South-Slavic American Autobiography: Three Variations

Abstract

In the tremendous post-1880 influx of Slavic peoples to American shores, the South Slavic nationalities were duly represented as thousands fled the impoverished, desperate villages and the political oppression of the decadent Austro-Hungarian Empire. Largely uneducated, almost all poor, sometimes denied the use of their own Slavic tongue in the Hungarian classrooms, they sought in America the freedom to be Slavic, to better their economic positions, and to realize their individual worth which the rearguard imperialism of Central Europe long denied them. Although many recorded their observations in the native tongue volumes of crudely-written popular poetry, for example few wrote in English and fewer still wrote autobiography. My intent is to examine three such autobiographies written by three immigrants from the South Slavic nationalities that now make up Yugoslavia: the Serbian Michael Pupin's From Immigrant to Inventor (1922), the Croatian Louis Sanjak's In Silence (1938), and the Slovenian Louis Adamic's Laughing in the Jungle (1932). All post-World War I works after the influx of South Slavic peoples had been curtailed by restrictive legislation they range from the simplistic, pedestrian narrative of Sanjak, a Croatian Lutheran minister, through Pupin's Pulitzer Prize winning work, the testimony of the scientist and a famed man of affairs, to Adamic's polished, introspective, occasionally profound work the work of a professional writer deeply committed to exploring the complexities of American life. As such, the three variations, in their similarities and differences, form a tapestry of attitudes important in understanding the immigrant. For in these works we see reinforced not only a matrix of cultural belief peculiar to South Slavic peoples, but the basic patterns so common to all immigrants: all the agonies and ecstasies of that fearful rite of passage the departure, the gestation period on the high Atlantic seas, and the rebirth in the strange, promised land. Thus, while only Adamic's work shows any pretension to any classification of traditional literature, all three serve as documents defining the immigrant imagination at a crucial time in American history. For my purposes here I want to examine