Marvels of Memory: Citizenship and Ethnic Identity in Abraham Cahan's "The Imported Bridegroom"

The final pages of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) offer the most poignant expression of self-division in immigrant writing in late nineteenth-century America. Successful but lonely, Levinsky says, "I cannot escape from my old self. My past and my present do not comport well. David, the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher's Synagogue, seems to have more in common with my inner identity than David Levinsky, the well-known cloak-manufacturer" (530).(1) Although Levinsky's confession that he has lost his "inner identity" is intensely personal, his rhetoric alerts readers to a familiar condition in immigrant autobiography and fiction. That is to say that while Levinsky's language is personal, his references to a lost inner identity indicate an experience that is anything but private. Levinsky's rhetoric of personal loss is paradoxically the signal and characteristic expression of subjectivity in immigrant fiction. A lost interior self might paradoxically define the immigrant character's self-understanding, especially as he or she describes the sense that a past self and a present self inhabit potentially irreconcilable languages, nations, and cultures, so that the language in which that loss is expressed seems to foreclose the character's ability to achieve wholeness because it replicates self-division at every point. Even the brief citation from The Rise of David Levinsky is structured by polarities' youth and age, religion and commerce, poverty and wealth, obscurity and fame. Such oppositions mimic an emblematic sense of self-division. Even more crucially, the rhetoric of self-division seems to privatize an experience that is produced socially and engages a socially-recognized form of expressing self-loss. As we can see in a case like that of David Levinsky, the conflation of a past self with an inner self creates the present immigrant self as a shadow or an image of an unreal, even a nonexistent, person. In this essay, I want to use another Abraham Cahan text, "The Imported Bridegroom" (1898), to look at immigrant fiction's textual stratgy of conflating a past self with a more "true" and "meaningful" interior self. I then want to look at the installation of a lost interior self as a perceived private loss. When the fragmentation of identity is schematized in this way, immigrant fiction's strategy of conflating the inner identity and private life of characters bears a striking resemblance to other models of self-division troubling late nineteenth-century writing more generally. In particular, I will examine the resemblances between a "split" or divided ethnic identity, the process of reification in a capital economy, and the attendant rift between public actors and private selves that it produces. In pointing out how Cahan's story participates in a general anxiety about the fragmentation of the self in a capital economy, my goal is to demonstrate that ethnic or immigrant characters suffering from a dislocation of identity that they understand as an effect of Americanization are in fact being initiated into a chronic sense of dislocation underwriting American identity at large in the nineteenth century. In arguing that ethnic writing shares a preoccupation with other late nineteenth-century models about the place of the subject, I want to make a case that ethnic literature typifies general crises of identity and capital that literary critics like Amy Kaplan and Priscilla Wald have examined. In her study of realist writing at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, Kaplan discusses realism as "an anxious and contradictory mode which both articulates and combats the growing sense of unreality at the heart of middle-class life" (9). She argues that realist novels "construct a vision of a social whole, not just as nostalgia for lost unity or as a report of new social diversity, but as an attempt to mediate and negotiate competing claims to social reality" (11). …