The Making of an American: Counternarration in Louis Adamic's <i>Laughing in the Jungle</i> and Anzia Yezierska's <i>Bread Givers</i>

Abstract

The American public was saturated with anti-immigrant rhetoric during the 1920s. (1) Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925), written one year after the passing of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, is often read against this historical backdrop. (2) The novel's initial critics saw it as politically informed by the desire to prove the assimilability of eastern European Jews. Since then, it has been read as a critique of American ideals, a preservation of ethnic values, and a testament to the hybrid of its female protagonist. The nativist climate in which Yezierska wrote persists throughout all of these readings by making the goals of assimilation and ethnic preservation incompatible: How could Anzia Yezierska, the cherished chronicler of the Jewish immigrant experience, have identified with an America that demanded the erasure of her ethnic past? (3) This assumption that mainstream American public's need of placation determines the purpose of immigrant novels may blind us to a possible answer to this question, one that critics have attributed within the last two decades to third-wave immigrants--that of the counternarrative. Counternarratives are stories representative of the whole country that are told from the perspective of a country's minorities. Seen as counternarratives, second-wave immigrant fictions join the litany of models for the nation as a community, such as Benedict Anderson's news-readers, the melting pot, and the mosaic. (4) This article considers how a historically unlikely candidate such as Bread Givers might function as a counternarrative by comparing it to a more obvious example, populist historian Louis Adamic's Laughing in the Jungle (1932). Writing with more historical distance from the Immigration Act of 1924, Adamic addressed ah audience more receptive to criticism from an immigrant who drew on his eastern European upbringing. Written eight years after the publication of Bread Givers, Adamic's Laughing in the Jungle, an autobiography of his up-from-the-ghetto experience, offers a full articulation of what a counternarrative of the time might look like. Adopting the discourse of populism, Adamic rejects ideals such as individualism and reimagines an America of different kinds of people who often fail to conform to such standards. To do so, he translates the agrarian cultural values of his Slavic background into an identity within the host land. Two literary strategies make this possible: first, he raises words from his immigrant past such as laughter and dung into a rhetoric of American identity; and, second, he engages with the traditional narrative structure of the autobiography. As an outright critique of American national ideals, Adamic's biography offers a strikingly clear example of how a second-wave immigrant sidesteps the prescribed criteria for national identity to build his own structure of belonging from the materials of his ethnic past. Through the lens of Adamic, we can detect the seeds of a similar position in Yezierska's Bread Givers. By focusing on its engagement with the plot structure of the bildungsroman (similar in shape to the immigrant autobiography) and its reuse of ethnic values as the foundation for a unique discourse of American identity, a resolution of the novel's participation in attitudes of both assimilation and resistance becomes possible: Bread Givers moves toward Americanization on its own terms. (5) In translation from one place and one generation to another, immigrant values become metaphors for an alternative sense of national belonging. In short, Bread Givers contains a subtle counternarrative depicting an identification with America that occurs through, not despite, the Jewish Polish values of its immigrant author. Historical and Theoretical Contexts Like many immigrant novels from the early twentieth century, Bread Givers continues to be read as a response to the American pressure to assimilate. …