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Title: Immigrant Voices: Twenty-Four Narratives on Becoming an American by Gordon Hutner ISBN: 0-451-52698-8 Publisher: Signet Pub. Date: March, 1999 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $6.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: A goldmine of textures and impressions
Comment: This is a wonderful anthology of autobiographical writings, spanning the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Beginning with Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's famous defining statement of cultural identity, 'What is an American' the collection captures the 'outsider' American becoming whatever an 'American' is...it's a superbly apt paradox and a fascinating problematic and one that is full of dramatic axis: the immigrant looking back to his or her old country while negotiating the new. One can't help feeling a certain exhileration at the complexity of the 'American experience' and the focus on first impressions of America is the compelling aspect--the just off the boat wonderment, the gradual disillusionment, and the afterthought or reflection from many years on--- a multitude of newcomers trying to figure out first hand how the society works, what its values are, how each new arrival hopes to carve his or her own world, the constant need for adaptation and improvisation, the sense in which loss and gain function as a necessary interchange, the bleaker moments of crisis and frustration, and, ultimately, survival, though of the tempered, reflective rather than triumphant or grandiose kind. The accounts feel so personal and immediate, full of sights and sounds and textures. It's a bit like reading historical fiction, because the sense of character and individual struggle is so strong. This first person quality is what really brings the history to life for me. Each letter or autobiographical extract seems to deliver such minute and particular documentary detail and one learns a tremendous amount of domestic and social history in the process. My favorites are probably a Norwegian frontier mother's account of her hard Iowan farming life, full of the stoically endured pains of leaving familiar life behind and her level headed grappling with the differences that bombard her as she and her husband try to build their farm; an extract from the memoirs of Henry Villard, describing his vigorous, heady engagement with American politics in the 1850s; Andrew Carnegie's robust and unromanticized account of his early immigrant days in Pittsburg; a young Syrian intellectual's memories of agonizing loneliness, struggle with the English language and determination to suceed in academic life at the turn of the century...and so it goes on, though I confess that my weakness is for the earlier accounts, with all their strange modernity (Crevecouer seems so timelessly on the nail about American types and the mingling of different religions and European ethnicities throughout the land). I wish there were more volumes. The introduction, by the way, is first-rate. Hutner is clearly a scholar of great integrity. But there is no reason this book should be limited to a student readership--it is so full of life and would be a great resource for all kinds of writers, and anyone with an interest in their own immigrant roots. It also has a wonderful feeling of landscape and customs, revealing an America of regions, urban and metropolitan. A great strength of the selection is that it offers a full array of experiences from many different countries--India, China, Korea, Syria, and Mexico--as well as European. New York figures prominently but does not dominate. All the usual cliches of the immigration account (Ellis Island, the immigrant as uneducated and backward) are avoided because each voice is so distinguished, so full of opinion and views and fully formed ideological outlook. All the voices are those of thinkers, and that's what makes this gem of an anthology such a great read.
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