The Search for Cultural Identity: Jewish-American Immigrant Autobiographies as Agents of Ethnicity

Abstract

One of the inevitable, concomitant experiences of the immigrant to America has been that of the transcultural dilemma, the conflict of two cultures, and the ensuing, often painful, search for cultural identity: the struggle to accommodate two selves and two cultural spaces into one integral identity. The majority of immigrants and their offspring have resolved this conflict through a gradual process of assimilation and acculturation to the dominant mainstream culture of the receiving country, thereby transforming themselves into something like a palimpsest. with only a few traces of the original text remaining. Within the Jewish immigrant group Mary Antin's The Promised Land (1912) can be seen as a prime example of smooth, one-way assimilation. Her autobiography is a singular celebration of her successful transformation from an Old World shtetl girl into a New England woman. The act of writing her autobiog-, raphy is a willful act of exorcism by which she wants to cancel her Old World self, her historical past; to make space for the emergence of her new American self, she first has to submerge her Jewish past and heritage. Other immigrants have tried to fight or resist such positive confirmation of the dominant culture either by negating the standard norms, values, and codes of the dominant culture or by substituting for the dominant culture a cultural alternative.1 The immigrants' awareness of their ethnicity - their cultural distinctiveness against the culturally dominant group - originated from and was sharpened by this transcultural conflict. It is suggested here by means of three examples that the autobiographies of immigrant writers who consciously fought assimilation and confirmation of the dominant culture and tried to find their cultural identities - at least to some extent through a process of rediscovery, reenactment, retainment and extension of their original culture and heritage - can serve as important signposts of the specifics of the particular ethnic group in America. At