The Immigrant American Dream

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The Immigrant American Dream

Introduction

For centuries, citizens of the world have arrived on American shores with little more than a suitcase and a dream of a better life. The promise of freedom and opportunity continues to lure foreigners to the United States, even though stories of hardship and isolation comprise the bulk of American immigrant literature. Having reached the promised land, immigrants find themselves faced with unimaginable obstacles. Even Americans who have had a chance to adapt and become "successful"—according to the traditional definition of material success as defined by the American dream—experience feelings of cultural isolation and otherness. Refugees, those who come to America seeking protection from war or political or religious persecution, face entirely different problems. Many of these people long for home and do not necessarily crave the rewards promised by the American dream. Despite the myriad reasons that brought them, American immigrants share a sense of isolation that, in some ways, defines their life experiences.

The Jewish American Experience

The Jewish identity is a complex mélange of religious belief, ethnicity, and culture. This fact is reflected in the rich variety of subjects and styles found in Jewish American literature. The common denominator that ties this body of work together is a sense of otherness expressed by Jewish writers living in a predominately Christian society. Emma Lazarus, who is best known for her poem, "The New Colossus," said, "The truth is that every Jew has to crack for himself this nut of his peculiar position in a non-Jewish country." Although she had an ambivalent relationship with her own Jewish-ness, Lazarus championed the Jewish cause in her poetry, writing about medieval Christian anti-Semitism from an early age. In 1883, during the rise of American Nativism, she created a society to support the resettlement of exiled East European Jews to Palestine. "The New Colossus" was written specifically for those Jewish exiles but offers a warm welcome to all immigrants. The poem is enshrined on a plaque at the base of the Statue of Liberty, the first glimpse generations of European immigrants saw of their new home as they arrived in New York Harbor:

    Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
    With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
    Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
    A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
    Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
    Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
    Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
    The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
    "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
    With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

In Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), the Holocaust and the 1960s moon voyages serve as metaphors for distance and detachment. The title character of the novel, Artur Sammler, is a Polish Jew and survivor of World War II. Sammler, an intellectual, philosopher, and occasional Columbia University lecturer, struggles to balance the events of his past and the chaos of contemporary life in 1960s America:

The persistence, the maniacal push of certain ideas, themselves originally stupid, stupid ideas that had lasted for centuries, this is what drew the most curious reactions from him. The stupid sultanism of a Louis Quatorze reproduced in General de Gaulle—Neo-Charlemagne, someone said. Or the imperial ambition of the Czars in the Mediterranean. They wanted to be the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean, a stupid craving of two centuries, and this, under the "revolutionary" auspices of the Kremlin.

While the United States looks to the future by exploring the frontiers of space, Sammler is caught in the past, unable to distract his consciousness from the horror of the Holocaust. By using the broad context of history, Mr. Sammler's Planet illustrates the distance between the myth and the reality of the American dream.

Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), features two Jewish cousins—Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay—who create a comic-book superhero with Houdini-like powers: the Escapist. The boys, based in part on real-life Superman creators, Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, attempt to escape their troubles through the pages of their splashy comic book. Kavalier's family was left behind in Nazi-occupied Prague while Clay, a Brooklyn kid, struggles with secret homosexual urges and an absent father. Set against the backdrop of golden era 1940s adventure comics, swing music, and pulp novels, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is an optimistic tragicomedy about escape, transformation, and liberation in post-Depression, pre-war New York. Chabon captures the fantastic struggle between good and evil, both in comics and in American life:

The Steel Gauntlet, Kapitan Evil, the Panzer, Siegfried, Swastika Man, the Four Horsemen, and Wotan the Wicked all confine their nefarious operations, by and large, to the battlefields of Europe and North Africa, but the Saboteur, King of Infiltration, Vandal Supreme, lives right in Empire City—in a secret redoubt, disguised as a crumbling tenement, in Hell's Kitchen. That is what makes him so effective and feared. He is an American citizen, an ordinary man from a farm in small-town America.

Chabon's story was inspired by the mostly Jewish cartoonists that created comic book heroes like Batman and Superman from the late 1930s through the early 1950s. They created worlds where anything was possible—worlds to which readers could escape. This made them heroes in a sense. In the novel, Clay muses, "Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself."

Outsiders in a New World

Part of the experience of being an immigrant is learning to adapt to American culture. This transition is especially hard for immigrants or descendents of immigrants with existing identity issues. Immigrant literature is rife with stories of minorities within minorities—people whose religious beliefs or sexual identities contrasted with those held by their families or communities. In Gay Talese's Unto the Sons, the author describes growing up an outsider on the small island of Ocean City, New Jersey, the son of a southern Italian tailor who immigrated to the United States in 1922. Published in 1992, Unto the Sons tells of Talese's family history, written in the author's well-known elegant, exhaustively researched style. His was a Protestant community; he was Catholic. The community was predominantly Irish; Talese was Italian. In chapter 1, Talese writes,

I was olive-skinned in a freckle-faced town, and I felt unrelated even to my parents, especially my father, who was indeed a foreigner—an unusual man in dress and manner, to whom I bore no physical resemblance and with whom I could never identify. Trim and elegant, with wavy dark hair and a small rust-colored moustache, he spoke English with an accent and received letters bearing strange-looking stamps.

Like Talese, Frank McCourt was a bookish boy who grew up to write richly detailed narratives about his immigrant experiences. But that is where the similarities end. McCourt, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes (1996), about the almost unimaginable poverty he endured as a child in Ireland, followed that best-selling memoir with 'Tis (1999), a history that focuses on the author's adjustment to the United States as a young man. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1930 to Irish parents, McCourt and his family returned to Limerick, Ireland, when he was a small boy. When he was nineteen, McCourt moved back to New York City, served in the army during the Korean War, and then worked a string of jobs before becoming a high school English teacher. It was only after McCourt retired that he pursued his dream of writing. 'Tis is filled with the language of the exiled. It is rich in despair and anger over having to work so hard to attain the dream—he refers to the American dream as the "tormenting dream" in the book's prologue—that seemed to come so easy to the Ivy League crowd he cleaned up after while working in the Biltmore Hotel's Palm Court. The book begins where Angela's Ashes leaves off: with McCourt sailing to America.

There was a book in the ship's library, Crime and Punishment, and I thought it might be a good murder mystery even if it was filled with confusing Russian names. I tried to read it in a deck chair but the story made me feel strange, a story about a Russian student, Raskolnikov, who kills an old woman, a moneylender, and then tries to convince himself he's entitled to the money because she's useless to the world and her money would pay for his university expenses so that he could become a lawyer and go round defending people like himself who kill old women for their money. It made me feel strange because of the time in Limerick when I had a job writing threatening letters for an old woman moneylender, Mrs. Finucane, and when she died in a chair I took some of her money to help me pay my fare to America.

It was McCourt's poverty and awkwardness that made him invisible to the brisk, self-assured college students he envied as a nineteen-year-old. Achy Obejas, another immigrant outsider, is the author of the 1994 short story collection, We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This? Obejas, who was born in Havana in 1956 and came to the United States as a child, is dually marginalized as both a Cuban refugee and a lesbian. She plumbs the depths of her complex immigrant identity in her stories, several of which are narrated by lesbians trying to understand the confusing world of love relationships. Refugee outsiders of all kinds—people with AIDS, Cuban boat people, junkies—populate her stories. Unlike immigrants seeking wealth and freedom as promised by the American dream, refugees long, instead, for the comforts of home. It is this distinction that brings the notion of family and cultural history into the discussion of the immigrant American dream.

The East Indian American Experience

Like the father in the story "We Came All the Way From Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" the protagonist of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's story, "The Unknown Errors of Our Lives," longs for her homeland. More specifically, she longs for her grandmother whom she loves "more than anyone else":

She had struggled through the Bengali alphabet, submitting to years of classes at that horrible weekend school run by bulge-eyed Mrs. Duttagupta, just so she would be able to read her grandmother's letters and reply to them without asking her parents to intervene. When a letter arrived from India, she slept with it for nights, a faint crackling under her pillow. When she had trouble making up her mind about something, she asked herself, What would Thakuma do? Ah, the flawed logic of loving! Surprisingly, it helped her, although she was continents and generations apart, in a world whose values must have been unimaginable to a woman who had been married at sixteen and widowed at twenty-four, and who had only left Calcutta once in her entire life for a pilgrimage to Badrinath with the members of her Geeta group.

Divakaruni, born in Calcutta, India, on July 29, 1956, came to the United States when she was nineteen years old. The protagonists that narrate the nine stories of her 2001 collection, The Unknown Errors of Our Lives, share Divakaruni's sense of hovering between two worlds: one comprised of her family heritage and traditional Indian beliefs, the other made up of new, American ideas. Divakaruni's hybrid identity is the fodder for her sometimes autobiographical work, which deals mostly with the East Indian American immigrant experience.

The final story in Jhumpa Lahiri's 2000 Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, "The Third and Final Continent," offers another example of East Indian Americans caught between two worlds. This time the protagonist is a male newlywed living in Boston, striving to make the American dream come true for himself and his new, homesick wife. While living and working in America, he finds himself complacently obeying the centuries-old traditions of his homeland:

My wife's name was Mala. The marriage had been arranged by my older brother and his wife. I regarded the proposition with neither objection nor enthusiasm. It was a duty expected of me, as it was expected of every man. She was the daughter of a school-teacher in Beleghata. I was told that she could cook, knit, embroider, sketch landscapes, and recite poems by Tagore, but these talents could not make up for the fact that she did not possess a fair complexion, and so a string of men had rejected her to her face. She was twenty-seven, an age when her parents had begun to fear that she would never marry, and so they were willing to ship their only child halfway across the world in order to save her from spinsterhood.

Although Lahiri was born in London in 1967 and raised in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, she was steeped in Indian culture from a young age. Her parents followed Indian traditions and took their daughter to Calcutta every two years to visit her grandparents. While abroad, Lahiri spoke Bengali, dressed in Indian clothing, and ate Indian food. These experiences contribute to her understanding of both integration and loss of culture, two predominant themes found in "The Third and Final Continent." Although the narrator is amazed and grateful for his very American achievements of owning a house and sending a son to Harvard, he feels pangs of loss over the culture he has left behind.

The American Dream Come True

Elia Kazan, Academy Award-winning director of such films as On the Waterfront, Death of a Salesman, and A Streetcar Named Desire, was born Elia Kazanjoglous in Constantinople, Turkey, in 1909. In 1912, his father, a rug merchant, moved the family to the Greek section of Harlem in New York before settling in the suburb of New Rochelle. In 1962, Kazan wrote his first novel, America, America, the tale of his uncle's odyssey from poverty-stricken, persecuted Turkey to America and the setbacks that accompanied it. After it became a best seller, Kazan translated it into film. The movie version was named one of the best films of 1963.

One of the more striking moments in the film occurs when the protagonist, twenty-seven-year-old Stavros, falls to his knees and kisses the ground once he reaches America. In A Life, Kazan's 1988 autobiography, he relates a disagreement over the scene between he and his production advisors. They thought the gesture cliché and suggested it be cut. Kazan kept the scene because, as he says in the book, "I doubt that anyone born in the United States has or can have a true appreciation of what America is." Clearly, Kazan, despite his outsider status and immigrant background, achieved the American dream and was able to successfully share at least a fictionalized version of it with the world.

Immigrant Working Conditions

One of the least-discussed aspects of the immigrant experience relates to the working conditions foreign-born citizens and illegal immigrants are often forced to endure. The dark side of the American dream has, from the country's beginnings to present day, involved immigrants working menial jobs for long hours at poverty wages. One of the first writers to explore the world of exploited immigrant labor was Upton Sinclair. While writing for the socialist political journal Appeal to Reason, Sinclair employed his particular brand of undercover journalism to reveal the hideous working conditions and unsafe food practices found in Chicago slaughterhouses in the late nineteenth century. Sinclair's story of a family of Lithuanian immigrants employed by Chicago's Union Stock Yards is called The Jungle, which describes the dark horror found in the slaughterhouses. When the novel was published in 1906 it became an instant bestseller and spurred the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act as well as the Meat Inspection Act. The novel remains one of American literature's more scathing critique's of capitalism.

More recently, Jimmy Breslin, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, sportswriter, columnist, novelist, and would-be politician, wrote about the particularly sad life and gruesome death of an eighteen-year-old illegal immigrant named Eduardo Gutierrez. The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez (2002) follows Gutierrez's path along the illegal immigration underground from San Matias, Mexico, to New York, where he gets a job working for a mob-run construction company whose bureaucratic practices made his death a tragic inevitability. He explains the origin of his short, sweet dream:

Gustavo, who lived behind him and had gone to America earlier, had called several times from Brooklyn and said he had a construction job and that the boss, Ostreicher, could use more workers. The pay was immense: Gustavo said he was making seven dollars an hour. Seven dollars in one hour! Eduardo carried bricks all day for the equivalent of five dollars a day and talked about the money Gustavo was making in America. Hearing this, his father knew that he was about to lose a son. Eduardo's father had only one thought for him: that liberty is not the country you are in, but the job you have. "If you do not like the job, then you quit and go to another," he said to Eduardo. "It is your only liberty."

Conclusion

The American dream continues to tempt world citizens with its promise of financial security and freedom, but many who arrive, sometimes risking their lives to get here, find the actuality rarely matches the dream. For most immigrants, legal or otherwise, if they are not working dangerous, low-paying jobs just to make ends meet, they are suffering from cultural detachment and isolation—sometimes both. Of course, there are exceptions, which accounts for the fact that the American immigrant population continues to grow.