4 - Immigration and Modernity 1900–1945

Summary

This chapter sketches two ways of narrating Jewish American literary history, namely first-person singular narration and third-person narration. Immigrant narratives represent the process of migration and assimilation and help to give shape to an individual's transformation. Gold's Jews without Money, more an unstructured memoir than a novel, is a first-person-singular narrative of twenty-two chronologically arranged vignettes. The year 1934 witnessed an aesthetic revolution in Jewish American fiction with the publication of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep. Roth's new third-person narration takes small David's point of view with strikingly beautiful images. Though the end point in both narrating ways is alienation, the readers have to decide whether the story of increasing assimilation that begins with Antin and Cahan or an alternative story that, inspired by Daniel Deronda, would start with Nyburg's Jewish idealism and Lewisohn's dissimilation might have more resonance today.