Immigrant Dreams and Civic Promises: (Con-)Testing Identity in Early Jewish American Literature and Gish Jen’s Mona in the Promised Land

One of the things about which he often made fun of me was my Talmud gesticulations, a habit that worried me like a physical defect. It was so un-American. I struggled hard against it. --David Levinsky Don't tell me we're just as good as anybody else, don't tell me we're Americans just like they are. No, no, these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place. --Alexander Portnoy American means being whatever you want, and I happened to pick being Jewish. --Mona Chang These are certainly not heady times to be an immigrant (documented or illegal) in this country. It has become almost de rigueur in political discourse to blame our recent immigrants for problems ranging from unemployment and crime to the national deficit. This largely emotive groundswell of anti-immigrant sentiment has translated itself into public policy in recent years, from the rather draconian federal welfare law that bears down most heavily upon illegal immigrants (and also grants states the right to cut off certain benefits to legal immigrants who are not citizens) to the generally increased fervor with which our current anti-immigration laws are being enforced.(1) Still, amid all the hoopla concerning our anti-immigrant or xenophobic zeitgeist (our relentless focus upon the pressures from without the immigrant experience), we have given short shrift to the subtle ebb and flow of the immigrant ethos itself in America, its visions and revisions. One cannot account for our current bad patch between immigrant and non-immigrant populations without taking into account the contrast between the immigrant dreams of the past and the immigrant dreams of the present. For if it is true that America seems increasingly on the verge of reneging on its promises to its immigrants, it is also true that the terms of that promise are not nearly as clear as they once were. A transformation from within the immigrant experience is underway, and cuts to the heart of our very conception of American identity. To conceptualize the immigrant dreams and civic promises of earlier in this century, one can look at the path of Jewish American immigrant assimilation, which reached its statistical peak in 1907. Jewish American humor and literature shed a good bit of light upon this sociological journey toward assimilation. As long as Jewish humor continues to delight audiences, jokes about Jewish assimilation will occupy their own niche in the genre. Many of these jokes chide Jews for their urges to assimilate, as the ineluctable "Jewishness" of the would-be WASP invariably provides the comic twist that makes for the punch-line. One of my personal favorites concerns a Jewish pauper who converts to Christianity after his local church offers him a $500 reward to do so. When his Jewish friends inquire some days later whether he received the reward, he replies (without a trace of sarcasm), "Is that all you Jews think about is the money?" Such humor affirms the impossibility of assimilation and revels in the naivete of any self-deluding Jew who believes otherwise. Simultaneously, such jokes deflect our attention, if only for a moment, from the more deadly serious implications of the Jew's ineluctable Jewishness. As Erica Jong recently put it, "A Jew is a person who can convert to Christianity from now to Doomsday, and still be killed by Hitler if his mother was Jewish" (97).(2) This is not to say that most early Jewish American immigrants simply made their peace with the inescapable burden of Jewish identity. Upon newly acquiring a hyphenated identity, Jewish Americans struggled to determine which side of the hyphen they should embrace. This struggle served as the essential grist for the artistic mills of our early Jewish American novelists. Given the relative safety and the material rewards that seemed to go hand in hand with being an "Amerikaner," it should come as little surprise that the Jewish side of the hyphen stood little chance of competing for the soul of many of these early protagonists. …