The image of the Jewish immigrant as reflected in the mirror of literature—and in much Jewish ideological writing—has tended to be one of frustration, disillusionment, and tragedy: the Golden Land turned out to be a hoax. Yivo (the Yiddish Scientific Institute), the alert and pioneering social-scientific institution (whose transplanting from its native Vilna in 1940 was described in Milton R. Konvitz’s “Yivo Comes to Morningside,” COMMENTARY, January 1947), has not been willing to accept this literary cliché as sociological truth, uninvestigated. Here one of its members, Moses KLIGSBERG, reports on several studies undertaken to throw light on the subject. These took the form of autobiographical contests in which Jewish immigrants were themselves asked to appraise their American experience. The results, however they may be interpreted, will be seen to be less in the vein of Dreiser, Asch, Gold, or Weidman, than in the style of an earlier American chronicler, Horatio Alger—with a difference.
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Over the years in the American saga, the Jewish immigrant has become a well-worn character. The dark chapters of his story are all too familiar—the enforced flight from Europe because of the terrors of persecution, arrival in America with dreams of a promised land, and then long years of frustration and unhappiness during which the first vision dims into utter disillusionment. In Yiddish literature, “the Golden Land” is a continually recurring phrase, but said almost always in irony or sadness.
Not only the novelists and amateur sociologists have contributed to this master-image of the American Jewish immigrant. Liberals, radicals, and Jewish nationalists have also found in the “tragic immigrant” grist for their ideological mills. That the bulk of the immigrants represented the embittered and defeated of the East European ghetto; that their subsequent experience in America led them only to a deepened awareness of inevitable, fundamental homelessness and insecurity—these are made to serve as historical “lessons,” pointing to some partisan millennium as the only salvation from a hopeless fate.
It has been a one-sided story—and in all the hundreds of thousands of words written on the subject, no one has apparently thought to ask the immigrant his own views of himself and his American experience.
However, at the beginning of 1942, the Yivo (Yiddish Scientific Institute) sponsored an autobiographical contest for Jewish immigrants, which had for its theme: “Why I Left the Old Country and What I Have Achieved in America.” The flood of autobiographies elicited by this contest can be considered the first substantial sampling of opinion on this subject. And although the final interpretation of the material must await further study, one thing is clear and unequivocal: the immigrants do not subscribe to the accepted portraits of themselves.
The impulse for the contest was two-fold. First of all, social scientists in the last thirty years have increasingly resorted to personal documents and first-hand interviews as the starting-points of inquiry. That documents of this kind provide perhaps the most direct revelation of the motives and dynamic forces underlying the subject’s “life history” would seem self-evident. Second, there is a special dearth of material needed by the researcher into Jewish life. The Jewish social scientist does not possess government archives, nor has there been, until very recently, any American cultural institution sufficiently interested in the great wave of Jewish immigration to amass documentary material. For these reasons the personal document takes on an unusual importance in the investigation of Jewish immigrant history, and we must increasingly now seek out the memoirs and first-hand narratives of those who went through the experience.
This is exactly what the Yivo attempted to do in holding its autobiographical contest. The instructions, printed in many Yiddish newspapers and publicized throughout the cultural institutions of American Jewry, made it amply clear that the stated theme of the contest was merely the jumping-off point for a full autobiography. In response, two hundred and fifty autobiographies were submitted, the average entry being about one hundred pages long. The ages of the contestants ranged from thirty to seventy-nine. All groups, from the first mass immigration wave in 881 down to the most recent refugees (940) from the European debacle were represented; the former group, of course, was in the great majority.
A word of caution, however, as to the “representativeness” of the material made available by the contest. Though the manuscripts undoubtedly reflect a cross-section of all generations and strata of Jewish immigrants for the past sixty years, they cannot be relied upon for purposes of a strictly statistical nature. Too few, as compared with the total number of existing Jewish immigrants, entered the contest to give it more than a limited value scientifically. At the same time, enough entries were received to reflect and to identify certain dominant notes in the immigrant Jewish consciousness.
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How do these generations of Jewish immigrants feel about their experiences in America? With astonishing unanimity they all voice satisfaction.
To start with, there is great content with their decision to come to America; not one regrets his emigration. Usually, they talk of their coming to America in terms like this: “[On such and such a date] I stepped on the happy soil of America”; or “[On such and such a date] I placed my foot on the free soil of America.” All descriptions of the arrival in America are paraphrases of one thought: it was a spectacularly happy milestone in their lives.
With equal unanimity, they describe the hard years of “ungreening” themselves without bitterness, reproaches, or any general criticism of the America which received them. In one autobiography after another, the difficult experiences of these years are described with a notable absence of negative emotion. Only two out of the entire group of 250 American autobiographers were disgruntled and unhappy: one because of a bad family situation, and the other—although he was a successful professional man—perhaps because of the wide gap between his youthful dreams and his actual realization of them.
What are the specific sources of this satisfaction with the American experience? On the simplest level, the sense of achievement: each writer is conscious that he has gone further in economic and social terms—than was possible in Europe. Beyond that, there is the sense of a freer and more secure life, without the constant and overburdening restrictions of Eastern European society; the socialists among the immigrants show a particularly sharp consciousness of the contrast between American democracy and the oppressive regime of Russian Czarism. Finally—and above all—the older generation finds happiness in its children.
One autobiographer says: “What have I then achieved here? My children are the true gift of my achievements; they have all gone through college. . . . “ Another maintains that the older immigrant generation should be proud of itself because it has “brought up a generation of doctors, lawyers, teachers, accountants.” A third: “My children are my greatest achievement in America.” Nearly all of them speak in this way, proud of their children’s education, higher position on the social ladder, and larger social usefulness.
In its announcement, Yivo was careful to emphasize that it wanted the contestants to describe the cultural relations between themselves and their children. Only a few made a real effort to comply and these spoke with a pathetic vagueness of a certain cultural estrangement between parents and children, a difference in outlook on life, and so on. One autobiographer states: “Our children see salvation through different eyes. I have to listen to my son and keep silent, because to tell him the simple truth, to tell him the story of my entire fifty years of life, would simply mean that his father is still groping around in God’s world and has prepared for him nothing definite.”
Only two of the contestants find it possible to speak of a spiritual kinship and sense of nearness to their children. One, a man active in communal affairs, says: “It is true that I have not succeeded in bringing up well educated children, but that is why I have the joy that my children are with me” (author’s emphasis); a similar statement is made by another contestant, a labor official.
But in spite of this apparent spiritual gap between parents and children, the majority of the writers, at least ninety per cent, simply express full satisfaction with their children and are very proud of their education and their social status. This is the most important fact in their feeling of having achieved their goals, the source of the gratification that holds first place in their minds. Apparently it was only in this last sense that they understood Yivo’s question about their cultural relations with their children. In addition, there is a strong identification with the children: the writers appear more important in their own eyes by virtue of the education and higher social positions attained by their children.
Should one take this at face value? Is it not possible that this very identification with the children implies in the parents a basic discontent with their own lot and a desire to see realized in someone else the goals which for themselves have proved unattainable? Is there a compensatory mechanism at work here? And in addition: may not the unanimity of satisfaction be an unconscious effort to improve on the truth on the part of conventionally respectable people very conscious of the fact that their words may be made public?
These questions are certainly relevant. It cannot be denied that the self-selection of the entrants, combined with the very wording of the contest’s title (“What I Have Achieved in America”), tended automatically to eliminate those who had suffered failure or fallen short of their set goals. However, against such criticism there still stands the evidence of the autobiographies themselves—with their reiterated and unequivocal assertion that, by and large, the immigrant Jew has seen America and found it good. And it is surely possible to have legitimate pride in the success of one’s descendants without automatically becoming vulnerable to the kind of analysis-by-opposites that always reads “minus” where “plus” is written—that always takes expressed satisfaction for the symptom of an inner dissatisfaction.
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We are fortunate, moreover, in possessing another series of autobiographies that provides a valuable frame of reference and helps to give us the proper perspective. These autobiographies are the result of a previous set of contests held by Yivo in Poland in 934 and 1939. The contestants were drawn chiefly from the young Jewish people of Poland, youths between fifteen and twenty-four years of age, and their autobiographies can be regarded in some sense as embodying the European past of the American immigrant. Even after allowances have been made for the general worsening of the political situation, it is still clear that the Polish youths, in describing their plight and frustration, are describing in essence the circumstances which the American immigrants left behind to come to the new land.
What story do these Polish youths tell us? It is a story of intense pessimism and frustration, contrasting most sharply with the explicit satisfaction of the Americans. Here are a few of the characteristic utterances of the Polish youth group: “My autobiography, which I wrote . . .under difficult circumstances and in moral depression . . . is not only mine, it is the biography of tens of thousands of Jewish youth, it is a cry in the dark night for help: don’t let us degenerate, don’t let us perish.” Another explains that his goal is higher education: “Help me find my way, come and lead us, we Jewish youth . . . we, the temperamental, energetic youth beg you: teach us, show us the way, and we will not disappoint you.” A third: “Now comes the question: will I be able to reproduce all my tragic experiences?” Still another: “I have been thinking a long time of writing my autobiography, in order to bring out my experiences, sufferings, and pain on paper.” A girl writes: “I couldn’t help writing since my heart was so overburdened with sorrow.” Still another says: “I was miserable, lonely, and old when I wrote these pages in the evenings late at night.”
This is the mood that pervades almost all of the youth autobiographies: a wail of frustration provoked by the insurmountable obstacles blocking their future.
A survey of the material reveals that it is impossible to assign any single, objective cause for this state of mind. A poor young girl, an orphan, who graduated from a secular Jewish elementary school and continued her cultural and social activities in a youth organization, feels happy although her circumstances are quite impoverished, But a boy of the middle class who is in the last year of the gymnasium feels miserable because he sees the way to a professional career full of hindrances. In both cases the family situation figures prominently in determining these different outlooks. The girl’s mother was a poor village peddler who did not stress the desire for social advancement; the girl started life with a modest goal, and whatever small advance she made was enough to warrant a feeling of happiness. In the boy’s family environment, however, there was considerable discussion of his future career; consequently, when he discovers the futility of his education he is filled with bitterness and frustration. From all this, one can say that the measure of the autobiographer’s unhappiness is inevitably the measure of his unrealized hopes for a career and social advancement.
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Now, although the two diverse groups of autobiographers, the American and the Polish, are separated by an age difference of thirty to forty years, and although in this space of time many changes took place in the European milieu, still there had been no essential change with regard to the difficulties a Jew encountered in trying to attain a higher position in the Old World society. From a sociological standpoint, and with suitable reservations, the Polish youth and the elderly Americans can be viewed as one continuous group—the accounts of the Polish autobiographers reflecting the past years and problems of the American immigrants.
This enables us to deal with a vital factor in the life history of the American immigrants—a factor which has left a deep impression on all their subsequent behavior—by viewing it, as it were, through the sharpened lens of the Polish experience. I refer here to the key problem that confronts all researchers in this field: the problem of the motives that lay behind the immigrants’ original decision to leave Europe.
In all the discussions of this problem, textbook banalities abound. Poverty and persecution—so the story goes—magnified by the impact of social catastrophe, produced the first and succeeding streams of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe to America. This point of view is especially supported by the fact that it was after the wave of pogroms in Russia in 881 that the first great influx of immigrants reached American shores.
Although this account is undoubtedly correct as a surface description, it does not explain what was at work beneath the obvious. It ignores the distinction which must be drawn between the general desire to emigrate and the specific reasons that moved each particular individual to take the decisive step. Obviously, the pogroms of 1881 and the crises of 1903-4 and 1905-6 affected a much larger part of the Jewish population than the minority who actually emigrated. Consequently, there must have been other compelling psychological reasons that went into the individual decision to emigrate, in addition to the pressure of external events. And if we analyze the American autobiographies, we find confirmation in the fact that with almost all the emigrants, or at any rate the first emigrants of a given family, there were specific personal difficulties and tensions that found resolution in emigration.
The writers of these autobiographies fall into several groups. There are orphans, who lost one or both parents in their childhood; persons who even as children had conflicts with their parents (did not want to go to heder, were poor students, had a “wicked” father or mother, joined a revolutionary movement against the wishes of their parents, etc.); others who left home at an early age and went to work in other towns; yeshiva students, who from childhood wandered from town to town and from yeshiva to yeshiva; and, finally, a certain number who had left home as youths to emigrate to distant parts of Russia.
These groups have one thing in common: their ties with their families and home environment were not close, and they were less affected by the traditions which the family and the home environment tried to preserve. They received little protection and guidance, and thus were required from their earliest years to show independence. As a result, they developed an individualistic attitude, a more enterprising spirit, and a looser emotional bond with their environment and traditions.
We need not here get involved in what is cause and what is effect—whether the conflicts of early life brought about the development of a greater independence, or whether an “innate” predisposition to independence brought about the conflicts with the environment. The result is the same: an individualistic type. In a period of social instability, this type of person, in whom all the psychological predispositions to emigration were already present, was the first to seize the wanderer’s staff.
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We can thus assert, on the authority of our autobiographical materials, that the Jewish immigrant community in the United States is by and large a concentration of one social-psychological type, that is, the enterprising, independent, activistic person with a strong individualistic attitude. That is not to say that al immigrants are of this type (certainly not all women and children who came to join husbands or fathers), but it is certain that in our American immigrant community this type is much more strongly represented than it was in any normal, settled Jewish community of Europe.
This does much to clarify the problem of the motives for emigration. As a matter of fact, the various reasons that gave the impetus toward emigration might well be grouped in one category: the ambition for social advancement. This is something quite different from the need to overcome poverty.
One contestant formulates it clearly in this way: “I made plans to go to America in order to get ahead.” Another: “In the old home I left an established business that provided us with an adequate livelihood. . . . There remained only the question of a tachlis [lifegoal] for the children.” A third: “The village did not have anything to give to the young people. . . . Many Talmud students in the houses of study exchanged their long kapotes for the blue uniforms of gymnasium students and went to the gymnasium in Odessa or Kiev, or even Germany. . . . Somewhere there sounds a mighty voice calling to us to run away into the wide world—America.” A fourth: “I had reached the point where I had to transform myself into a new shape. . . . This couldn’t happen in the old home.”
Only one says that he went to America to earn a living, to accumulate a little money, and then go back (but he remained). All the others show clearly that the most important pressure for emigration was the desire for social advancement and for a purpose in life—a career.
Naturally, this fact has had a strong influence on the character of the American Jewish community. It finds its prime expression in an active and conscious attempt to fit into American life.
Much has been written about how the conditions of American life have effected changes in the life and thinking of immigrants; but it is clear that just as strong as any “erosive” action of the American environment was the subjective factor of the immigrants’ intention and readiness to adjust themselves. One writer, from a strongly Orthodox family, tells of one of his brothers, who, when he went to work for the first time and was asked his name, was told “Yerahmiel” wouldn’t do, and the workers began to call him Jack. “And that is what his name has remained,” says our writer. “From that time on we have all called him Jack.”
This small incident—a typical pattern in immigrant life—shows how strong was the anticipatory readiness to adjust. (Incidentally, both basic facts revealed here—the prevalence of the independent, vigorous type among the immigrants and their eagerness to adjust directly contradict the traditional anti-immigration argument that those who seek admission to our shores are the “weak, unassimilable, ungrateful offscourings of Europe.”)
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For all their independence, the emigrants’ decision to leave Europe still involved a conflict between the search for an open road to personal advancement and the ties of a community, a tradition, and a definite way of life. The first won out, as we have seen. But this does not mean that the second was entirely obliterated, for it manifests itself later in various indirect ways.
For example, though none of the American writers expresses any regret at having left Europe, the tie with the old home remains active for decades, expressing itself in well-known forms: bringing over to America as many members of the family as possible—even distant relatives—a duty as sacred as the greatest of the commandments; sending material help to the home village; forming circles that have an old-country basis—landsmanshaften, etc. The tendency is to bring over and establish here as much as possible from the old home: certain landsmanshaften used to bring over the rabbi of the home town, who was for them the embodiment of the community they had left behind.
One observes among the immigrants a distinct hierarchy of preferment with respect to the spiritual values of the old country, intellectual, ethical, abstract values being accorded first place, while the customs and rituals that flourished in the European community are considered much less important. These abstract values are those that can, so to speak, be transported: for the Orthodox, the Torah; for the progressive, the party program. It would seem that the Jew believes his most important spiritual values are capable of the easiest transplantation. What he cannot take with him must be inevitably less valuable.
Here again is strikingly revealed what is perhaps the most constant aspect of the Jewish immigrant personality: a striving for a definite, significant, and ethically meaningful goal in life. It is not enough to seek material gain and personal welfare; welfare must also express itself simultaneously in a social function—as doctor, lawyer, scientist, communal leader, etc. The spiritual elements of the old world that help to give life a meaning are eagerly welcomed in the new land; the external, interfering “habits” are just as eagerly discarded.
The young people of Poland, living under the pressure of constant discrimination, saw their lives in melancholy colors, not so much because of the immediate material disadvantages from which they suffered, but primarily because the way to higher education and the realization of their potentialities was closed.
The immigrants to America, on the other hand, consider themselves fortunate not primarily because their material standard of living has been raised—one finds occasionally even a tendency to denigrate the purely material side of the autobiographer’s achievement—but rather because America has made possible an improvement in their social condition and the chance to develop their personalities. And this seems also to be the underlying motive in their identification with their children and the satisfaction they derive from them: in the educational and social progress and usefulness of the children, they see the fulfillment they sought in America.
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