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

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Muir, Lisa

While their autobiographies portray the more typical struggles involved in living up to American expectations, Cohen and Spewack also reveal how America itself drove them back into their ethnic groups rather than allowing them to become Americans. But, since this meant writing of the country's failures, particularly of the failure of American individualism, they did so carefully. In their respective autobiographies, Cohen and Spewack wrote of the paradox between America's desires and America's needs. America desired to portray itself as a country of unity and tolerance. It relished and celebrated the immigrant success story. But America also feared immigrants once their trickling numbers became a flood after the 1880s.

Immigrants were taught to be Americans in public schools through the use of a common language, but learning the language of America's founding fathers, says Dearborn, also provided the immigrant woman with "the opportunity to expand that rhetoric to include her, in effect by subverting it" (1986, 92). Richard Rodriguez has said that autobiography is the obvious arena within which to wrestle with languages, calling autobiography "the genre of the discontinuous life" (1989, 8) and the appropriate choice for anyone who has "suffered some startling change, a two-life lifetime; to anyone who is able to marvel at the sharp change in his life" (7). Dearborn echoes this discontinuity when she points to the enlightenment living at the edge provides, writing, "[L]iterature by and about those who seem to be on the edges of American culture can perhaps best represent what happens within that culture" (1986, 4). And rather than discount those who work and write at the margins as too marginal for study, Paul John Eakin stresses that our understanding of both mainstream and margin is "enhanced by study of the other" (1991, 8).

Cohen and Spewack wanted to reveal to America that its practices and perceptions of the late 19th and early 20th century had stripped immigrants of their ethnic identity but failed to provide avenues for the acquisition of an American identity Historically America has realized its identity only through divisions between groups. From America's earliest days dealing with Native Americans, the country's sense of nationalism has been predicated upon boundaries. In Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature, William Boelhower cites European contact with the Indian as the "first deep laceration in the American quest for identity" (1987, 45) and the basis for cartographic logic as used to "explain and control the realm of the local" (46). He concludes that the way to nationalism has always been to build roads and draw boundaries (65). The grid imposed on the American West by the Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785, for instance, meant control in one great semiotic swoop. Communication between peoples, as in the verbal description of a place or location, became unnecessary since the map transformed an area into a "single mathematical and mercantile scheme" and a "national signature of possession" (48).