At a time in which the dominant culture’s pressure on immigrants to Americanize increased, Mary Antin (1881-1949) and Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) wrote literary works that bore witness to the...Show moreAt a time in which the dominant culture’s pressure on immigrants to Americanize increased, Mary Antin (1881-1949) and Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) wrote literary works that bore witness to the complexity and personal costs of assimilation. The Eastern European Jewish immigrants in Antin’s (fictionalized) autobiography The Promised Land (1912) and Cahan’s novella Yekl; A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and his novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) offer insights into the impact of America’s assimilationist ideology on identity construction, showing how both ethnic and national identities are imagined, constructed, and performed. The protagonists explore the social injustices Jewish immigrants suffered in the United States and the complex nature of Americanization by sometimes bluntly criticizing the pressure to conform, but elsewhere demonstrating that they have assimilated to a certain degree. The protagonists find themselves in a bind: on the one hand they need to give in to the pressure to assimilate in order to attain the American dream, while on the other hand they often feel tied to their Jewish cultural heritage.Show less
