The American Schlemiel Abroad: Malamud's Italian Stories and the End of American Innocence

Abstract

What is an American? The question asked by the French immigrant Hector St. John de Crevecoeur even before the Revolutionary War was at an end has haunted many Americans down to our own time. Our colonial beginnings left us with the task of defining our national identity, and from the same source came the habit of defining it in terms of our deviation from European patterns-social, political, moral, cultural patterns-a habit reinforced by later waves of immigration. All white Americans, after all, have European ancestors. This is why until recently most of our major novelists sooner or later felt they had to come to terms with the Old World and why many of them have explored their relationship to it by writing international stories and novels in which Americans are brought in contact and conflict with Europeans and European ways of life.