviceable Engshy; lish, and the expression of a Catholic sensibility tempered by supershy; stition and a disdain for Church authority.
By giving us a young narrator, Mangione produced the effect of a 'native informant' who is happy to explain the perceived signifishy; cance of phenomena within his culture but is loath to pronounce broad generalizations. Folklore sans sociology exposed the narrative to criticism, including a charge by Isaac Rosenfeld that Mangione was encouraging a condescending readership marked by 'the tourshy; ist's mentality' and a comparison by Diana Trilling to Life with Father. Rosenfeld and Trilling were right that the book lacked a certain ambition; Mangione hadn't even conceived of his memoirs as a novel, but his publishers, Houghton Mifflin, had insisted on a ficshy; tionalization for marketing purposes. Yet the book does have a critshy; ical edge. 'In Sicily,' Gerlando is recurrently reminded, 'people are so poor they will follow a donkey, hoping he will move his bowels, and will squabble over the manure the moment it hits the earth' shy; which is, as Gerlando later sees for himself, scarcely exaggerated. In the hill towns and seaports outside of Palermo, where Gerlando's relatives still live, the institution of the family is the primary weapon of survival. The historical lesson haunting the otherwise playful MountAllegro was that the attractive communality of these immishy; grants had not been transported from the Old World but was fashshy; ioned here through the relative largesse of wage labor.
World War II was a watershed in ethnic literature because it was a watershed in the national social imagination. The campaign to unify the country, discredit the Nazi race theory, and celebrate deshy; mocracy led to a redrawing of the boundary between desirable and suspect ancestries: the circle of cultural anxiety that had once desigshy; nated the descendants of Northwestern Europeans as 'American' but Southern and Eastern Europeans as 'other' shifted outward to embrace a melting pot of Europeans — 'Protestant-Catholic- Jew' in -401- the title of Will Herberg's central book — at the expense of those whose ancestors were not European and/or not 'Judeo-Christian.' On Columbus Day, 1942, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt lifted the 'enemy-alien' designation from Italian Americans to national applause — barely six months after the government had begun the war-long process of interning guiltless Japanese Americans. Symbolic of European ethnics generally, the Italians had through the twenties if not the thirties been understood to be of a different 'race' (that is the word that was used) than that of Anglo-Saxon Americans, but were now incorporated under the general designation of the white mainstream. This redefinition authorized European Americans to susshy; pend much of their ethnic consciousness and Americans at large to regard the depiction of European Americans — especially middle-class ethnics — as reflections, more or less, of themselves.
As early as 1940, a celebrated symposium on 'American Literashy; ture and the Younger Generation of American Jews' (held by the forerunner of the magazine Commentary) pronounced an end to Jewshy; ish self-consciousness in American writing: 'they are spectators no longer but full participants in the life of this country.' The symposhy; sium was prophesying a major shift in the identities and writing agendas of American Jews, a shift to be facilitated by wartime and postwar prosperity and that was to apply as well to other Europeanshy; descended ethnic groups. Even if assimilation was often pursued less vigorously than economic security, and even if some institutions (the boardrooms of many Fortune-500 firms, much of the Ivy League, and so forth) remained closed to them, still for the public at large the long-standing association of urban poverty with foreign accents had been laid to rest, and the invitation was open to writers from such backgrounds to forgo emphasizing difference in favor of developing more central voices.
Jewish American novelists led the way in developing middle-class and upper-middle-class scenarios, with or without an ethnic cast. Budd Schulberg's Hollywood novel, What Makes Sammy Run?, was published in 1941, and its expression of suburban Jewish alienation as a North American malady was soon echoed in major novels by Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and a small host of darkly comic writers (Stanley Elkin, Bruce Jay Friedman, Canadian Mordecai Richler). Imshy; mediately upon their heels came portraits of other ethnic middle -402- classes, including the excellent novels of Edwin O'Connor focusing on Irish American politics and of J. F. Powers focusing on the clergy and laity of comfortable American Catholic communities. Into the 1970s arose writers who had been raised in first- or secondshy; generation homes — Norman Mailer, J. P. Donleavy, Don DeLillo — and who occasionally created protagonists with one or another ethnic awareness, yet who managed to create the overreaching effect of havshy; ing transcended ethnic consciousness themselves.
For all their acuity about the long-term direction of ethnic Euroshy; pean writing, contributors to the 1940Commentary symposium could not but have underestimated how large the need would soon be to put the question of Jewish identity (which seemed from the pershy; spective of the United States comfortably on the wane) in global perspective. The postwar novel of the Holocaust constituted a special flooding of the mainstream, some of it in Leslie Fiedler's words 'proshy; foundly sentimental' (especially when written by Gentiles). Yet other novels were devastating in examining the aftermath of surviving the death camps, for instance Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker (1961) and Bernard Malamud's Fidelman stories, or provocative in rebalancing the equilibrium between Jewish particularity and the sufshy; ferings of humankind, such as Bellow's The Victim (1947) and Malshy; amud's The Assistant (1957).
Post-Holocaust novels were by no means the only sign of renewed ethnicity in American writing after the war. Already by mid-century, and increasingly through the next quarter-century, the prewar expeshy; rience of immigration reasserted its hold over the imaginations of certain writers: this time because European ethnics no longer felt the stigma of otherness and could revisit their recent origins on their own terms, without having to be, first and foremost, cultural mediators. While too late to intrigue mass audiences, yet written with the adshy; vantages of historical, political, and psychological distance, these later works often outstripped their better-known prewar forerunners in accuracy and evocativeness. Yet the primary business of these narshy; ratives was far less a matter of intergroup representation and far more a matter of intergenerational tribute and reconciliation. In reshy; hearsing the settlement experience, postwar novelists bore witness to the generation of immigrants who had dared to initiate cultural revshy; olution, who had suffered not only the physical burden of overcomshy; -403- ing poverty but also the deeper damages of self-recrimination for rupturing inherited traditions and of double estrangement from their homelands and from their Americanized offspring.
Mangione's MountAllegro and Curran's The Parish and the Hill typified the local-color family narratives of the 1940s, which in effect bridged the generic shift from mediation to memory. Children of Russian Jews produced similar memoirs, including two by symposhy; sium participants that seemed in direct defiance of its recent mandate: Isaac Rosenfeld's Passage from Home (1946) and Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City (1951), the first in a trilogy. In subsequent years would come many minor texts by members of almost all European ethnic groups, verging upon an industry around 1970 as part of 'white ethnic' pride (which imitated and responded to the rise of African American self-consciousness). A few major treatments of the great migration and settlement brought smaller European groups to the fore for the first time — Elia Kazan's America! America! (1962) on the Greeks, David Plante's The Family (1978) on French Canadians in New England, Chaim Potok's The Chosen (1967) on the Hassidim. A few others revealed wonders within material thought too familiar: including Tillie Olsen's Tell Me a Riddle
