Reviews for Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing

The average rating for Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-29 00:00:00 James Appleby A Love Letter To The United States In the most iconic of American poems, "The New Colossus", Emma Lazarus wrote about the meaning of the then-new Statue of Liberty: "'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!'" Lazarus's poem frames "Becoming Americans", a new anthology from the Library of America which manages both to examine and to celebrate the American immigrant experience. The volume is edited by Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Stavans is himself an immigrant of unusual background. Born in Mexico City in 1961 to a Jewish family of immigrants from East Europe, Stavans immigrated to the United States in 1961. He thus is able to write of his own American experience from a unique Jewish-Latino perspective. Stavans wrote the introduction to this volume and also contributed a selection from his autobiography which describes his experiences as a Mexican Jew. In a revealing interview he gave to the Library of America upon the publication of this volume, Stavans described "Becoming Americans" as "my love letter to the United States, a tolerant, warm-hearted country that has been extraordinarily generous to me as an immigrant. Among other things, the country has allowed me to explore my talents to the limit." The book consists of nearly 700 pages of text together with a chronology of immigration to America beginning with the settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The anthology includes selections from 85 writers describing their varied experiences in coming to the United States from 45 countries. The selection begins in 1623 with a letter from one Richard Frethorne to his parents setting forth the hardships of life at Jamestown. It concludes with a 2003 selection by Richard Rodriguez, the child of immigrants from Mexico, from his novel "Hunger of Memory", describing his childhood difficulties with the English language. Rodriguez is the only contributor to the volume who was born in the United States. The materials are arranged in chronological order from date of arrival in America and are drawn from a variety of sources, including letters, diaries, essays, poems, stories, and novels. Each entry includes a short biographical sketch by Stavans to put the text in perspective. While the volume as a whole merits Stavans's characterization as a "love letter", the individual entries show little trace of illusion or sentimentality. Immigrants have faced difficult journeys, hard choices, and long struggles in the United States, and they are amply documented here. The book documents the ambivalences many immigrants experienced in coming to terms with the New World, including the inevitable choice each person had to face about the degree to which he or she would assimilate to the new land or attempt to maintain the traditions and values of the old land. The theme of coming to a new land with a different and difficult language, English, runs through many of the entries in this collection. The selections vary in length and in interest. Taken as a whole, they capture a great deal about the immigration experience and about the United States itself, from New York to the Midwest, to Texas, California, and points between. Blanket generalization would be foolhardy. But I would like to mention some of the entries that I particularly enjoyed. In the small group of entries from Colonial America, I liked James Revel's poem describing the experience of a felon transported to Virginia as punishment for theft as well as Phylis Wheatley's short famous poem "On being brought from Africa to America." Early 19th Century selections include excerpts from John James Audubon, from Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, who came to the United States late in his life, and from Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who became a Civil War General and later the Secretary of the Interior. Later selections include short poetry by unnamed Chinese immigrants arriving at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. A selection from a novelist, Anzia Yezierska, who was unfamiliar to me, describes the conflict between a young immigrant woman who has managed to secure a college education and her traditional, unlettered parents. I would like to read more of this author. Other East European Jewish immigrants presented include Abraham Cahan, from his Autobiography, Henry Roth, from his novel "Call it Sleep" and and Issac Bashevis Singer, in his outstanding short story "A Wedding in Brownsville." The collection includes a letter from Thomas Mann, explaining his decision to stay in the United States rather than return to Germany after WW II, together with good selections from Palestinian Edward Said, and Czeslaw Milosz. Among contemporary writers, I enjoyed the contribution of Jhumpa Lahiri, "The Third and Final Continent" describing the experiences of an educated immigrant from India and his new wife. Gary Shteyngart's comic "The mother tongue between two slices of rye", Gary Delanty's poem about immigration from Ireland, "We will not play the Harp Backward Now, No", and Stavans's own autobiographical essay were other highlights. Cristopher Isherwood (1904-1986) came to the United States in 1939 with the poet W.H. Auden, both of whom are represented in this volume. The selection from Isherwood's diaries includes the following reflection which I thought captured something of the tone of many of the selections regarding the many-faceted, ironic, and outsider character of American immigrant life. Isherwood writes (p. 335): "Actually, in my sane moments, I love this country. I love it just because I don't belong. Because I'm not involved in its traditions, not born under the curse of its history. I feel free here. I'm on my own. My life will be what I make of it." So should the American ideal be for both immigrants and for those born in the United States: to have life "be what I make of it." For both natives and immigrants, this anthology helps explore the never-ending process and promise of "becoming Americans" and of the American dream. Robin Friedman

Review # 2 was written on 2019-06-01 00:00:00 Morgan Mcadams There's a lot in this book to love - an interesting topic, and a complement of fine authors and sparkling historical figures from whom the selections are drawn - but somehow, this anthology is a slog. Part of the problem for me is that many of the selections, at least in the first half, focus on the moment the immigrant arrives in the U.S.. Sometimes that's exciting, but lots of these selections are variations on the same theme of being alone and powerless in an unfamiliar place. Often, I'm betting, more interesting and varied parts of the immigrant experience come later in these lives, possibly much later, and involve much deeper levels of identity, as the immigrants fight in America's armed forces, marry native-born spouses, negotiate family identities with native-born children, or watch successive waves of immigrants arrive in the country. Perhaps later selections have more of this, but I haven't noticed a lot of diversity so far. At this point, I'm shifting from reading straight through to dipping in and out, with no particular end date in mind.