Jewish immigrants as New World explorers and conquistadores

narrative identity fashioning and political purpose in the early twentieth century

authored by

Kathleen Loock

Abstract

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.

External Organisation(s)

Freie Universität Berlin (FU Berlin)

Type

Article

Journal

Atlantic Studies : Global Currents

Volume

13

Pages

512-534

No. of pages

23

ISSN

1478-8810

Publication date

01.10.2016

Publication status

Published

Peer reviewed

Yes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Cultural Studies, History, Literature and Literary Theory

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities

Electronic version(s)

https://doi.org/10.1080/14788810.2016.1192828 (Access: Closed)