Americanizing the Ghetto: Abraham Cahan and the Fiction of Capitalist Inclusion

This chapter explores Sana Krasikov’s short story collection One More Year (2008) and Anya Ulinich’s novel Petropolis (2007) in order to develop a comparative approach to representations of irregular and unauthorized migration, a form of movement that has been largely identified with migrants from Mexico and Central America. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich represents ethnically and racially diverse protagonists from Russia, Georgia, and Uzbekistan, who arrive in the United States on nonimmigrant visas and become irregular or undocumented. These two works move beyond the themes of assimilation and family migration that dominated twentieth-century cultural productions by eastern European immigrants of Jewish descent, such as Mary Antin, Abraham Cahan, and Anzia Yezierska. Their work laid the foundation for a literature of assimilation to a middle-class white US racial identity that became fully available to European immigrants by the mid-twentieth century. The fiction by Krasikov and Ulinich emphasizes post-Soviet characters’ experiences of diminished access to the US labor market, residency, and citizenship rights, and thus positions itself in the larger context of contemporary US immigrant writing.

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4. Educating the Ostjuden: Abraham Cahan and Gestures of Resistance

The Autobiography of Citizenship ◽

10.36019/9780813570167-007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 133-166

Keyword(s):

Abraham Cahan

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Abraham Cahan

The Jewish East Side 1881-1924 ◽

10.4324/9781351303682-2 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 17-38

Author(s):

Milton Hindus

Keyword(s):

Abraham Cahan

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5. Into the mainstream

Jewish Literature: A Very Short Introduction ◽

10.1093/actrade/9780190076979.003.0006 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 50-60

Author(s):

Ilan Stavans

Keyword(s):

International Literature ◽

Anzia Yezierska ◽

Jewish Literature ◽

Philip Roth ◽

Saul Bellow ◽

Abraham Cahan ◽

Cynthia Ozick ◽

Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽

Grace Paley ◽

Jewish Writers

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

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