Conceded Reconciliation: The Impact of Habitus on Ethnic Identity Formation in Bread Givers and The Island Within

Abstract

The anti-Semitism of the 1920s affected the status of Jewish Americans as equal citizens in the United States. This paper examines the Jewish immigrant’s journey from their ethnic habitus to Americanization in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1925/1999) and Ludwig Lewisohn’s The Island Within (1928) that were published amidst the rising tensions of Anti-Semitism. Yezierska and Lewisohn demonstrate how the habitus of these two characters shape their identities as Jewish Americans. Bourdieu’s sociological concept of habitus indicates that the character and the tastes of an individual are shaped in relation to the set structures of his habitus, which is internalized unconsciously. Sara Smolinsky in Bread Givers and Arthur Levy in The Island Within try to preserve their internalized Jewishness in a society that thought the unassimilable Jew was a menace to American values. This paper uses Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion on the habitus as well as Jean Phinney’s model of ethnic identity formation as its initial discussion and develops Phinney’s model to elaborate on the final phase of the formation of Jewish characters in these works. According to Phinney’s argument, the ethnic subject achieves reconciliation between the ethnic identity and the identity of the majority group. However, this paper argues that the main characters of the two novels--Sara and Arthur, reach a conceded reconciliation in the final phase of their ethnic identity formation, which allows them to exercise subjectivity and reclaim their identity against the deterministic aspect of habitus.