Marcus E. Ravage's An American in the Making, Americanization, and New Immigrant Representation

Abstract

An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917), an unconventional immigrant memoir by Marcus Eli Ravage (1884-1965), a Jewish American writer and journalist from Romania, has received little critical attention despite its popularity and favorable reception in the early twentieth century. Conceived at a time when the immigrant writer was competing with sociological accounts of “the immigrant story,” An American in the Making tells an unexpected story of Americanization. Speaking in part to his contemporaries’ theories of Americanization and against the growing nativism of the late 1910s and 1920s, Ravage also writes back, responding to previous representations of “the immigrant” by both immigrant and American writers and critics of the social scene. Ravage’s memoir, now in its fourth edition, affords us the opportunity to explore how the work of a first-generation or new immigrant writer, public intellectual, and journalist engages the political and cultural debates surrounding Americanization at the beginning of the twentieth century. Along with the cultural work of the immigrant press in the ideological context of the nationalist debates over American identity in the early twentieth century (especially the melting pot versus cultural pluralism), this memoir dramatizes the unsettled facets of Americanization discourses and practices. I argue that Ravage rewrites not only what he considers the immigrant’s “tragedy of readjustment” but also the genre of immigrant autobiography. In a polemical work, which often challenges the dialectic of Americanization, he shows the reader “an American in the making,” neither fully Americanized nor a greenhorn but a subject of literary production, aware of his objectification in contemporaneous sociological studies and photojournalistic exposes (such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives [1890]). Furthermore, the demands of the genre of immigrant autobiography (established by the literary market) mirrored the coercive demands of Americanization