Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition by Dana Mihăilescu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition by Dana Mihăilescu Markus Krah (bio) Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition. By Dana Mihăilescu. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018. xxi + 249 pp. The transformation, adaptation, acculturation, and, if you will, Americanization of immigrants from the eastern parts of Europe around the turn of the twentieth century has been crucial to the ways in which American Jews understood and presented themselves as individuals and as a group in their American and Jewish contexts. The existing studies of these complex processes leave room for new perspectives, so Dana Mihăilescu's book is a welcome addition. Mihăilescu, a professor of English/American Studies at the University of Bucharest, takes an innovative approach by connecting literary, philosophical, and historical perspectives on the topic. Analyzing the work of six writers who came to the US from Russia and Romania, she argues that immigration caused "the need to re-imagine the subject's ethical agency in a new regime of state, showing how the dilemmas associated with eastern European Jewish American identity represent a critical element in fashioning modern subjectivity" (xi). This re-configuration involves a shift from a "fixed-type of identity in autocratic eastern European societies to contingent, fluid identity in democratic United States." Moreover, immigrants transitioned from "double ethical standards" and a focus on self-preservation and survival (eastern Europe) to an "emphasis on ethical responsibility for the ethnic/generational/human other via critical resistance to limitations of norms in a democracy" (xi). Mihăilescu comes to this original thesis by analyzing the novels, memoirs, and essays written by the six writers who form the source base [End Page 469] for her study: Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, Anzia Yezierka, Konrad Bercovici, M. E. Ravage, and Maurice Samuel. By recuperating the voices of Romanian Jewish immigrants through the three latter authors, she aims to complete the picture of the eastern European Jewish experience of America. To the body of their work she applies the theories of philosophers Judith Butler, Axel Honneth, and Emmanuel Levinas. Butler's notion of vulnerability, Levinas's encounter with and responsibility for the other, and Honneth's concept of "recognition" in the face of moral injury are the main ingredients of the "new sense of ethical agency characterizing Jewish identity in America" (xvii). This philosophical framework in which Mihăilescu situates eastern European Jewish immigrant identities runs as a thread throughout the book and is woven into sections sketching the historical background of the immigration experience. These considerations make up the first part of the study, preceding the analysis proper of the writings of the six authors. The analysis follows several leitmotifs which Mihăilescu traces from eastern Europe to the US in the writings of the immigrant authors. In her brief concluding chapter, she doubles down on her thesis by stating that the "awakening to the other […] marks the positive refashioning of Jewishness in America in the early twentieth century" (231). Surprisingly, however, she states that this identity reconfiguration through the experience of responsibility for the other was not unique to immigrants to the US but also characteristic of Jews who remained in Europe and engaged the other in various ways (232). A review by a historian cannot do justice to the philosophical analysis Mihăilescu performs on her literary sources, but it does need to point out problematic aspects of the study, which is premised on questionable assumptions about the history of eastern European Jewish immigration to the US and makes claims about this experience based on the analysis of its sources. Bracketing the larger issue of a unified "eastern European" background to these immigrant experiences, Mihăilescu's thesis of the shifting identity of immigrants rests on reductive and over-simplified dichotomies and concepts, such as the opposition between "Orthodox" and "Progressives" in Eastern Europe (for which the shtetl serves as a pars pro toto) and the US (62). She stresses the differences between western and eastern European Jews by quoting Simon Dubnow and Nathan Glazer (59). She uses writings by her six authors to illustrate or prove problematically large claims about the development of different...