TY - JOUR

T1 - Jewish immigrants as New World explorers and conquistadores

T2 - narrative identity fashioning and political purpose in the early twentieth century

AU - Loock, Kathleen

PY - 2016/10/1

Y1 - 2016/10/1

N2 - This article examines how Jewish immigrants of the so-called New Immigration (1880–1924) used the space of autobiography to symbolically “discover” and “possess” the New World and discusses this kind of narrative identity fashioning against the national debate over immigration restriction. Works such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), Marcus E. Ravage’s An American in the Making (1917), Elizabeth Hasanovitz’s One of Them (1918), and Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow (1918) take up the El Dorado myth when describing America as a “land of gold” and thus appropriate a popular discourse pattern of Spanish explorers and conquistadores. They also appropriate discourses of wonder and taking possession that are prevalent in traditional European New World writing. Wonder – a direct reaction to the first encounter with unknown places, people, and objects – is omnipresent in these texts and conveyed by various linguistic and narrative strategies. Trading exotic Yiddish names for Americanized versions or entering American educational institutions constitute acts of taking possession, and are, in fact, modern variants of Spanish practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jewish-American immigrant authors negotiated their narrative identities as model American citizens by adopting popular discourse patterns of Spanish discoverers and conquistadores, and by changing them according to their own political purposes, interests, and needs. Such narrative identities framed the immigrants’ transatlantic journey in ways that linked them with America’s mythical past and thus enabled the entire group to feel at home in the United States, to inscribe themselves into the nation’s origin stories, and to (re)negotiate the meaning of Americanness.

AB - This article examines how Jewish immigrants of the so-called New Immigration (1880–1924) used the space of autobiography to symbolically “discover” and “possess” the New World and discusses this kind of narrative identity fashioning against the national debate over immigration restriction. Works such as Mary Antin’s The Promised Land (1912), Marcus E. Ravage’s An American in the Making (1917), Elizabeth Hasanovitz’s One of Them (1918), and Rose Cohen’s Out of the Shadow (1918) take up the El Dorado myth when describing America as a “land of gold” and thus appropriate a popular discourse pattern of Spanish explorers and conquistadores. They also appropriate discourses of wonder and taking possession that are prevalent in traditional European New World writing. Wonder – a direct reaction to the first encounter with unknown places, people, and objects – is omnipresent in these texts and conveyed by various linguistic and narrative strategies. Trading exotic Yiddish names for Americanized versions or entering American educational institutions constitute acts of taking possession, and are, in fact, modern variants of Spanish practices of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Jewish-American immigrant authors negotiated their narrative identities as model American citizens by adopting popular discourse patterns of Spanish discoverers and conquistadores, and by changing them according to their own political purposes, interests, and needs. Such narrative identities framed the immigrants’ transatlantic journey in ways that linked them with America’s mythical past and thus enabled the entire group to feel at home in the United States, to inscribe themselves into the nation’s origin stories, and to (re)negotiate the meaning of Americanness.

KW - Christopher Columbus

KW - European New World writing

KW - Immigrant autobiography

KW - immigration restriction debate

KW - Jewish Americans

KW - nativism

KW - New Immigration

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84978096901&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/14788810.2016.1192828

DO - 10.1080/14788810.2016.1192828

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84978096901

VL - 13

SP - 512

EP - 534

JO - Atlantic Studies : Global Currents

JF - Atlantic Studies : Global Currents

SN - 1478-8810

IS - 4

ER -