Rose Cohen and Bella Spewack: The ethnic child speaks to you who never were there

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Muir, Lisa

Beginning in 1880, roughly two million Russian and East European Jews immigrated to the United States over the following three decades. Once here, thousands of newly arrived young immigrant women left their New York tenement homes to find acceptable work, to obtain an American education, to make myself for a person, as so many said. Some made it, but many first-generation immigrant children, especially those residing in New York City, felt caged by the ethnic boundaries of the Lower East Side. Crossing over to Americanness remained an elusive goal since, contrary to what it claimed, America tended to shut immigrants out. While professing freedoms, America was also erecting walls. Citizenship in the broader sense did not mean daily social acceptance, and hard work did not necessarily produce the promised rewards. In response, some wrote appealing to those who would not listen. Rose Gallup Cohen published Out of the Shadow: A Russian Jewish Girlhood on the Lower East Side (1918) to critical acclaim, and Hungarian Bella Cohen Spewack penned Streets:A Memoir of the Lower East Side (1922), though she never sought its publication. Both women wrote autobiographies about how hard it was to be the American success story America promised was possible.

A few of the literary voices to emerge from the era would become established "American" voices, but they were also clearly accepting the terms of American identity at the time. Immigrant authors wanting to describe themselves as new American authors spelled out their "conversions," as Priscilla Wald characterizes it, so as to "assure an anxious native-born population that they intended] not to disrupt but to assume an American identity" (1995, 243). Mary Antin, for instance, became the celebrated voice of the new immigrant American with her conversion narrative The Promised Land by confirming that she wanted to be part of the club. A bolder Anzia Yezierska spent a lifetime writing of the joys and woes of being from two worlds, all the while realizing that experiences that invalidated the American narrative risked suppression. Few immigrant writers breaking into the literary world, continues Wald, could hazard the kind of"contradictions, rhetorical disjunctions, and even expressions of discomfort" that would mark "the impossibility of a fully successful conversion" (1995, 243).Yezierska wisely recast her stories to fit the awaited chronicle ofAmerican history, softening her anxious tone somewhat by fictionalizing personal events and tailoring her presentations for her readers. The result, however, is debatable. Elizabeth Ammons calls Yezierska's Bread Givers "a mess," describing it as "a hodgepodge of realism, folk tale, fairy tale, melodrama, polemic, expose, and Horatio Alger howto myth" (1992, 166). As for Antin, her lack of a full American "conversion" has been a subject of recent scholarly debate.

But women like Rose Cohen and Bella Spewack, who may have been perceived as new American voices, actually wrote in their autobiographies against the American voice that they were supposed to discover and venerate. They established that the conversion from ethnic to proper American need not be the ultimate goal in the immigrant narrative.

Both women capture the rawness of everyday life in their autobiographies, but the works are singular. Spewack turned afterward to Broadway comedy and Cohen published nothing else save for two short stories and three brief responses to the public's interest in Out of the Shadow. The combination of success and struggle apparently came to a head for Rose Cohen on the 17th of September 1922. Cohen, then forty, attempted suicide by jumping off a New York bridge into the East River. She was rescued. Soon after she disappeared from public notice. Cohen's Out of the Shadow provides few links to these events. It ends seemingly celebrating America and, as did so many female-authored works in earlier eras, with Rose as a young woman eagerly anticipating her impending marriage.

Spewack wrote of her Jewish girlhood on New York's Lower East Side around the same time. Twenty-three years old in 1922 and having just made a happy marriage, she wrote of her difficult childhood at the turn of the century off Lower Manhattan's tough streets of Broome and Delancey. Spewack, however, never sought the publication of Streets. In fact, in many ways the Bella who wrote of her childhood at twenty-three was never heard from again. After her marriage to Samuel Spewack, the two collaborated successfully on Broadway plays and Hollywood movie scripts the rest of their lives.

In their respective autobiographies Cohen and Spewack explain their own confusions with the concept of ethnicity they felt America had imposed on them. Spewack, who wrote in her twenties, and Cohen, who wrote in her thirties, clearly and purposefully maintain an ethnic voice, but theirs is the voice of the ethnic child. It might be said that use of the childhood voice was simply their way of conforming to public taste, but the intentions of Cohen and Spewack ran deeper than the presentation of a likeable character. Their ethnic child was no romantic incarnation of a divine child whose fictional innocence brought with it a host of didactic implications for the reader; the young girl of their autobiographies was not the doomed visionary of the previous century. Cohen and Spewack leave behind the nineteenth-century tradition of using the angelic child character by depicting themselves as ordinary children. As the protagonists of their own real life stories, they function in sharp contrast to the kind of David Copperfield figure who existed in the world of the Bildungsroman, initially greatly troubled but eventually triumphant, and the Little Eva figure of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, who expires before her divine presence can be tarnished.