5-2008
Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction,
Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939
Laura Patton Samal
University of Tennessee - Knoxville
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Samal, Laura Patton,
"Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939. "
PhD diss.,
University of Tennessee, 2008. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/343
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To the Graduate Council:
I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Laura Patton Samal
entitled "Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the
Politics of Liminality, 1899-1939." I have examined the final electronic
copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be
accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy, with a major in English.
Mary E. Papke, Major
Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance:
Thomas Haddox, Carolyn R. Hodges, Charles Maland
Accepted for the Council:
Carolyn R. Hodges
Vice Provost and Dean of
the Graduate School
(Original signatures are on file with official student records.)
To the Graduate
Council:
I am submitting
herewith a dissertation written by Laura Patton Samal entitled ―Rights of
Passage:
Immigrant Fiction, Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality,
1899-1939.‖ I have examined the final
electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it
be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor
of Philosophy, with a major in English.
|
|
____________________________________ |
|
We have read this
dissertation and recommend its
acceptance: ______________________________
Thomas
Haddox ______________________________
Carolyn
R. Hodges ______________________________
Charles
Maland |
Mary
E. Papke, Major Professor |
|
|
Accepted
for the Council: |
|
|
________________________________
|
|
|
Carolyn
R. Hodges, Vice Provost and |
|
|
Dean
of the Graduate School |
(Original
signatures are on file with official student records)
Rights of Passage: Immigrant Fiction,
Religious Ritual, and the Politics of Liminality,
1899-1939
A
Dissertation
Presented
for the
Doctor
of Philosophy
Degree
The
University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Laura
Patton Samal
May
2008
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to my husband,
Sam Samal, to my children, Lucia and Julian Samal, and to the memories of my
parents Miriam and Richard Patton, in grateful appreciation for their love,
faith, and support, and for being models for me of what is best in
humanity.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank all of those who helped
me complete my Ph. D. in English Literature.
I would especially like to thank Dr. Mary Papke for her guidance and
encouragement during this process, and for her intelligence, humor, and passion
for literature and life, which continue to inspire me. I would also like to
thank Dr. Charles Maland for his suggestions and contributions to my
dissertation, which were always helpful and enlightening, and so kindly
offered, and Dr. Thomas Haddox whose invaluable comments always helped me
consider important questions I had overlooked.
I would also like to thank Dr. Carolyn Hodges for giving her time to
serve on my committee. Finally, I would like to thank my family, whose love has
been the major force behind the writing of this dissertation.
ABSTRACT
The novels written by immigrants to the
United States during the great wave of immigration in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries reveal a preoccupation with religious ritual as a
major means through which they depict the tensions and dynamics at work in the
immigration experience and the confrontation with American culture. This
dissertation establishes the significance of religious ritual in novels written
by immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1939, and delineates the
important spiritual, social, and political functions such ritual served by way
of its special properties. I argue that
immigrant writers used ritual as a powerful hieroglyph by which to comment upon
the complex connection between the religious, the ethnic, and the political in
the life of the immigrant.
The challenges that immigrants faced in
their daily lives were ripe to be worked out within the special mechanism of
religious ritual. Immigrant life was one of physical hardship, in which the
body was debased by racial prejudice, inhumane working conditions, and a
squalid living environment, while the voice of the immigrant was often silenced
by an inability to speak the dominant language. In addition, the religious
immigrant, no matter what religion he or she practiced, confronted a society
that challenged preconceived notions of the order of the cosmos and of the
ultimate vertical and horizontal obligations of human beings in the world. Thus
immigrants faced competing visions of redemption posed by other religions,
Americanization, and the pursuit of material success. Immigrant writers
continually compress the foregoing concerns into ritual moments in their
novels. Ritual, which employs the body
as a medium for the expression of religious truth and aesthetically orchestrates
physical movements and expressive use of the Word, conferred dignity on the
immigrant body, gave voice to the immigrant soul, provided a context in which
the immigrant could experience beauty within a poor and often ugly environment,
and challenged the immigrant to choose between conflicting visions of
redemption within American society.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION................................... 1
CHAPTER ONE:
Ritual Somatics: Purity, Power, and the Immigrant Body............ 33
CHAPTER TWO:
Ritual Space and the Immigrant Quest for Place..................... 84
CONCLUSION.................................... 327
WORKS CITED.................................. 339
PRIMARY SOURCES........................ 340
SECONDARY SOURCES.................. 343
VITA.................................................... 352
Introduction
To enter into the fiction written by immigrants to the
United States in the early 1900s is often to encounter scenes like the
following: A Norwegian woman on a
snowswept prairie, obsessed with securing last rites for her neighbor, sends
her husband to his death in a blizzard in search of a minister; an anguished
young Jewish immigrant spends his first Passover in America alone among
Gentiles, eating ritually unclean food in a
Nebraska boarding house; a lonely Korean
exile gazes at the trains rushing in and out of
Grand Central Station and remembers the power and grace of his
father‘s procession up the steps of a Confucian temple. These moments, taken
from the novels of O.E. Rölvaag, Elias Tobenkin, and Younghill Kang,
respectively, testify to the importance of religious ritual in the novels of
immigrant writers. Again and again in these novels, the ritual moment serves as
a special means of throwing the immigrant experience into high relief. Indeed,
it becomes, as Werner Sollors says of American literature in general, the
―coded hieroglyph of ethnic group life in the past and ethnic tensions in the
present‖ (Literature and Ethnicity
649). This dissertation will establish the significance of religious ritual in
novels written by immigrants to the United States between 1899 and 1939, and
delineate the important spiritual, social, and political functions such ritual
served by way of its special properties.
I will argue that immigrant writers recognized the problematic nature of
religious ritual in American life and used it as a powerful hieroglyph by which
to comment upon the complex connection for the immigrant between the religious,
the ethnic, and the political in the liminal space of America.
In
1988, religious historian Jay Dolan recognized the importance of immigrant
religion for the study of American religious history, and called for the use of
immigrant religion as a ―wide angle lens‖ through which to analyze the American
religious experience as a whole (―The Immigrants and Their Gods‖ 66); yet no
comprehensive work specifically dedicated to immigrant religion by a single
author yet exists. The immigrant
religious experience has been documented as a part of larger historical
surveys, such as the religious histories of the United States by Winthrop
Hudson, Sydney Ahlstrom, and Martin E. Marty, the histories of immigration
published in the midtwentieth century, such as Marcus Lee Hansen‘s The Immigrant in American History and
Oscar Handlin‘s The Uprooted, and in
studies of particular ethnic groups, such as Odd
Lovoll‘s study of Norwegian immigrants, The Promise of America, and Irving Howe‘s moving tribute to Jewish
immigrants, World of Our Fathers. Jay
Dolan‘s The American Catholic Experience and
Howard Sachar‘s A History of the Jews in
America are representative of full-length histories of particular religious
groups, which also include some discussion of immigrant religion. Collections of essays, such as Immigrant
Religion and Urban America,
edited by R. Miller and T.D. Malek, and The
Immigrant Religious Experience, edited by George Pozzetta, contain some notable shorter treatments
of the immigrant religious experience, such as Timothy Smith‘s important essay
―Religion and Ethnicity in America,‖ but these works tend to isolate particular
ethnic groups or religious groups for study rather than provide an overview of
immigrant religion.
Furthermore, although the use of ritual
is a salient feature of immigrant writing, no work exists to date on its
critical importance in immigrant literature. While the body of research is
growing, little work has been specifically directed toward the importance of
religion in immigrant fiction, and no work on ritual in immigrant fiction has
been published to date. Much of the
commentary on immigrant fiction treats religion as ancillary to ethnicity, even
though ethnicity and religious experience have intertwined and mutually
conditioned each other in America since the beginning, and continue to do so
today. As the physical and cultural
boundaries of the sacred and the profane continue to be debated in American life,
it seems appropriate, even essential, to reexamine the ways in which ritual was
used not only by immigrants but also by nativists and other groups to construct
and experience the sacred in a nation in which the sacred and the profane were
ineluctably and bewilderingly entangled. In addition, many of the novels chosen
for this study have long been neglected. Some have not yet been translated into
English. Voices and stories have gone unheard which deserve to be heard,
stories which can help us as we struggle to disentangle the strands of the
political, the ethnic, and the religious in contemporary America. If, as
theologian Theodore Jennings has remarked, ritual serves the noetic function of
helping us question and discover ―the fitting or appropriate act,‖ then to
understand how the multitude of newly arrived ethnic groups worked out their
vision of this fitting act in the early years of the last century may lead us
to understand better how to act fittingly toward each other in the new century.
I.
The Context of Immigrant Ritual Practice
This dissertation will make use of the
studies cited above to elaborate and contextualize the use of religious ritual
in immigrant novels within the broader context of immigrant religion. Timothy
Smith, in the aforementioned ―Religion and Ethnicity in
America,‖ argues, citing Handlin and Hansen, that the
experience of uprooting, dislocation and loss endured by the masses of
immigrants flowing into the United States in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries was a ―theologizing experience‖ that ―intensified the
psychological basis for theological reflection and ethno-religious commitment‖
(1175). The prevalence of ritual in immigrant novels bears witness to the truth
of Smith‘s claim and partially explains its presence in immigrant novels as a
medium for working out the trials of this experience.
While all of the various ethnic groups
migrated from societies that were in varying degrees ritualized—that is, the
daily life of the community was marked by repetitive, formalized observances
that made reference to the sacred in some way—and that experienced deeply
troubling challenges to the possibilities of ritual practice in a secularized
culture, within specific ethnic
groups there were complex dialectics which influenced the particular responses
of each group to the use of ritual. For
example, within the Jewish community on the Lower East Side of New York City,
the crowded streets and tenements were packed with Orthodox Jews, Reform Jews,
Hasidic Jews, Zionists, Socialists, Anarchists, and proselytizing Christians,
all of whom participated in the tensions involved in working out ritual
practice. Although George Marsden
suggests that Jews could still be Jews in America without religious observance,
both Irving Howe and the Jewish novels themselves testify to the fact that, for
many Jews, ritual observance was central to the maintenance of individual and
collective Jewish identity. In the Jewish novels included in this study, the ritual moment becomes particularly
intense for those Jews who either wanted or resisted assimilation because it
often forced them to choose among competing and conflicting redemptive
communities.
The challenges that immigrants faced in
their daily lives were ripe to be worked out within the special mechanism of
religious ritual. Immigrant life was one of physical hardship, in which the
body was debased by racial prejudice and inhumane working conditions, often
sequestered into crowded and dirty quarters where the immigrant soul received
little gratification from the beauty of its surroundings, and the voice of the
immigrant was silenced by the inability to speak the dominant language. Ritual, which employs the body as a medium of
the expression of religious truth, aesthetically orchestrates physical
movements and expressive use of the Word, conferred dignity on the immigrant
body, gave voice to the immigrant soul, and provided a context in which the
immigrant could experience beauty within a poor and often ugly environment. Immigrants were also frequently engaged in a
conscious or unconscious process of mourning for a lost world even as they
fought to survive in a new one. Ritual, through its strategies of fixity and
periodicity, was an important means by which immigrants invoked the past and
negotiated their relationships to it and to their ethnic groups.
In
addition, the religious immigrant, no matter what religion he or she practiced,
confronted a society that had developed its own array of civil religious
rituals that all loyal Americans of the time were expected to perform. These competing understandings of the
ultimate vertical and horizontal obligations of human beings in the world
forced the immigrant to ask the fundamental questions of ―Whom do I serve?‖ and
―How?‖ This confrontation with multiple understandings of redemption in a
plural society and how to achieve it was often compressed into the ritual
moment, requiring the immigrant either to engage in ritual as a means of
cultural resistance or, as was often the case with assimilated immigrants, to
practice it with discomfort and a longing for the time in which they could once
again engage in ritual as part of their ethnic group without ambivalence. In
the various chapters of this dissertation, I will argue, then, that immigrant
writers used religious ritual for multiple purposes: to confer dignity upon the
immigrant body by making it the locus and crucible of religious truth; to
construct and interrogate the boundaries of immigrant place within American
space; and to create an arena in which the immigrant‘s struggle for language
and the ownership of the Word could be worked out, in which beauty could be
experienced and the politics of aesthetics could be questioned, and in which
they could explore and critique competing visions of redemption in American
culture.
Werner Sollors has remarked that ―[t]he
achievement of a Christian and American selfhood was always part of the
struggle against a heathenish, ethnic ‗otherness‘‖
(―Literature and Ethnicity‖ 654). This study is based upon the premise that
religious ritual was problematic for immigrants, not only because it was the
icon of this
―heathenish, ethnic ‗otherness,‘‖ but also because its very
properties often conflicted with the dominant ethos of the time. Indeed, immigrant
writers seem to have recognized that ritual practice, which appears to preserve
the codes of the past, to subordinate the individual religious conscience to
the collective and to religious hierarchy, to privilege body and symbol over
spirit and Word, and to reinforce cultural boundaries, was a stone that could
trouble the living stream of American Anglo-Protestantism, nationalism,
progressivism, individualism, and spontaneity.
Mark Twain‘s description of his encounter with the healing rituals of
the Turkish dervishes in Innocents Abroad,
written at the beginning of the major period of immigration to America,
encapsulates this view.
His account first describes the silent movements of the
dervishes in almost poetic terms: ―They made no noise of any kind, and most of
them tilted their heads back and closed their eyes, entranced with a sort of
devotional ecstasy.‖ But what appears to be a sort of fascination is quickly
undercut by American pragmatism, skepticism, and racial stereotyping: ―It was
about as barbarous an exhibition as we have witnessed yet [. . . .] This is
well enough for a people who think all their affairs are made or marred by
viewless spirits of the air—by giants, gnomes, and genii—and who still believe,
to this day, all the wild tales of the Arabian Nights‖ (387). Whether Twain is
offering his own critical assessment of the rituals of the dervishes or a
tongue-in-cheek commentary on American religion and cultural prejudice, his
comments, while made abroad, also suggest that those immigrant novelists who
represented their rituals in literature in the United States addressed a
complex web of attitudes that contained both fascination and revulsion, and
was, further, conditioned by unconscious religious, cultural, and racial
factors. For this reason, it is important to map the representations of ritual
by immigrant authors onto the American religious and cultural milieu of the
time in order to identify the dynamics of the prevailing American attitudes
toward ritual, the exigencies which gave rise to the use of ritual in these
novels, and the purposes it served for the authors, the immigrant communities,
and the audience at large in all their varying degrees of
Americanness.
II.
Immigrant Ritual and American Religious History
The American religious and political milieu at the time of
the great wave of immigration beginning in the 1880‘s was itself turbulent, and
American attitudes toward ritual practice were a complicated legacy of American
history and prejudice against the religious practice of both Native Americans
and Roman Catholics, as well as fears of witchcraft, dating back to the written
accounts of the first explorers and colonists.
In
The
General History of Virginia, Captain John Smith records the ritual practice
of the
Indians of the Chesapeake Bay as the groaning and grunting
of ―fiends,‖ who with ―hellish‖ voices
and ―most strange gestures‖ attempted to ascertain his intentions toward them.
Smith‘s account is one of the first American texts to link the ritual practice
of the Other to the primitive, the superstitious, the childish, and the
diabolical (21).
In Religion and American Culture,
George Marsden distinguishes two
important strands within American religious thought that contributed to an
American bias against ritual practice: the Dissenting and Enlightenment
traditions. Both of these tributaries later merged into a common current of
anti-ritual bias, most often reflected in anti-
Catholicism. The Puritans, as heirs of the Protestant
Reformation, sought to remove from worship all religious practice that was not
biblically based, requiring the elimination of the lavish ecclesiastical
adornments and the formal rituals of Anglican worship. Ritual was allied with
the abuses of papal power in the Puritan mind, and with Catholic corruption and
the subjugation of individual religious conscience. William Bradford‘s Of Plymouth Plantation recalls the
Separatist recognition that the ―base and beggarly ceremonies‖ of the Anglican
church were unbiblical and unlawful, requiring a submission that was ―contrary
to the freedom of the gospel‖ and ―ma[d]e a profane mixture of persons and
things in the worship of God‖ (86). In Roads to Rome, Jenny Franchot examines
the Calvinist ―anti-corporeal aspirations‖ and the exaltation of the Puritan
Word and Voice over the ―flesh-bound powers of Rome‖ that made
the ritual use of the body in Catholicism especially repugnant to the Puritan
mind. This anti-Catholic bias conflated Catholic ritual with Native American
ritual encountered in the new world, which was also seen as both primitive and
diabolical. Later, in the eighteenth century, these attitudes were reinforced
as the Great Awakening‘s emphasis on the conversion experience rather than the
ritual of baptism as a mark of true Christianity, and its egalitarian vision of
the church as a gathering of spirit-filled individuals rather than a
hierarchical structure of ritually subordinated bodies, furthered what Franchot
describes as a continual movement from the material and the ceremonial to the
spiritual and the verbal in American Protestantism.
A similar bias existed in the deistic rationalism of the
Enlightenment tradition promoted by American patriots, which viewed the
Catholic Church as the ecclesiastical despot of the Dark Ages, ruling by superstitious
ritual practices that maintained the power of the clergy over the individual
believer. The ritually elaborate Church of England was on the side of the
English monarchy and tied political power to membership in the
Anglican Church, two aspects of Anglicanism that contradicted
the democratic vision of American revolutionaries and contributed to the
conflation of the rituals of monarchy and the rituals of religion in the minds
of patriotic Americans. [1]
The founding fathers did, however, recognize the political power of ritual to
build national solidarity and used secular ritual enactments such as burning in
effigy, funeral processions for King George, and tarring and feathering
ceremonies as a means of resistance to the ―oppressive‖ rituals of Catholicism,
Anglicanism, and the English monarchy, and to incite Americans toward revolt,
practices that prefigure the conditions of immigrant, civil, and nativist
ritual practice over a century later.
During the early nineteenth century, the second Great
Awakening and the rise of revivalism countered Deism‘s influence and increased
the tendency in American Protestantism toward spontaneous and individual
outpourings of the spirit rather than the collectively sanctioned and formalized
practice of religious ritual. Ahlstrom notes that during this period a
distinctive form of American Protestantism emerged that was ―bent chiefly on
revival tasks, inspired by the vision of the United States as a great new
Christian republic, [and] was quick to attack Roman Catholicism and other
foreign excrescences on the American religious scene.‖ He also states that
―liturgical formality, and sacramental emphases became familiar objects of
attack and even derision,‖ as ritual, which objectifies an allegiance to the
practices of the past, continued to be associated with backward superstition,
mental servitude, and the corruption of the flesh (The Protestant Encounter with World Religions 16).
The nineteenth century saw another
development that was significant for American attitudes toward immigrant ritual
practice: the beginnings of comparative religious studies in the United States.
The first major American studies of world religions were published in the
mid-nineteenth century at the same time that the nation began receiving reports
on the ritual practice of ―the heathen‖ from Protestant missionaries. Both
sources of information, especially the missionary reports, were generally used
to reinforce the superiority of Christianity and tended to dismiss ritual as
part of the superstition of primitive societies. Charles A. Goodrich‘s survey of world
religions, A
Pictorial
Account and Descriptive View of all Religions To Which is Added a Brief View of
Minor Sects… Also a History of the Jews and Life of Mohommed (1851), dismisses
Chinese religion as ―full of superstitions‖ and gives Taoism
merely a page, yet the work became preeminent in the American field of world
religions at the time and was avidly read by Americans curious about the
beliefs and practices of other religious traditions. While there were
intellectual forays into the field of comparative religion, the general
American position with regard to world religions at this point
was one of ―intellectual isolation, [. .
. .] anti-intellectualism, national arrogance, and substantially unchallenged
fundamentalism‖ (18). The American interest in world religions culminated in
the nineteenth century at the World‘s Parliament of Religions, a part of the
Chicago Exposition of 1893. While the
project was conceived as a first step on the road to achieving a discourse on
religion for a globalizing society, it suffered in many ways from a competing
Western project to Christianize the world (Seager 10).
A large part of these attitudes was
conditioned by the rise of Protestant Nativism within the United States, which
John Higham describes as ―convert[ing] social and economic conflicts into
religious and nationalistic ones,‖ and which gave rise to a concomitant
anti-Catholic prejudice in response to the challenge to the vision of America
as a Protestant Zion by the influx of Irish Catholic immigrants in the 1840s
(82). Franchot notes that the Calvinist anti-corporeal bias often saw a
miscegenation of spirit and matter in Catholic ritual that mirrored racial sensitivities
in the antebellum period. Nevertheless,
mainstream antebellum writers displayed an overt interest in ritual in general.
James
Fenimore Cooper‘s depiction of Native American ritual practice
in the Leatherstocking tales appealed
to both American and European tastes for the exotic, eventually influencing the
French novelist Eugene Sue‘s The
Mysteries of Paris, which, in turn, influenced immigrant novels like the
German Heinrich Börnstein‘s Die
Geheimnisse des St. Louis and the Italian Bernardino Ciambelli‘s I Misteri di Bleeker Street, written in
urban America. Nathaniel Hawthorne frequently used the rituals of both
witchcraft and Roman Catholicism to interrogate the Puritan legacy of the
individual religious conscience, and Lydia Maria Child linked Native American
and Anglican ritual at the forefront of her novel Hobomok as a sign of the artistic, sensual, and mystical in
confrontation with the strictures of Puritan society. Most importantly, in a career that continued
late into the nineteenth century despite public rejection, Herman Melville used
ritual repeatedly, from Typee to Billy Budd, to enact the systole and
diastole of constraint and ecstasy in the human condition. The interest in
ritual evident in mainstream antebellum literature may have been the residue of
the Gothic period or a sign of a greater willingness to explore the exotic as
part of the quest for a uniquely American literature. More significantly, it
may have been due to an unconscious sense of the need for a ritual catharsis to
purge and unify a country deeply stained and strained by slavery, as
Melville‘s Battle Pieces makes clear. Melville‘s dry-eyed grief, revealed in
poems like
―Shiloh‖ and ―The March into Virginia,‖ reflects his
recognition of the Civil War as what Victor Turner called the liminal moment, a
moment in which a neophyte is subjected to the stripping away of all previously
held notions in order to receive divine wisdom and move into a newly received
status. In Melville‘s view, such
instruction, considering
America‘s history and the human condition in general, was
necessarily tragic; yet the outcome, if America could be initiated into
spiritual maturity, might be worth the price.
Sadly, Melville died without seeing his
hopes fulfilled. The ritual of purgation seems to have taken place without a
renovation of the national consciousness. In the postbellum period, the
presentation of ritual moved to the margins in American literature as the
Gilded Age provided more stimulating and stylish occupations for the American
mind. This may have been partly the result of the rise of realism and the
efforts of writers like William Dean Howells to focus literature on the real as
opposed to the romantic and to the thorough amalgamation of the dissenting and
patriotic traditions, which Ahlstrom, citing Sidney Mead, argues was the
central development in American religious culture during the decades after the
Civil War (845). Once again, ritual seems to have been dismissed as part of a
more primitive time by mainstream writers like Twain, who wryly presented it as
the pastime of dirty, deluded, poverty-stricken races in Europe and the
Holy Land. Twain‘s
depictions of the ―primitive‖ rituals of foreigners conferred a smirk upon the
American Janus-gaze at the religions of the Old World and immigrant religious
worship at home. Hence, ritual practice
became less a part of mainstream fiction and more the province of marginalized
groups, as can be seen in the work of regionalists like
Sarah Orne Jewett‘s The Country of the Pointed Firs, Charles Chesnutt‘s The Conjure
Woman,
and Thomas Dixon‘s The Clansman.
III.
The American Religion and Civil Religion at the Time of Immigration
A few years later, during the early
decades of the twentieth century, French political scientist and educator Andre
Siegfried observed what had been true for three hundred years: that
Protestantism was America‘s ―only national religion and to ignore that fact is
to view the country from a false angle‖ (America
Comes of Age 56). Most religious historians agree with Siegfried‘s
observation. Ahlstrom remarks that by
the
1880‘s an Evangelical Protestant mainstream
made up eighty percent of American
Protestantism and fifty-five percent of the American religious
population, and that a minor revolution in church and state relations had
strengthened the legal status of Protestantism in most states in the Union
(843). Nevertheless, the plain, white
walls of the national Protestant meeting house were being shaken by
factionalism and theological trauma, and spattered by the immigrant influx
itself. ―Next to rapid urban expansion,‖
writes Ahlstrom, ―probably no historical development of the later nineteenth
century had a heavier impact on the spiritual self-consciousness of the
American people than the demographic revolution produced by immigration‖ (A Religious History of the American
People
749).
Many aspects of the mainstream Protestant
church during the period of immigration exacerbated the tensions experienced by
immigrants in attempting to carry out their religious observances. The degree
to which foreign traditions contrasted sharply with typical American religious
practice intensified problems. John Higham has underscored the intimate
relationship between the mainstream Protestant Church and the ideological
behemoth of Nativism that continued to sound and breach from the 1840‘s through
the early twentieth centuries. As the Protestant hegemony began to be
challenged by the rise of urbanization, the labor movement, and the strange
appearance and practices of incoming aliens, its members sought to buttress the
walls of the meetinghouse against the theological and social implications of
these changes. Consequently, the mainstream Protestant church became a bastion
of middle-class morality and the status quo, adapting itself to the popular
ideals of American patriotism, Manifest Destiny, and the aspirations of the
common man to material prosperity. Books like Josiah Strong‘s Our Country continued the
Anglo-Protestant amalgam of theology and racial supremacy and combined the
rhetoric of the pulpit with a call to arms against the dangers of corruption by
urban immigrants. Yet, at the same time, in the margins of Protestantism,
disinherited, native-born Pentecostals and snake handlers (who developed
rituals of their own) sought rebirth in the life of the spirit and found their
own ecstatic means of breaking out of the strictures of mainstream practice.
The nineteenth century also witnessed a
surge in revivalism among evangelical Christians, which similarly diminished
the role of ritual with an emphasis on personal choice and emotion as Americans
sought spontaneous emotional release at the hearing of the Word rather than the
choreographed use of the body to create and express religious truth. In
Protestantism, both mainstream and marginal, liberal and conservative, the
tendency was toward a radically individualistic Arminianism that was
anti-liturgical in that it ―vented both an American love for spontaneity and a
deeper anti-Catholic animus‖ (847). The evangelical impulse within the
Protestant church found expression in other ways that heightened the tensions
in immigrant ritual practice. For example, Jews were often the major targets of
the Protestant nationalist conflation of conversion and assimilation as the
rise of pre-millennial dispensationalism, the belief that the Second Coming of
Christ would occur only after the restoration of Israel and the conversion of
144,000 Jews, led to a feverish proselytizing
within the Jewish ghetto.
Alongside this faction within
Protestantism emerged that of theological Liberalism and Progressivism in
response to the theological crises of the nineteenth century, a movement that
sought to find some universal values to which human beings could cling in the
aftermath, and to advance humankind into a millennial future based on human
achievement rather than on the Second Coming of Christ. Both groups found
ritual‘s tendency to reinforce cultural and religious boundaries antithetical
to their platform of religious unity and progress, and viewed the practice of
ritual by marginalized groups, whether immigrant or Native American, as
partially responsible for their marginalization and as an impediment to the
realization of a global religious discourse of reason and inclusion (Marty
107-8). Ahlstrom remarks that liberal Christians
―tended to slight traditional dogma and the sacraments.
Baptism came to be considered as an initiatory formality [. . .] while the
Lord‘s Supper was usually given memorial significance and its importance to
public worship was minimized‖
(779).
A further complication was added as
Protestant reformist fervor and Nativism blended with American civil religion to
create new forms of civil ritual practice as well.2 In The Invention of Tradition, Eric
Hobsbawm has traced the general movement in the nineteenth century among
emerging nations in Europe toward the creation of secular rituals to reinforce
national solidarity. Although a similar tactic had already been used during the
early years of the American Republic, a new crop of civil religious rituals
emerged during the period of immigration as Americans, feeling the need for
unification after the Civil War, became anxious in the face of the
multicultural and ideological invasion of American territory by foreign
hordes.
Because, as theorist David Kertzer
claims, rituals objectify relationships between individuals and organizations,
for immigrants to engage in their religious rituals in such
2In his
landmark essay ―Civil Religion in America‖ (1967), Robert Bellah discusses the
significance of American civil religion described as ―an understanding of the
American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality,‖ which
makes use of the Old and New Testament archetypes of Exodus, Chosen People,
Promised Land, New Jerusalem, and sacrificial Death and Rebirth. Bellah notes
that American civil religion was never conceived as a substitute for
Christianity although it borrowed many of its concepts.
Rather, it ―was able to build up without any bitter
struggle with the church powerful symbols of national solidarity and to
mobilize deep levels of personal motivation for the attainment of national
goals‖ (Daedalus. Winter. 1967: 1-21).
an environment meant that they entered into activity that
placed them in tension with the ritual enactments of American civil religion
and the anti-ritualistic bias of both Evangelical and Liberal Protestantism.
Performed within the constellation of religious and quasi-religious loyalties
competing in American society at the time, immigrant rituals became political
acts, even acts of cultural resistance akin to the Ghost Dance rituals
practiced by the Sioux, which led directly to the massacre at Wounded Knee
during the same period. Immigrant novelists were quick to pick up on the
political significance of ritual practice and responded in varying degrees of
cultural resistance, depending on their own attitudes toward assimilation.
Indeed, all of the immigrant novels to be examined in this study use the
special features of ritual to interrogate the entanglement of the ethnic, the
religious, and the political in America, an entanglement which often made it
impossible to be a good American and a faithful practitioner of one‘s religious
faith at the same time.
IV.
Ritual Theory and Immigrant Religious Practice
One of the primary tasks in a study
devoted to the use of ritual by immigrant writers is that of establishing a
working definition of ritual, a task that has preoccupied theorists since the
beginning of its study. The scientific study of ritual, which began in the late
nineteenth century, has consistently connected it to the special use of the
body and the word, to delineating boundaries, especially social boundaries, and
to asserting contrasts, especially the contrast between the sacred and the
profane. This dissertation will make use of several theories of ritual to
establish the special properties that make it such a powerful means of
illuminating the immigrant experience. Opinions have varied widely on what
exactly ritual is, what it does, and what distinguishes ritual from other types
of human behavior. A few examples might demonstrate the lack of consensus among
scholars of ritual: Emile Durkheim
suggested that ―rites are the means by which the social group reaffirms itself
periodically‖ (387). Victor Turner defined ritual as
―formal behavior prescribed for occasions not given over to
technological routine that have reference to beliefs in mystical beings or
powers‖ (Image and Pilgrimage in
Christian Culture 243). David Kertzer defines ritual as ―action wrapped in
a web of symbolism‖ (9). Sally Moore and Barbara Meyerhoff define ritual as ―an
act or actions intentionally conducted by a group of people employing one or
more symbols in a repetitive, formal, precise, highly stylized fashion‖ (199).
Robert Bocock‘s definition stresses the rhetorical aspects of ritual: ―Ritual
is the symbolic use of bodily movement and gesture in a social situation to
express and articulate meaning‖ (37), while David Parkin‘s emphasizes its
spatial aspects: ―Ritual is formulaic spatiality carried out by groups of
people who are conscious of its imperative or compulsory nature and who may or
may not further inform this spatiality with spoken words‖ (18). Finally,
Jonathan
Smith simply states, ―Ritual is, above all, an assertion
of differences‖ (109). The controversy over establishing
the salient characteristics of ritual continued unabated for decades until
theorist Jack Goody, in ―Against Ritual,‖ finally suggested that it was
impossible to define it as a separate form of human behavior and that the
category of ―ritual‖ should be done away with entirely. Contemporary
ritologists like Catherine Bell disagree because they feel that the concept of
ritual is too deeply embedded in human consciousness for us to cease trying to explain
it. Bell, who identifies the
characteristics of ―fixity,‖ ―repetition‖ and ―formality‖ as fundamental to any
understanding of ritual, prefers to use the term ―ritualization‖ to denote a
strategic practice, rooted in the body, that specifically differentiates itself
through a symbolically constituted spatial and temporal environment as more
important or powerful than other ways of acting.
Although I will examine immigrant ritual within the
context of the rituals practiced by civic, nativist, and secret societies of
the time, my primary focus will be on the religious
ritual of immigrants for two reasons: 1) To open up the parameters of this
study to any type of behavior that
might be classified as ritualized would require a breadth that is beyond the
compass of a dissertation; 2) Religious
ritual was so politically charged during this time period, and was such a
contact zone between factions within the immigrant and native-born community,
that to focus on ritual behavior apart from its theological dimensions would be
to neglect one of the richest aspects of the discussion. What Durkheim wrote of
primitive religious ritual is true of the immigrant practice of ritual as well:
―The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees
new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more
force, either to endure the trials of existence or to conquer them‖ (416).
Therefore, my definition of religious
ritual, which draws upon the work of several ritual theorists, is as follows: Ritual is intentionally symbolic human
behavior that periodically frames a point in time and space through formalized
physical movement, may include a special use of language, makes reference to a
sacred realm which it seeks to distinguish from the profane, and serves to
negotiate relationships between an individual or group and an Other or others.
I feel that this definition is supported by the work of scholars in the field
of ritual studies and is especially useful for exploring the political and
cultural significance of the use of ritual practice by immigrant writers. The
theorists whom I find most important for this study include most of those
already mentioned. Their discussions of the special properties of ritual will
enhance my ability to delineate the ways in which ritual acts upon the
individual participant and the social bodies it addresses. I will draw on some theorists more than
others, most prominently Emile Durkheim, Clifford Geertz, Theodore Jennings, Catherine
Bell, David Kertzer, Gerd Baumann, Mircea Eliade, and Victor Turner. A brief
discussion of their theories follows.
In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Emile
Durkheim, the father of ritual studies, located the significance of ritual in
its power to reinforce the bonds of a social community by bestowing a feeling
of power and security which the social body experiences as a moral force
emanating from outside the community itself but which is, in fact, the
collective force of the group. Durkheim recognized the power of ritual to
forestall feelings of vulnerability and isolation, and to organize and regulate
the moral life of human beings. I will draw from Durkheim in discussions
relating ritual practice to the moral life of immigrants and immigrant
communities, and its importance as a medium for reinforcing ethnic
identity.
Clifford Geertz‘s discussion of ritual‘s ability to create
and house its participants in an ideal world is especially useful for my
discussions involving the immigrant experience of place, time, memory, the
aesthetic, and the moral order. Geertz also discusses the importance of
understanding the differing roles that ritual establishes between insiders and
outsiders and emphasizes that ritual performances are ―not only the point at
which the dispositional and conceptural aspects of religious life converge for the believer, but also the point at
which the interaction between them can be most readily examined by the detached observer‖ (113). I plan
to use these aspects of his theory in my discussion of immigrant writers and
the political uses of ritual, particularly when the writer seems to implicate
the reader as a non-ethnic observer of the ritual act.
In ―On Ritual Knowledge,‖ Theodore Jennings provides
several key concepts that will be critical to this study. Jennings argues that
ritual is a special form of embodied knowing that serves important noetic
functions for the participant by providing an exploratory means of discovering
―the fitting action‖ in the world as encountered by the Sacred (120). Because
it relates to human actions, ritual for Jennings is intimately connected with
ethics, and, because it searches for the fitting
action, it is also indirectly tied to the aesthetic. Jennings uses Turner‘s idea of the liminal
state as the primary means of the transfer of wisdom, not by intellectual or
speculative means but by the practice of ritual itself. According to Jennings,
ritual is knowledge through action, a specialized form of knowing by which the
body ―minds itself‖ through paradigmatic activities that govern not only the
ritual action but all other forms of the ritual action in the outside
world. Jennings claims that the ultimate
object of ritual action is ontological or cosmogonic practice, and that ―to participate
in a ritual is to know how the world acts, how it ‗comes to be‘‖ (121).
Jennings‘s theories will be useful in a variety of contexts, particularly for
explorations of the body and the aesthetic, and for the immigrant use of ritual
as an ethical compass, a means of exploring the nature of the fitting action in
a radically different world.
Catherine Bell
borrows from Jennings and Pierre Bourdieu in her theory of ritual, which, for
purposes of this study, includes two very important aspects: the embodied logic
of ritual and its power to create what Bell calls ―redemptive hegemony.‖ Bell
and Bourdieu join Jennings and many other scholars who locate ritual primarily
in the body, with language as a secondary component. They recognize that the
body mediates ―via a dialectic of objectification and embodiment‖ that makes it
the center of coordination for social and cosmological experience, and that
ritual practice passes on schemes of perception through subconscious means
often without ever bringing those schemes to the level of conscious awareness
or social discourse.
Bell argues that the purpose of ritual is to produce a
ritualized body—that is, a body with a ―sense of ritual‖ which it carries into
the world at large. In a manner similar to Jennings, Bell claims that ritual
creates a ―structured and structuring environment‖ which leads to the embodying
of those structures outside the sphere of ritual practice. By redefining the
problems of existence in terms of the ritual itself through formalized and
orchestrated movements in time and space, ritual creates what Bell calls
―redemptive hegemony‖ (84), which provides participants with a sense of
empowerment through having discharged the true obligations of existence and, in
turn, enables them to reenter the outside world with a sense of ―ritual
mastery.‖ Bell‘s concepts of the
centrality of the body and redemptive hegemony will be essential to my
exploration of the importance of ritual in dignifying the immigrant body and
the political use of ritual by immigrant writers to interrogate and critique
the immigrant‘s confrontation with competing redemptive hegemonies within the
American culture of the time.
In
addition, the work of David Kertzer and Gerd Baumann, who recognize the
political power of ritual and its relationship to cultural resistance
in pluralistic societies, will figure strongly in my discussion. Kertzer‘s Rituals,
Politics, and Power examines the role of ritual in the negotiation of power
relationships within societies and the degree to which ritual can undermine the
solidarity of a society as a whole by bolstering the solidarity of one of its
internal political antagonists, an effect that will be especially pertinent to
a discussion of ritual and ethnic factions in American society.
Baumann, in turn, goes beyond Durhkeim‘s
understanding of ritual as performed by cohesive societies in order to endorse
basic values for themselves alone. Instead,
Baumann claims that in plural societies
rituals ―[are] complicated by the presence of
‗Others,‘ be it as ‗visible‘ participants or as ‗invisible
categorical referents‘‖ and that ―ritual performances, symbols and meanings may
be directed at these as much as, if not sometimes more than, at the ritual core
‗community‘ itself‖ (99). Baumann‘s notion of the implicit Other addressed by ritual
practice will also be important with regard to the immigrant writer‘s
implication of the reader, who, as is clear from the strategies and language
the writer uses, is most often understood as native-born as well as ethnic.
Both of these theorists will be invaluable in supporting my assertion that
immigrant ritual was a political act within the highly charged arena of
American religious practice.
The work of Mircea Eliade will assist me in relating the
immigrant‘s use of ritual to the task of constructing place out of American
space. In The Sacred and the Profane,
Eliade points to the importance of ritual and hierophany in establishing a
still point in the turning world of homogeneous space and its importance for
achieving a sense of orientation in the
cosmos. I will thus use the work of Eliade in my exploration of the immigrant
use of ritual in the context of the polarities of space and place in
America.
Finally, Victor Turner, who expanded on
the theories of his predecessor, Arnold Van Gennep, constructs ritual by means
of a tripartite scheme which he felt was true for all ritual practice:
separation, liminality, and re-incorporation. That is, in all rites of passage,
the ritual participant is first separated from the structures of society and enters
a liminal state in which he or she is stripped of all previous means of
identity in preparation for the new state, which, once achieved, will include
reintegration into the group once again.
For Turner, the liminal state performs an important compensatory role
for society by providing a context in which the preordained hierarchies of
daily life are overturned and true communitas
can be achieved—that is, an ordering of human relationships along truly
personal and egalitarian lines that is the opposite of the structuring and
institutionalizing tendencies in society. Turner‘s interest in the liminal
state will be critical to my conclusion in which I will seek to connect
immigrant ritual practice to broader issues of American religion and identity.
V.
Overview
This dissertation will consist of five chapters,
thematically arranged so as to allow an exploration of a variety of issues in
connection with a broad heading. The arrangement will move from most concrete
to most abstract—from the body of the immigrant to the body politic. Due to the multiple significances of ritual
practice, the flow of the discourse may seem somewhat elliptical— theories and
novels that I examine in one chapter will resurface in another as different
areas of the discussion intersect.
Chapter One will concern the use of ritual by immigrant writers to dignify and
empower the immigrant body at a time in which it was the target of racial
prejudice and scrutiny. In general, the greater the degree of its dissimilarity
to the Anglo-Saxon body, the more contempt the immigrant body received. For example, because Italian bodies were
linked with the Negro body, more Italians were lynched than any other immigrant
group. While the male Italian body was brutalized by labor conditions and
attacks from outside the ethnic group, the female
Italian body was also subject to oppression and attack from within the ethnic group, and often
served as the sacrificial object for the expiation of the tensions and failures
of the Italian immigrant community. Italian immigrant writers often used ritual
in connection with the female body to confront a variety of issues regarding
ethnic and spiritual purity. Similarly, as Sander Gilman has explained, the
Jewish body was continually studied, beginning in the eighteenth century, in
order to demonstrate the unfitness of the Jew for inclusion in the social body.
The Jewish novels, in turn, show a preoccupation with the body and, in some
cases, explicitly identify the Jewish body with the body of Christ. In this
chapter, therefore, I will focus on Jewish and Italian immigrant novels, making
use of the theories of Jennings and Bell, which stress the empowerment of the
body through ritual, to argue that immigrant writers used ritual to dignify the
immigrant body and to critique its degradation both within the community and in
American society.
Chapter Two will
concern the importance of ritual to the immigrant project of constructing
immigrant place within the American rural and urban landscape, themselves metaphors
of American cultural space. Since the
immigrant‘s primary experience was one of dis-location,
one of the primary concerns of the religious rituals in immigrant novels is
that of establishing a place within American space in which the sacred and the
ethnic could be protected. In urban America, the ghetto was ostensibly a place
in which the immigrant could experience life according to his or her own
customs and beliefs, but it was also circumscribed by American space, which
often seemed chaotic, incomprehensible, exclusionary, and alien to the
immigrant‘s needs and concerns. In addition to their awareness of American
control of space, immigrant communities often patrolled and circumscribed their
own spaces within the ghetto. For example, in Jews
Without
Money, Michael Gold recalls the thrill and anguish of his forays into the
adjacent
Italian neighborhood only to be insulted and chased away,
while Italian writers like Louis Forgione and Garibaldi LaPolla use the
religious processions of the Italian festa
to celebrate ethnic space within the competing cultures surrounding Little
Italy. In this chapter, I will employ the theories of Yi Fu Tuan, Jonathan
Smith, and Mircea Eliade, along with the work of William Boelhower on ethnicity
and place, to discuss novels written by Louis Forgione, O.E. Rölvaag, and Elias
Tobenkin and to argue that immigrant writers used ritual as part of the project
of achieving orientation and a sacred place of habitation within the
disorienting and often hostile American landscape and culture.
In
Chapter Three the discussion will turn to the relationship between immigrant
ritual and language. The struggle with language was a key component of the
immigrant struggle in America. Because the immigrants selected for this study
come from nonEnglish-speaking groups, they were all beset by the problem of
language. Mastery of English was the key to survival, or at least to
assimilation, and this often meant a deemphasis if not a total rejection of the
language of one‘s native land in favor of English.
Thus, ritual, with its use of bodily movement to express
religious truth, was significant with regard to language because it provided a
silent means for immigrant expression that transcended language and the
politics of language both inside and outside the ethnic community.
Furthermore, the special use of ethnic
and specialized languages in immigrant novels reflects the political struggle
between ethnic language and the dominant language of the culture. Ritual
observance often includes the specialized use of language, which raises the
additional issue of which language
should be used for religious devotion. This issue was especially problematic
within the Jewish community, where a pecking order of languages was established
with English and Hebrew in competition for top rank, while the former
folk-language of Yiddish struggled to move up from the bottom with the
assistance of writers like Abraham Cahan, who sought to raise it to the status
of a literary language.
The debate over language within the Jewish
community reflects a common theme within immigrant social bodies regarding the
power and politics of religious language in the United States as it relates to
the Protestant emphasis on the Word and ethnic conceptions of Holy Language,
whether it be the Hebrew or Latin of ancient religious tradition or the
language of the ethnic community itself, which took on overtones of holiness as
it became allied with the simultaneous preservation of religion and ethnic
identity. In this chapter, I will use the novels of Lawrence Sterner, Rölvaag,
and Cahan to argue that immigrant writers used conflicts over the ritual use of
the Word to explore the relationship between language, assimilation, and the
loss of sacred community in
America.
Chapter Four will
examine the connection between ritual and the aesthetic. Pierre Bourdieu has
explained that ritual makes use of all of the senses— not only the five senses
but also the sense of the moral and the sense of the beautiful. Indeed, ritual
in general, through its use of formalized movements to order space and time and
its special use of the Word, provided the immigrant with an experience of
beauty that in many cases was unavailable elsewhere. Irving Howe describes the
ghetto as a place of squalid, poorly lit ―dumbbell‖ tenements, poor sanitation,
without a shred of natural greenery to mitigate the ugliness of the
surroundings. Anzia Yezierska‘s protagonists often testify to the accuracy of
Howe‘s description and the immigrant‘s need for aesthetic gratification when
they express their revulsion at the ugliness of their surroundings and their
longing for beauty
Since immigrants had little means and
little opportunity to beautify their surroundings, ritual practices like Jewish
Sabbath observances, Passover meals, communion services, and processions with
elaborately decorated saints and Madonnas assumed critical importance as they
enabled immigrants to inhabit a place in which the holy and the beautiful were
available at once. Younghill Kang‘s memories of the highly stylized rituals of
ancestor worship in The Grass Roof
and East Goes West reveal the degree
to which ritual enhanced for him the aesthetic sensibilities of the Confucian
sage.
Kang uses these memories to heighten our
experience of the dislocation of his protagonist
Chungpa Han, whose aestheticism finds no
place in the pragmatic framework of
American material culture.
In
many of the immigrant novels, the question of aesthetics in ritual becomes an
arena for critiquing aesthetics and the politics of beauty in America in
general. In many of the Jewish novels, for example, orthodox protagonists are
often placed in bewildering, even traumatic, confrontations with western
understandings of beauty, both inside and outside of Judaism, raising, in turn,
the issue of whose definition of
beauty should dominate ritual practice. Ethnic conceptions of beauty were complicated
by the unease and condescension with which native-born Americans regarded their
conceptions of the beautiful. At the
same time that Yezierska strove to represent the Jew as devoted to the
beautiful, novels like Hemingway‘s The
Sun Also Rises, according to Walter Benn Michaels, presented Jewish
aesthetic failure as a sign of racial failure.
I will discuss
Yezierska‘s Bread Givers
in this chapter, along with Steiner‘s The
Mediator, and Kang‘s novels The Grass
Roof and East Goes West, as I argue that immigrant writers used
the experience of ritual to comment on the absence of beauty in immigrant life
and to question the politics of the aesthetic in American life.
The final chapter will
explore the use of ritual by immigrant writers to question and critique the
competing redemptive hegemonies within American culture during the period. As
was discussed above, America presented a bewildering array of choices and
competing plans for salvation to the immigrant. Immigrant writers often used
ritual as a tool for circumscribing various permutations of insiders and
outsiders, as characters struggle with competing redemptive hegemonies. The
immigrant was faced with other religions, other forms of his own religion, American civil religion
and Americanization efforts, as well as the American vision of redemption
through material success, all of which further complicated his efforts to
satisfy his spiritual needs and to find community in an often lonely place.
Because the ethnic and religious selves were so intertwined in
American culture at the time, the two could not easily be
separated, forcing immigrants into difficult choices between redemptive
hegemonies or into ambivalent and often unsatisfying attempts to combine or
live between conflicting visions of redemption.
David Kertzer has explained that ―rituals are typically found
when individuals confront transition points in their lives and that strong
emotions associated with ritual often reflect the inner conflicts,
uncertainties and fears that afflict people in such circumstances‖ (100). Add to these tensions the complications
brought on by the experience of immigration, and the possibility of religious
or moral crisis at the ritual moment is multiplied exponentially. This chapter
will use novels by Ciambelli, Steiner, and Rölvaag to examine the ways in which the ritual
moment often became the deciding moment in which immigrants and immigrant
writers were forced to navigate within a complex constellation of power relationships
in America, all of which claimed to be paths to salvation.
The conclusion will attempt to tie the
major themes discussed in the main chapters to larger religious and cultural
issues, such as the ambivalent relationship in America between the spiritual
and the material, the sacred and the profane, the religious and the
ethnic. In addition, I will discuss the
ways the concerns addressed in these novels speak to current domestic and
international issues relating to religion and ethnicity.
I selected the particular ethnic groups
included in this study for several reasons. First, I sought to include groups
that faced the most challenges in the American landscape, whether physical, as
in the case of the Norwegians, or cultural as in the case of Italians, Jews and
Asians, because of my desire to explore the ability of ritual to empower and
preserve individuals and groups in the face of adversity. I also wished to
include non-
English speaking immigrants in order to explore the ways
ritual functioned as an alternative language and as a crucible in which the
issue of the politics of language was intensified. Finally, I attempted to
assemble the most disparate group of ethnicities I could find. To include only
Northern European immigrants would have been to miss an opportunity to discover
the cantus firmus in the polyphony of
immigrant religion, the commonalities shared by widely differing ethnic groups
in the experience and practice of
ritual.
This study is intended to apply the broad
view suggested by Dolan in order to establish some preliminary theoretical
foundations for the study of immigrant literature as it relates to immigrant
religion, American religion, and the complex American relationship to ritual
itself. It is by necessity preliminary.
To attempt such an overview, one runs the risk of overgeneralizing and
universalizing, of setting up the Protestant hegemony as a monolithic Goliath,
which the embattled immigrant fought with his ritual slingshot. Although there
was a dominant Anglo-Protestant hegemony in America at the time of the great
wave of immigration that was indeed allied with anti-Catholic and antiritual
bias, Nativism, and a sense of racial and cultural superiority, Protestantism
had its own spectrum of religious observance, from the elaborate rituals of
High Anglicanism to the simple silence of a Quaker meetinghouse. This
discussion is not intended as the final word on Protestantism but as a general
assessment of the particular kind of Protestantism that had become so pervasive
at the time and which is presented by immigrant writers in the novels
themselves.
Since the concept of ritual is also
subject to much debate, as discussed above, one runs the further risk of
setting up boundaries that are either too rigid or too permeable when seeking
to define ritual observance in America. Even when the discussion is limited to
religious ritual, there is room for debate.
An additional challenge is posed by the insider/outsider problem in the
study of ritual raised by Geertz: Who is best able to interpret the content or
function of ritual for a particular group, the objective outsider or the
subjective insider? Can either be considered wholly objective or subjective?
This study is predicated upon the idea that immigrant writers were somehow both
insiders and outsiders to their communities, and that they intentionally sought
to make available to the American public some insight into the significance of
ritual for their communities and for the American community, which by necessity
consists of multiple perspectives on any ritual practice, indicating their
belief that the definitive word on immigrant ritual practice is somehow itself
plural.
These challenges are significant, yet it
seems worth the risks involved to consider immigrant ritual from a broad
perspective because exploration of the immigrant religious dilemma has direct
bearing on the larger issue of how Americans perceive the religious practice of
other cultures in an increasingly interethnic world. If, as Oscar Handlin has claimed, immigrant
history is American history, then the
immigrant religious experience must
be moved to the center of American religious history as well. The degree to
which we can see the religious experience of the alien as the American religious experience may well be the degree to which
we can absolve the religious alien of the projections of our own national
unconscious.
Chapter One: Ritual
Somatics: Purity, Power, and the Immigrant Body
Franz Boas began his North American
anthropological studies by lifting skulls from Native American graves and
comparing their measurements to those of living Native American prisoners in a
Victoria jail (Stocking 189). In the presentation of the results of his studies
to the International Congress of Anthropology in 1894, Boas, who unlike most
scientists of his time, did not conceive of racial types as static but as
continually developing products of heredity and environment, made an
interesting remark, especially when we consider the next big project he would
undertake:
There is no necessary correlation between the social unit
which we call a tribe and the physical unit which constitutes the
characteristics of the individuals of a certain region. The physical type is
the result of the complex descent of a people and of the effect of the
surroundings upon its physical development. It has nothing to do with the
political and social organizations which we call tribes or nations.
(Memoirs
of the International Congress of Anthropology 193)
A
few years later, Boas would be measuring the heads of Jewish immigrant boys in
New York public schools for the American Immigration Commission because
nativeborn Anglo-Americans believed that the physical type had everything to do with the social
organization of the American nation. Boas‘ statement attempts to distinguish
between the physical body and the social body; but, as many immigrant writers
recognized, the immigrant body was a problem precisely because of the complex
and often subtle dialectic between the physical body and the social body,
through which, as
Mary Douglas has made clear, ―there is a continual exchange of
meanings between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the
categories of the other‖ (93).
For Anglo-Americans of Boas‘ time, the immigrant body was a
sign that evoked their historically complicated and tragic relationships to the
bodies of both African Americans and Native Americans, and raised the conundrum
of whether to maintain ethnic difference at the risk of social instability or
to allow miscegenation at the risk of losing Anglo-American purity. For the immigrant, the body was the only home
he or she possessed upon entering a Promised Land that was not, apparently,
promised to everyone, a habitation battered by the pains of labor, the diseases
of overcrowding, and the awareness that its architecture did not suit the
American city upon a hill.
As the immigrant novels to be discussed
in this chapter make clear, the religious
body of the immigrant was also problematic for the American social body because
its fixed and symbolic use in the religious practice of immigrants went against
the grain of the dominant American social and religious ethos of the time.
Since, as Timothy Smith suggests, the immigration experience was a
―theologizing experience,‖ the sense of covenant between immigrants and their
gods often made religious expression crucial to the survival of the immigrant
community (1175). Yet, the immigrant acted out his religion on an American
religious stage the backdrop of which was a stained-glass mosaic of Protestant
bias against the body and toward the spirit, a historical legacy of
anti-Catholic prejudice which linked ritual practice to Roman Catholic
entanglement with the flesh, fascination and revulsion at the ritual practices of
the ―heathen‖ as depicted in missionary reports and travel narratives, and
fears of Native American ritual as both bewildering and, as in the case of the
Ghost Dancers who were massacred at Wounded Knee during this period,
politically dangerous. Political assimilationists of the period sought to
incorporate the immigrant body into the American social body even as they
worried about what effects it would have on the bodies of Americans, while religious assimilationists established
missions in immigrant neighborhoods to convert immigrants to American religious
practice, proselytizing among Jews, for instance, in the hopes of ushering in
the Millennium through their conversion.
Despite such pressures, however, many
immigrant novelists deliberately called attention to the difference of the
immigrant body in religious practice, as will be evident in the following
discussion of the work of Italian novelists Bernardino Ciambelli and Garibaldi
LaPolla, and Jewish novelists Ezra Brudno, Edward Steiner, and Abraham Cahan. These novelists consistently depict
immigrants doing strange things with their bodies in ritual: They clothe them
in bizarre garments, move them in strange ways, make secret signs with them,
and prostrate them before iconic images of other bodies. Perhaps because they
came from cultures that were highly ritualized, these writers instinctively
recognized the body‘s symbolic power in ritual to question and critique the
dynamics within the immigrant social body and between the ethnic community and
the larger social and religious corpus of America, and they capitalize on this
in their fiction through ritual somatics.
In ritual somatics, immigrant writers raised the physical bodies of immigrants
to the status of icons of the immigrant experience. Just as John Winthrop
constructed the immigrant social body as the body of Christ during the earliest
wave of European immigration to America, immigrant novelists often turned to
the ritual use of iconic bodies, such as the Christ and the Virgin Mary, to
represent the immigrant experience and to draw upon the theological use of
somatics by the first American immigrants in order to claim a place in the
immigrant theology of America.
Much of the mainstream religious
practice of late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth century America was conditioned
by liberal Christianity and millennial Christianity, both of which downplayed
any fixed or institutionalized use of the body in religious devotion. Liberal Christians as well as Jews based
their religious practice on a rationalistic belief that sought to unify mankind
in an orderly and reasonable progression toward a universal faith that could
provide an antidote to increasing materialism (Marty, 17). For this group,
ritual practice was at best looked upon with condescension and at worst seen as
divisive and irrational, based as it was on a symbolic use of the body, which
inevitably called attention to the boundaries between religious groups.
For different reasons, Evangelical
Christians also rejected traditional ritual, as they were imbued with
millennial hopes of the restoration of God‘s kingdom on earth and viewed the
ritual use of the body as an obstruction to the spontaneous outpouring of the
Holy Spirit, which transcends institutional devices (Douglas 17). Mary Douglas
describes the millennialist as follows:
[The millennialist] does not seek to
cherish any particular social forms. He would sweep them all away. The
millennialist goes in for frenzies; he welcomes the letting-go experience, and
incorporates it into his procedure for bringing in the millennium. He seeks
bodily ecstasy, which, by expressing for him the explosive advent of the new
age, reaffirms the value of the doctrine. Philosophically his bias is towards
distinguishing spirit from flesh, mind from matter [. . ;] for him, the flesh [
. . .] represent[s] the corruption of power and organization. (17)
This division of mind from matter was alien to most immigrants
whose ritual practice enacted a fundamental belief in the body‘s ability to
create religious truth along with the Spirit.
At the same time that they entered a
religious milieu that denied the religious use of the body within religious
tradition, immigrants faced another challenge in new attitudes toward the body
that replaced the older Victorian mores, based on an understanding of the body
as the servant of romantic love, with a focus on bodily attractiveness and
sexual thrills designed to sell products. Kevin White maintains that the dawn
of sexual liberalism at the turn of the century and the commodification of love
destroyed the older transcendent Victorian values associated with the physical
expression of love and created an emotional distancing between men and women as
their relationships became a game of sexual conquest. White writes, ―when love
became sexualized in the early twentieth century, higher, deeper love was
subsumed and buried in a compulsive search for sexual gratification‖ (335). For
immigrants coming from cultures in which the body was at the service of the
survival of the values of the community, this modern separation of the body
from the emotional, the moral, and the transcendent, along with the
codification of standards of physical beauty on an unprecedented scale, could
be both disorienting and frightening.
Douglas has analyzed the differences in
societal attitudes toward ritual as based on differences in systems of cultural
control. According to Douglas, homogeneous societies with strong communal bonds
who value external forms as a means of maintaining stability within the social
group tend to engage in ritual, while heterogeneous societies who favor relaxed
communal bonds and emphasize inner feelings and ethics tend to reject ritual as
a means of social control (32). This is surely the phenomenon experienced by
immigrants coming from the tightly knit and highly formalized cultures of
southern and eastern Europe to the diffuse and pluralistic society of America,
a country with a religious history which emphasized inner experience and
individual conscience rather than external forms as the true measure of
religious integrity.
Most immigrants came from ritualized
cultures where their bodies were essential parts of the seasonal, daily, even
hourly expression of religious truth. In their rituals, immigrants knew what to
do with their bodies: the proper place, the proper stance, the proper motion.
With their bodies, they could perform a ballet of the soul, inscribe
transcendent meaning into the space about them, and connect with loved ones
across the sea by a common gesture. In ritual, they knew, as they knew nowhere
else in American society, what theologian Theodore Jennings calls ―the fitting
action.‖[2]
Although their bodies were subject to the crowding and disease of tenement life
and the hardships of labor, to the uncomprehending and sometimes revolted gaze
of native-born Americans, and to the bewildering new sexual rules of modern
American life, in their rituals immigrants could use their bodies for the
highest purposes they knew. Religious ritual thus provided a means like no
other for dignifying the immigrant body in an atmosphere in which it was
continually degraded. Paradoxically, in the conformity of ritual practice many
immigrant bodies experienced a freedom they found nowhere else in American
life.
The developments in ritual theory over
the last thirty years confirm the foregoing claims. The work of Michel Foucault regarding the
construction of the modern subject through technologies of power exercised over
bodies, along with anthropological and feminist studies of the body, have led
many theorists to recognize the importance of the body in ritual practice and
to regard ritual as both a disciplinary framework in which the body is used to
create a ritualized subject and as a form of embodied knowing. Much current
ritual theory focuses on the importance of the ritual use of the body as the
mediator and constructor of religious truth and characterizes the knowledge
gained from ritual practice, because it is expressed in physical activity, as
intrinsically different from ordinary cognition (Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice 94). Jennings‘ description of the
embodied knowing gained through ritual practice is representative of the
attitudes of many modern ritologists:
Ritual knowledge is gained through a bodily action which
alters the world or the place of the ritual participant in the world [. . . .]
It is primarily corporeal rather than cerebral, primarily active rather than
contemplative, primarily transformative rather than speculative. [. . . .] It
is not so much that the mind ‗embodies‘ itself in ritual action, but rather
that the body ―minds‖ itself or attends through itself in ritual action.
(Jennings 115)
In
Outline of a Theory of Practice,
Pierre Bourdieu discusses the body‘s ability to create a ―practical mastery‖ in
ritual practice through a logic embodied in physical movement and lodged in a
mythical language of the body, which is beyond the grasp of conscious
articulation and is always richer than the verbal translations we attempt to
impose upon it.[3]
Bourdieu maintains that, in ritual, the body is the locus for the
coordination of all levels of bodily, social, and cosmological
experience through unspoken ―schemes‖ that pass from practice to practice
without ever becoming explicit in personal consciousness or social discourse,
and thus serves as a form of logical shorthand for those ―who cannot afford the
luxury of logical speculation, mystical effusions, or metaphysical anxiety‖
(115). While in no way a substitute for a conscious commitment to a set of
beliefs, this activity would be essential to many immigrants who were faced
with a theologizing experience but without the time or opportunity to analyze
or interpret that experience.
Ritologist Catherine Bell also insists on the body as the locus of a
dynamic and largely unconscious exchange between a mythico-ritual space which
the body first constructs by means of physical movements, then absorbs and
appropriates, taking it out into the world at large—a process which creates a
―ritualized person‖ who can ―generate in turn strategic schemes that can [. .
.] dominate other socio-cultural situations‖ (Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice 99). In ritual devotion, the body
becomes the central axis of the construction and appropriation of the sacred,
and for the transformation of the world. Thus, the body, as the vessel by which
this dialectic was carried on, achieved a status and power unknown in the daily
experience of many immigrant groups, since it provided a sacred role for the
body in contradistinction to its place in ordinary life. For many groups, then,
the special status given to the body by ritual fulfilled a spiritual need which
was often intensified, as was the case with Southern Italians and Eastern
European
Jews, by political oppression at home and
marginality in America.
At the same time, the medium of ritual
engaged the immigrant body in a choreography of social controls that worked
toward the maintenance of stability within the ethnic community. In her
analysis of ritual behavior, Douglas emphasizes Marcel Mauss‘ claim that the
human body can never be considered apart from its place in the social dimension
and that the concern to preserve social boundaries is often projected onto the
preservation of bodily boundaries (98-99). As Douglas notes, ―The physical body
can have universal meaning only as a system which responds to the social
system, expressing it as a system‖ (112).
Immigrant writers seem to have recognized, either consciously or
unconsciously, the deep relationship between the physical body and the social
body in the utterance of ritual. Since ritual not only conveys information to
the social body through the symbolic actions of physical bodies, it also
expresses the social body to itself and to others. Thus, it was a powerful tool
for the interrogation of assumptions about the immigrant body both inside the
ethnic community and in mainstream America.
Boas‘ study for the American Immigration
Commission focused especially on the bodies of Eastern European Jews and
Southern Italians.[4]
These two ethnic groups bore the brunt of nativist and eugenicist fears because
their bodies did not conform to traditional American taxonomies of race and
raised fears of miscegenation, which attitudes furthered the tendency to
construct the bodies of these immigrant groups as impure.[5]
Significantly, the religious practice of Italians and Jews, which was often overtly
physical, was also the most problematic, not only for Protestant Americans, but
also for Irish Catholics and Reformed Jews, who sought acceptance within
mainstream American culture.
The southern Italian body, in particular,
was linked to the African American body, not only because of its ―swarthiness,‖
but also because Italian immigrants in the southern United States readily
associated with African-Americans on a regular basis.[6]
More Italians were lynched than any other ethnic group, the most notorious
example being an incident in 1891 in which eleven Italians were taken from a
jail in New Orleans, after being acquitted of the murder of a police
superintendent, and hanged by a crowd of vigilantes amid cries of ―Hang the
Dagoes!‖ in what has been called the largest mass lynching in American history
(Cosco 2). John Higham has noted that ―the Italians were often thought to be
the most degraded of the European newcomers. They were swarthy, more than half
of them were illiterate, and almost all were victims of a standard of living
lower than that of any of the other prominent nationalities entering the United
States‖ (66). While Boas‘ study attempted to argue for the modifying effects of
environment on race characteristics, the flagrantly racist yet influential Dictionary of Races or Peoples (1911)
compiled by William Dillingham for the Immigration Commission took a different
approach. The Dictionary, according
to Higham, created an ―invidious contrast between the northwestern and
southeastern Europeans in the United States,‖ and distinguished between the
light-skinned ―Aryan‖ Italians of the North and the darkskinned ―Hamitic‖
Italians of the South, using the bodies of Italians to differentiate further
between their mental characteristics. The Dictionary
described the northern
Italian as ―cool, deliberate, patient,‖ and
readily assimilable, and the darker southerner as
―excitable, impulsive,‖ with ―little adaptability to highly
organized society‖ and a tendency toward violent crime (qtd. in Cosco 176). Although
they differed in their assessments of the prospects of immigrant assimilation,
both Boas and Dillingham used the immigrant body as topography of the immigrant
mind. The darker the physiognomy, the more primitive the mind and its beliefs
were held to be.
Similarly, the physicality of Italian
ritual in a period that viewed individual and collective humanity through the
lens of evolutionary theory was seen as the sign of religious atavism.[7] In The
Madonna of 115th Street, Robert Orsi has chronicled the
development of the feste in honor of
the saints and the Virgin Mary that were celebrated in Italian Harlem beginning
in the 1880s, during which elaborate processions transported the statue of the
Madonna or saint through the neighborhood and into the church, a practice that
attracted the scorn of American Catholics and Protestants.[8]
The spectacle of the great Mount Carmel parade usually consisted of thousands
of marchers winding their way through Italian Harlem ―trailing incense and the
haunting sounds of southern Italian religious chanting‖ (6). A major component
of these ritual celebrations, which incorporated Italian folk practices dating
back to ancient times, was a focus on the body. The body of the statue was
often fabulously decorated with jewels[9]
and pinned with dollar bills as offerings, while followers who sought healing
of bodies wracked by pain and disease used them to express their gratitude,
penance, and devotion. Many of the faithful walked barefoot, or on their knees,
on scalding July pavement from neighborhoods as far away as Brooklyn. Many
bloodied their own faces and walked with disheveled hair (8). Women carried
enormous tiers of candles as part of vows made to the Virgin in exchange for
her favors. The greater the favor asked, the heavier the candle to be born by
the body. Booths lined the sidewalks full of ex-voto offerings, wax replicas of
internal organs, limbs, ears, and eyes, which could be carried in the
procession and placed at the Virgin‘s feet in gratitude for a miraculous
healing. Upon arrival at the church, many penitents could be seen crawling up
the steps on their hands and knees, ―some of them dragging their tongues along
the stone‖ (4). If the body was injured and bled as a
result, the sacrifice was deemed even more
efficacious (Primeggia 20).
Of the festa of the Madonna del Carmine, Orsi writes, ―For the entire
history of the devotion, this celebration of a woman, in which women were the
central participants, was presided over by a public male authority‖ (53).
Orsi‘s comment signifies an important way in which the ritual practice related
to the Madonna manifests both the centrality of the female body to the
religious culture of the community and the hidden
power of the matriarchy lying beneath a veneer of male
privilege. The Madonna image was the primary model for Italian women in East
Harlem who became, like their female intercessor, the essential link between
the family and religious devotion in a community that was overwhelmingly male. In
Southern Italian immigrant communities, which were, due to a history of
ecclesiastical misuse of power in Italy, notoriously anticlerical, men rarely
participated in organized ritual observance. Thus, the small numbers of women
in the community were responsible for fulfilling the family obligations of
ritual practice: receiving communion, going to confession, having children
christened and confirmed, and saying the Rosary (Ardito 144). Within the home,
through rituals performed at domestic shrines with vigil lights continually
burning before images of the Virgin and other saints, women also maintained the
territory of what Orsi calls the domus,
the family sphere, which was the true center of southern Italian religion and
the subject of intense anxiety regarding its integrity on the western shores of
the Atlantic. Orsi describes East Harlem as a community in separation, where
families were divided in the pursuit of prosperity and where a continual fear
persisted that ―family structures and norms would be eroded in the experience
of migration,‖ either by failure to find work or by the breakdown of the bonds
of love and commitment through time, distance, and exposure to a new society
whose social controls did not correspond to those of traditional
Italian society (24-5). As she fought to
maintain the domus as a sacred precinct, the
Italian woman was the keystone in the arch of
Italian religious experience in America.
Along with the obligation to connect the
immigrant community to the sacred, the female body was expected to conform to
the Madonna image of purity, self-sacrifice and unconditional love.[10]
Orsi reports that the women of Harlem, an area with one of the highest rates of
disease and infant mortality, worked under atrocious conditions at flowermaking
and dressmaking both at home and in dark and poorly ventilated factories, where
they were frequently made ill by vapors from glues and dyes, only to leave work
in order to cook and clean for large extended families that often included
boarders (28). In particular, the bodies of young women became an obsession
within the domus-centered community. As Orsi writes, ―all the community‘s fears
for the reputation and integrity for the domus came to focus on the behavior of
young women‖ (135). Indeed, the female
Italian body was closely identified with the body of the Virgin Mary and served
as a special vehicle for the sanctification of the Italian community and for
defending it against the anxieties and ambiguities of immigrant life in a
society perceived as both alluring and corrupt.[11] Two novels written by Italian immigrants—one in the
early years and one at the close of Italian immigration—use ritual to create a
somatics of purification in which the female body, through its identification
with the Madonna, becomes the venue for the exorcism of aggression that
threatened the integrity of the Italian body, the domus, and the Italian
community at large.
Bernardino Ciambelli, whom Italian
scholar Martino Marazzi calls ―the father of Italian-American immigrant novels‖
(52), wrote I misteri di Bleeker Street
in 1899 as part of a series of feuilleton
novels modeled after Eugene Sue‘s Les
Mystéres de Paris (27). Sue‘s
urban novels with real-life characters embedded within a fictional narrative of
crime and intrigue appealed to many immigrants in the United States, prompting
a minor explosion of this genre in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
The mysteries novels depicted life in
the slums, with improbable but exciting plots designed to reveal the true life
of the urban immigrant to the uninitiated.[12]
Ciambelli, a journalist, playwright, and actor, was a major figure in Little
Italy and well known to Italians across America through his many contributions
to Italian journals (such as the Bollettino
della Sera, which he founded in 1898), the most important of which were his
serialized novels
(28).
Aimed
at an educated immigrant audience with a taste for the sensational,
Ciambelli‘s novels, which his obituary in Il Progresso described as ―a faithful representation of the
feelings of our great immigrant masses, in a period of confusion, before they
settled into a new and in a certain sense hostile country‖ (qtd. in Marazzi
27), are not novels of assimilation but of the embattled immigrant community as
it experiences what Rene Girard has called ―the sacrificial crisis‖— the
pollution of the social body by violence resulting from the undermining of
social boundaries perceived as sacred by that society and which always requires
the ritual sacrifice of one of its members as the means to purification (16).
According to Girard, ―it is not the differences but the loss of them that gives
rise to violence and chaos‖ (50). Rituals are essentially acts of sacrifice ―to
offer protection to those who find themselves in the path of the ritual
impurity—that is, caught in the floodtide of violence‖ (30).
Ciambelli‘s novel reveals New York‘s Little
Italy as the very type of community Girard describes: one plagued by a loss of
moral bearings, the violation of sexual boundaries, and continual crimes of
violence between family members and between members of the Italian community. Most of the crimes committed in the environs
of Bleeker Street consist of assaults upon the body, which is variously
subjected throughout the novel to beating, drugging, poisoning, shooting,
stabbing, drowning, and rape. On Bleeker Street, Italian crime organizations
prey upon other Italians, and opium dens house orgies conducted by persons of
questionable sexual orientation, thus embodying the blurring of traditional
formulations of good and evil, of insiders and outsiders. In this novel,
Ciambelli uses in particular the bodies of women, either assailed by evil or
the tools of evil, as iconic battlefields for the struggle between purity and
pollution in Little Italy. The novel, structured by an international adventure
plot that ranges among New York, San Francisco, Uruguay, Cuba, and, of course,
Italy, tells the story of the beautiful but coldly evil Iole Rains and her plot
to kill her father and her equally beautiful but innocent sister Ada in order
to inherit their father‘s fortune.
The conflict in the novel turns on the
purity of the body and blood relationships within the domus, and reflects
Ciambelli‘s awareness of ethnic discrimination against Italians both inside and
outside the Italian community. The blond and blue-eyed Ada is the daughter of
Civil War hero William Rains and his Florentine wife Pia, while Iole is the
daughter of Rains‘ first wife, a gypsy, who was impregnated by a gypsy king
before she lured the unwitting Rains into marriage, thus making Iole neither
Rains‘ daughter nor Ada‘s sister. The novel was written during a period when
the Italian social body was the object of the intense nativist analysis
represented by Dillingham‘s Dictionary,
leading to the stereotype of the southern Italian as a darkly primitive,
knife-wielding anarchist, an image that northern Italians themselves often
fostered. In I Misteri, Ciambelli, a
native of
Bagni di Lucca in northern Italy, creates a family of ―good‖
characters from the North while strategically using the bodies of the dark
gypsies Iole and her father Mino to receive the negative projections of the
southern Italian stereotype. Not a single Italian in Bleeker Street ever wields
a knife—only the gypsy. Neither does any Italian ever willingly commit a sexual
indiscretion—only the gypsy, the Irish, and the American; yet the contamination
of sex and violence symbolized in these alien bodies shakes the structure of
the stable society sought by the simple working people of Little Italy,
requiring the sacrifice of a pure Italian woman in order to restore the
community to health.
Ada Rains, whom Iole and her American
accomplice Otis drug and leave for dead in a fire in the Union Bank,
miraculously survives and goes to live incognito with the family of Clara
Alberti, another pure and innocent northern Italian woman, who works at a flower
factory in Little Italy. Clara later falls in love with the socialist poet
Aurelio, who has recently emigrated from Milan. They marry and have a child.
Immediately thereafter, Clara discovers that many years earlier, Aurelio‘s
mother was seduced by a soldier and left to raise her only son alone. This
soldier later went on to marry Clara‘s mother, thus making Clara and Aurelio
half-siblings and, thus, guilty of incest. The unintentionally incestuous union
of Clara and Aurelio, while appealing to tastes for sensational literature,
also reflects a deep anxiety within Little Italy regarding contamination from
insidious forces that cannot be predicted or controlled.[13]
Clara, who learns of the secret first, protects her husband from the truth,
bearing the secret in silence, her body succumbing to the corruption of her sin
as she weakens and finally dies.
In the funeral of Clara Alberti,
Ciambelli creates a major ritual event that dignifies and purifies the Italian
body, which, though it was perceived as impure, was in a larger sense innocent
because it was subject to forces of evil in a new and incomprehensible society.
Ciambelli first describes the ritual procession into the church, as the workers
who loved Clara pull her funeral carriage through the streets of Little Italy
by hand to the
Church of the Madonna of Pompei. The procession illustrates
Bourdieu‘s logical shorthand of ritual to construct the body of the Italian
laborer as the performer of a saving act as it moves the embodiment of communal
pollution toward the sacred temple of the undefiled woman, the Madonna. More importantly, Clara‘s funeral cortege is
a type of the Madonna‘s festa procession,
reflecting the Italian community‘s representation of its values to itself and
subtly creating an unspoken relationship in the mind of the reader between the
body of Clara and that of the Madonna. The
defilement and purification of the immigrant body is implicitly linked to the
unstained purity of the Virgin Mary, thus elevating the immigrant body through its
identification with the iconic body of the Madonna while at the same time
admonishing the immigrant to maintain the boundaries of the Sacred in the midst
of the Profane.[14]
During the funeral itself, Ciambelli also
uses the body of the crucified Christ hanging over the altar as the icon of the
broken immigrant body and the broken social body of Bleeker Street, a
relationship he makes explicit by having this ―huge Christ of bloody tears,
with a head reclining on a wounded and tortured breast,‖ gaze at the body of
Clara and appear to ―smile with affection at the angelic creature who awaited
absolution in the immobility of death at the foot of the altar‖ (279). As the
priest consecrates the bread and wine and the body of Christ is sacrificed
again for, and with, the bodies of the immigrant community, all are united in
the sacred Corpus Christi. The symbolic movements of the priest and
parishioners of Bleeker Street as they communally eat, drink, kneel, and cross
themselves before the iconic bodies of Clara and Christ construct the
mythico-ritual space of which Catherine Bell has written and, in turn, create a
ritualized social body which, having internalized unspoken schemes involving
its own beleaguered state, its internal corruption and need of purification,
and the proper boundaries between the Sacred and the Profane, can now begin its
movement out of the ordeals that have assailed it. The funeral mass also
empowers the social body through the opus
operandum, the efficacious rite, by which the immigrant body, though often
powerless in the daily toil of American life, is theologically endowed with the
power to transform the world through sacred ritual, the ultimate manifestation
of ―the fitting action.‖
As the priest dispenses holy water upon
the body of Clara and the crowd, and
chants absolution ―in the midst of a great
anguish that invaded everyone, causing a spasm
saint), America offers to the Italian man the curse of
the saloon, the poisonous atmosphere of cheap moving pictures, and the dangers
of the slum dance hall. In Italy we know the difference between a peasant who
has lived there always and one who has spent a few years in America and then
gone back. The former is poorer but the latter is quite rotten.‖ 22
of emotion,‖ the symbolic purification of the Italian social
body in the house of the Madonna is complete (280). At the end of the ceremony, the priest
addresses the congregation saying, ―For her who now enjoys the glory of
Paradise, do not cry, but sing hymns of gratitude. For those who remain
below—you must now bear the tribute of grief for this good soul, and gratitude
for her holy resignation to the will of the Highest‖ (280). Ciambelli‘s
funeral, coming almost mid-way through the novel, becomes an expression and
exorcism of the ―great anguish‖ that has imperiled the social body, a gift of
absolution and grace, and an exhortation to endure the burdens and deprivations
of immigrant life without sacrificing the ―will of the Highest,‖ the sense of
the proper boundaries between the Sacred and the Profane created by and
inculcated through the ritual operations surrounding the sacrifice of the
contaminated innocent.
From the moment of the funeral, the
action slowly, though very circuitously, begins to move toward the vindication
of the community and the final purging of evil, which does not fully take place
until the death of Iole, who is shot by her Italian husband while she is
keeping a tryst with a gypsy lover. Because Iole is the embodiment of the alien
evil that threatens the community, her death occurs without any of the ritual
observances given to Clara. Ciambelli
records no funeral, nor is her grave marked or visited until the end of the
novel, when the ritual of marriage between the three central couples removes
the onus embodied in the corrupt and transgressive Iole, and reestablishes the
sacredness of the female body in Little Italy. The compassionate Ada, now safe,
kneels and prays at her ―sister‘s‖ grave in an act of forgiveness, and the
purity, order, and stability of the domus is restored. Ciambelli‘s ritual
somatics thus express the anxiety and suffering of the Italian immigrant
community while purging it of violence through the sacrifice of an immigrant
body exalted in its identification with the iconic bodies of Christ and Mary.
During the years between Ciambelli‘s
novel and the end of the great wave of immigration, the Italian community in
America underwent a number of crucial changes as it became established.
Although it was still plagued by problems of poverty, unsanitary conditions,
crime, overcrowding, and disease, Orsi reports that between the First World
War and the late 1920s, Italian Harlem ―matured into a
self-aware and politically sophisticated community‖ and assumed political
control of its own destiny through figures like Fiorello LaGuardia, who first
became a Congressman for East Harlem in 1922 (Orsi 45). At the same time, the
community became divided by its varying responses to the idea of material
success. Many Italian residents slowly improved their circumstances, which
often meant they moved out of a neighborhood they viewed as degraded in the
eyes of society, while others feared that material success would destroy the
values that held the social body together (91).
Additionally, the Italian community brought to the United States an
already potent myth of ―Lamerica,‖ developed by immigrants who had returned to
Italy, a myth that equated the Statue of Liberty with the body of the Madonna
and viewed American dollar bills as sacred objects fit to attach to the
garments of religious statues (Ardito 133).[15]
Garibaldi LaPolla, a first-generation
immigrant who eventually became a figure in the public education system of New
York, was only two years old when he immigrated to America in 1890 (Peragallo
138). His novel The Fire in the Flesh
reflects the changes and tensions within the Italian community at the time he
wrote the novel in 1931.
LaPolla‘s novel indicates that the social controls symbolized
by the body of the Madonna had begun to weaken during his lifetime as more
Italians achieved material success and the domus absorbed elements of American
styles of behavior that conflicted with traditional Italian models. Thus, The Fire in the Flesh makes explicit
what was only implicit in Ciambelli‘s novel.
Further, The Fire in the Flesh exemplifies the theories of Mary Douglas,
who, borrowing from Basil Bernstein, describes the highly structured
―positional family‖ that the Italian domus typifies as one of the kinds of
communities that depend on ritual observance to maintain a rigidly fixed social
structure. In contrast, the American
society to which the Italian immigrant was exposed corresponded to what Douglas
describes as the ―personal family,‖ one that advocates informality, intimacy,
and fluidity of social roles as conducive to social mobility. The Fire in the Flesh reveals the
anxiety of the Italian community brought on by its encounter with the American
model of the domus necessary for a society dedicated to personal achievement.
This new model necessarily weakened the social controls embodied in the Madonna
symbol of female sanctity, resulting in a reformulation of the Madonna as the
Madonna of liberation through material success. In LaPolla‘s novel, the
stresses within the Italian community are not embodied in outsiders who bring impurity
into the community but are due to the Italian quest to ―make America,‖ which,
when conducted by a female Italian protagonist, becomes an especially serious
sin against the original Madonna image—an image which, in turn, undermines the
American project through its inappropriateness to its new setting.
Lapolla‘s
novel, like Ciambelli‘s, engages in ritual somatics that address questions
regarding the loss of social boundaries and controls through the symbol of the
Madonna. The Fire in the Flesh, however, explores this dilemma through the
conflict between the type of female purity idealized in Ciambelli‘s novel,
which subordinated the instincts of the body to the values of the soul and was
central to the maintenance of the community, and the Madonna of success
connected with the Lamerica myth. He does this chiefly in an important ritual
celebration through which he sets up the conflict between these two models that
will drive the action of the novel, revealing the paradox of Italian devotion
to an ideal feminine image that is burdensome but nevertheless crucial to the
survival of the immigrant community.
The novel begins in a southern Italian
village, where a group of peasants observes the Feast of the Annunciation
through the type of ritual procession that will become integral to the feste celebrated by Italians in Little
Italy. LaPolla‘s description focuses on a troupe of peasant bodies carrying a
heavy, unstable statue of the Madonna. They struggle under the weight but are
united in the performance of the holy task of bearing the body of the Mother of
God into the sanctuary:
The huge image of the Virgin almost toppled from the
shoulders of its bearers as they shoved their way in the front. [. . . .] The
procession was a motley queue—a fantastically uniformed band with a sprinkling
of musicians in homespun. Women in heavy shawls sweating under the burden of
candles, often too huge even for their peasant robustness. Hard shambling men,
their backs bent. Priests in full vestments dragging their cassocks in the hot
dust. Little girls and boys swaying censers. The enormous clay image of the
Madonna oscillated in her palanquin, beaded and befringed and heavy with silks,
bestudded with medals, laden with money offerings pinned in great profusion
over its sides. [. . .] The tired men who carried it made no attempt to hide
their relief as they bore the revered image down the long aisle of the
cathedral, while the rest of the procession filed behind, the band silenced,
the whispers hushed, the tread of feet softened in the mild gloom. (4)
LaPolla‘s procession depicts the encoding of positional roles,
as the peasants enact the symbolic shorthand that ritualizes Italian bodies to
labor together in their pilgrimage through life toward a sacred resting place
and (especially for women) to uphold the sacred values of the Holy Woman. At
the same time, it anticipates the conflict between spiritual values and the
aggressive pursuit of material success as those who try to shove their way in
front risk toppling the Madonna from her perch.
As the procession deposits the statue of the Madonna, which LaPolla
describes as a frightened young girl with her child, we encounter her real-life
counterpart in Agnese Filoppina, a local girl whom the village priest has
impregnated and who has now defiantly brought her newborn son, whom she
delivered alone ―in the grottoes,‖ into the church to confront the father. The
people are shocked at the news, but rather than blaming the priest, they locate
the sin in the body of the young girl and ostracize her. Because the community
cannot include a female body that operates outside the rigorous standards of
feminine purity associated with the Virgin Mother, Agnese is forced to emigrate
to America with her father, brother, and a husband of convenience—Michele, the
village fool, who has loved her since childhood.
Never again will the Italian social body
in the novel be as united as it was in its struggle to bear the Madonna‘s body
into the church. The rest of the novel is a downward spiral resulting from
Agnese‘s conflation of the divine task enacted in the procession of the
Annunciation with the project to ―make America,‖ her attempts to reformulate
the Madonna image amid the ambiguity of the New World, and the disruptive
effects her actions have upon the domus.
Orsi has noted that the cult of the Madonna
in Italian Harlem rooted itself in the interstices between the expectations of
women‘s power and the realities of it. In Lapolla‘s novel the fire in the flesh
is the immigrant quest for power in America, a pursuit of material success that
perverts the holy materiality symbolized by the Madonna‘s body. In Agnese,
whose vision of making America requires the acquisition of power usually
reserved for the male in Italian society, the traditional Madonna image becomes
distorted beyond all recognition. For instance, Agnese rules the family with an
iron fist and refuses to show affection to her own son for many years. She
pursues the outward trappings of the Madonna statue in the form of wealth and
status, which isolates her from the social body, and a strange form of sexual
purity by living with a man she does not love, an arrangement that increases
her physical and spiritual isolation from her own body.
Only late in the novel does Agnese
exhibit any of the Madonna‘s traditional traits, but these traits in their new
setting only serve to compound her misery. After being reunited with Father
Gelsomino who has defrocked himself and come to America in order to chastise
his flesh through hard labor, Agnese finally realizes that her adolescent
desire for the socially sanctioned purity brought by marriage kept her from
being with a man she truly loved. Her husband Michele, however, stabs Gelsomino
in the culminating scene acting out of an intense jealousy of the man who has
claimed his wife‘s affection for so many years. Agnese, seeing that her husband
has mortally wounded Gelsomino, prays to the Madonna; then, in an attempt to
save her husband from prison, she stabs him to make it appear that he was only
defending himself from her former lover. Her husband is exonerated, but his
body then falls prey to his hatred for his wife, and he loses his ability to
speak or move. Agnese, now chastened by her experience, attempts to conform to
the old Madonna model even further by taking over his care as her penance. At
the same time, she realizes that her devotion to the now infantilized Michele,
locked into his silence and immobility but with his memory intact, makes him
all the more miserable. When Agnese‘s brother tells the old family servant that
Agnese and Michele have become like animals gnawing at each other in a trap,
she shakes him indignantly and insists that he pretend that all is well or
things will be ―like real hell‖ (346).
The traditional image of the Madonna carried
on the back of the peasant no longer seems to work in a world in which the
domus and the social body are caught between the models of the Old World and
the New World. Those who pursue the New Madonna embodied in the Statue of
Liberty risk destroying the sacred integrity of the domus, while those who are
ritualized to perform according to the inner logic expressed in cultic devotion
to the traditional Madonna risk becoming trapped in a false and sterile
existence that fails to achieve the liberation envisioned in the Lamerica myth.
Through his use of the body in the ritual of the Feast of the Annunciation,
LaPolla shows the ironic beauty of the immigrant‘s adoration of the iconic
female body of the Madonna, which, although it served to unify the community,
embodied a logic that had no place in the pragmatic project of making America.
The heavy image of divine female perfection carried on the backs of ordinary
human bodies may be too much to bear in the new American milieu; yet, the
spiritual task signified in the ritual movements of these bodies gives them a
dignity and a sense of community that was sorely needed in the theologizing
experience of the American pilgrimage. At the same time, the ritual procession
in which the Italian body is subordinated to an image made of clay tricked out
with finery earned by the sweat of those who labor to carry it—a self-created
and illusory vision of perfection—foreshadows the often tragic Italian service
to the American Madonna of material success. Just as the ribbons and lace of
hard-earned peasant decorations hide a clay statue, the vision of America and
the immigrant self in America will give way to a reality of such ambiguity that
the willingness to carry the burden of either image will inevitably result in
confusion and alienation.
The rituals in these Italian novels
depict the encoding of the schemes and logic of social controls upon the
individual body and the social body in a somatics that lays bare those controls
to the public gaze. Both novels locate
ritual practice in connection with the female Italian body under the icon of
the undefiled Divine Woman to work out the tensions and anxieties facing the
social body regarding its own level of purity. In
LaPolla‘s novel, however, these schemes show signs of wear and
tear as the model of the personal American family with its fluid pattern of
identity that allows for the pursuit of commercial success infiltrates the
positional model of the immigrant family. These Italian novels subordinate
assumptions about the purity of the Italian body by native-born
Americans to perceptions within the ethnic
community itself.
Like their Italian counterparts, Jewish
immigrant writers also turned to the use of symbolic bodies in ritual practice
to accomplish purposes related to the purity and dignity of the immigrant body.
In the novels of Jewish immigrants, however, the issue of the purity of the
body is much more explicitly addressed, partly because of a Jewish heritage
which emphasized ritual purity, but also because of a long history in which the
Jewish body was constructed by non-Jews as not only impure but also as weak.
This history often forced Jews like Boas who wished to achieve outside the pale
of Jewish society to disembody themselves as Jews.
A German Jewish immigrant, Boas always
represented himself not as a Jew but as a German;[16]
yet he spent a great deal of time measuring and critiquing the Jewish body.
―Much to my surprise,‖ he writes concerning the possibilities of transforming
the Jewish body to the ―American type,‖ ―an important change in type may also
be noticed in the East European Jews, which race was particularly the subject
of our inquiry; the race is very short headed, but there is a decided tendency
to an increase in length of head among the later immigrants‖ (Letter to J.W. Jenks, 3 September, 1908
207). Boas‘ comments reveal a preoccupation common among American nativists and
Western scientists in general with the Jewish body as anomaly and as a space of
deficiency. Indeed, Sander Gilman, who has written extensively on non-Jewish
stereotypes of Jewish bodies, maintains that:
The construction of the Jewish body in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries is linked to the underlying ideology of
anti-Semitism, to the view that the Jew is inherently different [. . . .] The
difference of the Jewish body is absolute within Western tradition; its
counterimage (from the comments of Paul, Eusebius, and Origen on the ―meaning‖
of circumcision) is the ―Christian‖ body, which eventually becomes secularized
into the ―German‖ or ―English‖ body with the
rise of the modern body politic. (The Jew’s Body 38)
Gilman‘s comments suggest that the very problem of the
immigrant Jewish body was complicated by a perception of difference rooted in a
ritual practice—circumcision— that was itself based upon an intense awareness
of the religious importance of the body and designed to set it apart as
consecrated space. This resulted in a double bind for the Jewish immigrant, for
although the Jews have been characterized as a people of the Word, a great deal
of traditional Jewish ritual practice centered on the body and bodily fluids,
with a highly developed ritual practice surrounding the hair and beard,
fasting, food preparation, the use of phylacteries and other types of ritual
objects and clothing, ritual purification of women after menstruation, and
elaborate rules for the treatment and handling of the body after death. Because
it was central to Jewish religious observance, no matter how a Jew might wish
to assimilate the body to American norms, to make it disappear, he must, if an
observant Jew, engage in activity that insisted on the body as Jewish body. Thus, if an immigrant
wished to leave his Jewish body behind, it often meant he must abandon ritual
practice; yet the very conditions of Jewish life, both before and after
immigration, often degraded the body to the extent that ritual practice was the
only medium by which it could experience legitimacy, dignity, and healing.
Jews were often better equipped than many
other ethnic groups for the hardships of immigrant life because they had known
nothing different in their previous experience. Yet, the living conditions of
overcrowded and unsanitary tenements and the working conditions in dimly lit,
poorly ventilated, and often stifling sweatshops exposed the
Jewish body to suffering in a grueling and
unvarying routine that was especially difficult.
Irving Howe reports that the conditions of life on the Lower
East Side were such that tuberculosis, the most feared disease of the time,
grew to such proportions that in 1906 it afflicted twelve out of every one
thousand Jews living on the East side and came to be regarded as ―the Jewish
disease.‖ Howe also states that illnesses caused by overwork— neurasthenia,
hysteria, and nervous breakdown— frequently led to serious physical
consequences. Suicide, for example,
while infrequent in Europe, became a serious problem among Jews in America due
to the stresses of dislocation and disorientation (149). Yet, rather than
arousing sympathy, the Jewish body was often the target of disgust and blame
for its weakness, as in the case of an article appearing in the North American
Review in 1908 that
used the illnesses of poverty among Jews to justify the argument that New York
crime rates were rising because Jewish immigrants, whose bodies were unfit for
labor, were more inclined to turn to a life of crime (135).
These types of judgments constructed the
Jewish body according to the perverse logic which had resulted in the Eastern
European migration to America to begin with, since the tragic pogroms in which
the bodies of Jews were massacred in unprecedented numbers arose out of
anti-Semitism and fears of Jewish participation in subversive activities
against the Czar. Many first-generation
Jewish immigrants and immigrant writers carried with them fresh memories of the
slaughter of their co-religionists and of European constructions of the Jewish
body as ugly, deformed, and diseased—the outward sign of inward Jewish
perversion—which made such violence against it possible. Many of them had also absorbed a sense of the
Jewish body ―so deeply impacted by antiSemitic rhetoric that even when that
body met the expectations for perfection in the community in which the Jew
lived, the Jew experienced his or her body as flawed, diseased" (Gilman
179). For example, Russian immigrant writer Elias Tobenkin frequently makes use
of the Jew‘s hatred of his own body by stressing its stooped and inferior
quality, which he claims is due to the excessive regimen of Talmudic readings
practiced by orthodox Jewish boys and the strictures of ghetto life, while in The Fugitive Ezra Brudno recounts the
taunts of Gentile boys who ridicule the gait of his protagonist Israel
Abramowitch as he walks down the alleys of his Russian village.[17]
These writers echo the beliefs of many Jewish professionals of their time,
which were a mixture of unconscious non-Jewish notions about Jews as carriers
of the corruptions of urban life and a desire to show those corruptions to be
the result of social causes rather than signs of an inherent physical, and thus
mental, deformity.[18]
Gilman succinctly sums up the situation when he states that ―being black, being
Jewish, being diseased, and being ‗ugly‘
[had] come to be inexorably linked‖
(173).
As the writing of Jewish immigrants attests, the
pre-immigration battle over the Jewish body was often fought in the arena of
ritual practice, as conflict over forced baptisms reflected both the degree to
which the body mattered to the Jew and the degree to which Christian ritual
practice was used to legitimate racial constructions of the Jewish body and to
purify and transform it to Gentile norms. Significantly, Mary Antin devotes
several pages in The Promised Land,
her memoir of her complete personal transformation through the purifying waters
of the American baptismal font, to the horror with which Jews regarded the
baptisms that were often forced upon them by Christians. Antin writes at length
about the kidnapping of Jewish boys by agents of the Czar, boys who were then
reared in Gentile families until they could serve in the army, during which time
they were continually coerced by priests, often through torture, to accept
baptism. Some were flogged and starved until they submitted. Antin cites the
particularly poignant case of a boy known to her father who was tortured and
locked in a cell until he fell asleep only to be told upon awakening that he
had been baptized in his sleep by priestly incubi.
―[T]hey held it to him he was a baptized Jew,
and belonged to the Church,‖ Antin writes,
―and the rest of his life he spent between the prison and the
hospital, always clinging to his faith, saying the Hebrew prayers in defiance
of his tormentors, and paying for it with his flesh‖ (11-12). Of her own defiance, Antin, who in tones that
give us pause considering her later attitude toward her American ―baptism‖ in
the Melting Pot, declares: ―there was no pain that I would not bear—no,
none—rather than submit to baptism‖ (11).
Antin mentions another pre-immigration
controversy involving ritual practice and the body in the problem of the Blood
Libel: the belief among Christians that Jews ritually sacrificed Christian
children in order to drink their blood during the Passover meal. This belief
was widespread and caused many persecutions in Passover season, during which
the bodies of Jews were frequently made to pay for the bodies of Christian
children they had supposedly sacrificed in their perverse rites. The myths about Jews associated with the
Blood Libel conflated Gentile fears of Jewish blood and miscegenation with the
supposed Jewish lust for blood, fears that were confirmed by then-current
medical journals that claimed one drop of Jewish blood was enough to completely
contaminate an Aryan (Gilman 175). The significance of the Blood Libel is
reflected in the novels of several Jewish immigrant writers, perhaps attempts
on one level to qualm fears regarding the danger of the Jew to America through
immigration. The Blood Libel takes on major proportions, however, in a novel
entitled The Fugitive, written by
Ezra Brudno. In this novel, the
treatment of the Blood Libel becomes much more than an unfounded rumor that
needs to be dispelled. It becomes, rather, an integral part of Brudno‘s
somatics and represents the convergence of Jewish and Gentile attitudes toward
the Jewish body, the Jewish social body, and the complex tensions between
them. Brudno, in a profound strategic
move, turned to the iconic body of Christ to reflect the tensions of Jewish
experience and to reconstruct the Jewish body as sacred in the public imagination.
The
Fugitive, published in 1904, was one of three novels written by Brudno, a
Jewish immigrant from Lithuania who
eventually lived and worked as a lawyer in
Cleveland. Brudno‘s novel, set in Lithuania and America, uses
ritual as a means of interrogating somatic constructions of the Jewish body
through a surreal series of events that conflates the myth of the Blood Libel
with the Christian rite of baptism. The novel recounts the search of the
orphaned Israel Ambramowitch for a physical and emotional home. After the arrest and execution of his father
on suspicion of the Blood Libel, the young Israel is rescued from the forest
and brought up by the Gentile Judge Bialnik, the very man responsible for his
father‘s death. Judge Bialnik‘s beautiful daughter Katya becomes Israel‘s childhood
playmate. When the two fall in love as young adults, Katya‘s father forces
Israel to leave the house rather than allow his daughter to marry a Jew. The
two are later reunited as adults, at which time Judge Bialnik finally relents
and allows
Israel to marry his daughter if he will first be baptized. The lonely
Israel suffers the same anxieties expressed by Antin over choosing to accept a
Christian ritual that has long exemplified the oppression of the Jewish people.
Throughout the novel, Israel‘s quest to remain true to his religion is
contrasted with the actions of his degenerate brother Joseph, who coolly
accepts baptism in order to marry the daughter of a prosperous Gentile officer.
While Katya assumes that the ritual of baptism will impose no moral dilemma for
Israel, he laments the tendency of Christians to dismiss the deep connection in
ritual between the spiritual and the somatic when he declares ―They do not
realize that faith, if it only exists, is rooted deep in one‘s heart, and the
one that sometimes extirpates it tears it out often with flesh surrounding it,
and the wound keeps on bleeding until there is heart no more‖ (248).
In
a chapter entitled ―The Burden of the Cross,‖ Israel experiences a waking dream
in which he is united with the crucified Christ in a vision of Jewish suffering
that leads to his reclamation of his own people. At a deeper level, this vision
and the events that follow it begin a reconstruction of the body of Christ as a
Jewish body, and, thus, the
Jewish body as a sacred vessel of suffering
for all humankind. Brudno first describes
Israel alone in his room, staring at the fire as he broods
over his decision to be baptized. As he gazes at a glowing ember, it gradually
comes to resemble a man on a cross. Upon looking at it more closely, he
realizes that the face of the man is his own. The vision then changes to the
gorgeous Vladimir Cathedral, one of the holiest shrines in Kiev, lit by
thousands of candles. As bells toll and thousands of people pour into the
Cathedral, Israel hears someone whisper, ―A Jew is going to be baptized‖
(241). When a priest begins the rite of
baptism, the ghostly figures of an elderly Jewish man and woman with horrified
eyes appear before him. They point silently to the right, and the cathedral
becomes dark.
A volcanic flame suddenly erupts from underground, and the
priests kindle a huge bonfire, all the while chanting a sad devotion. In a
chilling anticipation of events of the 1940s, Brudno describes an old Jewish
man and a young woman being brought forth to be offered up as a burning
sacrifice. As they prepare to die, they
both continually chant
―Hear, O Israel, God our Lord, God is one.‖
The ghostly woman then points to the left
where Israel beholds a river on the banks of which stands a crowd of terrified
Jews. One of them steps into their midst and addresses the crowd. While some of
the listeners protest, some begin nodding with satisfaction. Horsemen soon
appear in the distance, and ―old men, women, maidens, little children threw
their heads back and the flashing knives were passed over their necks
hurriedly. [. . . .] The crowd became smaller and smaller and the number of
corpses with ripped throats grew larger and larger. A long stream of blood
flowed into the river‖ (244). In a vision that recalls moments in Jewish
history like the mass suicide at Masada, the Jewish body becomes the vehicle
through which the Jew must do violence to himself in order to express any sort
of power in the world. At the same time, Brudno raises the dimensions of the
ritual sacrifice of the Jewish body to cosmic dimensions through a comparison
with the iconic body of Christ on the cross and prepares the way for his use of
the Christian ritual of baptism as a transformative re-immersion in the blood
of the Jewish people that will restore Israel in all senses of the word.
Brudno‘s disturbingly surreal vision is
fulfilled a few days later as a pogrom breaks out in Vilno and the streets fill
with the blood of slaughtered Jews. Israel staggers through streets piled with
Jewish corpses, eventually stumbling upon a young Jewish woman being raped by
Polish muzhiks. When a voice from within
suddenly commands him to defend his people, Israel immediately picks up a sharp
iron and begins hammering the skulls of the rioters, telling us, ―I craved to
see blood, to wash myself clean with blood, to submerge myself in blood. I
struck heads and breasts and shoulders with the rage of a demon and blood
gushed forth abundantly. ‗Baptise your Jewish soul with blood,‘ a weird-like
voice whispered to me. And I did bathe in fresh, hot human blood‖ (253).
In this passage Brudno plays on the
symbolic frontiers between the Jewish Passover and Christian baptism to turn
the tables on the whole Christian symbology of baptism. First, the passage
evokes the Judaic underpinning of the Christian rite of baptism: its symbolic
connection between immersion in the blood of the Jewish Christ with the escape
of the Israelites from bondage through the Red Sea. The reader also is
confronted with subtle messages regarding the Christian religious debt to Jews
and to the suffering of the Jewish body. These tacit associations widen further
into the larger question of the Jew‘s place in the American Promised Land,
since Israel will immigrate to America shortly after this baptismal Passover
from bondage to Christian hegemony through the Red Sea of Jewish blood.
At the same time, the events of the
pogrom take on the taxonomies underlying the historical cycles of sacrificial
violence connected with the Blood Libel. Brudno makes it clear that, contrary
to the myth of the Blood Libel, the Jews are the recipients of Christian violence
rather than the perpetrators of violence against Christians. Yet, he also risks
depicting a Jew who refuses to do violence to his own body in expiation for
wrongs against Christians, or as an expiatory sacrifice for violence within the
Christian community, as Girard‘s theory of sacrificial violence would suggest,
but is willing
instead to use violence against his oppressors, thereby
defiantly taking on the guilt for spilling Christian blood. The deliberate
movement from the problem over baptism to the dream vision, in which the ritual
of baptism becomes the self-sacrifice of the Jewish body, to the pogrom, which
reclaims the roots of Christian baptism in the body and blood of the Jewish
Christ, reverses the order of power in the Christian rite of baptism and the
Blood Libel, and thus reconstructs the Jewish body as both powerful and capable
of violence.[19]
These ritualized events reactivate
Israel‘s sense of Jewish identity and loyalty to his ethnic and religious
heritage. Although he meets and marries Katya in America years later, Israel
never accepts baptism, insisting on an intermarriage that maintains the
religious boundaries forged in his tragic experience in Vilno. Israel chooses
to live marginally, claiming the cross of Christ as the instrument of the
sacrifice of the Jewish body, as he tells Katya: ―The cross, my love—the cross
I bear weighs heavily upon me‖
(391). Brudno‘s use of ritual somatics continues an early form
of multicultural debate that arose in the mid-nineteenth century Jewish project
to write a counter-history of
Christianity from a Jewish standpoint. Beginning in the
mid-1800s with the work of Abraham Geiger, Jewish religious historians reversed
the Christian gaze at the Jew and began to recast Christianity as dependent on
Judaism out of what Susannah Heschel has called ―a Jewish desire to enter the
Christian myth, become its hero, and claim the power inherent in it‖ (Heschel
110). The central concern of much of this movement toward Jewish
self-empowerment lay in the reconfiguration of Jesus as a Jew (109).
The late nineteenth-century Jewish
project of religious counter-history is continued in the work of Edward
Steiner, whose similarly complex preoccupation with the figure of Jesus shows
the influence of Brudno‘s earlier novel. Steiner, however, who became a
Congregationalist minister, professor of Applied Christianity at Grinnell
College in Iowa, and a sociologist of immigration, considered the figure of
Christ from the perspective of a Jewish convert to Christianity. The Immigrant Tide, one of his accounts
of his many travels in steerage with immigrants traveling back and forth
between Europe and America, contains a particularly poignant chapter entitled
―The Price
They Pay‖ in which Steiner describes the
battered bodies of the immigrants returning to
Europe with envelopes full of money for their families after
toiling for long periods in America. Some are blind. Some are crippled. Some
die of tuberculosis on the voyage. In his description of the working conditions
of immigrants, Steiner relates that ten thousand immigrants in the preceding
year died in the mines alone and describes the toll taken on the immigrant
body:
I could see the mouths of half a dozen mines, out of which
were dragged in one year the mangled, powder-burnt asphyxiated bodies of a
thousand once-breathing souls. I heard the cries and groans of hundreds of
women and thousands of children; for I have seen mothers embrace bodiless limbs
and limbless bodies, fragments of the sons they had born, and although 30,000,000
dollars and more were carried home by the living, they too had paid a price
beyond the hard labour they did. In the suffering they endured in damp mines,
by the hot metal blasts, in cold ditches and in dark and dangerous tunnels,
they paid the price indeed. (44) Steiner draws a parallel in this chapter
between the body of Christ and the immigrant body in whom ―He incarnates
himself‖(39); yet, the same book contains a much more ambivalent chapter
entitled ―The Jew in the Immigrant Problem‖ in which Steiner presents pictures
comparing Jewish facial features of the ―poorer‖ and ―finer‖ types and
attributes the prejudice directed toward Jews to their unwillingness to work at
hard labor, their intolerance of Sunday laws, and their questionable ―oriental‖
business methods. Steiner considers these and other characteristics of his own
people as detrimental to their prospects of assimilation, never once mentioning
the fact that he himself is a Jew.
Like Boas, then, Steiner writes as an
assimilated European American contemplating the problems of outsiders from the
perspective of an insider persona that refuses any recognition of his own
ethnic identity. Steiner does reveal himself more fully in other books,
however, particularly in From Alien to
Citizen (1914), an
autobiographical account of his emigration and assimilation that conflates
Americanization and Christian conversion. In this book,
Steiner describes the anguish he experienced before his conversion in a way
that reveals his sense of the intimate relationship between the spirit, the
body, and the social body for the Jew: ―Should I cut myself loose from a race
and its traditions, and in doing so wound all those who were flesh of my
flesh?‖ (291). In general, however, Steiner shows considerable ambivalence
regarding Jewish ethnicity throughout his work, on the one hand working toward
a social gospel for the immigrant and claiming that he opposes anti-Semitism
(330), while on the other asserting that ―the Jewish Type when very pronounced‖
is ―disagreeable,‖ and calling for immigration from Eastern Europe to cease
entirely (The Immigrant Tide 285).[20]
Although Steiner‘s autobiography devotes
only a few paragraphs to his personal dilemma over conversion, his novel The Mediator, published in 1907,
concerns itself entirely with a Jew who converts to Christianity and suffers
continual physical and mental anguish for his decision. Unlike Steiner himself,
however, his protagonist explicitly reclaims the body of Christ for Jews and
elects to live a much more difficult life on the frontier between Judaism and
Christianity, a decision that Steiner may not have found possible to make in
his own life. The action of the novel is continually punctuated by ritual moments.
Like Lapolla, Steiner opens the novel with a ritual procession—this time in
connection with the Feast of Corpus Christi— to set up the central somatic
concerns of the novel: the misconstruing and abuse of the Jewish body by
Christians, and the revision of the iconic body of Christ as a Jewish body that
can incorporate both Christians and Jews. Most importantly, however, Steiner
uses the ritual of Communion, the symbolic sacrifice of the body of Christ to
reclaim Christ as an image of the Jew and thus the icon of Jewish suffering. Steiner‘s complex attitude toward the body of the
Jewish Christ reveals a deep ambivalence regarding his Jewish heritage and his
decision to disembody himself as a Jew.
The Mediator recounts
the story of Samuel Cohen, the only son of the Levite Abraham Cohen, the last
of a long line of priests who are central to Jewish religious practice. Samuel
is born in the Russian village of Kottowin on the highest Jewish holiday, the
Day of Atonement, thus establishing his priestly role in the reconciliation of
Christians and Jews. Samuel‘s mother dies in childbirth,
forcing his father to find a young woman to nurse his infant son. Because there
are no Jewish women who are able to nurse Samuel, due to the poverty and hunger
of the Jews in the village, Abraham turns in desperation to a young Polish
woman, Suszka, with the plan to have her first eat kosher food and wait a few
hours before nursing the infant Samuel so that her milk will be pure according
to Jewish law. When he arrives with her at his house, however, the baby is
crying so hard from hunger that Abraham forgets the ideal of ritually clean
food and allows the Gentile Suszka to nurse his son immediately. This episode recalls one from Steiner‘s own
life recounted in From Alien to Citizen in
which he tells of having had a
Slovak nurse and being vaccinated with virus
taken from the arm of a Slovak boy ―whom
I called brother by vaccination,‖ which ―made me feel kin to
these Gentiles‖ (From Alien to Citizen
25), and indicates that, just as it did for Steiner, what has gone into the
Jewish body will have a significant effect on the spiritual life of Samuel
Cohen.
Suszka, who lives with the family from then on, becomes a
mother to Samuel. As Samuel grows up, he begins to chafe at his Jewish
religious practice and the rigidity of his father‘s views, which he feels are
calculated to ―shut in the boy‘s little soul and keep the joy of God‘s world
out‖ (The Mediator 45). At Passover, he feels particularly unhappy,
when ―during and after the meal, there were long prayers, bitter herbs, and
memories of the hard days when Israel was in captivity: all this, while
meaningless to the child, oppressed him‖ (44). While visiting Suszka, Samuel
surreptitiously enters a
Christian church for the first time during the ritual of the
Easter mass. The beauty of Christian ritual and the orderly procession of the
bodies of the acolytes up and down the steps to the altar make a dramatic
impression on the young Samuel, who immediately dreams of becoming a Christian
priest and leaving behind what he feels to be the disorder and cacophony of
Jewish ritual practice in the synagogue (47-8).
As time goes by, Samuel‘s relations with his father and
other members of the Jewish community in Kottowin become strained. Suszka is
forced to leave the household because it is rumored that she is
―Christianizing‖ Samuel. An authoritarian aunt comes to take her place and
shows him none of the love that Suszka did. His father forces him to read the
Talmud for long hours, a practice that Steiner describes as stultifying for a
young boy, and Samuel continues to grow up without the love and joy that his
soul craves. When the czar allows Jews to attend public schools and the village
of Kottowin is connected to the outside world by railroad, Samuel‘s eyes and
heart are opened by his first exposure to novels and poetry, which his father
forbids, in an attempt to force Samuel to devote himself to his religious
heritage. At one point, his father becomes so angry at Samuel‘s lack of
interest in reading the Talmud that he knocks him unconscious. Dr. Rosnik, a
secular Jew, is called in. Rosnik advises Abraham to give up his insistence on
Samuel‘s Talmudic training and to focus on sending him to college instead. In a
troubling yet poignant admixture of religious skepticism, European
constructions of the
Jew as diseased, and Steiner‘s own feelings about his
heritage, Rosnik tells Abraham of Heinrich Heine‘s description of a hospital in
Hamburg where people were suffering from three diseases: bodily ill, old age,
and Judaism. ―He was right, Reb Abraham,‖ Rosnik continues, ―and, to my mind,
Judaism is the worst disease of the three, since it is incurable‖ (68); ―Bodily
ills can be cured by physic; old age doesn‘t hurt always; but
Judaism can‘t be driven out by physic nor by baptismal water;
it hurts all the time outside and inside‖ (71).
He goes on to tell Abraham that he did not have his son circumcised
because he ―did not want to put a mark on his body which would make him suffer
all his life‖ (73) and that Abraham would do better to advise his son to go to
America and make money. This will give Samuel real power, which the moribund
rituals of Judaism cannot provide because soon the rituals of Judaism will no
longer matter in a rapidly modernizing world.
Abraham cannot change, however, and
Samuel becomes so unhappy that just as he is preparing for the ritual of Bar
Mitzvah, at which time he will become an adult member of the Jewish community,
he runs away to see Suszka. While he is on his journey, he meets a kind monk
who walks with Samuel and defends him when some Gentile boys abuse him, saying
that because Jesus was a Jew the relatives of Jesus should be treated well.
Later, Samuel sneaks into the village church to hear the monk preach and again
feels transported into a better, more beautiful world than the one he knows.
The monk preaches about Love, something Samuel has not been able to experience
in his own worship. After the mass, Samuel tells the monk about his newly
awakened soul and his desire to enter the monastery. The monks immediately have
him baptized and, through special permission of the Pope, allow him to enter
the monastery at thirteen. Samuel never returns to his father, who, upon
learning of his son‘s decision, dresses himself in sackcloth and ashes in
ritual mourning for his lost son.
The novel resumes the action fourteen years later, when
Samuel, now an ordained priest of the Catholic Church, is preparing to
celebrate his first mass. The Polish nobility, however, have decided to use the
ritual of Communion as a lesson for the Jews.
The mass is to be celebrated in the church in Samuel‘s
hometown of Kottowin, and the procession has been ordered to pass through the
Jewish quarter, and by the synagogue in particular, where the band plays ―the
Jew march.‖ Samuel, who knew nothing of this edict, is humiliated and saddened.
When they arrive at the church, Samuel, who is now known as Brother Gregorius,
feels a sense of impending doom as he prepares to celebrate the holy Eucharist.
The face of Christ on the cross appears to him as his father‘s own face,
rebuking him. As he lifts the host to perform the mass, someone shoots at him.
Samuel faints, only to be awakened by Dr. Rosnik telling him to get up and show
he is unharmed. Samuel manages to complete the mass, but
[t]he ceremony which he performed was to him like the real
dying of the Lord, and he felt as if he himself were on the cross, and that a
spear had pierced his side. [. . . .] All Brother Gregorius felt was the broken
body and the spilt blood. The miracle of transubstantiation had taken place,
but the Lord was dead in his own heart, buried in the tomb. (109)
In the ritual moment,
theology and counter-history are one in a new form of transubstantiation, as
Samuel‘s body and the bodies of all Jews are merged with the body of Christ,
the very symbol used to signify the Jewish body as different.
In a manner similar to that of Brudno,
Steiner drives his point home further as the Christian ritual sacrifice of the
Jewish body leads to its ironic reenactment in the village of Kottowin, where a
bloody pogrom against the Jews immediately ensues in retaliation for the
―shooting‖ in the church, an act which was arranged by the nobility as a
pretext for punishing the Jews. The Jewish quarter is burned, and the Jews of
Kottowin are massacred. Samuel, now reawakened to his heritage, accuses the
nobility of arranging the pogrom and declares himself a Jew who will live and
suffer with his own people. In a paradoxical passage reminiscent of The Fugitive that may reveal some of
Steiner‘s own unexpressed feelings, Samuel unleashes a tide of rage on the
Gentile community for their acts of violence against Jews, swinging a large
crucifix, the icon of Christian martyrdom, to beat the Christian tormentors of the
Jewish community.
While Samuel manages to drag his father
out of a burning house, Abraham, despondent in his old age, without a son to
whom he can pass on the priestly legacy, tells Samuel that his son is dead. Now
homeless, the Jews of Kottowin, including Abraham, emigrate to America. Samuel
is left behind, broken in body and spirit, in the care of Suszka, but he will
eventually emigrate and start a new life as well, now as a Jew but under the
new name of Gregorowitch.
Steiner‘s use of the ritual of Communion
and the ensuing pogrom engages in a somatics that annihilates the boundaries
between Judaism and Christianity, revealing the Jewish body of Christ as the
site of the suffering and martyrdom of the Jews, and its deep connection,
through its suffering, to Christianity and the rest of humanity. In the
communion ritual, the Jewish body is both dignified and defended by its
political and theological use as the Jewish Samuel Cohen, born on the Day of
Atonement, acts as priest in breaking and offering the body of the Jewish Christ
in a Christian ritual of atonement that reunites him with his own Jewish body.
Samuel will later continue his religious quest in America. Unlike Brudno‘s
Israel Abramowitch, however, Samuel will refuse to live solely as a Jew but,
instead, will attempt to live in the margins as a mediator between Judaism and
Christianity, opening a Jewish/Christian mission and settlement house as part
of a Tolstoyian vision that seeks to imitate Christ through service to the
poor. Samuel‘s marginality will earn him the vilification of both Christians
and
Jews, but he will willingly accept their
opprobrium as part of his mission to include both
Christians and Jews in the body of Christ.[21]
Steiner‘s somatics work to elevate the
status of the Jewish body in the American mind, perhaps to accomplish in a
fictional mode something that Steiner was unable to do in the more scientific
mode of his sociological discourse on immigration. The ritual somatics of both
Steiner and Brudno, carried on in the context of a Christian nation that bore
the imprint of the body of Christ through foundational texts like Winthrop‘s,
attempt an audacious social and theological task as they boldly raise up a
competing definition of the body of Christ in the people of Israel, even as
they make a plea for the incorporation of the Jews into the mythic American
Body of Christ.
Finally, in one of the saddest and most
radical uses of ritual somatics, Abraham Cahan turned to the body of the father
as the icon of Jewish patriarchy to shape the tragic contours of his 1917 novel
The Rise of David Levinsky. In a long career at the Jewish
Daily Forward, Cahan
continually defended the Jewish body, and, although a Socialist, Cahan was
sympathetic to the ritual practice of Jews as an important medium for cultural
preservation and political empowerment (Howe 112), often writing in the persona
of a maggid, a traditional Hebrew
preacher, on matters of socialism in order to appeal to the religious
sensibilities of his audience (111). In his autobiography Bleter Fun mein Leben, Cahan recalls the Sabbath rituals in his
Lithuanian town of Vilno with reverence and gratitude:
The synagogue was in the far corner of the courtyard.
Coming toward it, I could perceive the hanging candelabrum, its candles burning
brightly, and the proud men of the congregation washed and clean in their
Sabbath clothes. Then the Sabbath was like a fresh, new blossoming. I could
feel it in my bones. Often, my father would tell me about the neshomah yeseroh,
the supplementary soul which descends on Sabbath eve for each Jew. I would feel
it in the service and afterward at home. I would feel the beauty in the
synagogue—beauty for the eye and the ear and the heart. (36)
He also describes the Sabbath celebration at home in a moving
passage that reveals an intertwining of memories of his father and the religion
of the Fathers that would prove significant in The Rise of David Levinsky:
A holy aura surrounds the white tablecloth and the shining
candlesticks with their glowing candles. My father paces back and forth across
the room, excitedly singing a Sabbath song, and it is then that it seems I hear
his neshomah yeseroh singing. I can hear it in his song. I can see it hovering
over the candlesticks. (37)
In The
Rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan draws upon his memories of ritual and
its emotional significance to tell the story of a man whose existential
unmooring is partially the result of childhood confusion over the
interpretation of a significant ritual moment—the funeral of his father. The first
significant memory that David recalls in the novel is also his first encounter
with death. Although he was only two, David was
brought at the age of two to recite Kaddish over his father‘s
shrouded body, according to Jewish law. Jewish ritual observance requires
setting the body apart and treating it as holy in death, with prescribed rules
for touching, washing, positioning and clothing the body. As part of the Jewish
belief that everyone is equal in death, all of the deceased are clothed in the
same garment—a simple white shroud, which is meant to symbolize purity,
simplicity, and dignity (Lamm 3-8).
David remembers standing beside his
father‘s body and associates the experience with the holy due to the power of
Jewish ritual, which requires the body to be enclosed by burning candles in a
sacred space upon the floor. David tells us, ―I was unable to fully realize the
meaning of the ceremony, of course, but its solemnity and pathos were not
altogether lost on me‖ (4). David‘s recollection of this moment gives us
important insights into a major event that underlies many of his actions, as
well as David‘s later difficulty in interpreting his own experience. In the
mind of the child David, the vision of his father‘s body covered with the
shroud becomes the symbol of both the presence and absence of the father, and
of the Jewish body, a paradoxical vision of the World of the
Fathers that will later lead to David‘s own simultaneous
advancement and diminishment. His fascination with his father‘s shrouded body subsequently
becomes a fascination with his father‘s coat, which he recalls pulling over his
head, shutting his eyes and imagining
―a flow of fantastic shapes, bright, beautifully tinted, and
incessantly changing form and color. While the play of these figures and hues
was going on before me I would see all sorts of bizarre visions, which at times
seemed to have something to do with my father‘s spirit‖ (5).
For David, the coat serves to
recall his father, but as a type of the death shroud, it also recalls the
father as blank. In the literal world of the child, to recall the father means
to imitate the father and to obliterate his own body with the coat just as the
shroud obliterated his father‘s body. Thus, the ritual means of dignifying the
Jewish patriarchal body becomes linked in David‘s mind to its disappearance.
The cloak of the father is the death shroud and becomes the symbol of David‘s
quest to obliterate the Jewish body, the Jewish self. ―The Jew,‖ Gilman writes,
―[. . .] has but little choice: his essence, which incorporates the horrors
projected onto him and which is embodied (quite literally) in his physical
being, must try, on one level or another, to become invisible‖ (236). David
carries this pursuit into his American project as he turns the desire for the
lost father into the quest for the cloak on a large scale, becoming one of the
nation‘s leading cloak manufacturers. In the new American setting, the cloak
becomes even more a symbol of the obliteration of the Jewish body as David cuts
his forelocks, disguises his own ethnicity with American clothes, and does his
best to keep his hands still when he speaks—all in pursuit of the cloak.
The egalitarian nature of the ritual shroud is
also ambivalent in the novel. On the one hand, David makes the cloak available
to all through mass production, yet the mass production of the garment
indicates the perpetuation of the conforming identity that David has adopted.
On the other hand, in his personal life David uses the cloak and the money it
brings as a symbol of status, which separate him both from his heritage and the
common man. He never succeeds in finding
love and family stability, drifting uneasily between unsatisfying images of the
commodified version of love Kevin White describes and the rigorous but
anchoring married life of Jewish tradition. Thus, as is the case with many
Jewish immigrant novels, the absence, alienation, or death of the father
signals the loss of the patriarchal values that will eventually lead to the
kind of moral confusion that marks the life of the wealthy David Levinsky, a
man who seems, more than any of the protagonists of immigrant novels, to suffer
a tragic impoverishment from the loss of ritual, what Mary Douglas describes as
―the loss of articulation in the depth of past time‖
(41). At the end of the novel David, who now
belongs to a German Jewish synagogue
―chiefly because it is a fashionable synagogue‖ (528), mourns
the loneliness born of his estrangement from his cultural roots with a final
wistful memory of ―the poor lad swinging over a Talmud volume at the Preacher‘s
Synagogue‖ (529)—the Jewish body,
ecstatic in ritual practice.
William Boelhower has remarked that in contrast to the
Europeans who arrived in the New World armed with cartographical
representations of geographical ownership, the Native American owned only the
territory of his body (Through a Glass
Darkly 61). One could argue that when the immigrant arrived in the New
World, these roles were reversed: the newcomer‘s body was the only terra firma on which he could stand, the
only space, at least at first, that he could attempt to call his own; yet, like
that of the
Native American, the immigrant body was heterotopic to the
Anglo-American cultural vision of American space. An uncomprehending gaze
constructed the immigrant body as tenement; yet to leave that tenement behind,
like Levinsky, Steiner, or Boas, often meant a difficult existence outside the
House of their Fathers. In their different uses of ritual somatics, which
insist upon the value of the body and of corporal knowledge to American
experience, these immigrant writers performed a compensatory service to
American letters and anticipated novels of the late twentieth century such as
those of Leslie
Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday, which continue the use of
ritual somatics to incorporate the ethnic Other into the American social body
and to reunite the spirit and the flesh in American culture.
Chapter Two: Ritual Space and the Immigrant Quest
for Place
At Chicago‘s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which proudly
touted the World‘s Parliament of Religions as the first public interfaith
dialogue, the visitor, having viewed the icons of American progress in the
White City, could exit the building and stroll down the mile-long Midway Plaisance past recreations of Celtic and
German villages toward the exhibitions at the bottom of the strip, where the
complexions of the inhabitants on display became progressively browner, the
clothing stranger, and the atmosphere more purely commercial. On ―Cairo Street‖
the visitor might have paid a small fee to enter the
Temple of Luxor and watch the ancient rites of Ammon Ra, or
stood in the bazaar for the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, where the Shema struggled to be heard amid the
clang of distant cymbals, the beat of tom-toms, and the band music from the
German village (Seager 28). Moving still farther from the White City, the
visitor could observe a
Java priest performing a wedding or funeral ceremony for the
inhabitants of his ―village‖ or watch an Inuit priest sacrifice a bull (27).
Humorist A.J. Dockarty gave an account of this spectacle of rituals in accents
reminiscent of Huck Finn, writing about Hindus and
Muslims ―all rigged up in sheets and pillar cases‖ (176). When
the Muslims face Mecca to pray, the ―innocent‖ rustic exclaims, ―You can‘t tell
whether they‘re at prayer or a dog fit, but I suppose it‘s all the same in
Arabia‖ (qtd. in Seager 211). At the
very bottom of the Midway, farthest away from the White City, stood the booths
of Africans and Native Americans who performed their sacred rituals for a
motley throng of the curious, the indifferent, the horrified, and the
mocking.
Richard Seager has described the
Columbian Exposition as an American sacred space, ―a disposable sanctum
sanctorum for [the] religion of civilization, and an ideological landscape
built upon the classical, Christian, and patriotic signs at the core of the
Columbian myth‖ (11). Indeed, the Columbiad was less the site of a religious
dialogue than a visual monologue, the layout of which proclaimed the sanctity
of a utopian Anglo-American space through
the symbolic interweaving of the moral, the religious, and the ethnic, where in
descending order on the ―evolutionary scale,‖ racial groups considered too
primitive for inclusion in the White City performed ―strange‖ rituals for a
carnival crowd hungry for, yet contemptuous of, the exotic.
As Seager
explains, ―The White City revealed white, mainstream America‘s preferred image
of itself, but the Midway Plaisance,
a living ethnographic display that formed a second part of the Exposition,
revealed America‘s image of the rest of the world‖ (24). For the immigrant who
may have attended the Columbiad, and who was
the rest of the world, this spectacle of ritual performance might have felt
oddly familiar, for these religious devotions, perceived as entertainment by an
uncomprehending crowd, poignantly reveal in microcosm the attempt by the ethnic
Other to ―place‖ himself by means of ritual within the socio-cultural landscape
of America. In this landscape the immigrant often suffered a chronic sense of
dislocation even as he disconcerted the native born, who in turn adopted
cartographical strategies that located the immigrant outside the sacred center
of America and reduced his living religious practice to cultural artifact. Immigrant writers such as Louis Forgione,
O.E. Rölvaag, and Elias Tobenkin frequently depicted the sense of dislocation
and liminality experienced by immigrants as well as their attempts, through
ritual, to create a sacred immigrant place out of American space, attempts that
were often, paradoxically, ambivalent and only partially successful. In
textually performing their rituals for the reading public, these writers
recognized that ―sacred places are always highly charged sites for contested
negotiations over the ownership of the symbolic capital that signifies power
relations‖ (Chidester and Linenthal 16), and, thus, used ritual as a means of
asserting a competing ideological map of geo-social space to resist ―maps‖ like
the Columbiad.
To decode the Columbiad is to appreciate the perennial
human need to be placed—to be oriented through the creation of a place set
apart from the homogeneity of space and time—as it would continue to manifest
itself during the major period of immigration from the 1880s to the 1920s, a
period in which many immigrants and native- born Americans perceived themselves
as dislocated. David Jacobson has attempted to define the concept of place as
follows:
―place‖ is a constant of the human condition. The search
for place [. . .] is the search for locating the self in the infinite universe
of space and time. The question of place, beyond territorial imperatives, is
what distinguishes humans from other creatures. The temporal and spatial
dimensions of place also indicate why the metaphysical dimension, large and
small, from God to icons, from theology to the spatial tempo of funeral rites,
is part of the definition of life. (92)
All human beings need to feel ―placed‖ in
time and space. Furthermore, as Jonathan Z. Smith has argued, the sense of
place is bound up with the experience of two very different types of space—the
locative and the utopian. Smith defines locative space as a metaphysical
extension of the positional structures described by Basil Bernstein— that is,
as a sacred temenos reinforced by the
imperative of collective adherence to fixed positions within a larger scheme of
things. By contrast, utopian space is unbounded, open, full of possibility, unattached
to any particular location, and reachable only by breaking the bonds of the
prevailing social order.[22] The immigrants who came to America during
this period entered an arena in which these two types of space were being
reconsidered, redefined, and often were in conflict, partly because of the
presence of the immigrants themselves and partly because of the ambivalence
with which Americans experienced their own space. Thus, the Exposition was a
cultural node at which the historically intertwined categories of the moral,
the religious, and the ethnic were spatially schematized for the viewing public
in a sacred space that served as a positioning strategy for locating the groups
who built it by de-centering those it relegated to the Midway.
The Columbiad, at which the ritualized
Other was barred from the sacred center of the White City, was in many ways a
nineteenth-century manifestation of the original need for locative and utopian
space experienced in the Puritan removal to the New World and the complicated
relationship to space and place that the Puritan exodus created.
Sacred spaces are not autochthonous, nor do they erupt
spontaneously, as Eliade noted. Sacred spaces, and America surely is no
exception, are constructed by human labor and are embedded with the politics of
power, position, and exclusion. As
Chidester and Linenthal maintain:
power is asserted and resisted in any production of space,
and especially in the production of sacred space. Since no sacred space is
merely ―given‖ in the world, its ownership will always be at stake. In this
respect, a sacred space is not merely discovered, or founded, or constructed;
it is claimed, owned, and operated by
people advancing specific interests. (15)
Indeed, the Puritan removal to the American
continent was in part a project to construct sacred space by expunging certain
rituals from the spiritual landscape in order to delimit a Biblical territory
in which the religious person could worship God free of what were viewed as the
corruptions imposed by the practices of the Roman Catholic Church and the
Church of England. The Puritan drive toward this new utopian space, resulted,
however, in an especially intense experience of liminality, the space of
―betwixt and between,‖ as Victor Turner has put it, which demanded some means
of creating locative space. Puritan sermons, such as Robert Cushman‘s Reasons and Considerations Touching the
Lawfulness of Removing out of England into the Parts of America, written in
1622, powerfully depict the Puritan‘s sense of being ―displaced,‖ of having no fixed point of orientation in the world: ―But
now we are all, in all places, strangers and pilgrims, travelers and
sojourners: most properly, having no dwelling but in this earthen tabernacle.
Our dwelling is but a wandering and our abiding, but as a fleeting; and, in a
word, our home is nowhere but in the heavens; in that house not made with
hands‖ (27).
Cushman‘s sermon poetically discloses the
dilemma at the heart of the Puritan experience of liminality in America. Since
―religions of transcendental hope tend to discourage the establishment of
place‖ (Tuan 180), the liminal space extended for the Puritan both horizontally
and vertically—a double consciousness of an experience of exile that urged the
foundation of a home in the New World even as it compelled the Christian whose
true home could never be found outside of the heavenly Jerusalem to remain a
stranger on the earth. Thus, ―there is that curious tension in [. . . ] the
Puritans, between the desire for movement,
to progress historically in the drive to the millennium, and the desire to order the world, to conquer the earthly
kingdom‖ (Jacobson 32). The Puritan longed for the heavenly Jerusalem even as
he labored to build it on earth. Both visions required that spatiality be
coterminous with morality. This tension between the desire for utopian and
locative space has continued in the American attitude toward place up to the
present day.
The ambivalence at the heart of the
American relationship to space was further complicated by the entanglement of
the need for locative and utopian space with the original Puritan confrontation
with the ritualized ethnic Other in the Native American, a confrontation which
involved a collision of patterns of movement and conceptions of time used to
demarcate space as place. As Jacobson notes, ―The Reformation offered a radical
reorientation to perhaps the central
markers of human life—movement, space, and time. Place is the intersection of time and space, and place is
demarcated through patterns of movement and settlement‖ (28). The Puritan
attempt to sacralize American space in the cleansing wake of a radically
historical, linear movement toward an
apocalyptic future lay in direct opposition to the cyclical, repetitive, and
fixed enactments that were characteristic of Native American ritual, which
Puritans viewed through a lens clouded with anti-papist sentiment.[23] Indeed, as the topography of the Columbiad
suggests, it can be argued that the collision of the Puritan creation of sacred
place by means of a linear and historical movement through space with the cyclical and ahistorical repetition of
movement within space that was
characteristic of Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Native American ritual remained
an unspoken theme in the dominant American spiritual narrative but became
explicit again as the millennialism that arose with the evangelical movement
combined with Anglo-American Nativism in a new confrontation with immigrant
ritual. Thus, even as the immigrant experience of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries reflected the same needs for utopian and locative space
experienced by the Puritans, their correspondence in the American mind to the
ritualized Other of Roman Catholic and Native American practice necessitated the
same defensive strategies of exclusion that the Puritans used to locate
themselves in the New World. Although
the national theological narrative delineated sacred space in a manner that was
in many ways antithetical to the immigrant‘s ritual construction of place, the
national political narrative allowed for—and even required—the use
of civic ritual to create a sense of national boundaries within which the
sacredness of human life was linked to civic order. Eric Hobsbawm has examined
the tendency of newly emerging nation states in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries to use ritual as a means of creating a sense of national
tradition and unity. America, in particular, faced the problem of creating a
unified American territory after the Civil War out of the heterogeneity brought
on by political conflict, urbanization, and immigration. Hobsbawm maintains
that this was done primarily through an exchange of civic rituals whereby
immigrants were urged to engage in the cult of the American national myth (by celebrating,
for example, the
Fourth of July and Thanksgiving), while
giving up their own collective rituals (like St.
Patrick‘s Day and Columbus Day), which might be absorbed, in
turn, by the nation (27980). That this exchange did indeed occur is exemplified
by the rituals at the opening of the Columbian Exposition, which symbolically
interwove the American Flag, the Statue of Liberty, and Händel‘s Hallelujah Chorus in a ritual
performance that universalized the amalgam of patriotic, classical, and Christian
signs implicit in the Anglo-Protestant religion of civilization, while at the
same time declaring Columbus Day, honoring the first ―Italian-American,‖ to be
a national holiday (Seager 6).
While the cartographical strategy of
location used at the Columbiad ordered American space in accord with an
Anglo-American vision of optimism and a fairly benign use of social
evolutionary and racial theories, the same sense of unease could give birth to
horrific nativist visions like the following excerpt from Boston poet Thomas
Bailey Aldrich‘s poem ―Unguarded Gates‖ (1892), which uses a
similar constellation of classical and Christian images in a meditation on the
pollution of American space by invading immigrant groups:
Wide open and unguarded stand our gates,
And through them presses a wild motley
throng—
Men from Volga and the Tartar steppes,
Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho,
Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav,
Flying the Old World‘s poverty and scorn; These
bringing with them unknown gods and rites,—
Those, tiger passions, here to stretch
their claws.
In street and alley what strange tongues
are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well
To leave the gates unguarded? On thy
breast
Fold Sorrow‘s children, soothe the hurts
of fate,
Lift the down-trodden, but with hand of
steel
Stay those who to thy sacred portals come
To waste the gifts of freedom. Have a
care
Lest from thy brow the clustered stars be
torn
And trampled in the dust. For so of old
The thronging Goth and Vandal trampled
Rome,
And where the temples of the Caesars stood
The lean wolf unmolested made her lair.
(20-41)
In this passage, the speaker warns the
white goddess of Liberty about invading hordes of ritualized immigrants, whose
―unknown gods and rites‖ are paired with the claws of tiger passions,
indicating the speaker‘s perception of them as both irrational and powerful
enough to defile the purity of sacred Anglo-American space symbolized in the
white goddess.[24]
The speaker‘s anxiety about the corruption of the purity of American space by
immigrant bodies reflects the primordial relationship between sacred space and
the issue of purity, which has been the issue around which the contestedness of
sacred space has revolved throughout the history of religion (Chidester and
Linenthal 10).
Aldrich‘s poem was only one of many nativist strategies
for the defense of the purity of American space during the years between the
onset of heavy immigration in the 1880s and the effective close of immigration
in 1924. Legislative strategies
included persistent attempts by nativist groups to reformulate legally the
ethnic composition of American territory by means of the literacy test and a
cunning use of census figures, beginning in earnest with the Immigration Act of
1882 and ending with the Immigration Act of 1924, which effectively ended Asian
immigration completely and limited
European immigrants to a quota of two per cent of the number
of each nationality‘s total American population in 1890 (Higham 324). The 1924
bill was justified by an appeal to the duty to preserve a distinct American
type, to keep America for Americans, and to save the Nordic race from being
swamped by ―lesser‖ races.
This
rationale reflected the pervasive influence of eugenics, discussed in Chapter
One, which can be viewed as another locative strategy
practiced by native-born Americans. Numerous books, such as Madison Grant‘s The Passing of the Great Race, sought by
means of ―a crude interpretation of Mendelian genetics‖ overlaid with religious
rhetoric to argue that the addition of new ethnic groups into American space
threatened to destroy the moral virtue of the nation—because, when races mix,
the higher type always reverts to the lower type (156). A form of literary
eugenism also took possession of the minds of a number of American men of
letters in the 1920s, to whose decrees immigrant novelists were likely to have
paid close attention. Literary traditionalists argued that the body of American
literature had become a contested space in which Anglo-American writers had a responsibility
to defend its purity from the corruptions introduced by lesser races and
immigrant parvenus like Theodore Dreiser whom H. L. Mencken, a voice of
tolerance, championed against a nation ―engaged in a grotesque pogrom against
the wop, the coon, the kike, the papist, the Jap, the what-not—worse, engaged
in an even more grotesque effort to put down ideas as well as men [ . . .] to
give the puerile ethical and religious notions of lonely farmers and corner
grocers the force and dignity of constitutional axioms‖ (qtd. in Elliott
314).
Mencken‘s description aptly describes
assimilationist movements like the
―100
Percent American‖ movement, which arose during and after the
war as yet another means of controlling the ethnic composition of American space
according to a historical vision of an agrarian, Anglo-Protestant nation. Such
movements often identified immigrants with an urban blight that could destroy
the sanctity of the Jeffersonian model of Americans identified with the land.
These fears were intensified by the vision of the closed frontier articulated
at the end of the 19th century by Frederick Jackson Turner, which
for the first time gave Americans a sense of limited space and raised questions
regarding the criteria by which that space should be constructed and to whom
that space should belong. Further, these movements sought to purify American
space by cleansing the immigrants of contaminating Old World traditions,
customs, and memories that divided their loyalties and made them susceptible to
subversive movements. During this period the Americanization Committee overseen
by Francis Kellor proposed requiring Americanization classes for foreigners and
the deportation of any immigrant who did not learn English and apply for
citizenship within three years (249). The American‘s creed, emphasizing the
duties of a loyal citizen, became a daily rite in the public school (205). The
Americanization movement eventually gave way to post-war frustrations that
resulted in a reactionary belief that aliens simply could not be assimilated
and thus supplied fuel for the fire to exclude immigrants by means of
legislation (263). As the energy left the movement, what Higham calls the
―tribalism‖ of the 1920s, with all of its attendant hysteria was free to emerge,
as various nativist groups within the country sought some kind of familiar
landmark in an increasingly unrecognizable territory. The 100 Per Cent American movement
also ushered in the birth of nativist secret protective societies that saw
their task as one of policing American space. This phenomenon had begun in the
late 1880s among lower middle-class workers who felt culturally and
economically dislocated by immigrants. At first these organizations were
confined to the Northeast and Midwest but, over time, spread to the West and
South as well. For example, in 1891, the American Protective League was
established in Omaha and, according to Higham, functioned during World War I
―almost as an auxiliary of the
Justice Dept,‖ searching for evidence against immigrants they
deemed a threat to national security, which often consisted of gossip, rumor
and hearsay, or suspicions aroused by the failure to buy Liberty Bonds
(211-12). The Ku Klux Klan was the most intense expression of the confluence of
fears regarding the integrity of American sacred space, religious
fundamentalist Protestantism, and 100 Per Cent Americanism. The Klan launched
attacks against Catholics and Jews, along with Negroes, as invaders of the
sacred precincts of America, most notably during the period between 1915 and
1923 (293). The white-robed Klansman, then, was a dark manifestation of the
same sense of the marginalization of Anglo-Protestant racial, moral, and
religious dominance that was manifested in the layout of the Columbiad, combined
with a rural fundamentalism that exacerbated the tendency of Protestant
Nativism to ―convert social and economic conflicts into religious and
nationalistic ones‖ (82).
Indeed, almost all of the locating strategies practiced by native-born
Americans during the late 19th and early 20th
centuries were allied with Protestant Nativism, and the rhetorical modes of
those strategies often partook of the same admixture of religion and
ethnocentrism found in the Evangelical slogan
―Christianization and Americanization are one and the same
thing‖ (261), which motto also captures the old ambivalence of the Puritan, the
simultaneous desire to sprint toward the Heavenly Jerusalem and to set up a New
Jerusalem on earth. For religious immigrants, who often experienced the values
of Americanization as in conflict with the values imposed by their religious
beliefs, such slogans created unavoidable tensions, which they attempted to
ease through a variety of ways, one of them being a faithful adherence to their
rituals. In their presentation of these rituals in their fiction, immigrant
writers took upon themselves the task of asserting a counter-cartography of
America that used the same strategic interweaving of the religious, the moral,
and the ethnic in the drawing of its contours.
The question of just how acutely
immigrants to America experienced a sense of dislocation, and the severity of
the needs that arose out of that sense, has been the subject of debate among
historians of immigration. Founders of immigration history, such as Oscar
Handlin, often depicted the immigration experience as one of alienation,
marginalization, and disorientation. Handlin writes, ―The whole American
universe was different. Strangers, the immigrants could not locate themselves;
they had lost the polestar that gave them their bearings‖ (86). Historians who
followed, however, such as Herbert Gutman, took a different stance, insisting
that immigrant experience was more marked by balance and continuity than
Handlin had acknowledged and that immigrants had effective coping mechanisms
that they used to smooth the transition from one place to another (Gutman 43).[25]
Immigrant novels indicate that both views are correct: Immigrants did
experience a wrenching sense of displacement and anxiety in the face of trying
to claim a piece of the American physical, social, and economic landscape, and
they did use certain coping strategies to meet the needs that arose out of that
sense of dislocation. Religious ritual was one of these coping strategies by
which immigrants were able to make a complex exchange between different types
of space and to create a sense of place in America.
First, the immigrant use of ritual
occurred in the context of a subtle interplay between varying conceptions of
utopian space. The immigrants who came to America felt its pull along with the
expectation of unbounded freedom and possibility the new country offered. When
they arrived, however, those visions of endless opportunity were tempered by
the realities of life in America. The dehumanizing spaces they were forced to
inhabit often drastically curtailed their sense of the possibilities of ever
possessing the ideal place of their dreams. Along with their desire for a place
in the new land, therefore, the immigrant developed a concomitant need for an alternative utopian space, an ideal
world in which the strictures, hardships, and confusions imposed by the new
world could be lifted, if only for a brief time, and the norms of immigrant
culture could predominate.
In addition, for the newly arrived
immigrant, the vastness, fluidity, and relativity of America must have caused
something similar to the disorientation that Mircea Eliade describes as the
―homogeneity of space‖—the essentially undifferentiated quality of reality. In
the fragmented environment in which the immigrants now found themselves, their
need for locative space intensified. Many immigrants now needed the sense of
enclosure, well-defined position, and secure boundaries that ritual provided in
order to endure the trials of creating a new life in a confusing and
latitudinarian society.
Finally, the immigrant had to achieve a sense
of place, a sense of familiarity and intimacy with the new environment, through
the introduction of memory and emotion into an unfamiliar territory. Following
Kant, many humanistic geographers insist that the concept of place cannot be
understood apart from considerations of the temporal and the emotional. Whereas
space is connected with unrestricted freedom, place is defined as a locus of
meaning, usually forged through the introduction of human feelings, values, and
memories at the intersection of time and space. For example, Yi-Fu Tuan writes:
―Space‖ is more abstract than ―place.‖ What begins as
undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it
with value [. . . .] If we think of space as that which allows movement, then
place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be
transformed into place [. . ; ] place is permanent and hence reassuring to man,
who sees frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere. (154)
Similarly, Allan Gussow points to the
role of emotion in the creation of place when he states, ―The catalyst that
converts any physical location—any environment if you will—into a place, is the
process of experiencing deeply. A place is a piece of the whole environment
that has been claimed by feelings‖ (30). Since the creation of place is
directly related to the intensity of
experiences rather than their extensity
(Feibleman 55), ritually constructed space, set apart from the drudgery of life
in the ghetto or the monotony of the grassy plains, provided a closed precinct
in which immigrants could create intimacy with their new environment through
deeply felt experiences that could be housed in memory.
The rituals performed in the basements of
Catholic churches in Little Italy, in tiny synagogues on the Lower East Side,
or in makeshift sod houses on the western plains were immensely important
mechanisms, which, through their strategies of formalized and symbolic
spatiality, fixity, and repetition created a transcendent alternative utopian
space, the security and order of locative space, and an emotional arena in
which the immigrant could forge bonds with American space through the
experience of the powerful but often unacknowledged emotions of hope, fear,
guilt, and grief that were part and parcel of immigration. If ritual did indeed serve such an important
function, it is important to examine how this was accomplished.
First, as many theorists have realized, ritual
frames a point in time and space through the erection of imaginary boundaries.
As the previous chapter established, this is done primarily through the
movements of physical bodies that manipulate basic spatial distinctions
radiating from the axis of the human body—up and down, right and left, inside
and outside, center and periphery. Bruce Kapferer calls attention to the
spatial aspect of ritual by describing it as ―self-contained imaginal space‖
that creates an ―‗invisible membrane‘ that surrounds the action itself and sets
it apart from the flow of everyday life while at the same time allowing for a
pragmatic engagement with it‖ (516518).
In short, ritual frames an invisibly bounded and enclosed space through
the movements of the body, much as a mime creates an invisible box through the
positions of his hands against the empty air. The construction of ritual space
through bodily movement may at first appear to contradict Tuan‘s definition of
place as ―pause,‖ yet when we remember, as noted above, that ritual movement is
movement within a space enclosed by imaginal boundaries, rather than through space toward an apocalyptic
future, we can recognize the symbolic movements of ritual as a kind of
burrowing into place, movements of anchoring or rooting rather than of
momentum.
Second, successful ritual, based as it is
upon a strategy of privileged oppositions that differentiate ritual space and
activity from the quotidian, creates the world
―as it ought to be‖ (Chidester and Linenthal 9-10), a highly charged
paradigmatic arena for enacting ultimate concerns as well as a protective area
that provides the participant
―another world to live in,‖ which Santayana claimed is the
primary purpose of all religion.
Furthermore, this sense of the world as it ought to be can exist in varying
degrees of tension with the world as it is. As ritual theorist Gerd Baumann has
recognized, rituals, particularly in pluralistic societies, implicate others,
whether they are directly or indirectly present. Rituals are used to ―convey a
message across a cultural cleavage to ‗others‘ or to an outside ‗public‘
and [. . . ] this message is concerned
quite centrally with reformulating the cleavage between ‗us‘ and ‗them‘‖ (98).
Thus, as part of the process of creating place, ritual can become a means of
critiquing the space outside the boundaries it erects. This is especially
important in the case of immigrant novelists who textually performed ritual for
the reading public, playing upon and enhancing its critical powers.
Jacobson‘s definition of place as the
intersection of time and space reflects a general consensus on the part of
ritual theorists: that the unique experience of time in ritual is essential to
the experience of place. Ritual locates
the participant historically and spatially through its subtle manipulation of
what Gunter Thomas has called a
―‗frozen‘ autopoesis
of communication,‖ by which it utilizes the memories of its participants
through the repetition of the same form of communication over large temporal
and geopolitical expanses, thus becoming a ―(meta)medium for the transcendence
of a given space and time by ritualized communication‖ (336). Through repeated
symbolic acts that trigger memories of other enactments, rituals provide a
sense of security by connecting their participants diachronically and
synchronically to a worldwide community that also connects innumerable points
in space. In so doing, ritual establishes and makes comprehensible the place of
its participants by connecting them across time and space with significant
persons who also perform the same symbolic gestures, thereby making any single
point a part of the translocal and transhistorical imaginal place created by
ritual.
Finally, the use of imagination and
memory in the ritual establishment of place inevitably connects it to the
emotional realm. Thomas J. Scheff has written of the power of ritual ―for
coping with universal distress‖ by creating an aesthetic distance through its
formalized symbolic gestures that enable participants to experience their own
emotions without being overwhelmed by them (484-6). Similarly, Dorothea Lüddeckens has
established ritual as a powerful vehicle for bearing and transforming large
amounts of human emotional freight by means of ―established culturally
constructed and maintained systems of symbols—pre-formed ‗models of the world‘
already associated with certain emotions‖ (570). The highly charged symbols and gestures of
ritual, therefore, when united with memories of previous enactments of the same
gestures, engender powerful unconscious resonances and entanglements of place,
memory, and feeling, creating intimacy with the point in space in which they
are experienced.
A brief consideration of one depiction of
Italian religious processions by immigrant novelist Louis Forgione can serve as
a starting point for an examination of the ways ritual constructed place and
provided the utopian and locative dimensions for its participants, as well as
the ways immigrant writers could use their performances of their communities‘
rituals to bring important concerns before their audiences. Orsi has documented the role of the
processional devotions to the Madonna and other saints in assisting the Italian
community to achieve a sense of orientation in America through their ability to
dramatize the emotional lives of their participants even as they ―claim[ed]
part of American space and American time‖ (189). A similar process is at work
in the 1928 novel The River Between, which,
like the novels of Ciambelli and LaPolla discussed in Chapter One, locates the
immigrant struggle toward the ideal in the body. Forgione examines the
unforgiving nature of the immigrant experience through two forms of physical
bereavement—the masculine loss of power and the feminine loss of purity—in
Italian Harlem. The novel depicts Little Italy as an overcrowded space of dirt,
poverty, and ugliness, where the gas works on the river continually belch smoke
and fumes while its inhabitants struggle continually with their failure to live
up to their visions of the ideal and their sense of abasement and
disorientation in a place they had believed would fulfill their dreams. The
story centers on Rose and Demetrio, two immigrants whose great strength and
passion is undercut by a deep sense of unworthiness and failure. Due to family
quarrels and their inability to conform to Italian norms of behavior, Rose and
Demetrio become homeless, living in exile
across the river from their old community.
Demetrio was once a proud business owner, legendary for his
physical strength, but, after many years in America, now blind and frail and
estranged from his son, he loses himself in idyllic memories of Sicily. Rose,
beautiful and sensual, has been unable to live up to the Madonna image imposed
upon her by Italian society. Since she has been unfaithful to her husband, she
has been deprived of communal supports and has had to resort to prostitution to
sustain herself. In their loneliness and
desolation, the two outcasts, doubly displaced in the American scene, meet
again, and Rose takes in the now ailing Demetrio. Shortly thereafter, they
encounter an Italian religious procession for a Calabrian saint, which Forgione
describes as follows:
First marched two squat huskies
arrayed in Sunday best, holding aloft a banner of violent hues. Numerous dollar
bills pinned on it made a fluttering border around the pink face of the weeping
saint. A dozen pompous personages followed, white ribbons on their arms and
folded sashes aslant on their breasts. The leader held a sword upright, like a
candle, and barked intermittent words of command. Tranquil-eyed, pointing to a
portion of the anatomy over which he holds especial powers, the saint followed,
supported tremulously on a gilded pedestal by four bronzed paisani. The rabble
came next: women, children, in overcoat and shawls, bearing lighted candles,
preceded by a small but noisy band blaring forth the same music which it had
played that morning at a gangster‘s funeral. (215)
Forgione here gives the reader a portrait
in miniature of the hundreds of religious processions that created a sense of
place for immigrants in Italian Harlem. The collective movement of bodies
through the streets of East Harlem creates the invisible boundaries of Little
Italy, a literal marking out of Italian territory, a locative space that positions
the immigrants according to an order they understand and relieves them of the
disorientation brought on by the unfamiliar social order outside its
boundaries. Furthermore, the highly charged symbolic activities associated with
the devotion to the saint create a sacred space in which the world is ―as it
ought to be,‖ where the frailties of the flesh are assured the compassionate
intervention of the divine, where the sword used to defend the community is
also the candle of devotion, where ―the rabble‖ are holy pilgrims, and where
the music of the gangster is fit for a saint. In addition, through the
ritualized repetition of the perennially enacted gestures of the Old World in
the context of the New World, the procession transforms the space of New York
into the ideal place of Italy as it is perceived through memory and the
emotions attached to memory, thus allowing the immigrants to form a bond with
American space by overlaying it with the veneer of the lost world. Forgione‘s
procession exemplifies Clifford Geertz‘s definition of ritual as ―some sort of
ceremonial form—[in which] the world as lived and the world as imagined, fused
under the agency of a single set of symbolic forms, turns out to be the same
world‖ (112). This is the essence of the complex transaction of space that
immigrant ritual practice accomplished. Through ritual, they could claim a
place in
America while simultaneously maintaining citizenship in the
world ―as it ought to be.‖ As recent theorists of place acknowledge,
however, the creation of place is bound up with the competition for and
conquest of space. Since ―every center has a periphery, every symbolic
centering also de-centers those persons and places that stand on or beyond a
center‘s periphery. Therefore, attention to geographical relations between
center and periphery locates specific sacred sites or environments within a
larger network of political, social, and symbolic relations of power‖
(Chidester and Linenthal 15). Though practiced by a marginalized group, the
Italian religious processions partook of these symbolic statements of power in
relationship to space. Furthermore, they
demonstrate
Baumann‘s theory that rituals not only perform certain truths
for the participants themselves but also for those outside the boundaries of ritual space. The hundreds of nonItalian
spectators who often attended the processions of Little Italy were the
recipients of subliminal messages conveyed by the privileged oppositions
implicit in ritual: we and they, here and there, center and periphery, sacred
and profane. Forgione‘s procession, though dedicated to a Calabrian saint,
creates a unified Italian identity in the eyes of other ethnic communities and
to the generalized American public who were implicitly excluded from its
precincts. Rather than a conglomeration of Calabrians, Neapolitans, and
Sicilians, the participants enact a new national consciousness of themselves
before others. The Italian religious processions asserted their own politics of
position, property, and exclusion, and functioned as an address to communities
across a cultural cleavage, claiming place by positioning the Italian community
at the center of sacred space and excluding those outside it.
Forgione‘s use of the ritual procession to
sanctify the failures and imperfections of the Italian immigrant in a place
that transcends the strictures imposed by the social order outside its boundaries enlarges the discussion
of the politics of space to include the reader as well. The novel textually
performs the ritual as part of a larger strategy of placement that positions
the reader as either a participant or a spectator depending on his or her
relationship to the immigrant group, thus implicating the reader in the
contestedness of sacred space in America. This strategy is apparent in all of
the novels under consideration in this chapter and was a natural outgrowth of
the boundaryproducing power of ritual, one of many reasons that immigrant
writers likely felt drawn to ritual as a means of asserting the right of the
immigrant to a place in America.
Whereas the Italian construction of place
occurred within the context of an American space characterized by overcrowding
and confinement, those immigrants who sought to create a place in the
territories of the West faced a different challenge—the literal experience of
what Eliade describes as ―the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no
point of reference is possible and hence no orientation
can be established‖ (21). The Norwegians who envisioned the American
prairie as Vesterheimen, a Norwegian
home in the West, migrated from Minnesota to the Dakotas after the Homestead
Act of 1862 made cheap land available (Øverland 5). They were the most rural of
any of the major immigrant groups, a people from districts imbued with a deep
attachment to the land and to age-old peasant traditions, for whom land
symbolized status and security and for whom the values of farming as a way of
life held quasi-religious significance (Lovoll
126-7). They were also a mountain people with a ―peculiarly
Norwegian sense of gloom,‖ which gave rise to a ―disproportionate incidence of
mental illness‖ on the prairie as the pointed peaks that once gave shape to the
horizon gave way to the undifferentiated line of the tabletop (Skårdal
100). While the Dakotas offered
seemingly unlimited resources for the taking, they could also prove to be the
ruin of the Norwegian farmer, either through the relentless extremes of weather
that battered the prairie or through the loneliness brought on by the isolation
of sod huts remote from any form of civilization. Norwegian
immigrants faced particular challenges in meeting their spiritual needs on the prairie. In a vastly different and
often indifferent environment, they
needed the solace and sense of stability provided by the rites of their Lutheran
heritage, but many faced the immense challenge of converting the prairie into a
habitable place and the homesickness incurred by leaving loved ones far behind
with little support from the Church of Norway, often resorting to lay ministers
and ordinary churchmen for the administration of sacraments in the extremity of
conditions imposed by prairie life (7578).[26] Lutheran church leaders characterized the
lives of immigrants as consisting of a certain apathy and ignorance toward
religious matters on one hand and a sense of urgent but unmet need for
spiritual guidance on the other; yet the typical immigrant, whether pious or
not, felt the need for ecclesiastical administration of rites of passage such
as baptism, confirmation, weddings and funerals (81). Additionally, although
the Norwegian Lutheran Church was plagued by controversy over doctrine, the
role of the laity, and the adoption of high church or low church liturgical
practices, the Norwegian Synod, which, according to Lovoll, became from the
1850s on ―the Norwegian Church in America,‖ adopted the ritual of the Church of
Norway because ―[t]he immigrant church on the prairies and in the wooded groves
in the Midwest, with its high-church ritual and its ceremony, gave the settlers
a sense of solemnity and security. The accustomed and timehonored forms were a
comfort and firm point of orientation
in the new environment‖ (87, emphasis added).
O.E.
Rölvaag‘s Giants in the Earth
(published first in Norwegian in 1924, and in
Rölvaag‘s English translation in 1927) locates the immigrant
quest to create a sacred place out of the geographical and cultural space of
America in the Norwegian immigrant project of settlement and home building in
the great Dakota Territory during the late 1800s. As Harold Simonson has noted,
the novel clearly foreshadows Eliade‘s interpretation of the ritual founding of
place as a project intimately connected with primordial cosmogony and the need
for a ―place (house, village, temple) that serves as a symbolic extension of
the world‘s axis, a paradigmatic cosmos in which we are at home because we
exist in a place made sacred by its connection to the axis‖ (15). For Rölvaag, this axis was a human
construction built of Norwegian culture and religious practice.
The novel, which begins and ends with its
protagonist Per Hansa Holm lost on the prairie, doggedly facing west, is filled
with human confrontations with space: people lose their way in the prairie
grass, animals and human beings are swallowed up in blizzards to reappear again
only after the spring thaw, Native Americans are buried in ―unconsecrated
space,‖ parents grieve over dead children left in unmarked graves in a grassy
void, property ownership is disputed, some pioneers search desperately for
landmarks, while others intentionally destroy them. More than any other
immigrant author, Rölvaag makes explicit the embeddedness of the human
experience of physical space in the experience of moral and psychological space
in America and the importance of ritual in mediating between interior and
exterior landscapes in the difficult transactions of space and place that had
to be made on the prairie. More specifically, Rölvaag uses key ritual moments
interspersed between episodes of human dislocation to insist upon the
psychological importance of cultural traditions in the establishment of place
in America and to assert an alternative ideological map of America as a sacred
space. The most significant of these ritual moments, the lay baptism of Per
Hansa‘s son Peder and the celebration of Holy Communion in his sod hut, asserts
ritual practice as a countermovement to the incessant westering toward utopian
space intrinsic to the American pioneer myth.
Giants in the Earth is, then, a study in the human need for
locative and utopian space. In order
fully to explore the psychological need for both types of space, and the ways
they often conflict, Rölvaag splits these two modes of being between two
characters—Per Hansa and Beret Holm. Per Hansa, who enters and leaves the stage
facing the sun—the utopian future—experiences American space as a wonderland of
possibility that will fulfill the visions of both the Bible and Scandinavian
fairy tales. For Per Hansa, America is Eden, Canaan, and the site of the
legendary Norwegian castle of Soria Moria. His thirst for and delight in
America as a utopian space, in which new kingdoms can be founded, is so great
that he feels little need for the security of locative space.[27]
Though sympathetic, Per Hansa cannot
understand his wife Beret, whose more sensitive, melancholy, and introverted
sensibilities have been honed by pietistic religious belief and a sense of
guilt at having failed in her filial responsibilities by following her husband
to America. Beret‘s need for locative space arises out of a wilderness experience
akin to that of Mary Rowlandson, in which the depravity of human nature, bereft
of all possible hiding places, inevitably calls forth its counterpart from the
emptiness extending on all sides. Rölvaag makes Beret‘s feelings explicit in a
poignant scene in which, sitting alone on the hill behind her house, she takes
in the monotony of the darkening landscape much as Melville‘s Ishmael
contemplates the whiteness of the whale: As her eyes darted nervously here and
there, flitting from object to object and trying to pierce the purple dimness
that was steadily closing in, a sense of desolation so profound settled upon
her that she seemed unable to think at all. It would not do to gaze any longer
at the terror out there, where everything was turning to grim and awful
darkness . . . . She threw herself back in the grass and looked up into the
heavens. But darkness and infinitude lay there, also— Suddenly, for the first
time, she realized the full extent of her loneliness, the dreadful nature of
the fate that had overtaken her. (39)
Beret‘s experience of the landscape is the sign of a deeper
existential disorientation and dread,
akin to Eliade‘s description of the experience of profane space, which, in its
relativity and homogeneity, deprives human beings of any fixed point of
orientation by which they can navigate their existence.[28]
For Rölvaag, whose interest lay in presenting the cost of the American pursuit
of the millennial future to those individual immigrants whose existential
orientation lay in the compass points of communal bonds, traditions, and the
daily consecrations of existence that lay in ritual observance, Beret‘s sense
of dislocation is not simply the result of weakness but of a deep awareness of
the spiritual value of these alternative methods of orientation that provide a
connection to the past and to God. As Simonson recognizes, ―[Rölvaag] sought to
uphold a culture that regarded institutional religion as a necessary
integrating force. He knew that a people without cultural roots becomes trivial
in its values, expedient in its aims, and vulgar in its tastes. Furthermore, he
knew that an individual in his singularity risks psychological breakdown if he
abandons a sense of tradition‖ (39). Rölvaag‘s trilogy, of which Giants formed the first part, reflects
these concerns, as it explores the unraveling of the fabric of Norwegian
culture through the failure of its institutions and the pressures of a
pluralistic society.
Beret‘s apprehension of her own isolation in an
existential void develops into a sense of a malign presence that has enclosed
her family in a magic fairy ring, cutting them off from God‘s sacred order of
existence. She attempts to counteract
this paradoxical confinement in an endless void by constructing her own
boundaries—first, by covering up the windows of her house to blot out the eye
of this entity from which she feels she cannot hide, and, eventually, by hiding
in the family chest that she has brought to America from Norway. These
boundaries are insufficient, however, to countervail against the evil forces
that threaten to dissolve her personality. Beret becomes convinced that she
will die in a savage wilderness as punishment for her sins.
The birth of Per Hansa‘s youngest son Peder on Christmas
Day, after a difficult labor during which the household is gripped in fear and
despair, occasions the first important ritual event in the novel.[29]
Like the immigrants of historical record, Per Hansa has no pastor to perform
the Rite of Baptism. Because the child is weak and the weather is severe, he
goes to his best friend Hans Olsa, asking him to baptize his son immediately, a
power given by the church to the laity in times of extreme need. Once the
decision has been made, Rölvaag emphasizes, Per Hansa and Hans Olsa ―stepped
over the threshold reverently. An air of Sabbath had descended on the room‖
(243). Because they are ritualized men, brought up in the Lutheran traditions
of Norway, they recognize the sacred space created by a table spread with a
white cover, the hymn book with the page turned down, a bowl of water, and a
piece of white cloth (243). These everyday material objects become transcendent
symbols of continuity and certainty to the immigrants because they recognize
them as the same elements used by their ancestors to inscribe Norwegian
Christian culture onto the world. The white cloth in its cleanliness demarcates
a symbolic square of purity, a clean and well-lit place in a house besieged by
terror. As the small circle of immigrants turns its back on the void surrounding
them and gathers around these familiar elements, the table containing the means
to salvation forms a fixed point in the indeterminacy of the prairie, an axis mundi, to use Eliade‘s phrase, a
new center of value that can redefine the boundaries of the Sacred and Profane
and counteract the malign fairy ring outside.
The narrative continues: Hans Olsa took the book and ―read
the ritual in a trembling voice slowly, with many pauses. And so he christened
the child Peder Victorious, pronouncing the name clearly. Whereupon he said the
Lord‘s Prayer so beautifully that his wife Kjersti exclaimed, ‗I don‘t believe
there is a thing lacking to make this christening perfectly correct!‘‖ (244).
The purifying rite of baptism, done within the imaginal boundaries created by
the ritual, and in strict observance of a sacred order, creates an ideal world
wherein the lives of children are consecrated and held as sacred in contrast to
an indifferent space wherein nature and culture often make ideas of order and
notions of individual importance meaningless. Furthermore, their adherence to
the fixity of the ritual code provides a sense of certainty through obedience
to established rules in continuity with historical practice. The fixity and
formality of the ritual creates a frame in which the immigrants can experience
the traumatic emotions associated with a difficult labor in a strange land,
thus establishing intimacy with that space by feeling deeply within it. This
sense of intimacy, in turn, creates a sense of place and belonging.
Rölvaag recapitulates this process on a higher level later
in the novel in the Rite of Holy Communion, which takes place when an unnamed
minister, who is clearly
Rölvaag‘s image of the ideal pastor, arrives at Spring Creek
and begins the establishment of a Norwegian congregation in the settlement. The
minister, who has been told of the suffering of Per Hansa‘s family due to
Beret‘s psychological state, realizes that their home needs to be exorcised of
the negative forces that have taken possession of it. Thus he quietly tells Beret that on Sunday,
he will perform the Rite of Holy Communion at her house and asks her to prepare
for the event.
At the minister‘s suggestion, the family
chest is covered with a white cloth and used as the altar. Per Hansa constructs
a kneeling bench before it, and the minister places the paten and chalice
between two candles on either end of the chest (401). The minister appears in
full canonicals before a house packed with people. As he preaches to them on
the topic of ―the glory of the Lord,‖ however, he senses that he is not
inspired by the Holy Spirit to give them the comfort they need in their
extremity. He gropes for analogies that will inspire and strengthen the
struggling pioneers. At last he remembers the story of an immigrant woman he
saw in New York who tied her nine children to herself with a long rope in order
to keep them from getting lost in the confusion of a great city. The minister
compares this act on the part of an immigrant mother to the love of God that
binds human beings to Himself to keep them safe. Immediately after this
statement, the minister invites the crowd to participate in the ritual of Holy
Communion. There, in spite of the minister‘s disjointed sermon,―[t]he people
came forward, knelt down before Per Hansa‘s big chest, and received an
assurance so gracious and benign that they could hardly credit its reality . .
. . Many eyes filled with tears during that hour‖ (407).
The minister leaves with the mistaken
impression that because he fumbled for words, he has never before ―failed so
miserably in any service!‖ (407); but the ritual, like
Peder‘s baptism, has accomplished something outside the power
of words: It has created utopian and locative space at once, giving
orientation, order, and a sacred, protected precinct for the immigrant, while
at the same time providing the fulfillment of what the ritual enacts—another
world to live in, the world as it ought to be, where human beings are valued by
God, where Norwegian culture is part of a sacred order, where human beings
perform acts of beauty that transcend time and space and reconnect them with
the world they left behind. The formality and fixity of the ritual also call up
powerful feelings to be felt while at the same time setting limits on the
expression of those feelings. The chest, like the table covered with the white
cloth, establishes a new axis mundi for
the immigrant out of the undifferentiated wilderness, thus asserting
symbolically the value of the immigrant‘s past as a repository of the culture
and traditions of the community that should be carried into the New World,
honored as a sacred inheritance and relied upon for strength and reassurance.
Rölvaag‘s presentation thus reflects his recognition of the power of ritual to
act as one manifestation of the rope of love and Norwegian culture that could
tie the immigrants to each other, to God, and to their heritage, and thus to
serve the larger purpose of rooting the immigrant in a new place.
For Beret in particular, these rituals
are not only momentary stays against confusion but ministrations in a general
process of healing. For, although she subsequently takes refuge in a piety that
can seem insufferable to her neighbors because its inflexible adherence to
religious values conflicts with the pragmatic moral compromises necessary for
American pioneering, from this moment on, her ability to withstand her interior
psychological pressures improves drastically. Because the security provided by
a ritual reconnection to the past has been established, Beret is able to
conduct the difficult business of prairie farming without any further traumatic
episodes. The sense of psychological orientation that ritual brings to Beret
leads her, however, to project her own need for ritual into the lives of her
neighbors. When Hans Olsa lies on his deathbed after coming down with pneumonia
from extreme exposure in a prairie blizzard, Beret‘s allegiance to religious
values leads her to believe Hans Olsa must have the rituals of the church to
ensure his placement in the world to come. Beret cannot rest until someone goes
to bring the minister to offer Holy Communion to Hans Olsa, even though the
snowstorm outside will ensure the death of anyone who dares to attempt the
journey.
Beret‘s intense need for locative space and her commitment to
the time-honored traditions of her faith make her insensitive to the risks
involved in satisfying her demands. She prevails, sending Per Hansa out into
the blizzard from which he will emerge only with the following spring, ashen
but facing the ever-beckoning, utopian
West.
Per Hansa‘s death, while partly attributable to the
actions of Beret and his own hubris in
assuming he can survive the implacable forces of Nature, is also part of a
complex of associations directed at the larger project of redefining America as
a sacred space that resonates with a significant observation made by Eliade
concerning the larger importance of sacrifice to the project of homefounding
and its homologous relationship to temple building. Eliade explains:
If a ―construction‖ is to endure (be it house, temple,
etc.), it must be animated, that is, it must receive life and a soul. The
transfer of the soul is possible only through a blood sacrifice. The history of
religions, ethnology, and folklore record countless forms of building sacrifices—that
is, of symbolic or blood sacrifices for the benefit of a structure. (56)
Rölvaag‘s use of the Eucharistic sacrifice in the sod hut
sanctifies it and purifies it, ensuring its stability and continuity, and it
prefigures the eventual sacrifice of Per Hansa as part of his project to found
a kingdom, thus further elevating immigrant life by linking it to cosmogonic
myth. But, it also enlarges the criteria by which sacred space in America
should be constructed, suggesting that, in order to endure, America as Eden
must be coterminous with America as Calvary. In other words, the infinite
possibilities for selfrealization must be tempered by self-sacrifice and a
willingness to carry the cross of eternal values over and above one‘s own
personal fulfillment. Thus, Rölvaag‘s use of ritual, in which the physical,
psychological, and cultural landscapes are intertwined and interchanged, speaks
not only to the Norwegian community with its message regarding the necessity of
cultural traditions to its survival but also to outsiders. During a period in
which the country envisioned itself as a model of a sacred community while also
promoting the value of individual success in a competitive marketplace, Rölvaag
lifts up the immigrant hut as a temple in which the American definition of the
sacred requires a dedication to the preservation of communal bonds and the
well-being of all. Those Norwegians who felt so
dislocated on the American prairie have now been placed in the national memory
as an integral part of that landscape. Less well-known and less easy to
reconcile with concepts of the American West are other immigrant groups such as
the Jews who tried to make a place for themselves in the small towns that
dotted the landscape. In God of Might, Jewish immigrant novelist Elias
Tobenkin provides a piercing study of the attempts of Russian Jews who, freed
from the walls of the ghetto, attempted to construct a place for themselves in
a Midwestern territory that made the imaginal walls of ritual even more
essential but which provided few means by which they could engage in ritual
practice.
The Jews who immigrated to America at the turn of the
century were no strangers to the problem of place. Confined to the Jewish pale
in Russia and to ghettoes in European cities, the Jew was well-acquainted with
inhabiting places that were in fact noplace. Yet, in the late 19th
century, as Irving Howe notes, a messianic fervor began to take hold of
European Jews when the shtetl began to crumble, urging them to break out of the
walls of the pale and the ghetto in pursuit of a utopian future and a new Zion
in which the Jew could live unrestricted (11). Hasidism, Zionism, Socialism,
and the am olam movements were all
manifestations of this renewed messianism.[30]
Emigration fever was another (24). Yet, when Jews reached America with visions
of a Jewish Utopia, they found themselves confined in crowded, dilapidated
ghettos much like they had known before and their place in America, while
improved, still determined by impermeable religious and ethnic boundaries.
The question of Jewish place was
particularly problematic in the 1920s, a high point of anti-Semitic activity in
America, when, out of isolationist reaction to the war, ―the International
Jew,‖ who was envisioned as allied with no specific place, became symbolic of
the dangers of international entanglements and was considered ―the most
dangerous force undermining the nation‖ (Higham 278). During this period,
numerous events occurred that demonstrated the increasing American suspicion of
Jews, whom they now associated with dangerous radicals, too acquisitive
bankers, and international conspirators (280). For example, the 1920s saw the
official publication of the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, a document created by Russian clergymen that was
intended to provide proof of a Jewish plot to take over the world. In 1918,
this document reached America, where the National Civic Foundation, a 100 Per
Cent American organization, and the American Defense Society, a nativist
protective league, promoted its distribution. A small American publishing house
issued an American edition in 1920, giving a readership already primed for
anti-Semitic rhetoric ―objective evidence‖ for their paranoia (280-1). The
1920s was also the period when Henry Ford waged an anti-Semitic campaign
against Jewish bankers after an economic slump left him heavily in debt. Ford
painted an apocalyptic struggle between creative industry and the Jewish money
kings of
suffered the conflict between utopian principles and
the need to be competitive in the marketplace. World of Our Fathers. (New York: NYU Press, 1976), 86.
international finance before the public that stirred
nationwide attention and met with much approval, especially in the rural areas
of the West and South where the campaign revived long-held hostilities against
international finance (285). Finally, as noted above, the Ku Klux Klan had
risen to new heights on an ideological wave which mixed the idea of the Jew
with the flotsam and jetsam of urban corruption, pollution of the Sabbath,
gross sensuality, and international plots to control America (286). Higham states
that
―[t]o the Klan the Jews stood for an international plot to
control America and also for the whole spectrum of urban sin—for pollution of
the Sabbath, bootlegging, gambling, and carnal indulgence‖ (286).
Elias Tobenkin wrote his most important novels during this
troubled period. Tobenkin, who emigrated
with his parents from the town of Slutsk in 1899 at the age of seventeen,
settled in Madison, Wisconsin, where he obtained B.A. and M.A. degrees from the
University of Wisconsin and subsequently embarked on a lifelong career as a
journalist and foreign correspondent. In between stints in Europe and the
Soviet Union, Tobenkin also managed to publish six novels, many of which
embodied his socialist beliefs (Tobenkin Papers). God of Might (1925), published during the middle of the antiSemitic
1920s, tells the story of Samuel Wasserman, born in the Jewish Pale of
Settlement, where between Jews and Gentiles, ―geographic lines
were sharply drawn‖ (3) by means of the competing rituals that defined the
boundaries of the two ethnic and religious spaces (4-5).
Samuel, the son of orthodox parents, is schooled in the
Jewish law. In keeping with the sense of timelessness born of oppression that
Howe describes as characteristic of the shtetl before the events of the late
nineteenth century revived
its sense of history (16), Samuel‘s father insists that he must study the law
―because a Jew must get ready for the other
world, and one can prepare for the world-to-come only by reading the law
and obeying its commandments, by being pious‖ (God of Might 9). Samuel reasons that the Gentile boys who taunt him
and jeer at him for being a Jew and who deprive him of a place in this world
will have no place in the world to come, the true home of the Jew. Thus,
Samuel, like many Jews of his community, and like the Puritans whose typology
was based on Jewish figures, compensates for his dispossession in this world by
locating his true home in the next.
As he gets older, however, Samuel reads the letters from
America sent by his secularized uncle Jacob Gold, enticing him with promises of
a utopian paradise. Like many young men in his village, Samuel becomes infected
with the fever of emigration. He eventually parts from his parents and makes
the crossing to the West where his uncle, now a peddler, deposits him in a
sprawling Midwestern town called Lincoln (modeled after Tobenkin‘s own town of
Madison), and continues on his peddler‘s route. Samuel, seventeen, the only Jew
in town, and thousands of miles from his family, takes a job as a store clerk,
a room in a boarding house, and begins his life in America, changing his name
to Waterman and doing his best to assimilate completely in order to make a
place for himself.
The residents of Lincoln realize they
have a Jew living among them who has different rituals and a special diet; but,
because they have no experience with Jews, the nearest approximation they have
to Jewish religious practice is that of Mr. Shire, the Seventh Day Adventist.
They see Samuel as different but are so inexperienced in matters of religious
plurality that Samuel‘s Jewish identity simply does not exist for them.
Although Samuel is at first relieved at being free of
religious persecution, this complete elision of his religious heritage becomes
in many ways more painful to him than outright prejudice.
Tobenkin raises the issue of ritual in
the establishment of place early in the novel when, during a visit from Uncle
Jacob, Samuel inquires nervously about how he should celebrate the approaching
Passover, one of the highest and most elaborate of Jewish holy days, one that
requires a ritual meal of ritually prepared food. Samuel has by now become uncertain about his
religious status. Before he left Russia, his father had given him a new pair of
phylacteries to use in his daily ritual observance, but they have lain
untouched in his suitcase, now, in the American context, ―obsolete, meaningless
. . .‖ (59). Samuel insists he does not feel a sense of guilt, but he does
experience a deep feeling of disorientation and uncertainty (58). Uncle Jacob
admonishes him saying:
I‘m afraid you and I will have to do without unleavened
bread this Passover; we‘ll have to get along with ordinary bread…. It isn‘t
anything to worry over…. After all, the eating of unleavened bread is only a
symbol, and strong men, thinking men, can get along without symbols, if
necessary…. You and I will not forget the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, their
release from bondage, whether we eat unleavened bread or not. (64-5)
Jacob also insists that the prophet declares
that empty rituals mean nothing to God.
Instead, the heart of faith is to love one‘s
neighbor and to strive to do well. The rest is
―chaff‖ (65). Here, in the words of Samuel‘s
Jewish uncle, which echo the prophets,
Tobenkin also invokes the very Protestant notion of empty ritual, perhaps
subtly referring to the mainstream American religious milieu in which Jewish
religious practice took place.
When Passover arrives, Samuel sits down
at the boarding house table in a scene that reveals the intense experience of
loss and anxiety that Jews often endured in giving up their ritual practice:
At six o‘clock he was at Mrs. Peck‘s for
supper as usual, as on ordinary days.
Samuel‘s heart was beating violently [. . ;] at the table
it was some time before he could swallow his first bite of bread . . . He was
not afraid of God nor of punishment. Of
course not. . . After all, the eating of unleavened bread on the Passover was only
a symbol. His uncle had said so. He knew
it himself. Only a symbol. Still he ate without looking to the right or to the
left of him. He finished his meal in
half the time it took ordinarily, and quietly slipped away from the table and
out of the house. (69)
The foregoing scene makes it apparent that, whether or not
ritual is an essential means of fulfilling the Jew‘s covenant with God, the
symbolic life it enacts is often essential to the immigrant‘s sense of
orientation in an unfamiliar world. Samuel attempts to follow his uncle‘s
advice, to live without the symbols of Jewish ritual, to live Jewish holy days
as ordinary days, embracing America as his new religion in order to create a
place for himself in the American utopia. The result, however, is disorientation
and desiccation because, ironically, Samuel gives up the very thing that can
most readily give him that sense of place, not recognizing the degree to which
religion, ethnicity, and place are intertwined in America.
In his search for some sort of connection, Samuel spends
long hours walking along the railroad tracks, watching the trains, fascinated:
He had grown to love trains. They seemed to him a link
between himself and the people he had left behind; between him and
his uncle in Chicago; between him and
his parents in the Old World. He loved to stand aside and wait for the onrushing engine, watch the train, panting
and crashing, dash past and recede into the distance until it became a tiny
speck. The people in these flying
trains, what glimpses he caught of them through the windows, stirred in him
sensations of vast distances and vague immensities. (51)
Although he senses his disconnection from those who ride
confidently into American space and time aboard the trains, the sight eases
Samuel‘s sense of disconnection from his past while also appealing to his drive
toward the future.
Like Abraham Cahan‘s earlier protagonist David Levinsky,
Samuel eventually achieves a good deal of commercial success, first buying his
own fruit market, then developing it into the first full-scale department store
in Lincoln. In Samuel‘s determination to
become an ―owner‖ of American space, Tobenkin depicts the sad dilemma of Jewish
immigrants, particularly those in the small towns of America. Because there is
no Jewish community in Lincoln, and because of the stereotype of the Jew as a
person unconnected with place but identified with material gain, the only way
Samuel can make a place for himself in Lincoln is to buy it— or to marry it.
Significantly, Samuel marries a Gentile American woman whom he meets at a real
estate office. In an important passage, Samuel watches his wife Jessie sleep,
noticing her complete repose of body and spirit, which he links to her sense of
being in possession of place:
It was this repose, this feeling that she had an
inalienable place in the world no one could claim, no one dispute,— this
feeling which had been with Jessie since her birth, which had been in the blood
of her people long before she was born, and which he, Samuel, had only lately
been trying to acquire—that had drawn him toward her from the moment they first
met. This look of repose had held him in fascination since. . . It was fascinating him now. (202)
In an episode that exposes the conflation
of Jewish ethnicity and religion in the
American mind, Jessie offers to become ―one of his race,‖
meaning one of his religion, but Samuel feels that in converting to Judaism,
she would lose her own place in America and that of his children, so he insists
on occupying a middle ground, going along with
Jessie‘s Christianity but never converting himself, thinking,
as Jessie does, that it will not really matter. His determination stems partly
from his Uncle Jacob‘s encouragement, from the belief that ―there are no
yesterdays in America, only todays and tomorrows. What you have been counts
neither for nor against you; it is what you are, what you make of yourself [. .
. .]You have burst the walls of the Russian ghetto, don‘t crawl into a ghetto of
your own making‖ (110).
Yet, all the while he follows his uncle‘s
advice and his commercial territory expands, Samuel‘s spiritual territory
diminishes. Ten years pass. Samuel now sits behind the glass partition of his
office feeling not like an owner but a tenant (218). The attitude of the
townspeople toward Samuel changes as the tribalism of the 1920s spreads to
Lincoln, and ―occasionally the word money was coupled with
another word—Jew‖ (244). His wife‘s aunt now lives with the family and begins
to resent Samuel because she perceives him as inept at keeping a Christian
Sunday. There are times, ―particularly on
the forenoons of Sundays and holidays, when he [. . .]
[feels] himself like a stranger, an outsider, in his own home‖ (220). When Jessie invites Mr. Allen, a Methodist,
to dinner one Sunday, a dilemma arises over Samuel‘s saying grace because, even
though ritual prayer is part of Samuel‘s heritage, he does not know how to say
a Christian grace
at table:
A blessing before meals—of course. . . In the Old World no
orthodox Jew ever went to table without a blessing—his father never did, he never did . . . . He knew the
blessing before meals—in Hebrew, but Mr. Allen was a Christian . . . . A
blessing—What was a Christian blessing like? (228).
Finally, Jessie tells Samuel to have Mr. Allen say grace,
which he does, effortlessly. Samuel feels humiliated, realizing that because he
has no community with which to engage in Jewish ritual practice, his family and
the town of Lincoln have come to consider him a secular Jew with no religious
belief at all, one whose only interest is money.
A short time later, some townspeople
approach Samuel regarding a group of recently arrived Jewish immigrants who
have camped out on the other side of the railroad tracks and have unwittingly
bought stolen property. When Samuel goes
to their encampment to try to intervene on their behalf, a complex dynamic of
displacement ensues. Samuel enters the Jewish space of the encampment on the
hither side of the railroad tracks, which, in relationship to the native
community, is no place. Yet, to Samuel, long separated from his Jewish origins
and recognizing the strangers as men from his home town, the encampment becomes
a Jewish space in which he can feel temporarily at home. The immigrants,
however, look back at him blindly, unable to recognize him as a Jew. In this
encounter, Tobenkin makes explicit the pathos of the Jew, whether assimilated
or unassimilated. Samuel, the assimilated Jew, walks out of the camp, aware of
his complete isolation, without ever acknowledging or being embraced by his own
people, who, in turn, must live on the margins of society if they wish to hold
on to their traditions.
Shortly thereafter, Samuel reads in the
newspaper that the Day of Atonement is approaching. The next morning he wakes
at daybreak in a sweat with a vivid memory of
his
first Yom Kippur:
As the ball of fire in the west began to descend toward
the horizon, something unexpected happened. Both the service and the people had become as
if galvanized. Everyone in the synagogue assumed a standing
posture and with eyes lifted skyward a cry went up from a thousand throats: a
cry of fervent passionate entreaty, like people pleading for their life . . . .
Hands were lifted, bodies
trembled, faces were distorted with agony. (242)
In his recollection, Samuel asks his father what is happening.
His father tells him ―they were pleading for the whole of Israel. They were
crying ‗The day is done, the gates of heaven are closing. Father of Mercies,
hear us‘‖ (243). Samuel now remembers this moment with a feeling of panic. He
looks out at the autumn landscape with a new recognition that the West is no
longer the place of inexhaustible possibility, but of sunset and the waning of
possibility. He is now forty years old and living in the spiritual and social
vacuum he has created by abandoning his heritage and the symbolic life: ―a
sensation as of closing would come
over him, . . . . Gates were closing—not of heaven, but of earth…It seemed to
him that he had been cast off, the whole world had cast him off‖ (243). Samuel then compares his lonely life to that
of his orthodox father, at whose death the whole community had attended the
traditional burial rites and the recitation of the Hesped (245).
When Jessie‘s brother and sister-in-law
move in with Samuel and Jessie, the family becomes highly active in the church.
Samuel now feels more and more estranged, especially from his son, whom his
relatives involve in a round of Christian activities that Samuel cannot share.
During this time, Samuel meets an older Jewish salesman named
Ted Stone, who, like Samuel‘s Uncle Jacob the peddler, lives
his life on the road. Samuel eventually confesses to Stone that he feels he has
no place in Lincoln. At this, Stone wearily suggests Samuel become a Christian
and join the church. Stone, who also married a Christian woman, tells Samuel
his own consequences of not converting to Christianity: his children resent
him, and he now stays constantly on the road because he makes his family
uncomfortable when he is at home. With a face marked by sadness, Stone tells
Samuel that if he could do it over again, he would have either gone where no
one knew him and buried his Jewish origins as deeply as he could or else he
would have come out with his race openly and aggressively, declaring ―I would
have made my wife and children Jews at any cost—at all cost‖ (252). Stone
predicts that Samuel will be in the same humiliating position in fifteen years
because people do not really care about religion but only about conformity:
―The world will have us only on its own terms and the terms, which a dominant
race, or class, or religion imposes, are always the same— surrender . . .
Christian and Jew will fuse and become one only when the Jew will be willing to
efface himself, to extinguish his identity—not otherwise‖ (255).
Samuel now begins to think about removing his family from
the influence of his zealous Christian brother-in-law and takes the train to
Chicago to discuss with a Jewish acquaintance the prospects of moving there.
The Jewish man, however, says the situation is no better in Chicago, and when
he discovers that Samuel has a Christian wife, he becomes distant. Now Samuel
realizes the horrifying extent of his displacement: ―It was war and people
ranged themselves on one side, on the other…One was either a Jew or a
Christian . . . In-between was No-man‘s Land . . . He was in No-man‘s Land‖
(269). Immediately
thereafter, in the last scenes of the novel, Samuel flees in desperation to the
Jewish quarter of Chicago, where he reads in a Yiddish newspaper of the same
anti-Semitic activities that Higham documented: ―Banks and other large business
institutions were closing their doors against Jewish employees . . . Schools
and universities were discriminating against Jewish brains . . . Jews were
excluded from hotels and apartment houses . . . Protocols . . . Henry Ford . .
. The Ku Klux . . .‖ (271).
Wandering aimlessly, Samuel finally comes
upon a synagogue. Hearing the
ancient prayers, ―his frame, as if in
response to a reminiscent summoning, swung
forward to the door of the synagogue‖ (271).
A member of the congregation leads
Samuel
near to the altar:
Candles were lit . . . The cantor, his
face and beard half hidden in the prayer-
shawl, was chanting God of might . . .
―God of might.‖ It was so long, so long ago
since Samuel had heard the prayer. The words of it had completely escaped
him . . .But it did not matter . . . He
found words, other words, his own
words…He was swaying with the rest of the
congregation . . .
―God of Might,‖ he mumbled, ―give me might
. . . Give me might . . .‖ (272)
Samuel‘s entry into the synagogue at the
sound of the ancient prayers comes
about through the deep involvement of the embodied knowing of
ritual in the construction of place as
he instinctively returns to the rites he had abandoned in his youth to redeem himself from No-Man‘s land.
Again, an altar creates a new axis mundi around which an ideal Jewish place, both
locative and utopian, can be ordered. Aligning
his physical movements with those of other Jews ritually to construct
the boundaries of a sacred enclosure,
Samuel feels like an insider, one who at last knows his place while at the same time being released from the bonds
of the prevailing outside social order into
a translocal and transhistorical realm that reconnects him to the places
and people he left behind. Samuel also participates in a worldwide Jewish
anticipation of the final restoration of
Israel to the holiest of places— Zion— thus countermining constructions of America as the Promised
Land, like Mary Antin‘s vision. Furthermore,
the fixed and formal autopoesis of
the Jewish ritual serves as a medium for calling up and healing Samuel‘s long-repressed emotions
associated with the traumas of
immigration in an environment strengthened by collective
sympathies.
On a broader scale, Tobenkin‘s
performance uses a highly charged ritual moment
to address non-Jewish readers across a cultural divide, asserting a
Jewish utopian place in high tension
with a Gentile-American space he characterizes as dystopia to the Jew—
indifferent, undifferentiated, and uncomprehending—leaving the reader with the sense that this moment will mark either the
beginning of Samuel‘s complete undoing
or a controversial return to his religious origins. One can almost envision
the next scene, in which Samuel will
open his battered suitcase and don the unused
phylacteries his father gave him so long
ago.
The
ritual moments in the work of Forgione, Rölvaag, and Tobenkin lay bare the
psychological and emotional cost involved in the immigrant quest for place in
America, a country that mythologized itself as sacred space even as it
restricted that space through ethnocentrism and the politics of exclusion. Like
the banner of violent hues in
Forgione‘s saint‘s procession, these ritual performances
courageously risk parading the sacred before an uncomprehending throng in a
symbolic claim to American space that also interrupts ethno-religious
monologues like that of the Columbiad to question the degree to which America,
where such politics of exclusion are practiced, can be assured of its own
sanctity. In the textual performance of
their rituals, these writers create a counter-cartography that also invites a
reformulation of the divide between the writer‘s ethnicity and that of the
reader, whether he or she is an assimilated immigrant or a nativeborn American.
At stake in all of this is the fundamental reformulation of the original
collision between the ethnic, the moral, and the religious in the definition of
America as a
sacred
space.
The question remains, however, whether American sacred
space can ever ultimately provide a sense of place for any of its inhabitants, whether foreign or native born. Jacobson
sums up the conundrum of the American relationship to place as follows:
―Like perhaps no other nation, America‘s historical role has
made its ‗place,‘ in the physical as well as in the moral sense problematic:
its self-described historical place as the carrier of universal values made
borders and boundaries constraining, even impediments. History was
accumulative; territory, again, was enclosed. This dialectic of time and space
becomes an ongoing implicit theme in the American story‖ (52). If America‘s
national sense of itself as place is unstable, then the ground in which its
inhabitants seek to be rooted will inevitably tend to roll and shift under
their feet. Add to this ambiguity the national drive toward the future, and the
promise of ever being truly grounded recedes with the horizon. The
River Between, Giants in the Earth, and God
of Might all conclude with a protagonist away from home, on the road.
Whether wandering through the streets of New York, trudging across the prairie
into the setting sun, or streaking across the Midwest on the American railroad,
all three protagonists undergo the displacement wrought not only by immigration
but also by the inherent
instability
of the concept of place in America.
William Boelhower
maintains that the American road has conquered place and mobility has shattered
stasis. ―[T]he road,‖ he states, ―is a non-place, it leaves the masses no rest.
He who follows the national road cannot dwell because the road annihilates
place‖ (74). Boelhower suggests that the
―non-place‖ of the road is the nearest approximation to place that the
American, born of a culture perpetually driven toward the millennium, in all of
its varying manifestations, can ever achieve. Ironically, the Puritan quest for
placement in a new land that would fulfill the eschatological promise of human
history continually deferred placement for those immigrants who followed them.
If
Cushman‘s poignant definition is right, then Americans carry a
particular burden if ―our dwelling is but a wandering and our abiding, but as a
fleeting.‖ The call of the road is now central not only to the American
propensity to uproot and relocate, but also to the tendency to shed jobs,
identities, and marriages (Williams 22) in the determined pursuit of the ideal
―house not made with hands.‖ Thus, as these novels reveal, the spatial
strategies of ritual could provide a kind of rhythmic pause in the obsessive
linearity of American trailblazing for the first generation of immigrants,
enabling them to accomplish a complex transaction of space and to feel
temporarily at home, but they could never establish the permanent sense of
place the immigrants had known in the countries from which they came, since to
leave the boundaries erected by ritual practice meant to return to the
non-place of the road. At the same time, however, these novels do point to the
essential value of periodic ritual enactments of the symbolic life for
providing temporary shelters along that road, oases of rest, glimpses of
permanence.
Chapter Three: Babel in
Babylon: Immigrant Ritual and the Question of Language
On the last day of December, 1900, the Rev. Charles F.
Parham, who is known as the first person to declare officially that glossolalia
was the only true evidence of baptism by the Holy Ghost, held a prayer vigil at
the Bethel Healing Home in Topeka, Kansas. Shortly after midnight on January
1st, 1901, a young woman named Agnes Ozman began speaking ―in the Chinese
language,‖ while ―a halo seemed to surround her head and face‖ (Parham 52-3).
She was thereafter unable to speak in English for three days, during which time
the other Bible students commenced speaking in what Parham claimed were no less
than twenty-one known languages, none of which they had ever studied. As
reporters and language experts descended on Parham‘s establishment, word spread
across the nation of the strange events in Topeka, which are now considered to
be the birth of the Pentecostal movement.
A few years later, an African-American student of Parham‘s named William
Joseph Seymour went to Los Angeles, where he began preaching the gift of
tongues at an abandoned church on Asuza Street, leading to a landmark event in
the history of American religion—the three-year-long Asuza Street Revival,
beginning in
1906, at which thousands of people of all races flocked to
worship to Seymour‘s refrain of ―let the tongues come forth‖ (Synan 99). The Los Angeles Times carried the following
headlines: ―Weird Babel of Tongues, New Sect of Fanatics is breaking loose,
Wild scene last night on Asuza Street. Gurgle of Wordless Talk by a sister‖
(1).
While religious devotees had been
speaking in tongues in America since the early 19th century, never
before had the public been so interested in this phenomenon. Thanks to a
considerable amount of press coverage, news of the Asuza Street revival spread
around the world. During its three-year duration, people of every race and
nationality sought release in the spirit from the strictures of language into
the freedom of a new, godly Babel. Many religious leaders, however, vehemently
opposed the Pentecostal movement, condemning glossolalia as ―Satanic gibberish‖
and ―the climax of demon worship‖ (Synan 145).
These reactions echo the words of Thomas Bailey Aldrich‘s poem
―Unguarded Gates‖ (1892), where very similar accents describe a different
linguistic threat to America—that of the immigrant with his multiplicity of
languages:
In street and alley what strange tongues
are loud,
Accents of menace alien to our air,
Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew!
(27-9)
During the next several years, as the
Pentecostal movement spread and the Spirit erupted from the mouths of the
faithful in unknown tongues that defied all linguistic norms, the literacy test
became a major strategy for restricting immigration (Higham
203), the Illinois state legislature declared ―American‖ to be
the official language of Illinois (Tatalovich 65-6), and Henry Ford‘s language
school in Detroit required immigrant workers to attend mandatory English
classes where the first phrase they were taught was ―I am a good American‖
(Higham 248). Clearly, the perception was that the importation of alien
languages, whether through Ellis Island or a rural brush arbor, threatened
American political and religious unity.
The language used in religious practice, a matter deeply related to the
spiritual needs of dispossessed groups like Pentecostals and immigrants, could
not be separated from the politics of the mainstream and the marginalized, of
inclusion and exclusion in America, as immigrant writers were quick to
realize. Their novels thus frequently
depict controversy over the ritual use of language as a means of examining the
relationship of language to religio-ethnic integrity within immigrant life in
America.
Though religious immigrants and
Pentecostals differed drastically in their religious practice, both groups were
generally marginalized, engaging in discourse that found no place in mainstream
American use of the word in literature or the popular press.
Further, both groups show a preoccupation with the religious
use of a language given by God, a special kind of utterance made for the
expression of matters beyond human comprehension.[31]
In this practice they differed significantly from their mainstream Protestant
counterparts. In addition, both groups
saw language as a powerful means of defining one‘s relationship to God, which
often also meant one‘s relationship to one‘s religious or ethnic group. Hence,
they used language in special ways to bind and empower a cultural community
they experienced as holy and whose inviolability they wished to preserve at a
time when their language was perceived as problematic by mainstream Americans
for whom it appeared to threaten the stability of political and religious life.
The religious practice of both immigrants
and Pentecostals was enacted in the margins during a period when much of
American religion was under the aegis of modernizing liberal theologians who
attempted to universalize mainstream religion by means of a new rationalism
which used the discourse of science to talk about God. By accommodating itself
to science and the higher Biblical criticism and removing the residuum of
irrational superstition, liberal theology hoped to defend the core truths of religious belief from science and an
encroaching materialism.[32]
Controversy reigned among Protestants over the status of the Bible as the Word
of God as some clergymen sought to hold on to notions of the Bible‘s inerrancy,
while others felt that Biblical criticism could liberate believers from
idolatry of the letter into a closer relationship with the Holy Spirit (Marty
38). Historian Martin Marty suggests, however, that this policy caused many groups
to retreat into semi-permeable religious and ethno-religious cocoons by which
they could regulate the degree of influence received from the outside world
(94). Immigrant novelists repeatedly
depict the interiors of such cocoons as well as the upheaval arising from their
rupture by the forces of American culture.
In order to understand the special
significance of language in ritual for immigrants, it is important to remember
some of the tensions immigrants faced with regard to language in America. First
of all, to enter the United States as a member of a non-English speaking ethnic
group obviously meant to be deprived of language in any realm other than one‘s
immediate environment. Thus, the immigrant had a choice—either to learn English
and assimilate or to remain within the confines of his or her ethnic community.
Many immigrants chose the latter option, but this often meant economic
deprivation. Yet, as will be seen in the case of Jewish immigrants, even to
remain within that linguistic community did not always relieve one of
linguistic accomodations, since many groups who identified themselves as Jews
spoke a bewildering array of languages.
Thus, at the same time that American nativists worried about the
linguistic contamination of the English language by ―accents of menace,‖ many
immigrants also had cause to worry about the purity of their native tongues.
Those immigrants
who chose the former option did so mainly as a result of economic and cultural
pressures. Whoever was not a farmer and needed to rise on the economic ladder
inevitably had to learn some English as a means of survival. The connection of
the English language to economic success often valorized it in the eyes of
immigrants, while reducing their respect for their own mode of discourse.
Culturally, especially during the years during and after World War I, when
anti-German sentiment intensified pro-English language and Americanist efforts,
the immigrant faced assimilationist pressures from such organizations as the
Committee for Immigrants in America, whose Division of Education took vigorous
nationwide action to enroll immigrants in English language classes and used
public schools to indoctrinate immigrants with American culture, activities
which John Higham characterizes as attempts to ―stampede‖ immigrants into
adopting the English language and ―into unquestioning reverence for American
institutions‖ (247). Additionally, ―hyphenated‖ Americans who spoke other
languages were suspected of conflicting loyalties and an unwillingness to
respond to America as a quasi-religious civic order that demanded the shedding
of old customs and habits, language often being the most conspicuous of these
old world ties.
Frequently, immigrant novels depict the
shame experienced by protagonists when their inability to manipulate the
English language brings on the label of greenhorn, whether from inside or
outside the ethnic community. For example, in The Rise of David
Levinsky,
David‘s attempts to simulate a Yankee brogue and his shame at his failure to do
so are part of his quest for economic and cultural success. Similarly, in Elias
Tobenkin‘s novel Witte
Arrives, Emil Witte‘s determination to leave his Yiddish past behind in
order to become a writer whose language is indistinguishable from that of a
native-born author parallels his quest for assimilation into the American
scene. Thus the immigrant experience of language in America was one of an
imbalance of power, in which the old language was considered to be much like
the immigrant parent of the second-generation—loved, but often a stumbling
block to assimilation and a source of embarrassment.
The use of language within the arena of ritual, therefore,
carried important spiritual and cultural significance for many immigrants who,
first of all, found comfort in a non-verbal means of expression in which the
tensions between languages could be held in abeyance. This, in itself, was not
only a refuge but also a means of empowerment for those immigrants who did not
have an accepted mode of discourse to use in their struggle for expression in
mainstream American life. As we shall
see, because of ritual‘s primarily non-verbal strategies for the articulation
of meaning, it was often the case for immigrant protagonists that, if nowhere
else in American life, at least in ritual, the words, happily, often did not
matter.
When the
traditional languages of the old world were
the focus of ritual practice, however, the ritual context provided an arena
in which the immigrant‘s language obtained a beauty and performative power that
it did not possess in the public arena of American life. Whether the
specialized religious languages of Latin and Hebrew, or the vernacular, as in
the case of Norwegian and Yiddish, the articulation of received wisdom by means
of the formalized and aesthetic use of these languages maintained their status
for the immigrant in a culture in which they generally had no place. When
priests and rabbis used these languages to transform the world, they maintained
cultural continuity for the immigrants and empowered them through the potency
of ritualized language.
Consequently, the removal of these
languages from ritual practice became a source of controversy in the new world
as many religious organizations felt pressure to conform to American norms by
substituting English for the languages of the old world in church and
synagogue. For some ethnic groups, such as the Norwegians and the Jews, who
will be the focus of this chapter, this was especially controversial, since it
meant the loss of cultural continuity in a sphere they turned to for comfort.
For the East European Jews, this dilemma was further complicated by the
pressures born of their historical experience in the Diaspora during which they
accumulated a variety of vernaculars along with Hebrew, each of which fought
for a place in a Jewish hierarchy of languages, cultures, and ethnically based
forms of religious practice.
Finally, it is important to consider that many of these
concerns were experienced as volatile, not simply for political and cultural
reasons, but for specifically religious reasons. If, as Timothy Smith has
argued, the immigration experience was indeed a theologizing experience, then
the language in which one addressed one‘s God, one‘s highest transcendent
value, mattered immensely. To speak to God in a strange tongue inevitably
affected the relationship the immigrant had with the very Being that he or she
turned to for guidance and who may have initiated the call to emigrate in the
first place. To maintain an intimate connection to God and continue a
relationship considered primary became problematic if the public ritual
enactment of that relationship distanced one from the Source of life
itself. In many cases, to remain loyal
to God often meant a decision to go against the official practices of the
church or synagogue. To do so, however,
also meant separation from a potent means of self-expression and
empowerment.
Although ritual theorists over the years
have continually debated the seemingly inexhaustible subject of just what and how ritual communicates, they have generally managed to agree that
ritual itself is a potent, multivalent, and highly compressed form of
communication. Emile Durkheim first discussed the primordial power of ritual
among human beings as a symbolic means of expressing the emotions of the social
unit to itself, thereby creating group consciousness and bonding (231). For
Durkheim, ritual was a necessary outward form for expressing collective
sentiments that could not be experienced otherwise, thus emphasizing the
crucial nature of ritual expression for social solidarity and collective
consciousness. Durkheim‘s theories are
particularly relevant to understanding controversies within immigrant
communities over the language used in religious rites, which were, in fact,
controversies over the integrity of the immigrant community itself.
Following Durkheim, and drawing from the
principles of structural anthropology and semiology, Edmund Leach suggested
that ritual is a system of communication with its own rules of syntax, which
human beings adopt in order to transmit collective messages to themselves (Culture and Communication 43). Leach
divided ritual into both verbal and non-verbal forms of communication that
involve two separate aspects: the technical, in which something is done, and
the aesthetic, in which something is expressed (523). Both forms served
important functions for immigrants by their ability to accomplish significant
tasks, such as rites of passage, while also expressing ultimate values and
providing an experience of beauty in lives otherwise lacking in aesthetic
pleasure, as will be discussed in Chapter Four.
More recently, Roy Rappaport has defined
ritual as ―the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts
and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers‖ (24). Rappaport also
divides ritualized messages into two types—this time according to the kinds of
messages they communicate: 1) self-referential messages that communicate the
social status of the participants, and 2) ―canonical‖ messages that refer to
the ultimate concerns of the social order itself (24-37). Rappaport locates the effectiveness of ritual
communication in its tendency to collapse the distinction between the
transmitter, the receiver, and the message (119). Participants recite or intone
collective messages, which they, in turn, absorb while also modeling the
message itself,
i.e. reverence, submission, or praise. Thus, when participants
use ritualized language, they act as spiritual emissaries, imparting and
receiving, and, in a sense, becoming
socially binding messages regarding what their highest obligations should be.
This manner of communicating transcendent truth in many cases provided a sense
of certainty and stability for immigrants embedded in a confusing array of
competing demands for loyalty.
Generally, theorists who study ritual and
language have fallen within two broad divisions: 1) those who study ritual as a
non-verbal language in itself and 2) those who study the ritual use of
language. In the first camp, several theorists have taken up the counterpoint
to Kenneth Burke‘s idea of language as action and concerned themselves with
ritual action as non-verbal language. David Parkin, for example, focuses on the
body and physical gesture as the primary means of ritual expression. While
Parkin agrees that ―words may be important elements of ritual performance,‖ he
defines ritual as a
―world of non-words,‖ claiming that ―it is precisely because
ritual is fundamentally made up of physical action, with words only optional or
arbitrarily replaceable that it can be regarded as having a distinctive
potential for performative imagination that is not reducible to verbal
assertions‖ (23). Parkin believes the spatial movement and gestural performance
of ritual led to its evolution into drama and theater (17). Likewise, in Ritual in Industrial Society, Robert Bocock recognizes ritual as a
non-verbal form of communication when he defines it as ―the symbolic use of
bodily movement and gesture in a social situation to express and articulate
meaning‖ (37). Theorists such as Catherine Bell and Pierre Bourdieu, who view
ritual as a form of embodied knowing, emphasize ritual as a special vehicle for
uniting thought and action that always works ―on the hither side of discourse‖
by means of the formalized and symbolic movements of the body rather than
through narrative statements. Both theorists thus de-emphasize the role of
words in ritual practice. Indeed, Bell
states that, although words are sometimes considered to be the most critical
elements in ritual, ―language isn‘t necessary to ritual as such‖ (113).
The attraction of the non-verbal
expressive power of ritual was readily apparent to immigrant novelists who
repeatedly include scenes in which immigrant protagonists, or their family
members, receive comfort and empowerment from participation in ritual despite
being excluded from the religious use of the word for various reasons. For example, we will recall that although the
Norwegian minister in Giants In the Earth
failed to preach the kind of inspiring sermon he wished, the Rite of Holy
Communion nourished the immigrants spiritually and increased their sense of
solidarity, regardless of the words. Similarly, Samuel Waterman, in Tobenkin‘s God of Might, has been estranged from
Jewish ritual practice for over twenty years, yet when he returns to the
synagogue, the ritual moment strengthens and comforts him. Tobenkin tells us:
It was so long, so long ago since Samuel
had heard the prayer. The words of
it had completely escaped him . . . . But
it did not matter . . . . He found words,
other words, his own words…He was swaying
with the rest of the congregation.
(272)
Thus, Tobenkin reminds us that, although
Samuel has lost the original words to
the rite through assimilation, the words of
the ritual are less important than the non-verbal
expression accomplished by the formalized
repetition of an order of physical gestures and
positions that unite him with the Jewish
community and the lost world of his youth.
Louis Forgione gives us a similar incident in The River Between. As described in
Chapter Two, Rose and Demetrio, living in
exile in the neighborhood of Cherry Hill,
encounter an Italian religious procession,
which they follow into the neighborhood
church where Mass is being said. There, ―the
light of the living altar glowed on their
faces, and bowing instinctively to the
ancient gods of their people, these two knelt in
worship‖ (217). Forgione continues:
The two attempted a prayer, but were lost
among the formal phrases, whereupon
they uttered snatches of orisons and
fervid words born out of the emotions that
sprang within. Gradually inclining her
head so that it touched his shoulder, lips
quivering, eyes suffused with heavenly
light, the woman murmured, ―We‘re
going to help one another—and comfort one
another. . . [;] we‘re going to love
one another—to do good—to go straight—to
live for one another‘s happiness.
(217)
Here again, the immigrant novelist presents two characters who
have lost touch with the ritual language of their religious community. Yet the
two experience a transcendent and redemptive moment through their participation
in a rite where words are secondary to the experience of communal acts of
worship. As in the case of Samuel Waterman, the words may be important, but the
meaning of the ritual relies less on language than on the physical act of
submitting the body to collective participation in a received order of movement
and gesture.
Finally, Abraham Cahan reminds us that ritual could also
be empowering to women who were excluded from the ritualized use of the word in
patriarchal Jewish religion. In The Rise
of David Levinsky, David recalls the actions of his mother who found her
own means of circumventing the exclusion of women from access to the ritual use
of language:
She was passionately devout, my mother. Being absolutely
illiterate, she would murmur meaningless words, in the singsong of a prayer,
pretending to herself that she was performing her devotions. This, however, she
would do with absolute earnestness and fervor, often with tears of ecstasy
coming to her eyes. (12)
Immigrant novelists thus present ritual
as a powerful, non-verbal form of selfexpression that transcends language
through physical gesture in synchronic or diachronic conjunction with others
that offered self-expression, spiritual sustenance, and collective empowerment
to people whose relationships to other languages of power were somehow
disrupted. What is equally important, however, is that these passages also
depict immigrants struggling to utter an extraordinary form of sacred language,
a kind of ritualized glossolalia that transgresses semantic norms in an
encounter with the holy, whereby the ritualization
of the language, not the words themselves, expresses sacred meaning. Thus,
though the immigrant might not have had command of words in American society at
large, he or she did have command of the ritualized use of words as an expressive medium and a taxonomy of discourse.
Through the physical movements and specialized language of ritual, therefore,
the immigrant could address the holy and express matters that required the
transcendence of quotidian speech.
This naturally leads us to the second branch
of ritual studies, that which examines the role of language in ritual practice.
While the body of research into the phenomenology of language in ritual is
daunting, and the variety of theories concerning what is being said and how
it is said is beyond the range of this chapter, a brief summary of a few
important theories will provide some clues as to the reasons immigrant
novelists found questions of ritual to be intimately tied up with controversies
over language and assimilation.
First of all, most theorists agree that
when rituals do use language, they
employ it in a distinctive way. Ritualized language is punctuated and aligned
with physical movement, usually highly formalized, often repetitive, and often
rendered extraordinary by means of intoning or chanting. In addition, special
languages are often used that form taxonomies of utterance within the ritual
itself. For example, when Latin or Hebrew are used in ritual practice, the
choice of language often cues participants as to the importance and authority
of what is being said.
In ritual, ―we speak a language we did
not make,‖ wrote Durkheim, ―a treasury of knowledge is transmitted to each
generation that it did not gather itself ‖ (212). Through the repeated use of
formalized language that is intentionally nonspontaneous, Durkheim argued,
ritual transfers an inherited body of wisdom from one generation to the next,
giving the participants the sense that what is in fact a socially created
reality comes from a trans-social, or supernatural, source. The ritual use of language inscribes the
ritual order and group solidarity into the minds and hearts of the social body.
In contrast to Pentecostal glossolalia, which signals the conferring of spiritual
power upon the individual, the language of ritual confers power upon the group,
providing spiritual comfort for the individual, in turn, through his or her
participation in the group. For
immigrants, the choice of language used to pass on the wisdom of the group,
therefore, could be a volatile issue, since it was so intimately bound up with
group identity and solidarity.
In a recent and interesting reformulation
of Durkheim‘s theories of ritual communication, Maurice Bloch argues that the
formalized language of ritual—that is, speech-making, intoning, singing, and
chanting—reduces semantic content by closing off possibilities of alternative
utterance, thereby maximizing the persuasive factor of language for the group.
According to Bloch, because of this strategic use of language, participants
find it difficult to resist authoritative utterances within ritual contexts.
For those who wish to resist the messages imposed by the strategies of ritual,
therefore, the only alternative is repudiation of the entire ritual order, a
phenomenon that indeed occurred among immigrants when the languages used in
their ritual practice began to be subject to the tensions of assimilation in
America.[33]
Ritual
also uses language in special ways to induce and transform emotion.
Benjamin Ray attributes the power of ritual language to ―its
ability to rearrange people‘s feelings and command psychological forces to make
things happen in people‘s lives‖ (110).
Ritualized language accomplishes this transformation of emotion partly
through the use of aesthetics to play upon the senses of participants, thereby
creating an emotional climate in which they can best absorb the spoken or
unspoken cognitive content of ritual. Additionally, as was discussed in Chapter
Two, by its reiteration of words used in countless previous performances,
ritual uses memory to recall the same words in similar or different contexts,
setting up an unspoken connection or opposition to those previous contexts and
the emotions associated with them. Additionally, as mentioned above, the use of
languages enjoying a special sacred status, like Hebrew or Latin, often evokes
emotions of awe and respect, which in turn color the perceptions of the
participants as to the significance of the words themselves. These words, often
read from holy books, as Durkheim recognized, carry the authority of God-given
wisdom.
Finally, ritologists have often identified ritual language
as playing a performative rather than a descriptive or expressive role. In Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935),
Bronislow Malinowski wrote, ―the meaning of any significant
word, sentence, or phrase is the
effective change brought about by the utterance in the context of the
situation to which it is wedded‖ (241). Thirty years later, drawing upon
Malinowski, John Austin developed his theory of speech acts, the ―illocutionary
force‖ of which transforms the world upon which they work.[34]
In this theory, words bring about change by pronouncement. Ritologist Ruth
Finnegan has claimed that Austin‘s approach is especially useful for the study
of ritual because it allows for a more expansive view of ritual language that
does not dismiss it as magical incantation but lifts prayer and sacrifice into
a special realm of speech utterances separate from everyday speech and that
accomplish such important tasks as annunciation, transmission, and valediction
(550). For immigrants, this aspect of the ritual use of their languages was
especially significant, since words having little power in the marketplace
could be used to accomplish lifealtering transitions and metamorphoses, making
pure what was sullied, making whole what was broken, and ushering the soul into
and out of life.
As these theorists make clear, ritualized
language can have extraordinary persuasive and transformative powers over the
emotional and moral lives of those who make use of it. These powers are
especially prominent in the novels written by immigrants, wherein protagonists
must repeatedly negotiate their relationships with their religious and ethnic
communities through their relationship to the language of ritual practice.
While the majority of non-English speaking immigrant groups struggled to some
degree with language, perhaps no immigrant groups struggled more than the
Norwegians and the Jews, for whom their ritualized language delineated and
protected a sacred ethnoreligious order experienced as besieged by the forces
of assimilation.
The Norwegian immigrant community
struggled from the beginning with the role its native language should play in
both church and society and made heroic efforts for many years to maintain
cultural identity through separate Norwegian schools, newspapers, literature,
and churches. While some Norwegians supported the
American common school and felt attendance there was essential
for survival, the Norwegians as a whole were the only Scandinavian group to
dissent from the American common school, which a number of them accused of
being ―godless and ineffectual‖ (Lovoll 98). As early as 1838, many Norwegian
parents worried that the Norwegian language would die with their generation
(99). With similar concerns, the Norwegian synod attempted to establish a
separate network of Norwegian schools where religious instruction and the
preservation of Norwegian language and culture could be combined with general
education in order to maintain Norwegian-American identity (100).
However, due to the disruption imposed by the Civil War and
opposition from Norwegian immigrants who continued to attend the common school,
this measure never replaced the American common school on a large scale.
Norwegian immigrants did, however,
establish a vast array of Norwegian newspapers in the Midwest during the
late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries not only as a means of providing
information and support to isolated immigrants spanning a large geographical
territory but also as a means for preserving the Norwegian language as the key
to ethnic identity (105). Naturally,
these newspapers depended on a Norwegianspeaking public to sustain them, and,
when immigration restriction significantly reduced the numbers of native
speakers in the 1920s, many of these newspapers simply could not continue. Decorah-Posten, the longest-running
Norwegian newspaper, for example, managed to stay afloat until 1972 by
absorbing subscribers from other Norwegian papers that had folded (329).
Norwegian writers also made valiant efforts to create an
impressive body of Norwegian-American literature that would provide a history
of Norwegian immigration and a linguistic source of ethnic pride and identity
for succeeding generations. Historian Orm Øverland considers the years between
1880 and 1914 as years of optimism in the
Norwegians‘ quest for an ethnic literature of their own
because an abundance of newly arriving immigrants from Norway gave hope that
the language might indeed survive for several generations into the future, and
the achievement of prosperity began to allow enough leisure time for reading
(109). Writers Waldemar Ager and Johannes Wist, major figures in this movement
of cultural preservation, felt that the survival of Norwegian culture depended
upon the survival of the Norwegian language and made this their primary
concern, stressing the importance of ―the cultivation of the language of the
old country by loyal citizens of the new‖ (324).
When the United States government began
limiting immigration, however, the Norwegian-speaking public needed to sustain
this literature diminished to the point that publication of fiction in
Norwegian became economically disadvantageous. In addition, the emergence of
the 100 per cent American movement meant that hyphenated Americans who read
journals and books in languages other than English raised fears of dual loyalties,
leading to a further decline in interest. When Ager suggested that the
Melting Pot was in fact a euphemism for a system whose aim was
to ―denationalize those who are not of English descent,‖ his patriotism was
questioned as a result (333). Rölvaag arrived on the American literary scene
during this period. After similar attacks, Rölvaag began calling his novels
―American literature written in the Norwegian language‖ (350), yet continued to
present the immigrant‘s language and heritage ―as one with a conservative
Lutheran view of the function of religion and the role of the church, both
under pressure from the popular trends of the time‖ (350).
Prior to 1917, the Norwegian Church of
which Rölvaag wrote was plagued by controversy over church doctrine. One of the
primary issues in this struggle, as Rölvaag makes apparent in the second novel
of his trilogy, entitled Peder Victorious,
was the incorporation of the English language into the rituals of the Lutheran
church. In its early years, the
Norwegian Lutheran church was cohesive, with Norwegian-born pastors ministering
to Norwegian-speaking congregations. With the emergence of the second
generation, however, trouble arose when Norwegian-speaking parents began to
struggle with the dilemma of providing cultural continuity and spiritual
guidance for their American-born, English-speaking children in a society they
perceived as secular. As more American-born pastors completed seminary, the
church began to adopt English as the language of ritual observance.[35]
The ensuing period was one of confusion as younger, American-born pastors
attempted to use Norwegian with older members, and Norwegianborn pastors
attempted to speak English with younger members.[36] In 1912, the president of one of the
Norwegian synods recommended the appointment of English-speaking members of
congregations to carry on the work of the church in an increasingly
Americanized population. Shortly after this, the 100 per cent American movement
during and after World War I resulted in 9,000 services being changed from
Norwegian to English within one year (327). Thus, even though the warring
synods of Norwegian Lutheranism were finally united in 1917 as the Norwegian
Lutheran Church in America, the stage was already set for the eventual loss of
the original tongue. Following World
War I, the number of services held in Norwegian declined in
accord with the death rate (327). In
1925, there were roughly equal numbers of services in Norwegian and English,
but after 1930, religious instruction was no longer given to young people in
Norwegian at all. By the 1940s, less than seven percent of all services were
conducted in Norwegian. Since ethnic identity was so closely tied to the mother
tongue, this eventually led to gradual identification with Lutheran congregations
of other ethnicities, such as Swedish and German. In 1946, the Norwegian
Lutheran Church in America officially dropped
―Norwegian‖ from its title altogether, and in 1960 united with
the German and Danish Lutherans to form the American
Lutheran Church (328).[37]
Lovoll maintains, however, that besides the old Norwegian carvings remaining on
the altars and pulpits in the MidWest, a distinctly Norwegian cast can still be
detected in the American Lutheran church in ―its orthodoxy and its penchant for
ritual‖ (328).
Rölvaag‘s Peder Victorious uses the crisis over language on the American
prairie as an arena in which to explore themes of particularity and plurality,
of inclusion and exclusion, of individuation and collectivity. As Peder Holm,
the American-born son of Norwegian immigrant Beret Holm, struggles to separate
from his family and move into independent adulthood, the territories of South
Dakota and North Dakota struggle to separate from one another in favor of
inclusion as states within the larger American union, and the Norwegian church
on the American prairie splits over doctrine, forms of worship, and the use of
English in its ritual practice. Indeed, the novel focuses on the ways in which
language can form a crucial filament in the cocoons of all those communities
who view themselves as holy—whether familial, cultural, ecclesiastical, or
national—and who wish to protect themselves from profanation and dissolution.
Rölvaag describes the collision of
languages taking place on the American prairie in terms that resemble those
used to describe the Pentecostal meetings: ―A confusion of tongues far worse
than at the time of Babel set in; neither before nor since have such liberties
been taken with English speech; and the language which the people had brought
with them fared not one whit better‖ (116). In the midst of this multiplicity
of languages, Beret and Peder Holm represent pars pro toto the immigrant community as either exclusionary or
acculturative, and the costs involved in either stance. Beret, the first-
generation Norwegian-American, is fiercely protective of her language, her
culture, and her family. Indeed, her defense of the Norwegian language springs
from her belief that without it, her children will lose their very humanity.
Fearful of the future, isolated from mainstream society by her refusal to learn
English, and certain that her children are being lured away from her by forces
she cannot control, Beret fights at every turn for the preservation of her
mother tongue, not only as the linguistic matrix in which she has always lived,
but also as the only language in which she feels she can be a mother. As Beret
listens to her children speaking English to one another, she wonders whether
she actually is their mother—―their language was not hers‖ (196). When Miss
Mahon, the
Americanizing schoolmarm, criticizes Peder‘s Norwegian accent
and urges Beret to speak only English with Peder in order to help him master
the language, Beret indignantly rises and tells her that it is ―more important
that the boy should learn to understand his own mother than that he should
learn to talk nice!‖ (138) Beret‘s fear of losing her son, and of her son‘s
losing his cultural roots, intensifies to the point that on one occasion, when
Peder struggles unsuccessfully to read a Norwegian newspaper to her at her
insistence, she repeatedly boxes his ears, shouting at him, ―Now you read
decently!‖ (196-7).
For Peder of the second generation,
English is the language of promise and of power. Like his father, he is
fascinated by the future and dismissive of the past. The narrative tells us
that Peder lives in a world that is compartmentalized into three rooms, two of
which are created and separated by language—a Norwegian room which he shares
with his family and their commitment to the past, and another, English room in
which he can dream dreams of future conquests (3). The third room, more troubling,
is that which he shares with God, a presence that has darkened since the death
of his father. In this room language has ceased to function. Peder no longer
prays (13).
In
many respects, the religious power of the third room has been supplanted in
Peder‘s world by the American common school, which seeks to
evangelize immigrants with the gospel of assimilation and inclusion in American
civil religion. Miss Mahon uses language, and attitudes toward language, to
inculcate the doctrine of Americanization in her immigrant students, preaching
the sacred lore of American heroes, like Washington and Lincoln, and arranging
for her students to recite their holy words in quasi-ritualized contexts at
school performances for the public. The special use of language in these
settings, as Durkheim and Leach suggest, makes important statements to the
social body regarding itself. In particular, the Gettysburg Address, which Miss Mahon has Peder
recite before the immigrant community, makes subtle statements as to the necessity of subordinating
particular cultural interests to the larger interests of the American sacred
order in order to avoid factionalism. In a manner similar to that described by
Bloch, the specialized use of language in the veneration of American civil religion
makes it difficult for anyone to oppose what is said. Anyone so doing would be
considered un-American.
At this meeting Peder hears a senator
deliver a speech in English and is overwhelmed by the beauty and power of his
oratory. The speech affects him so strongly that he vows to speak only English
from then on in order one day to possess the persuasive power of language that
the politician, the minister of the American civic order, displays. Peder,
whose intellectual gifts make him a star at school, longs for inclusion in a
bright American future the senator describes, but his language hinders him from
the status he would like to achieve. In turn, Peder resents his mother for
holding him to a moribund culture that deters him from full participation in
this vital new society. Beret, on the
other hand, is profoundly disturbed by her son‘s drift into the cultural
homogenization brought on by the pressures of Americanization and the mixing of
ethnic groups on the prairie, forces over which she feels she has little
control.
Beret, in whose vision the Norwegian
Lutheran community takes on the Biblical proportions of the children of Israel,
contends most strenuously against the English language in matters relating to
religion. Beret does not want English used in the ritual practice of her
church, in Bible reading, or in prayer. For Beret, holy matters should be
expressed in holy language, and that language is Norwegian. The new minister at
Spring
Creek, the focus of Beret‘s ire, wishes to modernize the Norwegian
church, moving it out of its ethnic cocoon and into dialogue with the rest of
America so as to minister to the next generation of Norwegian-Americans.
Reverend Gabrielson believes that ―[h]ad the Norwegians, from the first, had
the foresight to found a church in the language of the country the work for the
Kingdom of God would have prospered far more, and all the lamentable schism
could have been avoided‖ (271). Gabrielson sees Beret‘s insular attitudes,
then, as contravening the evangelical ethos of Christianity itself. In
addition, Gabrielson, who is a practical man, tells the horrified Beret that in
twenty years no Norwegian will be spoken in America, and the church must
prepare itself for that inevitability (220). Gabrielson thus begins implementing
the use of English into the ritual observance of the Norwegian Lutherans in
Spring Creek.
The struggle between Beret and Gabrielson
over language, on the other hand, is ultimately a struggle for the soul of
Peder. Above all, Beret does not want Peder talking to God in a language she
cannot understand (34). Gabrielson, however, wishes to groom Peder for the
ministry and encourages him to approach the practice of his faith in English.
His methods only increase Peder‘s
confusion over language, religion, and assimilation: If God lived here, He must be an American.
There you have it!. . .What would they want of a Norwegian God in this country?
Most likely that‘s just what these
Norwegians didn‘t understand and so things went wrong with
them [. . .] But just suppose now God didn‘t like their talking to Him in
Norwegian?. . . When He was an American? [. . .] [H]e couldn‘t get rid of the
thought that it wasn‘t proper for an American to talk Norwegian to God. (17-18)
Gabrielson gives Peder an English Bible,
the first he has ever seen, and, like Miss Mahon, has Peder read its holy words
publicly before his mother, whose reaction is as would be expected: ―she wanted
to get up and protest—[Peder] was not going to read the Word of God to her in
English!‖ (224) The conflict intensifies
at Beret‘s barn-raising when all sit down to eat and Reverend Gabrielson offers
―a lengthy blessing in English‖
(242). Beret takes offense at Gabrielson‘s choice of English
for the ritual blessing of the food, but Gabrielson quietly suggests that Beret
is applying exclusionary religious ethics to the issue of language, explaining
that God does not intend for us to keep spiritual gifts to ourselves but to
interact with other communities. Beret rejoins, ―But supposing that what is
precious to me is worthless to others?. . . It might also be that I cannot make
any use of what I am getting in return.‖ The narrative tells us that Beret
looked to the others
―like one who has lost her way and doesn‘t
know whither to turn‖ (243).
Beret‘s dismay partially stems from her innate
capacity to understand what Rappaport has explicitly described: the power of
ritualized language to make selfreferential statements about the participants
and to impart canonical messages about their ultimate concerns. Beret
recognizes Gabrielson‘s choice of English to bless the food she has prepared
for her Norwegian friends as a declaration that the old social order she has
loved, and which she needs for her own psychological stability, is no longer
valid and that Norwegians are now a people who accept cultural annihilation in
the name of Christ for the sake of Americanization, a reversal of values she
finds repugnant. This interpretation is
born out in a private discussion the two have later, when Gabrielson tells
Beret she is no longer a Norwegian but an American. Beret insists she is a human being first and
that language is essential to maintaining one‘s humanity (224). When Gabrielson
argues that one does not cease to be a human being just because one changes
languages,
Beret resorts to Biblical analogies,
comparing the Norwegians to the lost tribes of Israel.
Gabrielson claims the tribes were lost on account of their
sins, but Beret immediately retorts, ―That they had so little regard for their
language must have been part of their sin‖ (225).
Finally, at the Rite of Confirmation, the
swirl of confusion regarding language, religion, and belonging comes to a head
for Peder, who, under pressure to assimilate into the American civic order,
which also presents itself as sacred, has gradually lost his faith in God and
his own cultural inheritance. When Reverend Gabrielson, who has confirmed
several other young Lutherans in English, asks him the three questions
prescribed by the Rite of Confirmation, Peder, who is believed by all to be
called by God to the ministry, cannot find any words to answer him. He is
completely silent. Beret sits stunned at her son‘s failure to respond, and the
narrative tells us that Peder, ―getting up from his knees before the altar, was
staggering and had to grab hold of the rail to steady himself. His features,
drawn and haggard, looked like those of one in terrible pain. The instant he
reached his seat he collapsed in a faint‖ (261). Peder, who recognizes the transformative
power of words uttered in a ritual context, is unsure of his willingness to
commit to this community and its God, but, as Bloch suggests, he cannot engage
in dispute because of the power of the formalized language of ritual to repress
alternative discourse. Peder‘s physical symptoms indicate a somatic rebellion
against the ritual order, which is born out by his later complete abandonment
of the religion of his youth.
Later, when Gabrielson, in English, tries
to make the recalcitrant Peder commit to attending seminary, Peder refuses,
reinforcing his disavowal by repeatedly answering Gabrielson‘s English
entreaties in a sullen Norwegian. Yet, while his retreat to his mother tongue
signals his separation from Gabrielson, it does not signify his allegiance to
his mother. By the novel‘s end, Peder has separated from Beret and his
Norwegian heritage
in favor of inclusion in the new, English-speaking
pluralism of America by marrying the English-speaking Susie Doheny, the sister
of his Irish-Catholic friend Charley, a union his mother stoically accepts as a
personal and cultural tragedy.
Peder
Victorious reveals the degree to which language, particularly the ritual
use of language, is implicated in the creation and destruction of sacred
communities. The novel‘s conflicts bring to mind Durkheim‘s claim that ritual
practice is not so much about the worship of deity as the worship of the social
order, a thesis that is especially apparent in Beret‘s conflation of the
Norwegian and Biblical communities and Miss Mahon‘s devotion to the American
civic order as a religious vocation. Both women view language as crucial to the
definition of sacred boundaries. Beret desires to receive holy wisdom by means
of a language that, because it has been passed down to her from her ancestors,
is capable of conveying the transpersonal truths she needs to hear. For Beret,
to speak to God, and of God, in a language of the American civic order is to
take upon oneself the yoke of a secular society bent on destroying those
truths. Beret‘s concerns, which reflect in an extreme form those of Rölvaag
himself, are born out in her son‘s experience, as Peder‘s estrangement from his
mother tongue coincides with his alienation from the God with whom he was so
intimate as a boy.[38]
In Peder Victorious, Rölvaag insists
upon allegiance to one‘s linguistic heritage as not only essential to the
maintenance of cultural integrity but of spiritual integrity as well.
Similar concerns over the moral use
of language appear in the novels of Jewish immigrant writers who were members
of an ethnic group that had perhaps the most complex dynamic at work in
relationship to language. Jewish immigrants often participated in a
multi-lingual community that spoke a host of vernaculars, while venerating
Hebrew as a sacred language and pursuing English as the key to prosperity. Yet,
as Jewish immigrant writers make plain, the Jews who were heirs to a rich and
ancient linguistic tradition were also carriers of a bitter legacy of Gentile
myth and fears regarding Jewish language itself, myths that centered upon the
language of the Jewish
Talmud and the vernacular of Yiddish as signs of Jewish
corruption and barbarism. Many Jews had internalized these old-world attitudes
toward Jewish language and subsequently carried them into the American milieu,
where they rumbled and sometimes erupted into their explorations of the
relationships between language, assimilation, and religious integrity in
America. Often, therefore, the writer‘s depiction of Jewish language and
ritual reflects the degree to which he
aligned himself with those attitudes.
Christian prejudice against Jewish
language as the sign of Jewish blindness has a history dating back to St. Paul
himself, who portrayed the letter of the Jewish law as a visual impairment that
could be removed only by the revelation of Christ. Yet, St. Paul‘s account of
his experience on the road to Damascus belies a Judaic tradition built upon a
devotion to the power and moral integrity of the word. The first act of God in
the Hebrew
Bible is an act of speech: ―And God said, ―Let there be light‖ (Gen. 1:3). For the Hebrew
God, Word and Act are one and spring forth in
perfection from God‘s perfect nature.
Thus, for the Jew, all language is fundamentally derived from
the goodness and power of God‘s primordial speech act at the moment of
creation, and the proper work of human beings is to answer and emulate the
all-powerful, all-perfect word of God.40 In the Jewish tradition, therefore, to fully
exist, one must speak to God and of God, and, although God cannot be
directly named, ―God is someone to whom Jews must keep talking, and as for
whether He ‗exists‘ or not, that is a problem for philosophers‖ (Howe
191).
Just as language itself was of the
highest theological importance to the Jew, the Hebrew language in particular
held a revered place for its unique capacity to express fundamental truths
about the universe. In his discussion of the outpourings of devotion to the
Hebrew language by the Kabbalists of the Middle Ages, Jewish scholar Gershom
Scholem sums up the special power of the Hebrew language for the Jew and its
theological basis: ―To them, Hebrew, the holy tongue, is not simply a means of
expressing certain thoughts, [. . .] language in its purest form, that is,
Hebrew [. . ,] reflects the fundamental spiritual nature of the world; in other
words, it has a mystical value. Speech reaches God because it comes from God‖
(17). Thus, for the Jew, ―the very
40 In Psalm 33, for example, human beings are first
called to sing to God because God‘s word is completely good and completely
efficacious:
Praise the Lord with the lyre,
make melody to him with the harp of ten strings! Sing
to him a new song, play skillfully on the strings with loud shouts.
For the word of the Lord is upright; and all
his work is done in faithfulness. He loves righteousness and justice;
the earth is full of the steadfast love of
the Lord.
By the word
of the Lord the heavens
were made,
and all
their host by the breath of his mouth.
[. . .]
For he
spoke, and it came to be; he
commanded, and it stood forth. (Psalm 33: 2-9)
nature of humanity is defined by language. Language is the
true link with God‖ (Gilman, Jewish
Self-Hatred 277). Centuries later, Jewish immigrant writers demonstrate the
essentially unchanged status of Hebrew in the eyes of Jews in their fervent
recollections of its spiritual power. Abraham Cahan, for example, remembers
well his father, who ―loved the Hebrew language and often read it aloud. The
beauty of the language would make his eyes sparkle with excitement‖ (The Education of Abraham Cahan 34). And
Mary Antin, whose father gave her the opportunity to study Hebrew just like her
brother, recalls her childhood joy in reciting Hebrew texts: ―What I thought I
do not remember. I only know that I loved the sound of the words, the full,
dense, solid sound of them, to the meditative chant of Reb‘ Lebe‖ (90).
However,
Jewish veneration of Hebrew was historically misconstrued by
Christians as a sign of legalism, materialism, and occultism,
as well as of the Jewish inability to recognize Christ as the true Logos. In Jewish Self-Hatred, Sander Gilman provides a comprehensive
discussion of the ways in which, beginning in the Middle
Ages, Jewish self-perception has continually
been tied to Gentile assumptions about
Jewish language, particularly that of the Talmud, or ―oral
Torah,‖ a commentary on Jewish law and ritual compiled after the fall of the
Temple and completed by approximately 600 A.D. (23). Many non-Jewish Europeans viewed the Talmud
as the primary receptacle of Hebrew, a special, hidden, demonic language, by
which the Jews secretly devoted themselves to occult rituals and the thwarting
of Christian truth, as is apparent in Christian dramas of the time, which
depict Jews conjuring evil spirits with
Hebrew incantations (24), and in the actions of the Church,
which, under Pope Gregory IX in 1244, seized the ‗heretical‘ Talmud, and after
a public debate, had it burned in Rome and Paris (33).These Gentile beliefs
were further shaped by Jews, often converts to Christianity, who felt compelled
to adopt the very attitudes that characterized their language as indicative of
a morally corrupt nature and an inability to reason effectively. Additionally, since the Book of Revelation
paints a vision of Jewish conversion as crucial to the Second Coming of Christ,
Christians viewed the Talmud as threatening God‘s plan of universal salvation
because it impaired the Jewish ability to accept Christ as the Messiah (33).
In the centuries
following the Middle Ages, ―[t]he association of the false perspective of the
Jews with the Talmud became universal,‖ Gilman explains, and the
Talmud came to represent ―those magic, evil books in which the
blindness of the Jew is contained‖ (33). Thus, the Hebrew language continued to
be linked in the European mind with black magic and secret ritual. In his
autobiography (1558-62), Benvenuto Cellini, for example, cites his recollection
of a Jewish magician engaged in secret rites in the
Colosseum who called upon the devil ―in phrases of the Hebrew‖
(24). Gilman suggests that in this period Jews began to be characterized as
either ―good‖ or ―bad,‖ depending on their distance or proximity to the
language of the Talmud, its magical practices, and the moral blindness it
inculcated.[39]
More
significantly, Martin Luther‘s pamphlet On
the Jews and Their Lies
(1543) openly declares that Jewish language is a code used by
a society of thieves to hoodwink Gentiles, a legalistic tool similar to that of
the Roman Catholic Church (but made even more duplicitous by Talmudic
argument), and thus a danger to the social order. Luther recommends
confiscating the Talmud and burning synagogues as a remedy for Jewish mendacity
(60).42 His other pamphlets also include some of the first published
references to Yiddish, a secular language that had existed among the Jews over
a wide geographical area for hundreds of years prior to the Reformation.
Yiddish used Hebrew characters, thus contributing to the perceptions of
non-Jews that it was a mysterious and secret language deliberately obscured in
order to hide Jewish machinations and diabolical practices from innocent
Christians. 43 Consequently, Gentile paranoia regarding Hebrew as
the secret language of the Talmud gradually came to extend to the vernacular
use of Yiddish, and its connection to the negative stereotype of the Jew from
the East began to take hold (76).44
scathingly satirical document written in the personae of ignorant supporters of the Cologne Dominicans.
Sadly, their defense did not extend to the Jews, since they included a great
number of anti-Semitic jibes at the converted Jew Pfefferkorn, portraying him as a Judas who, with
his promiscuous Jewish wife, had skulked into Christendom from the East. Gilman
cites this document as the beginnings of the stereotype of the ―Eastern Jew‖ (Jewish Self-Hatred 48-9).
42
Luther links Jewish ritual to the evils of the
Catholic Mass as the sign of a people who believe salvation can be achieved by
words rather than faith, and he urges Protestants to cleanse the Hebrew
language ―from the piss of Judas‖ (qtd. in Jewish
Self-Hatred 64). Luther‘s belief that Jews were congenitally incapable of
being converted directly anticipates the arguments of American nativists four
hundred years later that claimed Jews were incapable of being assimilated.
43
Gilman acknowledges that there were, in fact, some
Jewish thieves and that Yiddish and Hebrew characters were used by thieves as a
secret code. What he finds problematic in Luther‘s statements is his conflation
of the language of thieves with the character of the Jewish people. (69).
44
In his treatise on the German language, for example, Johan Christoph Adelung
identified Yiddish as a specifically Jewish language tied to the East, a historically
threatening place for the Germans because of repeated attacks by Turks and
Huns. (70).
By the time of the emancipation of
the Jews in the late 18th century, Yiddish had come to be explicitly
identified in the public mind as a Jewish tool of corruption, thievery, and
deceit. Along with increased proximity of Gentiles to Jews, emancipation
brought about increased anxiety. Jews now found themselves in a double bind,
especially with regard to their language (83). On the one hand, according to such
documents of emancipation as Austrian Emperor Joseph II‘s Edict of Toleration
(1781), Jews were required to give up their use of Hebrew and Yiddish in public
discourse so as to protect Gentiles from Jewish exploitation in commerce and to
send their children to German- speaking schools. On the other hand, as Jews
came to resemble Gentiles in language and education, Gentile anxiety over
Jewish assimilation led to an increased need to identify the Jew who, with his
propensity to lie and deceive, might be masquerading as a Gentile. Such
anxieties led to the required use of Hebrew words in oaths taken by Jews in the
courts and to the use of exaggerated Jewish language in the theater to single
out Jews as either villains or buffoons (76).
In what have been described as the first
positive portrayals of Jews in German, however, Enlightenment dramatist
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing‘s The Jews (1749)
and Nathan the Wise (1779) portray
Jewish protagonists who speak perfect German, the language of reason and
objectivity, thus attempting to promote the image of the ―good Jew,‖ one who
maintains his distance from the argumentative discourse of the Talmudic pilpul and the passionate, ―barbaric‖
language of Yiddish. Lessing‘s characters are therefore indistinguishable as
Jews because the hallmark of their Jewish identity in the public mind, their
special language, has been stripped away in order to make them appear virtuous.
Thus, perhaps Lessing unwittingly continues the propensity of Europeans to use
Jewish language as the measuring stick for Jewish character (82).
A year before he wrote The Jews, Lessing had met Jewish
philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, upon whom he clearly modeled his noble Jewish
characters. Mendelssohn, the only Jew at the court of Berlin, held favor there
precisely because he was unrecognizable as a Jew, having rejected the language
and methods of reasoning of his heritage in favor of German language and logic.
Mendelssohn later became the central model for the Jewish Haskalah, or Enlightenment movement, and the forerunner of the
Reform movement in Judaism. At a
particularly precarious moment when Mendelssohn was called upon by a Christian
pastor either to refute the claims of Christianity publicly or to convert to
Christianity himself, Mendelssohn opted to reject public disputation and
religious polemic, the characteristic mode of Jewish Talmudic argumentation and
rabbinic discourse, in order to present himself as the non-disputatious,
rational, and objective Jew, who stands, rather, as a neutral observer. Gilman
cites this moment in which Mendelssohn, in self-defense, split the self-image
of the Jew into ―good‖ and
―bad‖ along the lines of language and reason
used by anti-Semites as decisive for
Judaism. From this moment on, Mendelssohn, the ―good Jew,‖
provided the major model for Jews who sought a way out of marginalization, one
which meant a radical shift in their linguistic identity from Yiddish to German
and Hebrew, and the relegation of their socially unacceptable discourse and
mode of argumentation to the stereotype of the ―bad Jew,‖ who, in turn, became
increasingly associated with the culturally degraded, irrational, ritual-bound,
Yiddish-speaking Ostjude, the Jew of
the East, whose diseased mishmash of language, like his superstitious ritual,
divided him from mainstream society and infected his ability to participate in
the civilized social order (98). Gilman maintains that Mendelssohn‘s adherence
to the image of the rational, German-speaking
Jew was, thus, ―the fulfillment of the cultural demands of
Christian, capitalistic society‖ (104).
Consequently, by the beginning of the 19th
century, Jews increasingly sought to abandon their connections to a language
they perceived as detrimental to their advancement as a cultural group. As soon
as Jews began to speak German on a regular basis, however, an interesting
phenomenon occurred. Non-Jewish Germans invented a mock language, called ―mauscheln,‖ or ―jüdeln,‖ to portray the way Jews spoke German with a Yiddish
accent. Mauscheln, ―the use of
altered syntax and bits of Hebrew vocabulary and a specific pattern of gestures
to represent the spoken language of the Jews,‖ became symbolic of the Jews as
―liars, falsifiers, and merchants‖ (139). At a time when Germany was striving
for unity through an adherence to a purified form of the German language,
Jewish mauscheln became the ideal
linguistic foil against which German political, ethnic, and linguistic
integrity could be defined. The resulting dilemma was that ―mauscheln was a quality of language and
discourse that Jews perceived as a major problem in their true and total
acceptance within the German community‖ (141). As the 19th century
progressed, mauscheln also became tied to biological theories of
race that identified Jewish speech as caused by physical defects born of
thousands of years of inbreeding (213-15). As a result, German Jews
increasingly felt compelled to reject Yiddish as a form of mauscheln, a corrupt language of the East, which signified
biological inferiority and ―a despised, incomplete symbiosis with the dominant
culture‖ (258), in order to achieve inclusion in Western European society, but
this also meant rejecting their native language which tied them together
ethnically as Jews in the West (107).
The German-speaking Jews who immigrated
to America in the 1820s carried these attitudes toward their language to the
new world. Heirs of the legacy of Moses
Mendelssohn, they possessed the same desire for assimilation
and the same views of Orthodox Jewish ritual, the Talmud, and the Yiddish
language as major stumbling blocks to Jewish progress in Western society. Before they arrived in America, they had
already begun to alter Jewish dietary laws and the rituals of the synagogue in
an attempt to bring Jewish religious practice out of the Middle Ages and into
accord with modern German society. This desire for modernization and reform of
religious practice led to the transformation of American Judaism. Beginning in
the 1840s, German Jews formed small groups called ―Reform Vereine‖ and invited
distinguished German rabbis to their houses of worship where they began
experimenting with changes in the liturgy. Reformers, such as Rabbi Isaac Mayer
Wise, who operated from an assimilationist platform, transformed Jewish worship
from spontaneous congregational outpourings to orderly sequences led by rabbis
that were in many ways indistinguishable from Protestant and Unitarian
services, finding Biblical support for their actions in the words of those prophets
who had emphasized social justice and ethical behavior and had attacked
priestly rites as superficial forms of worship. Organs and choirs were
instituted along with pews and family seating. Many temples even moved their
Sabbath worship to Sundays and eliminated prayer shawls, the ritual of bar mitzvah, the huppah, the dietary laws, the eating of unleavened bread during
Passover, and ―most everything considered sacred by traditional Jews,‖
including chanting the Torah and the Talmud (Raphael 65). Perhaps most significantly, Wise and
his followers reduced the use of Hebrew to a minimum, replacing it with English
as the language of religious practice.45
Thus, by 1881, Reform Judaism had come to be American Judaism. Fewer than fifteen of
200 major congregations in the U.S. were still Orthodox (Glazer 38). German Jews
had assimilated quickly into the American milieu and achieved a large degree of
prosperity, living lives relatively free of anti-Semitism in a democracy they
found congenial since it was based on the familiar values of the Enlightenment
and the Old Testament. Into this placid environment now came what many German
Jews experienced as a plague of Ostjuden,
whose presence threatened to undermine all that German Jewish immigrants had
worked so hard to achieve.
These Eastern Jews, in turn, had already
witnessed the beginnings of a reversal of the attitudes held by their German
co-religionists toward their people and their language. In late 19th
century Europe, a reaction against Western European rationality and anti-
Semitic race theories had set in. Jews began reformulating
images of the ―good Jew‖ and the ―bad Jew‖ and along with them, standards of
Jewish language. Writer, philosopher, and theologian Martin Buber, for example,
identified the once-reviled Eastern Jew with the mystical piety of Chasidism, a
religious practice that he presented as older and more
45 Isaac
Mayer Wise (1819-1900) was a Bohemian rabbi who, after immigrating to America
in 1846, formulated the basic theology and practice of Reform Judaism in
America. Wise quickly became a progressive modernizer, a ―free religionist,‖
who stressed the unchanging truths at the heart of all religions over their
―transient‖ historical forms and sought to universalize the Jewish faith. Wise
was an ardent American who believed that the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution were the fulfillment of God‘s revelation to Moses on Sinai and
that Americans and the people of Israel shared one ―national Deity‖ (Raphael
151). He threw himself into the study of English and was one of the few rabbis
in the U.S. to have mastered the language in the 19th century
(Glazer 37). Fierce battles were fought
over the changes in liturgical practice, but eventually all Reform
congregations adopted the Union Prayer
Book published in
1894, which was based on Wise‘s Minhag America (American Ritual, 1857), and services were now
conducted almost entirely in English.45
authentic than the rationalistic Judaism of central Europe in
collections of stories like Tales of Rabbi
Nachman. In a subversive move, Buber defiantly created a new form of mauscheln, now to be the property of the
Jew and a sign, not of his barbarism or his deceit, but of his piety.[40] In so doing, Buber attempted to reclaim
Yiddish as a language belonging to the Jews, yet his tools, according to
Gilman, were those of the anti-Semite
(279).
Theodore Herzl, the leader of the Zionist
movement, also used the linguistic concept of mauscheln, this time transforming it into an anti-Zionist character
type, called Mauschel, whose weak and
corrupt nature disables him from taking courageous action to restore the people
of Israel to their homeland. Mauschel, published in 1897, includes the following
portrait of the Zionist‘s sinister doppelgänger:
As a type, my dear friends, Mauschel has always been the
dreadful companion of the Jews, and so inseparable from him that they were
always confused. The Jew is a man like all others, no better, no worse [. . .
.] but Mauschel is a distortion of the human character, unspeakably mean and
repellant [. . . .] The Jew aspires to higher levels of culture; Mauschel
pursues only his own dirty business [. . . .] Even the arts and sciences he
pursues only for mean profit [. . . .] It is as if in a dark moment of our
history some mean strain intruded into and was mixed with our unfortunate
nation [. . . .] In times of anti-Semitism Mauschel shrugs his shoulders.
Honor? Who needs it if business is good? (qtd. in Elon 251-252)
In order to promote the cause of Zionism, then, Herzl turned to the same anti-Semitic
stereotypes of the avaricious, opportunistic, gesticulating Jew that were
partly responsible for the urgent need of Jews for a homeland in the first
place (Jewish Self-Hatred 243).[41]
Thus, German and Russian Jewish
immigrants to America were historically divided not only by the language they
spoke but also by their attitudes toward Jewish discourse itself and its proper
relationship to Jewish piety. Further, since German Jews had become estranged
from their transnational binding agent, Yiddish, they had difficulty in
understanding their co-religionists, both linguistically and philosophically.
An example of such misunderstanding occurs in Cahan‘s recollection of being
interviewed by an American Jew upon his arrival in the United States:
The main office of the Hebrew Emigrant Aid Society was on
State Street, directly opposite Castle Garden. When I arrived there I was
interviewed by an American Jew who conversed with me in German, which neither
of us spoke well. Unable to communicate effectively, we were uneasy with each
other. I departed with a strong impression that he was a heartless bourgeois.
And he probably suspected that I was a wild Russian. That is what they called
us immigrants at that time, sometimes even to our faces. This inability to
understand each other affected the relationship between the Russian-Jewish
immigrants and the American Yahudim
or German Jews who had crossed over years earlier. (The Education of
Abraham
Cahan 218)
In the religious sphere, a storm of
controversy broke out as the newly arrived Orthodox immigrants clashed with
German Reformed Jews in America who looked down on their religious practice and
the language in which it was sometimes conducted.[42]
The synagogues of the new immigrants had practiced Orthodox ritual in Hebrew,
with occasional sermons in Yiddish. They now hardly recognized what they
perceived as a bland and unemotional version of Christianized worship.
Additionally, for many Eastern Jews who were still connected to the ancient
mystical sense of the Hebrew language as the language of the living God, the
glory of Hebrew was considered compensation for the long and painful wait of
the Jews for the Messiah (Howe 12). To implement English in ritual practice was
to launch an assault on the fundamental relationship between the Jews and their
God. Jacob David Willowski, the Rav of Slutsk, for example, declared that
English had no place in the ritual observance of Jews and that English sermons
were so dangerous that ―there [would be] no hope for the continuance of the
Jewish religion‖ if they were allowed to continue (Sorin 181). To do away with
Hebrew and submit to the yoke of English was simply a linguistic form of
Babylonian captivity in many Orthodox eyes.
In addition, many Jews from the Pale also
insisted on using Yiddish, the bane of
German Jews, in their services. Much to the chagrin of the
modernizing and universalizing German Jews, therefore, most Eastern Jews
shunned Reform temples, creating honeycombs of small synagogues in Jewish
quarters, organized by members of the same village, where they used not only
Yiddish but the same accents of
Yiddish spoken at home in their ritual observance, evidence that ―it was the
word that counted most. Yiddish culture was a culture of speech, and its God a
God who spoke‖ (Howe 11).49
Even as Orthodox Jews struggled over the
proper use of Yiddish in the synagogue, members of the secular Jewish community
attempted to raise the status of Yiddish in the eyes of their fellow Jews. For
example, although many Russian Jewish socialists and intellectuals, like their
German counterparts, looked down on Yiddish as the language of a backward
thinking people, Abraham Cahan insisted that Yiddish could be used as warp to
hold the weft of Jewish culture and politics together, becoming the first
American Socialist to address rallies of Jewish workers in Yiddish50
and devoting
49
Over time, however, religious officials of even these
congregations felt the need to incorporate American language in order to gain
the respect of the congregation. Cahan tells the sad story of Rabbi Jacob
Joseph who was called from Vilna, Cahan‘s home town, to become Chief Rabbi of
the East side. Cahan, an atheist, nevertheless went to hear him preach:
It was only his second or third sermon since his
arrival and already he was making a clumsy attempt to accommodate himself to
his audience by using American Yiddish. Once he used the word ―clean‖ for
―rein,‖ and it was easy to see this was purposely done to show he was not a
greenhorn. His efforts to acquire social polish failed. [. . .] His American
words sounded unnatural. It was a pity.
I surveyed the congregation.
Almost all around were men dressed in fine American style: pressed suits,
starched collars, neckties and cuffs, clean-shaven and spruced up. The rough
edges of a small East European congregation had been replaced with American
polish and sophistication.
They looked upon their Chief Rabbi and decided he was
a greenhorn.
Reb
Yankev Yoisef was like a plant torn out of the soil and transplanted into a
hothouse.
His health deteriorated. He suffered a paralytic
stroke. (396)
50
Cahan writes in his autobiography of his defense of
Yiddish as a powerful literary and political language to intellectual friends
who dismissed it: ―Yiddish, they thought, was suitable for daily talk at home,
in the cheder, or while bargaining
with a Jewish merchant. But the idea that one could make a serious political
speech in this homey language seemed comical to them‖ (237); [. . . .] ―Even
though some of my friends showed contempt for Yiddish, I defended it. I showed
them how racy and powerful it could be and how it lent itself to the most
beautiful, the most subtle and delicate thoughts. I felt at home with my
Russian-
most of his life to the Yiddish-language newspaper The Jewish Daily Forward, which became a
lifeline for newly arrived immigrants and a major institution of Yiddish
culture.51
Yet, even among advocates of Yiddish,
there was dissension, since Yiddish itself was not uniform. The Yiddish of the
Galicians, Poles, and Romanians used different vowels from that of Lithuanians,
and Hungarians spoke a variant of Yiddish that was closer to German (Sorin
101). The Yiddish theater also contributed to linguistic confusion in the
Jewish quarter. According to Cahan, who believed in realistic language,
―[s]imple Yiddish was also avoided on the Jewish stage. The Jewish theater rang
with Deitschmerisch, a jargon of Yiddish and German, so that it was not unusual
to witness the depiction on the stage of a pious Jew or even a synagogue sexton
delivering long passages in Deitschmerisch‖ (The Education of Abraham Cahan 307). In his recollection of a
conversation with a member of the Yiddish theater, Cahan describes
Deitschmerisch as a kind of ―ridiculous Yiddish‖ made up of broken German,
indicating his familiarity with the concept of mauscheln.52
speaking friends. But I felt a strong attraction to
the Yiddish language, more than I had ever felt in Russia‖ (281) Yet Cahan
himself never got over elevating the Russian language over Yiddish as a
language for intellectual discussion, admitting that ―Russian was the language
of my intellectual self. I thought in Russian‖ (281).
51
Cahan dedicated his
newspapers to the common man, using ―the
simplest Yiddish so that even the most uneducated worker could understand it.‖
He often had to defend his practice to Jewish intellectuals, who, like those
who wrote for the theater, felt that Yiddish was not ―high‖ enough for public
discourse. ―How can you write Yiddish just as it is spoken?‖ Cahan recalls
being asked. ―In writing Yiddish, the language ought to be embellished so that
it sounds more respectable‖ (397).
52 Cahan
recalls, ―I once asked Karp, who had arrived with the first professional
Yiddish actors in 1884, why he spoke Deitschemerisch instead of Yiddish on
stage. He replied that it was the duty of the Jewish actor to elevate and
educate his audience by teaching it to talk a more refined speech than common
Yiddish.
He couldn‘t understand that his Deitschmerisch sounded only
like some kind of ridiculous
Yiddish. He was certain that even broken German was
more beautiful than unbroken Yiddish‖ (308).
In
order to standardize the language, scholar Alexander Harkavy created an
English-Yiddish dictionary and a Yiddish-Yiddish dictionary. Cahan, like
Harkavy, was
Lithuanian and used Lithuanian Yiddish
exclusively in The Jewish Daily Forward. As
Litvaks began to outnumber other nationalities in the Jewish
community over time, Lithuanian Yiddish took hold as the official mode of
discourse (237). Yet the already particolored fabric of Yiddish also showed
signs of what seemed at first to language purists like Cahan to be the
incompatible hues of English, as Jewish immigrants adopted word like ―vindes‖
(windows), ―silings‖ (ceilings), and ―pehtaytess‖ (potatoes) into their common
speech (The Education of Abraham Cahan
242).[43]
Thus, the cultural body in which Jewish
immigrant writers began to publish their fiction pulsed with the life-blood of
many different nationalities striving to speak their complex experience in a
language equal to the task but often encumbered by prejudicial views of their
own means of expression. Just as it was for the Norwegians, language was
taxonomic for Jewish immigrants at the turn of the century, classifying the
speaker as well as the meaning and significance of what was said. Competing
discourses, particularly in the realm of religion, often became strident in
their demands for primacy as many Jews struggled to hold on to their language
and the ultimate values they associated with it, even as they sought competency
in a new one, for over this Babel loomed the English language, which many
recognized would eventually engulf all other forms of discourse. Amongst these
intertwining, sometimes harmonious, sometimes dissonant Jewish voices,
immigrant novelists Lawrence Sterner and Abraham Cahan examined the politics of
language in the new world and its relationship to ethno-religious integrity
through the lens of the rich and ambivalent linguistic heritage they inherited
from the old world. As a result, their work often reveals fascinating
reformulations of the images of the ―good‖ and the ―bad‖ Jew according to the
ways in which they either assented to or dissented from non-Jewish assumptions
about Jewish language. Although their novels were almost exactly
contemporaneous, the two differ drastically in their visions of the
Yiddish-speaking Jew. Sterner‘s work betrays its direct descent from Moses
Mendelssohn and the assimilationist platform of the Haskala, while Cahan‘s novel offers a much more ambivalent
presentation of the Eastern Jew, one that redistributes the virtues and vices
of previous portraits in the face of a uniquely American experience.
Sterner‘s novel The Unchristian Jew was granted a copyright in 1917 and was
published by the author in 1919 at the close of World War I, when
Americanization efforts and anti-Semitism surged in America. The Leo Frank case
of 1914 had enflamed pre-existing American prejudices against Jews, who were
viewed as both money kings and socialist radicals. Sterner, a German Jew who had strong
socialist sympathies (whether Tolstoyan or otherwise is not clear), was later
active on the American stage, writing and performing in the 1920s in rather
frivolous and racy comedies with titles like The Club’s Baby and T.N.T.
(or) Behave. The Unchristian Jew, which
concerns the failure of both Christians and Jews to fulfill their moral
responsibilities to their fellow human beings in the capitalist economic order
of America, seems uncharacteristic of his later career, yet it clearly depicts
the difficulties caused by Jewish sensitivity to the moral agency of language
when issues of assimilation spilled over into Jewish cultic observance. Sterner
uses language and ritual to draw contrasting portraits of two major characters
along the lines of the linguistic split in the Jewish self-image begun by
Moses Mendelssohn, portraits which locate the ―bad Jew‖ in the
Yiddish-speaking ritualized Jew of the Russian Pale and the ―good Jew‖ in the
rational, acculturated reformer of the West.
The novel opens at sundown on a Friday
evening as Simeon Sachs, a prosperous New York Jew, performs his Sabbath
observance with his family. Sachs is a member of the most orthodox congregation
in New York City, one of those Jews, according to the narrative, who ―still
zealously cling to Saturday as a day of worship and rest—scorning Sunday as
they scorn Christ, and condemning as traitors to their faith those who transfer
their Sabbath to the ‗Christian‘ Sunday‖ (8). In the dining room, which is
―ostentatious‖ and ―overfurnished,‖ with
numerous gilt-framed paintings and silver serving dishes, the narrative tells
us that Sachs ―rattled off his prayers at a tremendous speed [. . . . ] All the
while he prayed, he swayed back and forth, presumably to mark his deep emotion‖
(12). On the little finger of each of his hands, Sachs exhibits ― a large
diamond of the first water‖ (12). In short, Sterner presents Sachs as the
coarse and ostentatious Jew, the parvenu, whose love of ritual corresponds to
his fumbling attempts to gain status in the eyes of the world by elevating superficial
show over substance. While Sachs uses the ritualized gestures and language of
the Sabbath observance to make statements to himself and his family regarding
an ethno-religious social order he supposedly believes is sacrosanct, Sterner
undercuts these statements with a presentation of Sachs as a Jew whose
embarrassing rituals are merely props to an economic order that is in fact
immoral and hypocritical. In his ironic treatment of Sachs‘ Sabbath rites,
Sterner indicates his own repudiation of a ritual order he sees as antithetical
to moral behavior.
Sachs corresponds in many ways to the old
European stereotypes of the ―bad Jew‖ internalized by German-speaking Jews of
the Haskalah. Significantly, Sachs‘
language and his attitudes toward the ritual use of language are the chief
indicators of his marginal status. Sachs speaks and writes Yiddish and Hebrew
fluently (8). Additionally, in a novel populated with Russians, Germans, and
Swedes, he is the only character who speaks in any kind of dialect—in this
case, a heavily accented English, sprinkled with Yiddish, and laden with
grammatical errors, a direct descendant of mauscheln.
Sachs, like the European stereotype, uses mauscheln
in his ruthless business dealings. In the following excerpt, Sterner uses Sachs‘
Yiddish speech as the sign of the superficial, hypocritical, materialistic Jew
who in his attempt to deceive unsuspecting customers haggles with a salesman
over the price of a teakettle, the finish of which, like the gilt of ritual
over hypocritical religion, masks its shoddy interior:
Durability, style and price means nothing to this biznus! I
buy the style I vant at my own price, and if the goods don‘t vear, that‘s the
customer‘s biznus; not mine! [. . . .] Now don‘t get angry because you got no
brains. You‘re like the rest of the shlemeels
I‘ve got about me. (27)
Like Herzl‘s character Mauschel, Sachs shrugs off any loyalty
to values other than those of buying and selling. Sterner‘s Simeon Sachs is the
Ostjude, theYiddishspeaking,
ritualized Jew, as reformulated by Herzl, a man whose language and religious
practice reveal his commitment to form over substance and his indifference to
matters of morality.
Further, Sachs attends Sabbath services
at the Temple B‘nai-Israel, where Sterner‘s description of the manner of
worship again echoes newspaper accounts of
Pentecostal tongues:
Opening the door of the Temple, one became suddenly
transported into the heart of Palestine during the days of Moses, Ezra, and the
Maccabees. A very Babel of almost savage confusion and incantation met the eye
and ear [. . . .] They all had on praying shawls, and the majority kept swaying
to and fro, calling upon the God of Israel, in the Hebrew tongue, with loud,
sorrowful, dissonant, unrhythmic wail, while intermittently they held
conversations with their neighbors on business and other secular topics.
(18-19)
Such descriptions clearly link Jewish ritual
practice and extraordinary language to
Gentile images of the conjuring Eastern Jew
like that of Cellini, as well as German
Jewish caricatures of their primitive,
materialistic, and unaesthetic co-religionists.
Sachs, who hurries through his own
Sabbath prayers, is particularly troubled by the changes to the language used
for worship instituted by the recently arrived Rabbi Cordova. To his daughter,
Rachel, who secretly admires Cordova, he has already complained:
Cordova uses vords that are not Jewish, and I don‘t like to
see you do it, too. I should never have allowed him to introduce English
sermons into the service [. . . .]
Ve must have more Hebrew teachers [. . . .] Rabbi Adster got on very vell
without English. All he did vas to remind us ve vere God‘s chosen people,
--that our God is the only true God, and Moses the only lawgiver. It don‘t
require
English to tell you that. (15)
Sachs‘ words thus fuse the man who wishes to maintain the
linguistic traditions of his people with a blind and mechanical approach to
religion.
Rabbi Cordova, on the other hand, like
Moses Mendelssohn and Isaac Meyer Wise, seeks to modernize and universalize
Judaism. In his search for the perennial truths in all religions, he has
discovered a deep sympathy for the teachings of Christ.[44]
Before his emigration to the United States, Cordova, in his travels over
Europe, came to view the ―insidious perversions‖ of Judaism and Christianity in
the religious practices of contemporary Europeans as dangerously superstitious
and divisive. Cordova‘s pursuit of truth and reason in religion then led to his
banishment from Jewish houses of worship in
Europe. He has recently come to America, where ―the torch of
Freedom burn[s] brightly,‖ in hopes of modernizing Judaism, lifting it out of
its isolating use of ritual, and establishing an ecumenical rapprochement
between Christians and Jews rational enough to recognize the commonalities
between their two faiths.
Again, Cordova‘s use of the Word
signifies his character. First of all, Cordova is gifted with a
soul-transporting singing voice, which he uses to great effect in the temple.
Second, like Isaac Meyer Wise, he has pursued his English language studies with
such diligence that, although he has been in America only a short time, his
speech is that of a highly educated, native-born American (20). When Cordova confronts Sachs on behalf of
underpaid and poorly treated workers, the ―good Jew‖ and the ―bad Jew‖ face off
as
linguistic foils:
Cordova: My visit involves a principle upon which I should
like to be informed.
Sachs: Vhat principle?
Cordova: The principle of purchasing an article at a price
that will afford a decent living to the artist or artisan producing it.
Sachs: You vant me to pay more than my competitors for
goods so that the hands that make them can have more vages? [. . . .] You may
be able to give sermons on Shakespeare, but vhen you come to talk biznus,
--vell, you‘ll excuse me for saying so, but you‘re a bit of a fool! [. . . .]
Cordova: Does your conscience never lead you to inquire into the effects of
these [. . . .] business transactions?
―Conscience?‖ Sachs said, shrugging his
shoulders. ―Vhat‘s conscience got to do with biznus? Conscience is religion:
taking care of your vife and children; biznus is profit: buying cheap and
selling dear (41-2).
Sachs‘ comments about conscience almost exactly reproduce
those of Herzl‘s Mauschel: ―Honor?
Who needs it if business is good?‖ That
the recently arrived Cordova speaks formal English with complete grammatical
precision, while Sachs, an American resident for over thirty years, speaks
―Yiddishized‖ English is explicable only by recourse to the old stereotypes of
the rational and assimilative ―good Jew‖ and the irrational and argumentative
―bad Jew,‖ whose mauscheln, like his
mindless pursuit of ritual practice, reveals his corruption, his
superficiality, and his fossilized intellect.
Cordova‘s confrontation with Sachs over
his inhuman treatment of the workers who produce his goods leads him to preach
a controversial sermon at the next Sabbath service at the temple. Disturbed over
Sachs‘ materialism and lack of concern for his fellow men, Cordova chooses the
First Commandment, ―Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,‖ as the text for
his sermon. The narrative tells us specifically that Rabbi
Cordova ―gave the words twice in Hebrew; then twice in
English; each time slowly, earnestly, with accents and pauses that brought out
the full force of that momentous command‖ (44). Cordova‘s ritualized use of the
language of the Torah in both Hebrew and English communicates an important but unspoken
message to the congregation about its ultimate concerns: that the heart of the
Hebrew faith lies in its ethics, which are no less valid and necessary in the
new world than in the old. The switch from the language of Israel to that of
America also implicitly suggests an allegiance to the values of assimilation
and progress rather than to the petrified practice of a religious community
that isolates itself from the world at large. While Cordova‘s linguistic
strategies indicate his desire to bring Israel into the American social body,
he is nevertheless treading on dangerous ground, for again, as Durkheim
recognized, in ritual ―we speak a language that we did not make‖ in order to
receive transpersonal wisdom. Thus, as Beret Holm understood, the question of which language should be the conduit for
spiritual truth and power is crucial. At stake is a choice between a sacred
language given from heaven specifically for the Jewish people and a secular
language symbolizing the imposition of the values of a culture perceived as
profane.
Cordova‘s sermon first lauds the values of Judaism,
―social equality, universal love, and peace‖(44), which he believes brought
about a major leap out of the sorcery, fetishism, and superstition of the old
religions of the Middle East. Now, however, he sees the perversion of those
values by Jews in the American marketplace.
The true Jewish cult, according to Cordova, is the Law of Moses, a
universal code of ethics, inscribed in the heart, that surpasses the empty forms
of ritual practice and demands fair treatment of one‘s neighbors. The Rabbi‘s
eloquent sermon, directed at Sachs, goes one step too far, however. His
ecumenical theology leads him to utter one particular word that outrages the
congregation—the name of Christ: ―Ye that do these things are still the
generation of vipers whose money tables Jesus, called Christ, overturned in the
temple!‖
Cordova declares, ―Ye are unspiritual,—
unchristian Jews!‖ (45)
The narrative then relates the effects of
this radical use of language in a ritual context upon the congregation:
Had a shell from an enemy‘s ship exploded in their midst,
it could not have caused greater consternation than the utterance of the name
―Christ‖ in that Jewish sanctuary. The whole congregation rose in a panic [. .
. .] In any place of worship it is most unusual for a congregation to interrupt
the preacher,— to shout him down as at any political meeting [. . . .]
Certainly never in the history of Judaism had any Rabbi dared to desecrate the
house of God by uttering the name of Christ within it, much less to set ―him‖
up as a guide for Jewish conduct
[. . . .] Could they ever congregate again in those polluted walls?
Would all the perfumes of Arabia cleanse the air within of that most hated name,
Jesus Christ!
The
men cried out in horror; the women wept, exclaiming: ―He must have lost his
reason.‖ (45-6)
Sterner‘s description of the rarity of public interruption of
sermons recalls Bloch‘s theory of ritual‘s distinctive use of language to
induce obligation by reducing the potential for competing utterance. Yet,
Cordova‘s decision to speak the name of Christ before a community especially
sensitive to the power of the word, whose terrible history resulted from this particular word calls forth chaos in the
sanctuary. Not only does the name recall the dark experience of Jews with
Christians, it also suggests the inevitable erosion of Judaism in the face of
an American society allied with Christianity, a fate already intimated in the
Rabbi‘s intonation of the law first in Hebrew and then in English. Furthermore, as Malinowski and Austin
suggest, the name of Christ uttered in a ritual context has the illocutionary
power to transform the world of the congregation, in this case to pollute it.
In this instance, the congregation feels it must repudiate its own ritual order
to avoid pollution by misuse of language in a ritual context by a radical
newcomer. Amid the furor, Sachs forces Cordova to step down and takes
possession of the rostrum. The Rabbi then repudiates the ritual order himself by
giving up his rabbinate completely, starting a Utopian community called,
significantly, ―Quality Town,‖ a place in which superficial yet divisive
rituals are forbidden and universal ethics based on reason are practiced by
all.
Sterner‘s novel scrutinizes the criteria by which true
religious practice should be judged against the backdrop of the conflicting
hierarchy of languages carried over from Europe, and made even more complex in
its new American context. To indict the practice of capitalism by hypocritically
religious Jews, Sterner uses the ritualized speaker of Yiddish as the
embodiment of the Jew who sells his moral birthright for a mess of pottage;
yet, like Herzl, whose Mauschel Sachs
so plainly emulates, Sterner turns to the same tools used by anti-Semites out
of their long-standing misperception of Jewish language.
The
linguistic boundary lines used by Sterner reflect the clean split in the
Jewish self-image between the ―good Jew‖ and the ―bad Jew‖
begun in the Middle Ages and brought to fruition in Moses Mendelssohn. In the
work of Abraham Cahan, who was perhaps a more astute observer of human nature
and who wrote fiction among Russian Jews who struggled to be individuals under
the weight of such images, those lines are much more circuitous and recursive,
as Cahan explored the distortions of these stereotypes brought about by the new
American hall of mirrors. Cahan‘s novel The
Rise of David Levinsky is the story of one man‘s long fall from moral and
linguistic grace through three distinct periods of time, the first of which
concerns his seven-year enclosure as an adolescent in a ritualized realm of
sacred language where he continually reads the Talmud with a multitude of
devout Jewish men in his native village of Antomir. The character of David
Levinsky has been described as the stunted fruit of an unappeasable hunger
formed in childhood and never satisfied (Rosenfeld 276). Yet, there is one
moment in the novel when David is
fulfilled, and that is during his tenure as a student reading Talmud at the
Yeshiva. Although David loses his mother during this period and is left
destitute, he fondly describes this time as one of intellectual, emotional, and
spiritual fulfillment created by a devotion to the ritualized reading of the
Word.
Talmud reading consists of a collective, periodic, and highly
stylized use of Hebrew and Aramaic, with elaborate rules regarding how the
sacred text should be read. It is a religious practice that involves the whole
person, a music for the intellect and for the emotions, a religious dance of
the body with its own special choreography using the head, hands, and torso.
The effect of this ancient ritual practice is often a form of religious
ecstasy. David explains, ―to read [the books of the Talmud], to drink deep of
their sacred wisdom, is accounted one of the greatest ‗good deeds‘ in the life
of a Jew‖ (27). Thus,
David and other pious Jews in Antomir keep
vigil by reading the holy word day and night
―in a hundred variations of the same singsong, literally every
minute of the year, except the hours of prayer (28).[45]
The ritual practice of intoning the
Talmud fulfills a variety of needs for the orphaned David. First, it satisfies
his intellectual curiosity. The intricate puzzles of the
Talmud and the argumentation of the pilpul, while from David‘s later standpoint seemingly obtuse and
archaic, provide a medium for intellectual development allied with moral and
religious values. David describes the Talmud as ―a voluminous work of about
twenty ponderous tomes [. . . .] It is
however, as much a source of intellectual interest as an act of piety. If it be
true that our people represent a high percentage of mental vigor, the
distinction is probably due in some measure to the extremely important part
which
Talmud studies have played in the spiritual life of the race‖
(28). Never again will David find the intellectual gratification he experiences
in Talmudic argument and interpretation.
The ritual chanting of the sacred text
also provides an outlet for emotion and raises David into a higher spiritual
realm. The following passage deserves to be quoted at length because of the
insight it gives into the emotional significance of Talmudic recitation in
David‘s early life:
My Talmud singsong reflected my moods. Sometimes it was a
spirited recitative, ringing with cheery self-consciousness and the joy of
being a lad of sixteen; at other times it was a solemn song, aglow with
devotional ecstasy. When I happened to
be dejected in the common-place sense of the word, it was a listless murmur,
doleful or sullen. But then the very
reading of the Talmud was apt to dispel my gloom. My voice would gradually rise
and ring out, vibrating with intellectual passion.
The intonations of the other scholars, too,
echoed the voices of their hearts, some of them sonorous with religious bliss,
others sad, still others happygo-lucky. Although absorbed in my book, I would
have a vague consciousness of the connection between the various singsongs and
their respective performers [. . .
.] All these voices blended in a symphonic source of inspiration for me. It was
divine music in more senses than one.
The ancient rabbis of the Talmud, the Tanaim of the earlier period and the Amoraim of later generations, were
living men. I could almost see them, each of them individualized in my mind [.
. . .] I pictured their faces, their beards, their voices [. . . ;] they were
all superior human beings, godly, unearthly, denizens of a world that had been
ages ago and would come back in the remote future when
Messiah should make his appearance. (37-8)
[46]
In this passage David uses musical metaphors to describe the
way in which the ritual use of language unites him synchronically and
diachronically with his fellow readers, the holy men of the past, and the
Messiah of the future in one collective song that transcends ordinary life.
[47] Experiences like this one inspire David
spiritually, grant him a glimpse of beauty, and alleviate his loneliness, which
becomes ever more chronic in the later part of the novel. Furthermore, David‘s
friendship with Reb Sender, the deepest and most emotionally satisfying
friendship of his life, is formed around their mutual devotion to the
recitation of the word. Reb Sender is a pious Jew, ―a dreamer with a noble
imagination, with a soul full of beauty‖ (31), who has ―no acquaintance with
the face of a coin‖ (29), and represents what David might have been had he been
able to retain the beliefs and ideals of his youth. Reb Sender passionately encourages David,
saying, ―if you love God you must be ready to suffer for it (29). He then
continues with this advice: Study the Word of God, Davie dear, [. . . .] There
is no happiness like it. What is wealth? A dream of fools. What is this world?
A mere curl of smoke for the wind to scatter. Only the other world has
substance and reality; only good deeds and holy learning have tangible worth.
(31)
Reb Sender‘s fidelity
to the moral integrity of the word leads him to give the following advice,
which is significant in the face of David‘s later misuse of language: ―Above
all, don‘t be double-faced; never say what you do not mean‖ (32).
Finally, the words of the Talmud, which David utters over
and over again in a ritual context, accomplish the transformation of the world
described by Malinowski and Austin. The words of the Talmud, intoned in the
manner prescribed by tradition, make
David‘s world holy and make him yearn for the holy. In
addition, as the ritual transmitter and receiver of messages regarding his
ultimate concerns, David becomes the instrument
of the sacralization of his own world. During this period,
David tells us:
[As] I read my Talmud, conscious of [God‘s] approval of me,
tears of bliss would come into my eyes. I loved Him as one does a woman. Often
while saying my prayers I would fall into a veritable delirium of religious
infatuation. Sometimes this fit of happiness and yearning would seize me as I
walked in the street. ―O Master of the World! Master of the Universe! I love
you so!‖ I would sigh. ―Oh, how I love you!‖ (38-9).
Similarly, in accord with Bloch‘s
theories, the repeated declamation of the Talmud in the ritualized setting
allows for its use in argumentation but precludes any disputation of the text
itself. Consequently, through the suppression of all countertexts, the text of
the Talmud, which is ―primarily concerned with questions of conscience,
religious duty, and human sympathy‖ (28), is experienced as true and binding on
all readers. Again, as Bloch has argued, the special language required by the
ritual setting enforces the obligatory nature of these morally binding
principles. To refute them necessitates the abandonment of the ritual order.
Yet, as the novel makes painfully clear, the inverse of Bloch‘s argument is
also true: David‘s later repudiation of the ritual order also means the loss of
the sense of obligation to the moral maxims its language instills.
The first period of David‘s biography
abruptly closes when he journeys from Antomir to America. In the epic of his
religio-linguistic metamorphosis, however, the first phase continues for a
short time after his emigration. When a garment manufacturer asks the newly
arrived David what he does for a living, David answers, ―I read Talmud.‖
The manufacturer answers, ―I see. But that‘s no business in
America‖ (91). Despite its seeming irrelevance in the American context,
however, David continues to seek out opportunities to read Talmud in the
synagogue because its special language and the unique manner in which it is
intoned provide a sense of comfort through memories of his cherished friendship
with Reb Sender; and, at a time in which David struggles to overcome the
stereotype of the greenhorn, his declamation of Talmudic wisdom instills a
sense of obligation to values beyond those of assimilation and acquisition as
well as a sense of continuity with his former identity:
Whatever enthusiasm there was in me found vent in religion.
I spent many an evening at the Antomir Synagogue, reading Talmud
passionately. This would bring my heart
in touch with my old home, with dear old Reb Sender, with the grave of my poor
mother. It was the only pleasure I had in those days, and it seemed to be the highest I ever enjoyed. At times I would feel
the tears coming to my eyes for the sheer joy of hearing my own singsong, my
old Antomir singsong.
It was like an echo from the Preacher‘s Synagogue. My former self was addressing me across the
sea in this strange, uninviting, big town where I was compelled to peddle
shoe-black or oil-cloth and to compete with a yelling idiot. I would picture my
mother gazing at me as I stood at my push-cart. I could almost see her slapping
her hands in despair. (109, emphasis added)
In this and other passages, David continually compares the
sacred unified music he once made with his co-religionists at the Preacher‘s
Synagogue to the strident competitive language of survival used in the
capitalist marketplace: ―I hated the constant chase and scramble for bargains
and I hated to yell and scream in order to create a demand for my wares by the
sheer force of my lungs‖ (107). His former choir members are now competitors,
diminished versions of those who once sang holy words and danced sacred meaning
with their bodies:
One fellow in particular was a source of discouragement to
me. He was a halfwitted, hideous-looking man, with no end of vocal energy and
senseless fervor. He was a veritable engine of imbecile vitality. He would make
the street ring with deafening shrieks, working his arms and head, sputtering
and foaming at the mouth like a madman. And it produced results [. . . .] One
could not help pausing and buying something from him. (107-8)
These passages are especially poignant when viewed as the sad
counterpoint to David‘s descriptions of his Antomir friend and fellow-reader
Naphtali whose singsong is the most beautiful in the synagogue and with whom
David ―would sit up reading, side by side‖ throughout the night, until the
worshipers came to morning service, a pastime he describes as ―one of the joys
of my existence in those days‖ (38): ―Naphtali had little to say to other
people, but he seemed to have much to say to himself. His singsongs were full
of meaning, of passion, of beauty. Quite often he would sing himself hoarse‖
(38).
As David gains a foothold, however, the
first phase in this ironic bildungsroman
gradually fades into the second, during which David‘s passion to learn English
eclipses his love for the music of the Talmud. Like many immigrants, David sees
English as the key to both social and economic success and pursues it with the
diligence he once gave to his Talmudic practice, attending English classes
―with religious fervor‖ (133). As David drifts away from the ritual practice of
Talmud reading, his sense of obligation to the moral use of language also slips
away and his tendency to misuse language becomes more and more apparent. David
admits to coming to the synagogue to read Talmud only to drop the book in order
to seek out prostitutes who ―lie and sham‖ to him just as he does to his
customers (125). He becomes friends with men like Max Margolis, who misuses
language to tell coarse stories about women. Most significantly, when he
becomes employed in a sweat-shop, he tolerates the blasphemous antics of a
fellow garment worker, whose favorite prank ―was to burlesque some synagogue
chant from the solemn service of the Days of Awe, with disgustingly coarse
Yiddish in place of the Hebrew of the prayer. But he was not a bad fellow, by
any means [. . . .] He was fond of referring to himself as my ‗rabbi‘ which is
Hebrew for teacher, and that was the way I would address him, at first
playfully, and then as a matter of course‖ (154-5). The passage makes plain the
degree to which David‘s friendships have fallen from the sacred camaraderie he
once shared with Reb Sender. Further, David‘s passivity at the perversion of
Jewish ritual language reflects the extent to which he has become estranged
from its moral agency.
David eventually moves out of the Jewish
neighborhood and goes to live in an Irish boarding house to learn English,
describing speakers of English in the same language he formerly used to
described the holy men of the Talmud: ―people who were born to speak English
were superior beings‖ (176). However, David‘s romanticizing of the English
language and his desire to master it are undercut by Meyer Nodelman, a
Jewish friend who is ―[c]rassly illiterate save for the
ability to read some Hebrew without knowing the meaning of the words,‖ who
tells David in Yiddish and broken English that there is another kind of
language in America that makes all formal education moot— money. In an analogy
reminiscent of Kafka‘s A Report to the
Academy, Nodelman asks,
―What is a man without capital? Nothing! Nobody cares for him.
He is like a beast. A beast can‘t talk, and he can‘t. ‗Money talks‘ as the
Americans say‖ (181). In order to be liberated from his cage, the Jew must
still acquire the language of assimilation, but now, in the American capitalist
scene, that language is money.
When David later moves in with Max Margolis and his
family, who embody the complex dynamics among first and second-generation
immigrants over language, David becomes enamored of his friend‘s wife and
watches her as she simultaneously prods her daughter to become proficient at
English even as she envies her the opportunity to learn it and grieves over the
loss of relationship she feels will inevitably follow her daughter‘s mastery of
English. David wages an all-out campaign to win Dora from Max, first speaking a
silent language of looks and gestures, then using English to woo her when they
are alone, ―even when every word we said had an echo of intimacy with which the
tongue we were learning to speak seemed to be out of accord‖ (275). When David
finally declares his love to Dora, however, he reverts to Yiddish, the language
of the heart (278).
As their affair progresses, David
recounts a moment in which Dora, who, like Reb Sender, feels that it is sweet
to suffer for what is right, declares her willingness to take the consequences
of her love for David, speaking in a style that recalls for him the ritual use
of language for spiritual devotion in the synagogue: ―It seems as if a great
misfortune had befallen me. But I don‘t care. I don‘t care. I don‘t care [. . .
.] I am willing to suffer for it.
Yes, I am willing to suffer for you, Levinsky‖ (280). David
remembers, ―she spoke with profound, even-voiced earnestness, with peculiar
solemnity, as though chanting a prayer,‖ but, having become estranged from the
values such language instills, he confesses, ―I was somewhat bored‖ (280).
The affair ends when Dora determines to
devote herself to her daughter‘s happiness at the expense of her own. David, in
turn, devotes himself to money-making, and his fascination with ―holy
languages‖ degenerates into an obsession with the acquisition of American
slang. He laments his lack of native-born acumen in words that echo the
biological theories of Jewish speech used by European anti-Semites in the 19th
century: ―I would write down every new
piece of slang, the use of the latest popular phrase being, as I thought,
helpful in making oneself popular with Americans [. . . .] That I was not born
in America was something like a physical defect that asserted itself in many
disagreeable ways—a physical defect which, alas! no surgeon in the world was
capable of removing‖ (291). On the sales circuit, this ―physical defect‖
becomes the subject of mockery by German Jews who heap ridicule upon David as
the gesticulating,
Talmud-reading Ostjude. Loeb, a competing salesman, tells anti-Semitic jokes about
Russian Jews like David:
One of the things about which he often made fun of me was
my Talmud gesticulations, a habit that worried me like a physical defect. It
was so distressingly un-American. I struggled hard against it. I had made
efforts to speak with my hands in my pockets; I had devised other means for
keeping them from participating in my speech. All of no avail. I still
gesticulate a great deal, though much less than I used to. [. . . . ] I laughed
with the others, but I felt like a cripple who is forced to make fun of his own
deformity. It seemed to me as though Loeb, who was a Jew, was holding up our
whole race to the ridicule of the Gentiles. I could have executed him as a traitor
to his own people. (328)
Yet later, on the same train, David dines with Gentiles and
struggles to speak ―with exaggerated apathy,‖ to keep his hands still so as not
to conform to the stereotype of the gesticulating Jew, and berates himself for
having talked too much (329).
David now admits to having no religious belief. His only
commitment is to the Social Darwinism of Spencer; but he nevertheless believes
that religion is an important social institution and contributes to its
support. As he enters the final stage of his linguistic decline, David,
successful by means of his ruthless business practices but intensely lonely,
attempts to regain the sense of moral integrity and community he experienced in
his youth by finding a bride from an Orthodox family with ―an atmosphere of
Talmudic education‖ (377). During one period of courtship, his prospective
father-in-law brings his son to read Talmud for David. David‘s reaction is
characteristic of his complex character. While he is deeply affected by the boy‘s
Talmud reading, which catapults him back into his own past at the Preacher‘s
Synagogue, he also confesses, ―[t]hat an American school-boy should read Talmud
seemed a joke to me. I could not take Rubie‘s holy studies seriously‖ (397).
David‘s longing for a language that can
resacralize his world like his ritualized reading of the Talmud once did leads
him to seek the hand of Anna Tevkin, the daughter of a once-renowned Hebrew
poet who now sells real estate in America.
Significantly, at a Jewish resort hotel in the Catskills, the sylph-like
Anna emerges before David out of the Babel of a crowd of Jewish immigrants who
have become estranged from their linguistic roots: ―there was a hubbub of
broken English, the gibberish being mostly spoken with self-confidence and
ease. Indeed, many of these people had some difficulty speaking their native
tongue. Bad English replete with literal translations from untranslatable
Yiddish idioms had become their natural speech‖ (426). Although he becomes
obsessed with Anna, his obsession with her stems largely from his fascination
with the poetic language used by her father. David goes to the library and
checks out three books of Tevkin‘s poetry, ―written in the holy tongue, a
language I had not used for more than eighteen years‖ (451). The words of one
poem leap out at David as they serve to lament his own experience:
Hush! the night is speaking. Each twinkle
of a star is a word from the world beyond. It is the language of men who were
once here, but are no more. A thousand generations of departed souls are
speaking to us in words of twinkling stars. I seem to be one of them. I hear my
own ghost whispering to me: ‗Alas! It says, ―Alas!‖ (452)
In his desperate attempt to recapture the emotional and
moral milieu created by the religious language of his youth, David spends long
hours with Tevkin and his family, the members of which are all devoted
Socialists and Zionists who find David‘s allegiance to capitalism hard to
swallow. On one occasion when the
subject of the Hebrew language comes up, David refers to it as a dead language.
His companions protest, saying, ―Oh no! Not any longer, Mr. Levinsky. It has
risen from the dead. For centuries the tongue of our fathers spoke from the
grave to us. Now, however, it has come to life again‖ (463). Once again, one‘s proximity to the Hebrew
language serves as a taxonomic indicator of moral integrity, but this time,
Gentile assumptions are reversed. For David, who has lost his moral
underpinnings, Hebrew is a dead language. For the Zionists who are committed to
a holy cause, it is very much alive.
Yet, even among the Tevkins, the ancient
connection to Hebrew as a holy language has lost its original purity. When
David attends the Passover seder at
Tevkin‘s home, the ceremony is fragmented and confused because none of the
children who must ask the four questions in Hebrew is either willing to
participate or able to speak the language. In contrast to the symphony of
Talmudic recitation at Antomir, David compares Tevkin‘s Passover service to an
opera in which each singer performs his own part in a different language.
Tevkin himself, who remains at the table to chant the final ballads of the
Passover ritual alone, dismisses them as ―charming bits of folklore‖ (496).
David fails to find the connection to the passionate ritualized language of his
youth in his liaison with the Tevkin family, and his courtship of Anna ends in
rejection and despair.
David is left to mourn his lost self, the enraptured boy
chanting Talmud at the Preacher‘s Synagogue in a world made holy by the word.
In The Rise of David
Levinsky, Cahan performs a fantasia on the old anti-Semitic theme of Jewish
language, modulating and recapitulating it in new keys. Significantly, the
first words David learns in America are ―All right,‖ a harbinger of his
eventual development into what Cahan called an ―Allrightnik,‖ his American
version of Herzl‘s Mauschel. While
David strives to avoid Yiddishisms and gesticulations, the external trappings
of Mauschel, inwardly he nevertheless
conforms to the stereotype, doing business at the expense of the poor, refusing
to identify himself with any cause greater than his own self-advancement,
misusing the Jewish legacy of moral language for personal gain, and attending
synagogue only because it is fashionable to do so, all the while engaging in
self-pity over the outcome of his life. In contrast, Reb Sender, David‘s old
friend at the Preacher‘s Synagogue, who cares nothing for money and everything
for moral beauty, defies the stereotype of the Yiddish-speaking Ostjude as a figure of greed and
barbarism, and serves as a pious foil to David in a manner similar to Buber‘s
Chasidic figures.
Cahan
also plays a subtle game with the old European stereotypes of
Talmudic discourse as conducive of spiritual blindness,
materialism, and deceit. Contrary to Gentile assumptions, David feels most
connected to what is holy and strives hardest to be good only when engaged in
ritual recitation. Reb Sender, who
spends his life reading Talmud, has probably the clearest vision of anyone in
the novel, offering David lifesaving advice he fails to heed. The ritualized
language of the Talmud, concerned with
―conscience, religious duty, and human sympathy,‖ moors David
to moral rectitude. Only when he abandons his ritual practice does he lose his
moral compass. Yet David, raised on Talmudic interpretation, also seems
strangely incapable of interpreting his own life and actions, and, having
abandoned the ritual order in which he first used it, he drops into the Talmudic
argumentative style of the pilpul when
he seeks to exploit a business associate (203). By the end of the novel,
David‘s relationship to language has become so slippery that we suspect he may
be manipulating us. In a confessional autobiography, this is surely the most
tragic sign of his loneliness.
Both Ronald Sanders and Irving Howe describe The Rise of David Levinsky as Cahan‘s own rueful ruminations, the
self-examination of a difficult and driven man with an acrid temperament,
―whose private self makes demands in behalf of ease, grace, and escape which
his culture cannot satisfy,‖ and whose ―public role traps him in an
imperiousness of tone and repression of self which weary him all the more‖ (Howe
527).
Cahan grew up in the town of Vilna, called ―the Jerusalem of
Lithuania,‖ a place of spiritual fame, and home to a famous Jewish mystic. In
his autobiography, Cahan states that the period of his greatest religious
fervor occurred during the time he spent chanting the Talmud in Yeshiva (61-2).
In a memoir written with what Howe calls ―a certain Litvak dryness,‖ some of
the most moving passages are Cahan‘s descriptions of the religious milieu of
his youth and its language:
After the [Sabbath] meal my father [. . .] reads the
Midrash. My mother reads her Yiddish translation of the Pentateuch. I read my Sefer Ha-Yosher, book of morality in
Yiddish. Sometimes, on these evenings my father reads aloud and makes my heart
quiver. All of this was more than a half century ago. It is all so very far
away and yet so clear, like the memory of a treasured song, a godly song.
(38)
Cahan‘s nostalgia and musical metaphors could have been
written by David Levinsky himself, suggesting that, while he may not have been
able to accept Orthodox theology, the religious world of his youth with its
unique form of religious expression may have offered Cahan an emotional and
artistic release that he never experienced anywhere else.
Cahan tells us little of his loss of
faith in his late teens, except that he first felt relief at not having to fear
God‘s judgment, then went about trying to convert others to atheism (89).
Cahan‘s description of himself closely resembles his portrait of David‘s
childhood friend Naphtali of the beautiful voice, who subsequently becomes an
atheist and destroys David‘s faith in God. If Naphtali is based on Cahan
himself, then it is important to recall that Naphtali also continues to chant
Talmud in the most beautiful singsong in the synagogue even when he no longer
believes (55). Naphtali‘s ambivalence, when viewed in conjunction with other
passages in the novel, such as the one in which David describes yearning for
God ―as one does a woman,‖ suggests that Cahan‘s ―dry Litvak‖ masked a soul for
whom the ritual use of language may once have been the love poetry for a
mystical relationship with God in which language, passion, and the spirit were
at least briefly united before his loss of faith, after which the spiritual
outpourings of the Passover ballads became merely ―charming bits of folklore.‖
Perhaps Cahan was remembering not only his early Socialist fervor but also the
ecstasy aroused by the ritual use of the word in Orthodox Judaism and the sense
of connection it provided to Jews and their highest concerns throughout history
when, in a 1902 issue of The
Jewish Daily Forward, he
lamented, ―I yearn for my greenness of old.
I yearn for my yearnings of twenty years ago‖ (qtd. in Sanders 270). In The Rise of David Levinsky,
Cahan examines the difficulty of singing the Lord‘s song by
the rivers of Babylon and the heavy toll taken on the Jewish soul by the loss
of its ancient vehicle for spiritual transport—the music of ritualized
language.
All three of these immigrant novels
reflect the relationship of the author to his holy community and to the
language it used to maintain itself and the degree to which each author saw
ritualized language as instrumental or detrimental to the preservation of moral
and cultural integrity. Rölvaag considered the ritual use of Norwegian to be
crucial to the survival of his culture and its capacity to contribute to
American life, while Sterner clearly saw the persistence of Yiddish and
orthodox ritual practice as signs of a Jewish isolationism and moral blindness
that should be replaced by a rational socialist approach emphasizing ethics
over aesthetics, and Abraham Cahan, with characteristic realism, saw both moral
and aesthetic power in the musical language of ritual but also recognized that
such subtle tones would inevitably be engulfed by the white noise of modern
American
life.
Dilemmas similar to the ones depicted by
these immigrant novelists were no doubt repeated countless times as religious
immigrants of all nationalities sought to voice their experience of the holy in
a culture whose language and mainstream religious practice often made such
expression extremely difficult, if not suspect. Like the Pentecostals whose
tongues of flame were often considered nothing more than the ignis fatuus of the ignorant, immigrants
sought by means of their special use of language to strengthen the fibers of
their holy cocoons at a time when modernizing intellectuals sought to direct
mainstream religious discourse in America toward the rational, the ecumenical,
and the progressive. When Flannery O‘Connor, who spent her life speaking the
ritualized language of the Catholic Church, was asked what type of Christian
she would be if she could not be Catholic, she answered, without a beat,
―Pentecostal Holiness.‖ Perhaps she recognized both groups as American misfits
who contorted ordinary speech in their attempts to express the inexpressible.
By refusing to hang their harps on the willows of ordinary discourse,
ritualized immigrants, like Pentecostals, offered a valuable counterstatement
from the margins to mainstream religious America, one that, divisive though it
may have seemed, nevertheless insisted that a true experience of the mysterium tremendum cannot be rationally
discussed, but must be stuttered forth, or sung.
Chapter Four: The Kalon-agathon: Immigrant Ritual and the
Politics of Aesthetics
In his essay entitled ―Filthy Rites‖
(1982), historian Stephen Greenblatt relates the story of Captain John Bourke,
who, while gathering evidence in 1881 for his ethnographic study Scatologic Rites of All Nations,
witnessed with horror the coprophagic rites of the Zuñi Indians. Greenblatt‘s
discussion focuses on Bourke‘s use of his own revulsion at the human ingestion
of bodily wastes in Native American ritual to initiate his epistemological
project, arguing that ―the very conception that a culture is alien rests upon
the perceived difference of that culture from one‘s own behavioral codes, and
it is precisely at the points of perceived difference that the individual is
conditioned, as a founding principle of personal and group identity, to
experience disgust‖ (3). While
Greenblatt‘s argument emphasizes behavioral codes, it also
raises the question of the underlying relationship between behavioral, or
moral, codes and culturally defined aesthetic codes. Occurring as it did during
the period when immigrants were entering the United States in large numbers
with their ―unknown gods and rites,‖
Bourke‘s disgust at the ―unaesthetic‖ rites of the Native American reflects the
milieu into which religious immigrants sought to practice their own rituals, a
new context in which ideals of the beautiful and the good, and their
relationship to one another, were radically different from those that
immigrants had taken for granted in the Old World. In Greenblatt‘s view, the
coprophagic rites of the Zuñis were part of their efforts to cope with their
own cultural demise in the face of Anglo-American supremacy. Like the Zuñis,
immigrants also needed their ritual practice to cope with an Anglo-American
cultural order that often viewed that practice with disgust.
According to Greenblatt, part of Bourke‘s
reaction was due to the Western perception of the body as ―grotesque.‖
Certainly, immigrant bodies were
considered grotesque, as we have established, and were viewed as evidence of
the immigrant‘s inherent immorality. As they experienced the negative judgments
of the dominant culture regarding their aesthetic and moral deficiencies,
immigrants, in turn, became particularly sensitive to questions of the
beautiful and the good. These issues were intensified even more by the immigrants‘
entry into urban ghettos, the squalid conditions of which robbed them of any
regular or sustained exposure to beauty, and the survivalist economics of which
subverted their previous understanding of morality. Religious ritual, which
often uses highly elaborate artistic means to enact the concerns of its
participants, was therefore a particularly powerful and much-needed medium of
aesthetic experience for the immigrant.
In addition, immigrants came from positional societies in which
conceptions of the beautiful and the good were inseparable from the collective
moral teachings passed down through ancient tradition and enacted in ritual
practice. In the new context of American capitalism, individualism, and
ethnocentrism, immigrants sought desperately to know what Theodore Jennings
calls ―the fitting act,‖ one in which the beautiful and the good are embodied
in a single gesture. In the bewildering context of modern American life,
however, the immigrants found that such was no longer easy to recognize or establish. Thus, for immigrants, ritual practice
provided an alternative realm in which beauty could be experienced, and the
fitting act, while difficult to ascertain in American culture, was, for once,
clear.
The reassurance provided by ritual was
complicated, however, by the immigrants‘ exposure to new American ideas of the
beautiful and the good, which had become increasingly separated from the moral
order and manipulated in order to serve the needs of the capitalist economy.
Some immigrants adopted those standards in their efforts to assimilate, and, in
turn, experienced their own ritual practice as a point of confrontation between
the old understanding of the ethico-aesthetic order and the new. Many of the most interesting examinations of
this confrontation were undertaken by novelists from ethnic groups that many
Americans considered especially unaesthetic and immoral, and whose ritual
practice was most likely to arouse reactions like Bourke‘s. Because ritual so
closely intertwines aesthetics with morality, the fiction of immigrant writers
often utilizes ritual scenes to dramatize the immigrants‘ quest for the fitting
act, their struggle to reformulate the relationship of the beautiful to the
good in the context of American capitalism and ethno-centrism, to represent
themselves as capable of aesthetic appreciation and discourse, and to
encapsulate their own views on aesthetics and morality. In the process, these immigrant writers
explore important questions: To what
degree can morality safely be aestheticized? To what degree is aesthetics
necessary to morality? In what ways, and under what conditions, do the two
realms falsify, undermine, or destroy each other? Under what conditions does
the pursuit of one interfere with the pursuit of the other? And to what degree
does ritual enhance or confuse our perception of aesthetic and moral beauty?
The immigrant‘s struggle with the proper relationship
between aesthetics and morality in America was symptomatic of a long-term
philosophical tension in the West extending at least as far back as the ancient
Greeks who formulated the idea of the kalonagathon—
that is, conduct having harmony, proportion, and grace. Marxist critic Terry Eagleton posits this
concept as distinctive to pre-modern, organic societies, where the three
central concerns of philosophy—epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics—were
intermeshed and culture did not function apart from the moral codes imposed by
the social order (366). Most of these societies incorporated a ritual
practice into their daily lives that made use of artistic strategies to engage
their members in an existing ethical order. Hence, Eagleton maintains, the
aesthetic ―was not sharply separated from the ethico-political [. . .] because
it could be seen as a form of social knowledge, conducted within certain
normative ethical frameworks‖ (366). Eagleton argues that over time, and
especially beginning in the eighteenth century with the development of
capitalism, these three spheres became disconnected, each becoming specialized and
sealed off from the other two. Knowledge became discontinuous with ethics and
aesthetics and lost its commitment to value (367). As competition and
exploitation became commonplace in the socio-economic sphere, ethics became
dissociated from the social order itself so that questions of ―What am I to
do?‖ had to be answered without reference to one‘s rights and responsibilities
within the social relations of the polis (367). Instead, one had to answer ethical questions
by a categorical imperative or by the emotional satisfaction gained from doing
right (367). Finally, the aesthetic also became free floating and autonomous,
serving purposes wholly its own, as culture became detached from social and
political values.
Out of the fragmentation of a once holistic
human practice, Eagleton maintains,
the field of aesthetics as a pursuit in its own right developed as a
compensatory realm wherein these three fields could be reunited in the
imagination for a society in which such was no longer objectively possible, or
even desired. Thus, in his Critique of
Judgment, for example, Kant cordons off the beautiful from collective
morality in locating value in the artifact itself with its own laws and
purposes distinct from its use or value to society. Eagleton argues that a
philosophical strategy such as Kant‘s creates the art object as a kind of
autonomous subject (3), a move that coincided with the capitalist construction
of an aestheticized individual subject who, like a work of art, also obeyed his
or her own laws, a vision of self-referentiality ideally suited to the needs of
bourgeois society (9). Philosophers in
the nineteenth century, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, continued the
aestheticization of the subject, creating a whole philosophy based on the
notion of self-creation according to the individual‘s intrinsic laws regardless
of the needs of society. Eagleton laments what he sees as the splintering of
human wholeness and the commodification of the beautiful by capitalism but,
like Marx, believes that such splintering allowed humanity to use reason to
free itself from the shackles of ecclesiastical, theological, and political
control. In addition, Eagleton feels that the realm of the aesthetic, though
continually dissociated from the political order up to the present time,
provides a utopian vision of the reunification of knowledge, ethics, and
aesthetics, and of ―human energies as radical ends in themselves,‖ a vision
which is necessary for the large-scale transformation of society.
A similar utopian amalgam of human
activities is also the goal and practice of religious ritual. In his important
essay ―On Ritual Knowledge,‖ Theodore Jennings argues that ―what is sought in
the exploratory moment of ritual knowledge is the fitting or appropriate act. [
. . . .] We might be tempted to call such a criterion ‗aesthetic‘‖ (119).
Jennings suggests here that ritual uses strategies that fuse the
epistemological, the ethical, and the aesthetic in one arena in which the
concerns of the participant are caught up in and subjugated to those of the
larger social order through engagement in a pattern of actions that
simultaneously express aesthetic and moral values. Although a Marxist might
look skeptically at religious ritual as a means of political revolution, in
many ways it performs the same visionary functions that Eagleton specifies: It
unifies the cognitive, ethical, and aesthetic realms in one human activity
perceived as an end in itself, and is surely one of the normative and unifying
frameworks Eagleton describes as being common to pre-modern societies which
interwove the ethical and the aesthetic in the pursuit of the social knowledge
of symbolic actions that exemplified one‘s obligations to
God and one‘s fellow human beings.
Many immigrants came from societies that,
although not immune from the changes brought on by capitalism and modernity,
were also, in many ways, holistic, positional communities erected upon a
ritualized order that defined the beautiful and the good as inseparable from
the needs of the social body and allocated a place to each member within a
constellation of relations that defined his or her obligations to the social
order. One of the chief means of reinforcing this sense of obligation was the
use of aesthetics in cultic devotion. In
its appeal to the senses and in its dramatic spectacle, ritual became a kind of
social art or theater for the immigrant that provided a means of aesthetic
experience and expression while at the same time intensifying the participant‘s
sense of obligation to the social order.
That ritual makes use of artistic
strategies to engage participants in a moral order has been acknowledged by
many ritual theorists. Emil Durkheim, who considered ritual‘s primary value to
be moral and social (371), also insisted that, ―in itself, the cult is
something aesthetic‖ (382). Drawing from the theories of Pierre Bourdieu,
Catherine Bell argues that ritual is a type of social practice that
simultaneously appeals to multiple senses within the individual, including the
aesthetic and moral senses (Ritual
Theory, Ritual Practice 77). Clifford Geertz closely identifies the use of
symbols in ritual with the expression of ethos—that is, the moral and aesthetic
aspects of culture (89-90). More specifically, Ron Williams and James Boyd
suggest that rituals, like works of art, are
―integrated combinations of artful means typically involving
music, chanting, dance, gesture, and staging‖ that appeal to the pre-social and
pre-cognitive senses in order to unify communities through the expression of
emotion (292-3). According to Williams and Boyd, rituals also resemble works of
art in their primary use of percepts and affects rather than concepts to
―promote sustained interaction with the paradoxical aspect of human experience‖
(304). Furthermore, like works of art, rituals can act as ―subtle instrument[s]
for the exploration of those central concerns that the practitioner brings to his practice‖ (295), and some rituals can
even be considered ―masterworks‖ to which participants can return again and
again to gain new and deeper spiritual insights (294). Through their use of
sensory appeals and artistic strategies, therefore, rituals could provide a
realm of beauty for immigrants whose environment was often grossly lacking in
aesthetic appeal while also providing them with a context in which to explore
their highest moral concerns.
As we have seen, the arrival of
immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the far East at the close of
the nineteenth century triggered responses from Americans that subtly, and sometimes
not so subtly, combined Nativism with race theories to justify restrictions on
immigration. These theories, as noted in Chapter One, made morality dependent
upon biology and were, in fact, largely pseudo-scientific screens behind which
Anglo-American aesthetics could operate.
Madison Grant‘s The Passing of the
Great Race (1916), for example,
developed an extensive anthropological basis for his essential claims that the
American ―Nordic‖ race was ―of superior type, physically, intellectually, and morally‖
(48) because of its higher degree of specialization, and that immigrants from
the ―primitive races‖ of southern and eastern Europe were essentially a
moustache on the national Mona Lisa.[48]
Throughout the book, Grant continually derives value from pseudo-fact, arguing,
for instance, that Alexander the Great‘s ―aquiline nose, fair skin, gently
curling yellow hair and light eyes‖ (162) were evidence of Nordic power over
the Middle East and that, since the purity of ancient Greek blood has since
been tainted with Mediterranean blood, ―it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of
AngloNorman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features,
especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of
Hellas‖ (162). Grant further bases his
argument for the supremacy of the Nordic race on his observations that the gods
of Olympus, Venus, and Christ himself ―are always depicted as blond,‖ while
―the two thieves who were crucified with Christ are always brunette,‖ going on
to observe that ―such quasi-authentic traditions as we have of our Lord
strongly suggest his Nordic, possibly Greek, physical and moral attributes‖
(230).
In
numerous passages, Grant also links biological aesthetics with morality in
pointing out specific physical features that testify simultaneously to the
aesthetic and moral supremacy of the Nordic race. He compares, for example, the
―high bridge[ed] and long, narrow nose, the so-called Roman, Norman or aquiline
nose, [which] is characteristic of the most highly specialized races of
mankind‖ to ―the bridgeless nose with wide, flaring nostrils‖ which is
―everywhere of a very ancient, generalized and low character‖ (30). Grant
foregoes any specific analysis of the Negro or Asian race, which he groups with
―certain aberrant species of man,‖ as being beyond the scope of the book (33),
but he does use evolutionary theory to align immigrants from southern and
eastern Europe with the African and warns that the national physique and
character will be atavistically degraded by admixture with inferior stock,
singling out in particular the Polish Jew, ―whose dwarf stature, peculiar
mentality, and ruthless concentration
on selfinterest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation‖ (16,
emphasis added).
In
addition to fusing aesthetics and morality, Grant also engages in a similar
conflation of religion and race when he states that ―Whether we like to admit
it or not, the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a
race reverting to the more ancient generalized and lower type. The cross
between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a
Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a
Jew is a Jew‖ (18). Grant views the ancient religious traditions of these
groups, with their highly developed moral codes, as deleterious to the
Nordic capacity to conquer. ―One thing is certain,‖ he later
warns, ―in any such mixture, the surviving traits will be determined by
competition between the lowest and most primitive elements and the specialized
traits of Nordic man; his stature, his light colored eyes, his fair skin and
light colored hair, his straight nose and his splendid fighting and moral
qualities, will have little part in the resultant mixture‖ (92).
Grant‘s concern to preserve the good and
the beautiful in the Nordic American extends so far as his advocacy of the
sterilization of ―social failures,‖ a practice which he views as ―a practical,
merciful and inevitable solution to the whole problem‖ that ―can be applied to
an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal,
the diseased and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be
called weaklings rather than defectives and
perhaps ultimately to worthless race types‖ (51, emphasis added). In
hindsight, given the events in Germany twenty years later, such statements
suggest the slippery slope created by extending aesthetic standards into the
questions of morality and race.
Grant envisions, then, an American
socio-religious order based on the aesthetics of upper-class Anglo America,
wherein a native Nordic American aristocracy ―resting upon layer after later of
immigrants of lower races‖ would control capital, education, and ―the religious
ideals and altruistic bias of the community‖ (5). Thus, for men like Grant, the
fitting act in America by definition must conform to moral standards that also
include a strong admixture of upper-class aesthetic standards, an attitude that
was common enough among Anglo-Americans for Horace Kallen to devote
considerable time to it in
Democracy Versus the
Melting Pot, published a year before Grant‘s book. Kallen recognized that
what immigrants struggled to gain in their attempts to assimilate was not so
much some quintessential American trait
but the aesthetic standards imposed by the New England upper class upon the
rest of America. Thus, Kallen, who links ethnic prejudice to class and economic
injustice, argues that ―Americanization‖ is less a matter of ethnic
assimilation than of a capitalist aesthetics based upon greed which required
the poor to ape the appearance and manners of the rich. ―In all things,‖ Kallen
writes, ―greed has set the standard, so that the working ideal of the people is
to get rich, to live, and to think as the rich‖ (5), implicitly arguing that
the ―perceived points of difference‖ at which Grant experienced such disgust
were largely determined by class rather than ethnicity or evolution.
Into this cauldron of seething opinions
regarding the aesthetic legitimacy of ethnic groups came the immigrants with
their ―outlandish‖ religious practices and their desire for acceptance. For
immigrants facing aesthetic and moral prejudice of the sort Grant promulgates,
the appearance of their ritual practice became problematic, for, as Jennings
explains, ritual is not only a classroom for the study of the fitting act but
also a performance that ―communicates knowledge of the agent of the action—‗we
are as we act‘—to others‖ (123). Thus the ritual medium for conveying
information regarding the moral acceptability of ethnic groups to outsiders,
when it aroused disgust in AngloAmericans, sometimes became detrimental to the
ability of immigrants to gain the acceptance they so greatly desired. Some of
these immigrants began to feel that the appearance of the ritual representation
of their moral character needed to be rehabilitated so as not to deter their
integration into mainstream society.
A clear example of this can be seen in
the case of Jewish immigrants, who had a long history of being constructed by
Gentiles as unaesthetic, beginning with their bodies, which, as we have seen,
were considered to be misshapen, weak, and diseased. However, unlike the Italians
and some other immigrant groups who were also perceived as aesthetically
deficient, the Jews had no ancient treasure house of beautiful artifacts to
which they could point in defense of their aesthetic worth. As the heirs of a
religious tradition that with the Second Commandment forbade the use of images
to express their religious sensibilities, the Jews were historically
dissociated from painting and sculpture, as they were known in the West. Their
reverence for language produced a great body of poetry, mostly religious, but,
as was established in the previous chapter, Jewish language itself was never
accepted by non-Jews as an aesthetic medium.
In
fact, in the nineteenth century, Jewish language became expressly identified in
Europe with biological race theories that argued against the
Jew‘s capacity to create anything of true beauty (Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred 209). For example, during a quarrel with the
Franco-Jewish composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, Richard Wagner wrote an influential
essay entitled ―Jews in Music‖ in which he argued that the sound of Jewish
speech, which is always that of a foreigner speaking a language not his own,
prevents the
Jew from ever producing true poetry or music: ―In this Speech,
this Art,‖ wrote Wagner, ―the Jew can only mimic and mock—not truly make a poem
of his words, an artwork of his doings‖ (qtd. 210). Many anti-Semitic writers,
such as Eugene Düring, focused their attacks on the Jewish poet Heinrich Heine
as the symbol of the Jew who, ―lacking any free and selfless activity of the
spirit which alone can lead to disinterested truth and beauty,‖ merely poses as
an artist as a means to infiltrate and pollute the purity of
German culture (212). And in Sex and Character (1903), a
book that influenced Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger places Jewish aesthetic
perception in the same category as that of women, both groups having a flawed
psychology that results in a shallow ability to perceive or express the
beautiful (Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred 246).
As we have seen, these perceptions of the
Jew as aesthetically deficient spilled over into controversies about religious
ritual. Indeed, an anxiety over its lack of conformity to Western aesthetic
standards was the chief catalyst for the radical revision of Jewish ritual by
the Reform movement, which began in Germany among Westernized Jews who saw the
aesthetics of their religious practice as interfering with their ability to
assimilate into German society. Thus,
they wished to ―dignify‖ their form of worship, to make it ―decorous‖ (Glazer
27). According to Nathan Glazer, Westernized
Jews were embarrassed by the traditional Jewish service, which
they viewed as ―a rather cacophonous Hebrew outpouring by the congregation,
dressed in hats and prayer shawls, and led by a cantor, [. . . .] using a
decidedly un-Western and un-Germanic mode of singing, or rather chanting‖ (27).
Major steps were taken, therefore, to impose Western European aesthetic
patterns upon a religious practice they now viewed as formless and chaotic,
including the introduction of organized seating, choirs, organs, congregational
hymns, and a more elaborate and formal order of worship (27).
Yet, Irving Howe makes an important point
about the Jews and their God that is especially significant for the novels of
Jewish immigrant writers:
He was not a God of magnificence; nor was he an aesthetic
God. The Jews had no beautiful churches; they had wooden synagogues. Beauty was a quality, not a form; a content,
not an arrangement. The Jews would have been deeply puzzled by the idea that
the aesthetic and the moral are distinct realms. One spoke not of a
beautiful thing, but of a beautiful deed. Only later did Jewish intellectuals
discover that, even in the usual Western terms, there was an innocent beauty in
Jewish liturgical music, the carving of the Holy arks, the embroidery of prayer
shawls, the calligraphy of the Holy Scripts. But where intellectuals saw these as objects or qualities to be isolated for
aesthetic inspection, their ancestors had seen them as integral elements in
the cultivation of God‘s Word. (11, emphasis added)
This emphasis on righteousness gave
dignity and meaning to Jews whom outsiders viewed as incapable of aesthetic
beauty both in their form or expression. While many non-Jews were describing
Jewish Messianic expectations as dislocating them from the loveliness of the
real world (Gilman, Jewish Self Hatred
214), the Jewish emphasis on moral beauty springing from such expectations
served them as a spiritual and ethnic refuge. For some Jews, however, who had
absorbed European and American culture and who sought to rehabilitate the image
of the Jew in non-Jewish eyes, this insistence on moral beauty over aesthetic
beauty could be a source of pain and embarrassment. Indeed, the conflict between the historic Jewish
emphasis on moral beauty and the new emphasis on aesthetic beauty Jews
encountered in the American marketplace informs many of the novels written by
Jewish immigrant writers during the early decades of the twentieth century. Two
Jewish novels in particular—Edward
Steiner‘s The Mediator
and Anzia Yezierska‘s Bread Givers—are
especially revealing examples of the ways Jewish writers used ritual to depict
Jewish ambivalence and confusion regarding the relationship of their own
tradition to Gentile aesthetic and moral codes.
Steiner, we will recall, was a Jewish
convert to Christianity who advocated Tolstoyan socialism and published several
books, such as The Immigrant Tide, in
which he subjected the bodies and habits of his own ethnic group to American standards
of aesthetic taste, comparing pictures of Jewish features of the ―poorer‖ and
―finer‖ types.
Steiner‘s novel indicates that part of his reason for
converting to Christianity may have arisen out of an especially intense form of
the same need to conform to European standards of beauty that prompted the
Reform movement‘s emphasis on aesthetic decorum in Jewish ritual. His story of
Samuel Cohen, the Jewish apostate who becomes a Christian monk, centers on the
power of ritual aesthetics as the impetus behind Samuel‘s conversion. Samuel,
the last in a line of Jewish priests, and therefore responsible for carrying on
ritual practice in the synagogue, has been brought up by his widowed father and
his Catholic nanny Suszka in the Polish town of Kottowin, which he describes as
―still Medieval,‖ a pre-modern society in which aesthetics,
ethics, and epistemology were inseparable from the needs of the social order.
Samuel, who feels oppressed by his father‘s
scrupulous observance of Jewish ritual, takes great pleasure in his yearly
visits to Suzska‘s village at Easter. After taking part in the Passover ritual,
which, we are told, ―oppressed him‖ (44), Samuel journeys for a visit to
Suzska‘s house. On the way, he crosses the estate of a Polish nobleman, where,
overcome with awe at the beauty of a lilac bush, he breaks a sprig to take with
him. The Polish nobleman catches Samuel and abuses him physically and
verbally. His anti-
Semitic insults scar Samuel‘s soul, making him perceive
himself as something ugly (46), a perception that sparks an already latent
desire for beauty and social acceptance in Samuel that will burst into flame
when he witnesses Catholic ritual for the first time and is captivated by the
aesthetic power of the Easter Mass and its appeal to the senses: [T]he ornately adorned altar, the lamps,
acolytes walking up and down altar steps, the tinkling of bells, the sonorous
voice of the priest, the deep vibrating tones of the organ; it fairly
overwhelmed the boy and the strange Latin phrases so musical and resonant,
wooed him with a prophetic promise that some day, he too, would speak them over
throngs of waiting people. (47-48)
Here, the sensory appeals and formalized
movements of Catholic ritual draw Samuel over a forbidden boundary as he crosses
the threshold into the Christian church, where the participants look at the
Jewish boy in their midst with astonishment, ―not knowing nor caring that he
was a kinsman of Him whose Resurrection filled them with gladness‖ (47). That
night Samuel goes to bed dreaming of acolytes walking up and down altar steps,
and, from that day forward, he is no longer content with the religious practice
of his own faith. Samuel perceives the beauty of Christian ritual as the sign
of
Christian love, which he also experiences in his relationship
with the kindly priest Father Antonius.
In a short time, Samuel transfers his conception of moral beauty from
faithful adherence to Jewish law to the new brotherhood symbolized by the
beautiful devotions of the Catholic Church.
At the same time that he is staggered by
his experience of beauty in Catholic religious practice, Samuel is exposed for
the first time to Western ideas and art as the Czar initiates Jewish attendance
at public schools as part of his project for ethnic cleansing through
education. Samuel begins secretly reading novels and poetry that, like the
Catholic mass, act as a means of gratifying his aesthetic sensibilities. His
father is adamantly opposed to Samuel‘s interest in any kind of Western
learning or art, which, as the province of Gentiles, he sees as detrimental to
his son‘s moral integrity.
On another visit to Suzska‘s village, Samuel again
experiences relief and delight in his observance of the Catholic Mass, which
temporarily liberates him from a home life he perceives as ugly:
He quickly forgot the Jews‘ street, with its mud, its open
sewers and their smells, and even the Talmud lessons, with their entanglement
of wisdom and folly. He felt himself transported into another world (83)
The priest in his
gorgeous vestments sang vespers, the congregation and the choir joining in
heartily; the sights and sounds soon enraptured the sensitive lad. The orderly
service, the beauty and harmony of it all, were so different from the
disorderly synagogue service, that every sound and every movement were a
distinct pleasure to him. (85)
At this point in the novel, Samuel‘s
response to Catholic ritual indicates his
increasing identification with Christianity, as he looks back upon the
ritual practice of his own ethnic group and feels disgust at its difference from
the artistry he finds in Catholic worship. When Father Antonius preaches about
Christian love during the service,
Samuel‘s conflation of moral and aesthetic beauty in his
experience of Christian ritual practice culminates in his entry into the
monastery and his abandonment of his faith and his father. At the rite of
initiation into the novitiate, Steiner tells us, ―Silence, deep silence,
hovered over all, as prostrate upon the floor, before the prior, Samuel lay in
submission, his young impressionable soul enraptured by the magic of the
service; all the human in him benumbed, and all the divine aflame‖ (91). The
artistic strategies of Catholic ritual have succeeded in seducing Samuel away
from his own religious heritage in the hope that Christians indeed ―are as they
act.‖
Fourteen years later, the young monk,
now also a priest, will celebrate his first communion, touching off the bloody
pogrom that will reveal to him the naiveté of his belief, as Christians
slaughter Jews at random in the streets.
Samuel Cohen‘s attempt to appropriate the ritual beauty of Gentile
hegemony, like his plucking the nobleman‘s lilac, brings down the violence of
anti-Semitic feeling upon the Jew. After being helped by his friend Dr. Roznik
to get passage to America, Samuel meets a cross section of immigrant types on
the voyage, including Zionists, Socialists, and Anarchists, all of whom argue
about the relationship of religion to the order of political and economic power
in the world. He also meets a wealthy American family, the Bruces, who, out of
their professed love for Jews, devote themselves to converting them to
Christianity. Once in America, Samuel
experiences the grim life of American workers under the lash of economic
exploitation in a sweatshop, making beautiful clothing for those who can afford
it, trying now to forget the God of hypocritical and cruel Christians but still
longing for the beauty of the religious life.
When his friend Rivka is seriously
injured, Samuel goes to the Catholic hospital to watch over her. Passing by the
chapel, he realizes it is Easter when he sees the nuns celebrating Easter
Mass. In a significant passage, Samuel
is drawn by the smell of incense:
[F]ollowing it to the chapel below, [he] stood by the open
door, looking longingly in at the officiating priest, who was elevating the
Host. Like a flash, there came to him
the vision of an Easter day in the long ago, when he had stood beside the open
door of the chapel in Kunova, watching Father Antonius with longing eyes [. . . .] Unnoticed, he stole into the
chapel and fell upon his knees. The nuns
had prostrated themselves in adoration before the uplifted Host; incense and
chloroform mingled in the air, soothing Samuel‘s overtaxed nerves. He sank into a wearied stupor. (228)
The ritual order still entrances Samuel through its use of
aesthetics, but Steiner makes clear the politico-religious dangers of Samuel‘s
torpor, brought on by the combined effects of incense and chloroform, in a
statement made by the religious skeptic Dr.
Roznik, who by now has also immigrated to America: ―With
incense the Church has amputated the heads of humanity and with chloroform she
amputates its legs. She saves the belly‖ (222). Roznik‘s observation carries
the implication that ritual is a tool of a system of power that, like a mad
physician, drugs the masses through its sensual appeal, leaving them hungry yet
unable to discern or defend themselves against the moral depravity of the
system in which they live. Ironically, Roznik depicts the church as using
aesthetics to induce moral anaesthesia.
Samuel remains torn between his aesthetic
and his moral senses, between his love for the beauty of ecclesiastical ritual
and his outrage at the moral depravity of Christians in their treatment of
Jews. Later, Dr. Roznik, with characteristic bluntness mingled with
anti-Semitic prejudice toward the aesthetics of Jewish ritual practice, sums it
up even more clearly when he explains Samuel‘s dilemma to Jane Bruce:
Samuel was born with all that hunger for beauty and
love—born into Judaism, which is hopelessly ugly. An orthodox Jewish synagogue, Fräulein, is as
ugly as a barn, and its prayers are a babel of sounds. Well, he looked into a Roman Catholic church
once, and presto, change. He was
converted, because there was music that went to his soul, pictures that
delighted his eyes, and a priest who talked of Love. (253)
Samuel eventually manages to give up his delight in the
aesthetic pleasure of Catholic ritual in favor of a religious socialism that
redefines the fitting act as social activism for justice within the capitalist
system rather than ritual practice. When a Dominican priest comes to Samuel
demanding that he return to his priestly duties or else be excommunicated and
deprived of the salvific power of Catholic rites, Samuel turns the priest out,
declaring that he is no longer a Christian but a Jew who will preach to the
Jews about Christ, their Messiah. From then on, Samuel will mediate between the
two faiths from a place that transcends the ritual practices of either side,
reading Tolstoy, working in the ghetto among the poor, and engaging in a
bread-and-butter evangelism that witnesses to Christ as Love through the
alleviation of suffering. He is now labeled an atheist and an anarchist because
he no longer fits into accepted models of Christians and
Jews. In a manner reminiscent of Lawrence Sterner‘s The Unchristian Jew, socialist ethics
now replace Jewish and Christian ritual as the true religious praxis, and the
aesthetics of Catholic ritual come to symbolize the morally questionable
capital, both economic and cultural, of the ruling class, which both Jews and
Gentiles should eschew in favor of the plainer but more authentic ethics of
Tolstoy. Steiner here depicts ritual as functioning much like Eagleton‘s
description of the capitalist realm of the aesthetic— as an imaginary utopian
realm in which human beings can experience the reunification of their abilities
and the beauty of a redeemed social order without having to restructure society
according to its vision. Thus Steiner
brings to our attention the problem of aesthetics in ritual: On one hand its
beauty can satisfy the soul and move it toward moral action, while on the other
hand its aesthetic power can also be used by the ruling class to militate
against the realization of the fitting act of establishing justice in society
at large. Like
Steiner‘s novel, the fiction of Anzia Yezierska repeatedly depicts the Jewish immigrant‘s attempts to negotiate
the proper relationship between aesthetic and moral beauty within an unjust
socio-economic order. In ―The Lost
‗Beautifulness,‘‖ for example, Jewish
immigrant Hanneh Hayyeh‘s desperate attempt to introduce a small element of
beauty into her surroundings through the simple act of painting her kitchen
leads to her eviction by a capitalist system that requires that she now pay
more than she can afford for an apartment she has beautified through her own
hard labor. More tragic, however, is her loss of faith in the moral beauty of
her upper-class employer Mrs. Preston and in America as a country in which
friendships are not determined by money or class. ―The Fat of the Land,‖ in
turn, relates the tragedy of Hanneh Breineh, a Jewish mother from the Lower
East Side, whose children make good only to find her no longer aesthetically
fit for their affluent friends and neighborhood. ―The Free Vacation House‖ describes the humiliation endured by a poor Jewish immigrant woman
who is treated to a charity weekend at a lovely house in the country only to be
shunted to the back of the vacation lodge out of sight of upper-class visitors
who might be disturbed by her appearance.
Finally, her novel Salome of the
Tenements recounts the obsessive quest for beauty by a young immigrant
woman whose religious sensibilities have been redirected away from Judaism
toward a passionate devotion to aesthetics in her love for beautiful clothing
and her genteel Anglo-American husband.
While she does not view Western aesthetics as the insidious drug that
Steiner does, Yezierska also champions the Jew‘s need for beauty and recognizes
the harm that results from sequestering the beautiful behind walls erected by
class and ethnicity.
Yezierska recognized her own need for
beauty, which she elevated even above her need for love, in the following
poem:
All
my life I‘ve let go all for the fleeting rainbow gleam
Of
beauty
My
hands are empty.
My
house is bare.
I stand
alone in the dimming memories of vanished loves,
But in me I felt [them] beating still—
. . . I
have spent love—and bought beauty. (qtd.
in Henricksen 67-8)
Yet,
she had also directly experienced Anglo-American prejudice toward the
―unaesthetic Jew‖ in her attempts to become a teacher in the
public schools. Yezierska was often criticized by her superiors for being loud
and overbearing in her behavior and unkempt and slovenly in her appearance (18-19).
She longed to emulate the standards of public dress and decorum exemplified by
the upper-class Anglo-American of the Northeast and held a life-long
fascination for the fine clothing and proper behavior of women to whom these
seemed to come naturally (233-4). A
controversy over the aesthetics of her personal appearance with regard to a job
in the public schools, in fact, caused her to appeal for help to philosopher,
psychologist, and educational theorist John Dewey, who was then held in great
esteem for his recent book Democracy and
Education and for his devotion to fairness in the American education system
(86).[49]
Yezierska‘s brief but profound connection with Dewey was one of the most
significant in her life, one that spurred her seriously to pursue her writing
career.
In John Dewey, the New England Brahmin,
Yezierska found a spiritual partner and mentor from whom she could glean the
wisdom she felt she needed to understand and gain entrance into Anglo-American
culture. During the early months of 1918, Dewey invited Yezierska to audit his
seminar on social and educational philosophy at Columbia University, which was
also attended by wealthy businessman, scientist, and art collector
Albert C. Barnes and Margaret Frances Bradshaw, who later published an
important book on aesthetics. Barnes and Dewey engaged in a long–term and
reciprocally influential discussion on aesthetics beginning at this time and
continuing at least until Dewey published Art
as Experience (1934), his major work on aesthetics, in which he
acknowledged his indebtedness to Barnes. Barnes, in turn, dedicated The Art in Painting to Dewey (Shusterman
105). It is possible, since their friendship was blossoming at that time, that
Dewey and Barnes discussed their ideas in some form at the seminar and that
Yezierska absorbed some of their discussion while auditing it. Bread Givers was published in 1925, the
same year that Dewey published Experience
and Nature in which he first addressed the subject of aesthetics at length.
It is arguable that the novel shows the influence of Dewey‘s ideal of moving
the aesthetic out of what he called ―the beauty parlor of civilization‖ and
into the daily experience of ordinary people in its insistence upon the
necessity of beauty to the lives of poor immigrants. Like Dewey, Yezierska
suggests that through its enrichment of the global experience of human beings,
aesthetics should serve to enhance the human capacity for the moral life,
regardless of class and ethnicity (99).
Bread
Givers is driven by repeated conflicts over the proper relationship between
the beautiful and the ethical, the most important of which centers in the
complex character of Reb Smolinsky, the immigrant father of four daughters. In
accord with
Jewish custom, and despite the fact that the family can barely
meet its most basic needs, Reb Smolinsky refuses to work so that he can devote himself to the reading
and study of the Torah. His choice of the spiritual over the material springs
from a Jewish spirituality similar to that described by Howe, in which beauty
is located in morality. Reb Smolinsky feels it is right for his wife and
daughters to support him because ―[t]he whole world would be in thick darkness
if not for men like me who give their lives to spread the light of the Holy
Torah‖ (24). But, in Yezierska‘s
presentation, the ruthless economic order in which the family lives makes Reb
Smolinsky‘s apparent pursuit of moral beauty no longer a matter of adherence to
religious tradition but a matter of self-indulgence, one that deprives his
family not only of the physical comfort of food and warmth but also of the
spiritual sustenance to be obtained through an occasional glimpse of the
beautiful.
Yezierska presents us with an immigrant
family blighted by the ugliness of its environment and repeatedly returns in
the details to the ugliness of the Smolinskys‘ surroundings—the dark airshaft
hole, the fly dirt on the kitchen light, the foul bedding and rags, the kitchen
table with uneven legs, the dirty dishes in the sink— as well as the family‘s
feeble attempts at beautification by means of a new oilcloth and flowers for
the table or a scrap of lace curtain to cover up the rusty pipes. She also
demonstrates that, though they were poor, the Smolinskys had a great capacity
for aesthetic appreciation in their love of the natural beauty of Poland and
the lovely handmade needlework they left behind, replaced now in America by
factory-made goods (30). Mrs. Smolinsky recalls her emotional connection to the
beauty of the Sabbath tablecloth she had created herself, sadly observing, ―In
America, rich people can only buy, and buy things made by machines. Even
Rockefeller‘s daughter got only store-bought, ready-made things for her dowry.
There was a feeling in my tablecloth‖ (33). In her portrait of the Smolinsky
family, Yezierska thus works against prevailing stereotypes of the Jew as
incapable of artistic appreciation and therefore immune to the absence of
beauty in the ghetto by showing that such ugliness was in fact hurtful to a
people for whom beauty was a necessary ingredient of their sense of
well-being.
In order to reconstruct the Jew as
capable of aesthetic sensitivity, however, Yezierska, like Steiner, resorts to
some of the very anti-Semitic attitudes regarding the unaesthetic Jew that she
seeks to subvert, particularly with regard to Jewish religion, which she
continually depicts as indifferent or even hostile to aesthetics and an
impediment to women‘s access to the beautiful. Although the family in its
impoverishment is cut off from most forms of aesthetic pleasure, two of the
daughters fall in love with men who genuinely love them and could easily
provide them with ongoing connections to beauty. Jacob Novak, a wealthy pianist,
courts Masha, but because he places aesthetic over moral beauty by playing the
piano on the Sabbath, Reb Smolinsky turns him away. Morris Lipkin, a poet, is
in love with Fania, but because he has no money, Reb Smolinsky will not
consider the match for fear that his daughter will not have enough money to
support his Torah study. Thus Reb Smolinsky is a troublesome combination of
devotion to spiritual values and a rigid adherence to collective moral codes
that make him oblivious to the emotional and aesthetic needs of his daughters.
In his blind pursuit of moral beauty as defined by his patriarchal religion, he
injures his own children and stunts their lives. In his determination to marry
his daughters off to rich men, Reb Smolinsky‘s devotion to the spiritual
becomes indistinguishable from the grab
for money in the marketplace.
The sins of their father‘s confusion
regarding moral and aesthetic beauty are, in turn, visited upon his children.
The oldest daughter Bessie, ―the Burden Bearer,‖ who has no physical beauty,
remains allegiant to the traditional patriarchal model of female moral beauty
through self-abnegation by giving up the suitor she wants and marrying her
father‘s choice, Zalmon the fishmonger, the widowed father of a houseful of
children, only because she feels compassion for his motherless son Bennie. Her
refusal to act on her own behalf results in succeeding years spent in ugliness
and misery and the forfeit of her own unique experience of life. Sara‘s sister
Masha lives at the other extreme, devoting all of her time in the beginning to
a mirror-gazing narcissism that requires total absorption in her own aesthetic
appeal. Instead of giving her earnings to the family for its survival, she
spends it on small bits of finery in imitation of the commodified images of
feminine beauty she sees in the newspapers and magazines (3). In the latter
part of the novel, however, Masha, now married to hardship and a man she
abhors, loses her exterior charms but gains in moral beauty according to
traditional Jewish standards as she sacrifices her personal happiness on behalf
of her children. Fania, in following her
father‘s choice of husbands, ends up the most financially successful and has
the most aesthetically pleasing life of any of the daughters, but her life is
devoid of moral beauty since she is now married to a gambler who provides a
life empty of spiritual values.
Yezierska‘s portraits of her selfless
characters indicate that she will no longer accept the total sacrifice of the
aesthetic to the moral required of women by patriarchal religion. Instead, she
seeks to redefine the relationship of moral to aesthetic beauty in the lives of
women. She clearly shows that the self-injury of the older daughters in
capitulating to their father‘s demands is morally wrong through her positive
portrayal of the youngest daughter Sara. For Sara, a pursuit of moral beauty
that indulges in easy selfabnegation and fails to shape consciously a unified
and meaningful experience for the self that includes some experience of the
beautiful is not enough. Unlike her older sisters, Sara engages in an aesthetic
project of self-creation that will entail finding a way to enrich her
experience by interweaving the aesthetic and the moral in her life. In Sara,
Yezierska rehabilitates the image of the Jewish woman as a figure that is both
capable and needful of aesthetic experience.
When she finally becomes unable to
tolerate her father‘s manipulation of the family to suit his own needs, Sara
leaves home and puts herself through college in order to become a teacher,
working long hours in a laundry in addition to time spent in study. During these arduous years, Sara continually
admires the women she sees whose dress and demeanor suggest the understated
elegance of the upper class, something in which she feels she is lacking. Yet,
it is her brash and outspoken behavior, largely at odds with the aesthetic
codes of upper-class Anglo-Americans, which enables her to break out of many of
the strictures imposed by her religion, her gender, her ethnicity, and her
class. Nevertheless, Sara continues to hold Anglo-American aesthetic standards
up to herself as models of ―a person‖
(237). When, at last, a college graduate and recipient of a $1,000 award for
her writing, she returns to New York on the train to seek a job as a teacher,
contrasting her now cool and subdued deportment favorably with her former
immigrant clumsiness when she first rode the train to college (237). Back in
New York, she selects an entirely new wardrobe of clothing, delighting in her
ability to choose the finest fabrics and to reflect her hard won moral
integrity in the aesthetic beauty of her outward appearance. She finds an apartment notable for its
simplicity and classic elegance.
Finally, she sits alone in her new home and quietly revels in the
aesthetic pleasure of the symbols of her moral achievement, observing, ―I, Sara
Smolinsky, had done what I set out to do,‖ adding that ―this simplicity was
rich and fragrant with unutterable beauty‖ (241).
Sara‘s new identity, forged from her spiritual, physical,
and emotional struggle, has now come to rest symbolically in the aesthetic
power of her clothing. Hence, it becomes the central focus of the climactic
scene in the novel, the funeral for her mother at which she is obligated to
observe the ritual tearing of the clothes prescribed by Jewish law as a
symbolic gesture of grief for a woman who sacrificed much for her and whom she
was forced to abandon in order to escape her father‘s tyranny. The funeral
ritual thus becomes a moment of crisis at which Sara must choose between a
collective idea of morality encoded in a ritual act that destroys aesthetic
beauty and her newly created ethico-aesthetic order:
The undertaker, with a knife in his hand, cut into Father‘s
coat and he rent his garments according to the Biblical law and ages of
tradition. Then he slit my sisters‘ waists, and they, too, did as Father had
done. Then the man turned to me with the knife in his hand. ―No,‖ I cried. ―I
feel terrible enough without tearing my clothes.‖
―It
has to be done.‖
―I don‘t believe in this. It‘s my
only suit, and I need it for work. Tearing it wouldn‘t bring Mother back to
life again.‖
A
hundred eyes burned on me their condemnation.
―Look
at her, the Americanerin!‖ (255)
The
scene recalls Maurice Bloch‘s theory, discussed in Chapter Three, that the
formality of the ritual setting makes difficult any refusal of
the obligatory gesture. But refuse it Sara does. The ritual context, which
demands allegiance to patriarchal concepts of which actions are to be
considered fitting, places Sara in a double bind: she must either conform, in
which case the act would not be fitting for her, or to rebel, in which case the
act would not be fitting for those who uphold the ritual order. When we recall
Jennings‘s recognition of the underlying aesthetic
implications of the ritual pursuit of the fitting act, Sara‘s refusal seems to
arise not from simple vanity or a superficial concern with outward beauty,
although her companions try to represent it as such; her refusal to perform the
ritual act of self-harm at the request of the male undertaker symbolizes
instead her redefinition of the fitting act through adherence to a feminist
aesthetics that refuses to sacrifice itself to the patriarchal order. Instead, she chooses to preserve the beauty
of her new garments so that she can continue to work and provide for herself,
which, in turn, will enable her to fashion her life as she chooses.
In refusing to tear her clothes, Sara
rejects the old understanding of the fitting act as it was embodied in the
rituals of the ―unaesthetic Jew.‖ She insists instead upon aesthetic experience
as a legitimate experience in its own right and a woman‘s right and obligation
to shape herself and her life consciously, according to her own inner law,
rather than the laws imposed upon her by patriarchal religion. In presenting
such a choice within the ritual context, Yezierska dramatically encapsulates
the tensions faced by Jews who were entranced by Anglo-American aesthetic
standards even as they engaged in a religious practice deemed unaesthetic by
those very standards. For many Jews, like
Yezierska‘s protagonist, this meant a similar choice between
allegiance to traditional Jewish codes of moral beauty that divided them from
mainstream society and the embrace of a secular aesthetics that divided them
from their religious heritage. Yezierska also portrays the burden such conflicting
understandings of beauty placed on immigrant women who were perceived by men
like Weininger as flawed vessels of aesthetic perception even as they were also
expected to conform to both upper-class standards of beauty and those
continually churned out by the capitalist engine of consumption.
In
choosing to dishonor her mother according to the collective values enacted in
the ritual, Sara seeks to honor her through what she perceives to be her own
independence and integrity; but that very integrity, as Kallen and Eagleton
point out, is symbolically manifested through aesthetic standards imposed by a
ruling class indifferent to the needs of Yezierska‘s community. Sara‘s
self-fashioning echoes the defiant existential aesthetics of Nietzsche in the
individual‘s overthrow of Jewish patriarchy‘s
―Thou Shalt‖; but it also conforms to the aestheticizing of
subjectivity Eagleton claims was the project of capitalism and confirms the
assumptions and standards set up by Anglo-American patriarchy to evaluate women
and other ethnicities. Sara sharply criticizes the loud clothing of the newly
rich immigrant Jew, for example (73), and is very careful not to choose
clothing for herself that could be considered gaudy, but instead chooses
quietly dignified clothing of expensive material and classic lines (239). She
modulates her voice from the peddler‘s fortissimo
to the debutante‘s sotto voce in
imitation of the refined young American women she observes in college. Only
after she acquires the ―cool voice,‖ ―the quiet stillness of a college lady,‖
and other aesthetic qualities deemed acceptable by the upper-class
Anglo-American male does she state
―Sara Smolinsky, from Hester Street, changed into a person!‖
(237). However, although she celebrates the beauty of her now culturally
acceptable voice and manners, the language and tone in which she celebrates
them are those of her old Hester
Street voice, indicating that her
newly acquired means of expression is not entirely her own. Hence,
Yezierska implicitly supports on an individual level what Kallen
complained of regarding immigrant life in general—that ―personhood‖ in America
is an aesthetic construction the behavior stemming from which must inevitably
conform to upper-class American norms.
Sara‘s acquisition of elegant manners and
quiet self-control also suggests an aesthetics of the fitting act that bears a
strong resemblance to the personal example and preferences of the refined and
reserved John Dewey, who was noted for his friendships with passionate types
like Yezierska (Henricksen 85). Dewey expresses his preference for balance,
decorum, and self-control in his understanding of the aesthetics of the fitting
act in the following passage from Art as
Experience:
There is an element of passion in all esthetic perception.
Yet when we are overwhelmed by passion, as in extreme rage, fear, jealousy, the
experience is definitely non-esthetic [. . . . ] Consequently, the material for
the experience lacks elements of balance and proportion. For these can be
present only when, as in the conduct that has grace or dignity, the act is
controlled by an exquisite sense of the relations which the act sustains—its
fitness to the occasion and to the situation.
(337)
Although he was devoted to improving the
lives of the common people, Dewey could not help embodying for Yezierska the
styles and tastes of the Anglo-American aristocracy whom Madison Grant
supported and Horace Kallen repudiated as the moral and aesthetic ruling class.
In his theoretical discourse and in exemplifying for Yezierska the qualities of
American good taste, therefore, Dewey may have contributed not only to the
novel‘s insistence upon the necessary interplay of the beautiful and the good
in the lives of poor immigrants but also to its celebration of the aesthetic
standards of New England. Yezierska
sought to rehabilitate the image of the ―unaesthetic Jew,‖ but as a result of
her exposure to the gatekeepers of the American temple of culture, she accepted,
as Steiner did, at least some of the terms imposed by the stereotype itself—
namely, that Orthodox Jewish ritual, with its refusal to capitulate to American
aesthetic standards, was not only hopelessly ugly but undermined the capacities
of its practitioners to embrace the beautiful.
An entirely different perspective on American aesthetics
and morality, and their relationship to the ritual practice of immigrant
groups, can be seen in the works of
Korean writer Younghill Kang, who arrived in the United States
at the age of eighteen in 1921, just before immigration restrictions made it
impossible for Asians to enter. Born in a remote village in Northern Korea,
Kang was the son of a Confucian scholar and received a thorough training in the
classics of Chinese philosophy (Choy 281) only to be thrust out of the nest of
Korean culture by Japan‘s annexation of Korea, the influx of missionaries who
brought opportunities for Western learning, and his own impulse toward
individualism. After refusing to accept the duties of early marriage and ritual
observance expected of the eldest son, Kang left his family and went to Seoul,
where he studied for several years before the political climate and his own
desires to go to the West became too intense for him to remain any longer. With the help of American missionaries, Kang
emigrated and studied first in Canada and then at Harvard. He later taught
comparative literature at NYU, worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica, the ACLU, and finally became a noted
lecturer around the United States, voicing strong opposition to the practices
of the McCarthy Era (283). Kang was a close friend of author Thomas Wolfe, who
introduced him to a publisher from whom Kang received a contract to publish his
autobiographical novel The Grass Roof in
1931 (Kim 286, n.20). Its sequel East
Goes West was published in 1937.
Kang‘s novels depict the misunderstanding
and prejudice endured by Koreans who received a great deal of abuse at the
hands of Americans who not only discriminated against them because they were
Asian but also continually mistook them for Chinese or Japanese (Kim 4). The
time at which Kang arrived in the U.S. was a particularly tense period in the
long history of American Sinophobia.
Anti-Asian feelings in America had begun as far back as 1850 when small
numbers of Chinese immigrants began arriving in California, and, even though
there were never more than 10,000 Koreans in the United States before 1945,
they continually experienced American hostility toward Asians, particularly
after 1900 when the ―Yellow Peril‖ scare moved across the country from
California, and when it became common for Koreans to be refused service in
restaurants and barbershops. In 1906, the San Francisco School Board decided
that American-born students of Korean ancestry must be removed from white
schools and made to attend
Oriental schools with the Chinese, and in 1913 the California
State legislature passed the Webb-Heney Land Law, which prevented Koreans,
along with Chinese and Japanese, from buying any type of real estate (Choy
107).[50]
Such attitudes were not only the province
of small business owners, rural farmers, and educators. Elaine Kim reports that
pulp fiction and dime romances as well as mainstream American fiction
contributed to a general fear of Asians.
Lois Swinehart‘s novel Sarangie: A
Child of Chosen (1926), for example, portrays impoverished, primitive, and
superstitious Koreans who are victims of the greedy aristocrats who rule them
(Kim 16). And Jack London‘s Star Rover (1915)
recounts the tale of a shipwrecked British seafarer in Korea who encounters
ignorance, cowardice, and sadism among the people there (7). According to London, Western civilization was
seriously threatened by the possible influx of cruel and cunning Koreans under
the leadership of the occupying
Japanese, who had learned to use technology
through their exposure to the ingenuity of
Western minds (8). As
Kim observes, in literature written by Anglo-Americans, the Oriental was thus
most often used as a foil to indicate what the American was not (4). His stereotype was usually that
of the cruel and crafty villain, born with a cool logic but without compassion,
or that of the cowardly, effeminate, servile, and helpless supplicant in need
of Western aid (8). American fiction made especial use of the language of
Asians, which it frequently depicted as cacophonous, and their struggle with
the English language as stock comic devices (8).
American fears of Asians again linked
physical appearance to morality, manifesting in disgust at Asian bodies as the
sign of moral corruption. Beginning as early as 1784, America had had a
tradition of constructing the Oriental body as an oddity through museum
displays, beginning with Peale‘s Museum in Philadelphia, which featured such
curiosities as the bindings used for the feet of Chinese women, and culminating
with P.T. Barnum‘s American Museum in New York, which, in the midnineteenth
century, housed the (in)famous ―Siamese Twins‖ Chang and Eng billed as Oriental
anomalies (Tyner 31). As more and more Chinese immigrants arrived, attitudes of
curiosity regarding a mysterious and faraway place gave way to more sinister
appraisals of the Oriental as a member of an inferior and degraded race that
was biologically incapable of understanding democracy (32). In the late nineteenth century, as
evolutionary race theories mingled with nativist fears intensified by reports
of Asian prostitution, much of the controversy about the Asian body focused on
its ugliness, dirt, and immorality, and female Asian bodies were banned from
entry into the United States in order to protect Anglo-American boys from
corruption and disease (41). Germ theory was also used to suggest that Asian
bodies carried particular diseases to which other races were not immune (42).
White American officials sought publicly to defend the AngloSaxon race against
Asian assaults on its innate morality and aesthetic beauty. Thus, Dr. Arthur
Stout, author of Chinese Immigration and
the Physiological Causes of the Decay of the Nation, wrote ―To the
Caucasian race, with its varied types, has been assigned the supremacy in
elevation of mind and beauty of form over all mankind [. . . ;] by commingling
with Asiatics, we are creating degenerate
hybrids‖ (qtd. 42).
Discourse regarding the immorality,
impurity, and ugliness of Asian bodies and behavior extended to include the
rituals of Chinese worship, which were also often looked upon as both ugly and
indicative of heathen immorality. For ten years in the California Senate, for
example, Representative Horace F. Page engaged in repeated diatribes against
the Chinese, linking their ritual practice with the sexual taint of
prostitution when he declared that ―Their [Chinese immigrants‘] moral obliquity
is such that they can give no reason why they should not bring their women here
for prostitution
[. . .] and practice their heathenism in our very midst‖ (qtd.
36). In California, a local judge in
speaking of the rites of Korean ancestor worship called Koreans ―immoral and
religious fanatics‖ (Choy 107). Even the relatively sympathetic Jacob Riis
calls Asian ritual practice ―senseless idolatry, mere grub-worship‖ (How the Other Half Lives 63).
Asian religious rituals were first
presented to the United States by Asian writers
in a series of books written by young men from various countries and published
by the D. Lothrop Publishing company beginning in 1887 with When I Was a Boy in China, written by Lee Yan Phou. One of the
last books of the series was entitled When
I was a Boy in
Korea, written by
New Il-Han, published in 1928, just three years before Kang published The Grass Roof. Both Lee Yan Phou and New Il-Han sought to
act as mediators and good will ambassadors who, though native to China and
Korea, presented their customs and religious rituals in accord with Western
bias. New Il-Han, for example, who came to the United States under the auspices
of Christian missionaries, attempts an almost anthropological study of his own
people but also presents Korean rituals through Christian eyes, sometimes
describing them as curiosities born of the superstition of the unenlightened
heathen (New 159).
Kang‘s autobiographical diptych, then,
while also serving partially as cultural mediator, was the first to present
Korean rituals unapologetically, not as objects of revulsion, curiosity, or
pity but as having beauty in their own right, aesthetic creations that enacted
and maintained the cultural integrity of an ancient civilization devoted to
living out beauty and goodness within a harmonious social order enriched by the
interaction of Confucianism with Buddhism and Taoism. In The Grass Roof, Kang shows us the ritual patterns that merged
aesthetics with morality to create an idyllic Korean pastoral existence. East Goes West goes on to present the
tragic plight of Asians caught in the West without those sustaining moral and
aesthetic ritual forms and their alienation in a modern world where all
collective patterns have become suspect.
The
Grass Roof creates the lost world of Korea and a family of Confucian
scholars and poets through the eyes of young Chungpa Han, Kang‘s alter ego, who
grows up viewing the world through the lens of Confucian aesthetic morality.
Confucius emphasized the importance of ritual practice for molding the individual
personality to full humanity and for training the participant to an innate
understanding of the fitting act through the ritual cultivation of collectively
sanctioned behavior (Kline 188).
Confucianism was a non-theistic, pragmatic reordering of
society according to a blend of ethics and aesthetics that sought to redirect
ritual practice away from the supernatural realm and toward the enhancement of
social life, which, in turn, influenced Chinese art (Zehou 46). In the fourth century B.C.E., Confucian
scholar Xunzi further explicated a metapraxis of ritual that stressed its
importance in reshaping human nature and behavior so that they conform to and
participate in the numinous order of the Tao, a way of being devoted to the
harmonious union of beauty and goodness. His
Yueji (Notes on Music), part of the Book
of Rites, became China‘s earliest document discussing aesthetics (47).
Typical of the Chinese interdependence of ritual, art, and social ethics, the
word yue can denote music, dancing,
painting, sculpture, engraving, and architecture, as well as the ceremonial
rites of the social order (48). The literal meaning of yue is ―joy,‖ indicating any activity whose sensory appeals made
people happy (48).
Confucian ritual, according to Xunzi,
aims at both expressing and restraining human nature, and at transforming human
desires so as to render them harmless to the social order. When this is
accomplished human beings can enter into a cooperative relationship with Heaven
and Earth that overcomes disorder in the cosmos and brings harmony between
human beings and between humans and the natural world. According to Xunzi,
without ritual, humankind will be unable to fulfill its desires, seeking
fulfillment instead through its innate impulse toward competition, which will
then cause the ethico-aesthetic order to disintegrate, a position remarkably
similar to Eagleton‘s, although it was formulated hundreds of years before
capitalism ever developed. ―The elements of human nature,‖ writes Xunzi, ―if
followed without direction of ritual and the social roles (yi) embodied in the rites, will lead people into chaos and conflict
[. . . ;] all those who follow their nature and indulge their natural
inclinations will inevitably become involved in wrangling and strife, will
violate the forms and patterns of society, and will end up in violence‖ (qtd.
in Kline 191).
Because Chinese aesthetics, like Chinese
philosophy, elevates emotional communication over cognition or imitation (Lehou
48), the Confucian scholar aims at the enhancement of ―heart/mind,‖ (Kline
200), a blend of cognitive, emotional, intuitive, and aesthetic sensibilities.
The Confucian scholar, therefore, is one who orders his life around a devotion
to moral cultivation through ritual practice based on a concept of the good
that encompasses the notions of beauty, wholeness, and harmony. ―The gentleman
knows,‖ writes Xunzi, ―that what lacks completeness (quan) and purity (cui)
does not deserve to be called beautiful (mei)‖
(qtd. 195). Indeed, one of the clearest indicators of high moral achievement,
according to Confucian ethics, is the quality and breadth of one‘s aesthetic
discernment, an idea that Kang echoes in The
Grass Roof when he states, ―Confucius
taught that a man should not be ashamed of coarse food, humble clothing, and
modest dwelling, but should only be ashamed of not being cultivated in the
perception of beauty‖
(7). It is understood, however, that the individual pursuit of
beauty must always take place within the hierarchy of relationships maintained
by a ritual order that cultivates the virtues of obedience and self-sacrifice
and restrains the individual from destroying its harmony.
In an autumnal mood, The Grass Roof presents a pre-modern, pastoral community of the
type Eagleton suggests was the repository of a ritual practice in which
questions of knowledge, ethics, and beauty were united in the service of the
social order. Kang‘s novel presents a pristine Korea before its annexation by
Japan in which, much as Xunzi advocated, a continuous cycle of ritual
celebrations perpetuates the beauty and harmony of a society on the brink of
dissolution. In fact, the first half of The
Grass Roof is essentially a series of ritual moments, including two rites
of ancestor worship, a wedding, the Dragon festival, a scarification ritual,
the ceremonial worship of the wandering ghosts, a pilgrimage to a Buddhist
monastery, and a Korean funeral. Kang‘s descriptions of these rituals are some
of the most beautiful and nostalgic passages in the novel:
The Ancestor‘s tomb was in the heart of stillness and pure
air and mountain pines; [. . . .] [The Annual Ancestor worship] occurred after
the Harvest, during the harmonious days of October, keen, warm, bright, sunny
days when the oak trees were golden and scarlet, and the lazy river was jeweled
with a cargo of treasure.
[.
. .]
We loved the all-day‘s march through the mountains, and the
mysterious house at night, lit by torches of those who were preparing food for
the Ancestor, and for his descendants too, to be eaten on the morrow. Early in
the morning, everybody rose. First a great tray, larger than a wagon, was
filled with all the best of everything, and carried by two men, who grasped the
handles at each end and placed it before the Ancestor‘s tomb. All the mature
and distinguished men of the village bowed down to the ground for several
moments and my crazy-poet uncle read aloud in a moving and eloquent voice a
prose poem of his own composition, written in classical Chinese in the best
calligraphy on a scroll of the finest Korean paper, four feet long and four
feet wide. As always, it began, ―In the Fall of the year, gathered together, we
pray to Thee‖. . . and ended: Bless us, and continue, Thou, to sleep in peace.‖
All the men were in clean white robes. (16,19)
A similarly depiction of the importance
of Confucian ritual aesthetics occurs at the New Year, when the village feeds
the ancestors again. In the following passage, Kang emphasizes not only the
sensory appeals of ritual itself but also the regulation of social life through
the fulfillment of ethical obligations according to an aesthetic pattern
imposed by the ritual order. In
addition, the scene evokes Chungpa‘s sense of awe at the spectacle as well as
the sense of security he experienced through his participation in a
pre-ordained form imposed upon reality by the ancient sages:
This was done in the last room from the kitchen—our most
formal room. A table had been spread with the best, and everything was done
according to the Book of Rites, which has told the exact ceremonial arrangement
for rice, meat, candy, salt, vinegar, and pepper. The spirit of the Ancestor
would come before the cock crew. All men—my father, my uncle, and my more
distant uncles and cousins—stood in white ceremonial dress with flowing sleeves
and tassels. Crouching down on hands and knees, all bowed until the forehead
almost touched the ground. Some spectators overflowed to the porch. In the room
next to the last room the women waited in silence. (42)
Not only do these rituals themselves
serve as an aesthetic medium of expression, but they also serve as occasions
for other artistic endeavors as well. As Kang describes in the first passage,
for example, Chunga‘s poet uncle reads a special poem that he has written for
the occasion. Similarly, at the New Year‘s feeding of the ancestors, Kang
reports that after the rites were completed every year, the entire village
engaged in a poetry contest, pinning their poems on the walls of their rooms
and the posts of their houses (39).[51]
Prizes were given not only for the quality of the poetry but also for the
beauty of the Chinese calligraphy. Indeed, The
Grass Roof pays repeated tribute to poetry‘s power to overcome the forces
of chaos and destruction through its imposition of an aesthetic order upon
reality. In this respect, poetry serves a function much like the rituals in
which it plays such an important role. In one important scene, Chungpa‘s poet
uncle, who devotes his life to poetry and scholarship, tells him a story about
an unarmed poet who attempts to pass by a ferocious tiger. Having no other
weapons, the poet recites a poem. Upon hearing the poem, the tiger allows him
to pass unharmed. ―Even wild beasts,‖ says his uncle, ―had to respect poets and
scholars‖ (125).
As aesthetically pleasing and secure as
the ritual order might have been, however, it was not enough for Kang or his
protagonist. ―Life in such country
districts as mine,‖ writes Chungpa, ―was a long unbroken dream, lasting thousands
of years, in which the same experiences, the same thoughts, the same life came
unceasingly, like the constantly
reappearing flowers of Spring, whose forms and attributes were the same, although the individuals
were changing‖ (100-1, emphasis added). Kang‘s description captures his ambivalence
regarding life as it was lived under the forms of Confucian ritual—beautiful
and harmonious yet indifferent to the uniqueness of the individual. In
particular, Kang criticizes the regulation of reproductive life, which forced
women to remain at home to bring children into the world, and adolescent boys
to marry, by arrangement, women many years their senior. In addition, Kang
reports that, from the age of seven, ―I often felt a dragon surge up in me
prompting me to be too original, a habit which sometimes brought me in disgrace
with parents‖ (16). It was Kang‘s
increasing sense of himself as
―original,‖ as an individual, whose uniqueness was denied by
the forms of Confucian ritual practice that led him to abandon his place in
that order and to quest after the development of his unique capacities in the
West.
After studying in Seoul for several
years, Chungpa finally gets assistance to leave Korea. On the ship to America,
Kang meditates on his youthful understanding of emigration through the eyes of
Chungpa, who regards it as a quest for ideal beauty: Above and around me on every side move
sea-gulls, following the motion of the waves, leading on from mystery to
mystery. It occurs to me that I am like a soul who has just cast off one life
and is not yet born in another; these are the spirits of all the beautiful
poets whom the muse has captured, attending me in my voyage to understand an
alien beauty. But can beauty be alien? (366)
Chungpa envisions his muse as a beautiful
Asian woman in Western dress whom he calls
Princess Immortality and whom he hopes to find in America:
―She seems isolated like myself, a woman with no nationality. Is she of West or
East? Is she a Chinese or a
Japanese? Is she European or American? Now she alone touches
the chord to which my heart dances, because of how she stands and looks into
the night. Her eyes too are on the far off stars. And from the milky way they
move to look at me‖ (367). The figure embodies his quest for the realization of
the Confucian ideal of completion in America through the unification of East
and West in the life of the poet/scholar.
Six years later, however, Kang published East Goes West, which narrates his
disappointing and meandering quest for America as the aesthetic and moral
utopia he had envisioned during his voyage.
Indeed, the two novels should be read in succession to gain their full
impact, since the latter novel is informed by and comments upon the former. In East Goes West, Chungpa Han arrives in
America as an eighteen-year old full of the wisdom of the East and longing to
complement it with the knowledge of the West, a young man whose understanding
of the fitting act has been molded by the patterns imposed by the ritual
practice of Confucianism. Chungpa is still deeply committed to the Confucian
ideal of the scholar whose moral duty it is to cultivate wisdom and the
appreciation of beauty in order to fulfill his place in society. Indeed, he emphatically states, ―A man has no
place in society, Confucius teaches, unless he understands aesthetics‖ (The Grass Roof 7). Yet, the collision of
Confucian aesthetic morality with Western capitalist pragmatism will become the
central problem of East Goes West and
a major factor in Chungpa Han‘s continued inability to establish a sense of
place in America.
In The
Grass Roof, Kang foreshadows the subsequent loss of his ethico-aesthetic
moorings in East Goes West in a key
memory of a ritual performed in the Temple of Confucius, a scene in which he
catapults us into the present in order to look back on the past as he now sees
it. ―One quiet night in New York City, looking down Madison Avenue at Grand
Central Station, I was suddenly reminded of the Temple of
Confucius, by I don‘t know what of massive gravity and power.
But noisy trains enter there, and not the ghost of the immemorial sage,
Confucius, quietly‖ (126). Kang holds up
this mechanical thundering of the trains in and out of Grand Central Station as
a foil to the aesthetic power of Confucian ritual to refine the inner man:
[The temple] was set in the heart of
nature; the services were very ceremonious, and all about it, the atmosphere
seemed solemn [. . . .] When the priest carried the cup of wine up the long
steps, he went very slowly. His ceremonial robe was very long with wide sleeves
and tassels sweeping the ground; it was white or sky-blue in color, and he wore
a kind of mitre with two ears, which symbolized the mountain on which the
father of Confucius once prayed for his birth. While the wine went up the steps
no one dared to breathe loudly. Lined up below in the big yard, standing in
ranks on the steps, were the other priests, all clad in this same way. Of
course there were a number of priests, for everybody who worshipped was a
priest, but he must be a poet and a scholar [. . . .] All the poets and
scholars looked up to receive the ghost of the learned Confucius, while my
uncle read from a long scroll of white silk the first stanza of the Chinese
hymn [. . . .] After the benefits of the ghost were received, the spirit was
escorted away while my uncle read these words:
Fount
high on Mount Ah-Ah!
Choo-Choo
and Sa murmur,
Rivers
that never run dry
Although
the source is far.
In
order should our rites be done
To
hymn the Lord Confucius‘ fame,
He
who refined the inner man
And gave all scholarship his name.
(127)
Kang‘s use of the contrast between the
mindless drive of the mechanized world toward the empty future and the measured,
ritualized procession of the Confucian priests to the altar encapsulates the
central conflict between American pragmatism and commercialism and Eastern
aesthetic religion. In an ironic passage
in East Goes West, Kang returns to
this earlier ritual moment and makes a subtle critique through his comparison
of Grand Central Station to the American mind:
Prophets of hereafter, poets of vision . . . , maybe the American is not so much these.
But he is a good salesman, amidst scientific tools. His mind is like the Grand
Central Station. It is definite, it is timed, it has mathematical precision on
clearcut stone foundation. There may be monotonous dull repetition, but all is
accurate and conscious. Stupid routine sometimes, but behind it, duty in the very
look. Every angle and line has been measured. How solid the steel framework of
Western civilization is! (163)
Throughout East Goes West, Kang repeatedly returns to ritual, and discussions about ritual, to recreate the poignant
experience of the Asian from a hierarchical, positional society lost in a
latitudinarian world without forms. In addition, he captures the essential
homelessness of the Confucian scholar/poet in America, where the human impulse
toward competition has been allowed to run amok, and where the aesthetic and
the moral are the tools of commerce, class, and race. One of the greatest
strengths of the novel is its capacity to turn the tables on the Anglo-American
gaze at the Asian. Kang subverts the American stereotype of ―ugly, primitive
hordes‖ of Asians at every turn, making plain the loneliness of American
individualism and the unaesthetic quality of life lived without ritual patterns
amidst mechanization and economic competition supported by a chaotic mélange of
social ethics centered, not on individual restraint, as Xunzi advocated, but on
individual acquisition.
In contrast to The
Grass Roof, which portrayed a homogeneous society in which his protagonist
was certain of the fitting act, East Goes
West paints a series of ethicoaesthetic blunders. Chungpa‘s first real job,
for example, is as a houseboy to a wealthy Long Island family. The entire
episode concerns his first attempts to understand the fitting act in the new
American context. Again, Kang uses the scene as a foil to the
Korean rituals depicted in The
Grass Roof. In contrast to the rural Shangri-La of his Korean village, a
collective society at one with nature, Chungpa goes to serve in a newlylaid-out
suburb where one lone house stands in a grid of empty streets, the unnatural,
individualist, and class-conscious aesthetics of which do not please him:
I did not care for the house. It ought here to be a
farmhouse but nobody attempted to make it a farm. It was a three-story
concrete, very abrupt to look at in that flat space. There was a tiny hedge a
little dog could jump and an artificial lawn with gravel paths. On the wind
also you could smell the sea, but there was no sea smell about the house. It
negated Nature, but the city was not transported yet. In a few years there
would be many houses [. . . .] Now, with neither society nor privacy, it was
desolate. (61)
Further, Chungpa stumbles repeatedly in
his attempts to perform the fitting act expected of him by his wealthy
employer. For instance, when he gets out of the car to open the door for her,
he trips over his books and sprawls on the pavement. The woman looks at their
Oriental covers and echoes nativist fears of Asian microbes when she shudders
and murmurs, ―I hope they have no germs‖ (62).
At dinner, Chungpa‘s Korean companion struggles to teach him the order
of service, but he cannot master it quickly enough to satisfy his mistress:
―‗Fork on left, spoon on right. . . pour water over right shoulder. . . offer meat
on left… don‘t take away plate under soup bowl till end of soup.‘ How was I to
remember all of this? It was like learning the Chinese book of Rites in five
minutes‖ (63). Needless to say, none of
Chungpa‘s actions at the dinner service is fitting, and he is eventually fired.
The scene makes plain the sad irony of a man, trained in poetry and aesthetics
devoted to communal celebrations in the temples of an ancient society, who now
appears as a clumsy primitive attempting to mimic the incomprehensible rites of
class proprietorship in the lonely house of a cultural wasteland.
Chungpa‘s major ambition is to study at
an American university. Before the contribution of an anonymous donor finally
frees him to study full-time, however, Chungpa holds a variety of odd jobs to
support himself. At each juncture, he attempts to discern the fitting act in
America only to be enlightened further regarding the perversion of the
relationship between beauty and morality in the American capitalist system.
When he works as a waiter in a restaurant, where, true to the historical
record, dozens of Koreans with M.D.s and Ph.D.s serve American patrons because
they are excluded from jobs in their field, Chungpa learns to apply capitalist
aesthetics to customers, sizing them up based on their ability to tip well
(89). When Chungpa, the descendant of scholars who viewed learning as
completely separate from material gain, takes a job selling an encyclopedia
entitled Universal Education, he is
instructed in the aesthetics of commercial enterprise by Mr. Lively, a man who
rates Edgar A. Guest as a great poet
―because he makes a lot of money with his writing and he is a
good moral man‖ (152). Mr. Lively
preaches to Chungpa that ―salesmanship is an art,‖ then goes about explaining
the strategy of pushing the unnecessary item to the customer under the pretense
of providing a service, adding, ―of course you know you are making more money
for yourself as well as your company when you sell the most expensive binding‖
(157). Chungpa compares these sales
strategies to those of American missionaries selling their religion to
Orientals who already had a more ancient one of their own (158).
One summer, Chungpa works as a hand
on a farm. While weeding a field, he
engages in a meditation that evokes the plight of the uprooted Asian
poet/scholar in the competitive American economic order:
Those weeds. . . I felt a kind of pity for them as I
worked. They were just as goodlooking as the crops, sometimes much better, for
many meadow flowers grew among them. I could not hate them except that they did
not give fruits, and still they tried to compete. Poor weeds! Poor golden
daisies! And as soon as I had cut them off from their cool roots in the earth,
the hot sun dried them up. That sun was merciless. (212)
In this passage, Kang subtly compares the beautiful
―uselessness‖ of the flowers to the Confucian practitioner of a moral
aestheticism that cannot flourish in the field of American pragmatism, which
allows no space for the contemplation of the beautiful and sees the good only
in useful products.
After his graduation, Chungpa, whose
sensibilities have been shaped by a Korean aesthetic that emphasizes the beauty
of emptiness over unnecessary clutter, briefly works at Boshnack‘s department
store in Philadelphia, where he is further educated in the art of selling the
unnecessary item.[52] The store routinely emphasizes the aesthetic
exterior of poor quality merchandize to appeal to the tastes of unsuspecting
buyers and uses special aesthetics in women‘s dressing rooms to enhance their
appearance and their desire to buy (311).
The long arguments over poetry and music that Kang depicts in The Grass Roof are now replaced by daily
sessions in which salesmen tell dirty jokes, even about their own wives. Demoralized
by his environment, Chungpa complains to a co-worker that laboring in a store
―costs too much in soul-destroying energy. A store is worse than a factory. The
aim is always money, things, sales . . . never life, never creation of
anything. It turns away from life. It makes humanity into just a stuff-handling
machine.‖ His American co-worker, however, takes this as an insult to the
store‘s owner, whom he feels is providing humanitarian service to those without
capital,
even though only providing them with
soul-killing jobs (317-8).
Kang also manages to include some biting
commentary on Western factory-style education, which he suggests is superficial
and lacking in any real substance for the mind.
One of its major faults, according to Chungpa, is the lack of training
in aesthetics through the splitting off of the creative from the critical in
the specialization of knowledge required by the capitalist division of labor:
My bewilderment and rebellion before
American education were enhanced by looking back to Chinese models. Confucian
education never required the study of anything but poetry, and it approached
that mostly by being a poet. All scholars were poets. There was no division
between the critical and the creative. None but the poets were scholars and
none but poets attempted to write on poetry. It did not make for Aristotelian
analysis, but it vitalized the whole field of knowledge to the creatively
minded. This was the way I wanted to approach Western knowledge. And found it
would not work, for there was no tradition like that in American education. I
was distressed at the lack of unifying principles. (203) American education, by emphasizing the
ownership of a specialized corner of the knowledge market, results in a
fragmented society of one-sided individuals who cannot achieve the Confucian
aesthetic and moral ideal of wholeness sought by the poet/scholar, and who
remain mired in unaesthetic lives, cut off from the true beauty and depth of
reality:
And it seemed to me that the life of the specialist became
utilized in an ever narrower groove, and did not reach the embracing whole of
life. ―Poor soul,‖ I thought, ―Poor modern soul, he is tortured in his confined
prison never to get out . . . he must
handle his specialty, never the infinite. He rides in his automobile over miles
of paved space, but he does not leave the car he is riding in. He flies, but he
never enters the air of the universe. He submarines, but never sinks himself to
the heart of the ocean, he tunnels mountains, yet he never feels the spirit of
earth, as Shelley or the Taoist poets did. (175)
Throughout Chungpa‘s quest for knowledge
and success in America, Kang also exposes the racist aesthetics to which both
Asians and African-Americans were continually subjected. In fact, no other
immigrant novelist shows more sympathy for, and solidarity with,
African-Americans than Kang. East Goes West is pervaded by subtle
ironies that reveal the conflation and perversion of race, morality, and
aesthetics in American society. For example, Chungpa is advised to cut his long
hair when he arrives in America because, he is told, if one wants to look like
a real American, he ―should not look like an Indian‖ (18). He is repeatedly
mistaken for a ―Chinee‖ (25) because of the inability of Americans to
distinguish differences in facial features among Oriental groups.
When his Korean friend George Jum brings his
white girlfriend to visit Chungpa at Mr.
Lively‘s house, Mr. Lively tells Chungpa not to be friends
with George because interracial couples do not look right to God (161). And
when Chungpa goes to Harlem to see George‘s white girlfriend dance in black
makeup, he also sees African-American comedians wearing even blacker makeup to
make themselves appear comical by deliberately inciting Anglo-American disgust
at the aesthetics of their appearance: ―They looked funny enough in this
northern western stream-lined civilization where the swiftest, sharpest line is
the best. But still they had worked hard to make themselves much funnier‖ (80).
Yet Kang also deliberately points out Harlem‘s aesthetic superiority to that of
Manhattan:
the air was richer in suggestion, more emotion-filled; the
colors had more depth, so had the smells; the lights, though not so numerous,
seemed mellower, gaudier, more picturesque, the spice of Africa was in the
atmosphere.[. . . .] And the atmosphere was very rich and husky, suggesting, in
amazing juxtaposition, the warmth and humbleness of home, and the plaintive,
alluring sadness of life‘s farthest exile. . . a dimmer, vaster captivity than
the Babylonian one . . . .‖ (20)
Kang‘s portrait of Harlem reveals his recognition of Confucian
aesthetic values within African-American culture—subtlety, emotion, warmth,
earthiness, and harmony between human beings and nature. At a later point, Kang
tells us, ―[A]s a stock character [the Oriental] is either a cruel and brutish
heathen with horrid outlandish customs, or a subtle and crafty gentleman of
inscrutable sophistications, [but] in the West the most salient virtue of the
Confucian heritage (among its many faults) seems to have escaped notice, that
virtue which strikes a peculiarly harmonious balance between being a wholesome
animal and a dignified human‖ (209).[53] In this commentary on Western stereotypes of
Asians, Kang makes plain their clumsy misapprehension of Asian character as a
result of the Western tendency to split and separate in contrast to the Asian
impulse to join and harmonize.
As Chungpa wanders throughout
Northeastern America, unable to root himself anywhere, he eventually comes upon
an African-American evangelist named Bonheure, who, recognizing a good bet in
Chungpa‘s erudition and eloquence, wants to hire him as a speaker. Chungpa is equally intrigued with Bonheure
and agrees to work for him. But Bonheure, we quickly learn, is another questionable
figure. He has converted an old movie theater into a church, where he
evangelizes the poor and needy Negro community.
He has set up an alternative society of saints, where all live
communally, turning their wages over to him in exchange for room and board.
Bonheure lives much better than the saints, however, wearing expensive suits
and preaching to them about the moral importance of his having a beautiful and
expensive automobile to drive around town.
When Bonheure arranges for a public
baptism in a nearby river, Chungpa, who claims he has already been baptized,
watches the ritual from the banks:
Tall and handsome, he waded out, a white silk surplice over
his clothes, until he was over waist-deep. The converts were not so well
protected. They wore white robes of a thin sleezy [sic] cheesecloth, and nothing on besides but the birthday suit. [.
. .] Spectators were lined up ranks deep on the riverbank, and I saw them
laughing and laughing, for they had come for the show. It was burlesque. I
don‘t suppose Bonheure really meant it to be so sexy (though always he knew how
to appeal to the crowd, white as well as black). But those nightgowns, as soon
as they got wet, clung like filmy gauze and carved out every mold.[. . . ] But
the saints didn‘t see that, neither the old ones nor the new ones. They were
exalted and serious. Tears came in their eyes, as they watched the long line of
Negroes in white robes going down into the river, and coming up clean, with
howls and hosannas, made more intense and vibrational by the cold water and
wind. With the saints, the spirit was moving too much . . . . .the flesh wasn‘t
weak enough to think how the flesh looks sometimes. (369)
Kang‘s inclusion of this ritual scene late in the novel as a
spectacle of public ridicule says much about the place of ritual in mainstream
American life. While the Negroes feel
their experience to be full of meaning, those on the outside of the ritual do
not recognize it as a fitting act of moral and aesthetic beauty, assessing it
only on the basis of the aesthetics of race and class. The fitting act for the
Negroes becomes, consequently, nothing more than comedy for the Anglo-American
public, whose reaction involves contempt and disgust that again call to mind
Captain Bourke‘s reaction to the Zuñis.
In a society that splinters the aesthetic from the moral in the service
of acquisition, Kang suggests, rituals, which attempt to fuse the two in the
service of collective harmony, have no real place, particularly the rituals of
those racial groups whose appearance mar the Nordic American portrait of
America. Kang also uses the baptismal
rite to make a trenchant comment about the immigration experience itself.
Baptism is the ritual of immigration,
used by many immigrant writers, such as Mary Antin, as a symbol of their birth
into a new life.
Kang makes numerous references to it throughout The Grass Roof and East Goes West.[54] The baptism of the Negroes, in turn, suggests
that, despite its promise of individual fulfillment, the baptism of immigration
may in fact be merely a burlesque, a process which immigrants undergo with
religious fervor but which may never change but merely confirm their status as
comic figures relegated to the margins of society, from whence they give over
their hard-earned dollars in good faith to a spiritual charlatan. Kang
makes especially good use of two figures in East
Goes West who serve to embody opposing stances toward American aesthetics,
morality, and the issue of assimilation. George Jum, a Korean who befriends
Chungpa when he arrives, advocates complete assimilation, applying the
aesthetics of American movies, magazines, and marketplace to his wardrobe and
his love life. George has cast off Korean culture as useless to his
assimilationist agenda, and he imitates the image and behavior of the self-assured,
worldly-wise American ―bachelor‖ used to sell products—wearing fashionable
clothes, flirting, necking, telling dirty jokes, writing love poems ahead of
time in case he should need one in a romantic escapade, and dating a white call
girl who dons black makeup in order to dance at a club in Harlem (Kim 38). When
George‘s girlfriend throws him over, he eventually retreats to Hawaii and
settles down with a Korean-American girl, realizing that the role of the
freewheeling American bachelor will always be an illusion for the Oriental. In
a letter to Chungpa, George is careful to remind him that ―I have not failed, I
have only not succeeded‖ (399).
It is in the second figure of Chungpa‘s
older friend Kim, however, that Kang makes his most salient commentary on
American aesthetics, morality, and the effects of mechanization, modernization,
and individualism, not only on the Asian, but also on modern humankind in
general. Chungpa meets Kim in a Chinese restaurant where, recently arrived and
penniless, he has been given free food in exchange for writing poetry. With
some embarrassment in the garish electric glare of the restaurant, the two men
attempt to share their mutual love of Chinese poetry and art. When Kim finds
the aesthetics of the place too inhospitable to the subject, he insists they
walk to his apartment, which is sensitively arranged and filled with Chinese
art, much of which he has painted himself (167). There, Kim tells the hopeful
and inexperienced Chungpa,
―You remind me of myself some fifteen years ago‖ (171). Unlike
the other Korean exiles, Kim does not have to struggle to survive. The son of
wealthy parents who support him through their large rice business, Kim has
traveled and studied all over the world and has mastered both Eastern and Western
learning, but he claims to have found nothing in either tradition to sustain
him:
Nothing to root man, nothing to anchor him . . . I have not
been idle. For sixteen years I have wrestled, in Germany, Italy, France,
England, America, leading myself into a Kantian labyrinth, into an Hegelian
logomachy, into a scholastic inferno (yet not through any Protestantism nor
Catholicism) into the geometric abstractions of Einstein. . . and I can find
nothing [. . . .] [I]n former life I was an Eastern poet. . . but tell me, what
now is to be our fate? Being unable to go back to that previous existence,
being unable to label ourselves in this new world . . . becoming lost within
another lost world? (178)
Like the daisies in the New England farmer‘s field, Kim is useless
to American society because he cannot produce anything but beauty. Kim, in turn, believes the moral values of
America are centered on production and acquisition, values he finds repugnant
as well as off limits to the Asian: ―The only goal for a man here is money and
power. But money and power in New York are not for men of my race. Even if we
succeeded, we would not be admired for that, but only hated and feared [. . .
.] Pagans coming over to spoil good manners and respectable morals. When
powerless, pagans are more tolerable, isn‘t that so?‖ (232)
In contrast to Chungpa‘s hopeful determination to blend
East and West in his experience, and George‘s one-sided and superficial
imitation of American commercial images, Kim is so thoroughly marked by the
aesthetic morality of his Confucian upbringing that he cannot adapt it to
Western capitalist models, and thus lives a half-life on the margins of
society. Without a place in the moral or aesthetic order, Kim implodes into an
alternative world where he can live in inverse proportion to the extroverted
productivity of American life. In a poetic foreshadowing of later events in the
novel, Kim calmly explains at a dinner party:
A famous Chinese philosopher was asked
what he would do with a useless tree.
He said, ―Why not plant it in the land of non-existence and
yourself lie in a state of bliss beneath it, inactive by its side? No ax nor
other hammer could touch it, and being useless, it would be safe from danger.‖
This has been my philosophy, in utilitarian civilizations where I and my muse
are not wanted. My life is the useless tree. I try to plant my tree in the land
of non-existence. (233)
Chungpa
recognizes Kim as ―the man of lost patterns, the man with a deep
Confucian love of ordered life‖ (240). His inability to live
without the collective forms and patterns of Confucian ritualized life has
rendered the Westernized Kim, in spite of his assiduous cultivation of his
individuality, unable to function in modern Western life. Kim hints at his need
for the collective patterns of ritual observance as well as his deep sense of
loss when he critiques Western individualist romantic love through an anecdote
about Confucian mourning rituals:
From the fourth century B.C. comes a story. A man saw a
little child crying hard for the loss of its parents. He said to his teacher, a
Confucian scholar, ―I could never understand the rites of mourners. Here in
this child we have an honest expression of feeling, and that is all there
should ever be.‖ The teacher rebuked him. ―The mourning ceremonial with all its
accompaniments is at once a check upon undue emotion and a guarantee against
any lack of proper respect. Simply to give vent to feelings is the way of
barbarians. That is not our way.‖ Well, this little child crying is the way of
Western love. (241)
Kim‘s evaluation of the collective value of ritual
mourning reproduces almost exactly Emil Durkheim‘s discussion of the same
topic: ―Mourning is not the spontaneous expression of individual emotions [. .
. .] Mourning is not a natural movement of private feelings wounded by a cruel
loss; it is a duty imposed by the group. One weeps, not simply because he is
sad, but because he is forced to weep. It is a ritual attitude, which he is
forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but which is in a large measure,
independent of his affective state‖
(397). For Kim, who still uses the Confucian moral measuring rod of
discipline and adherence to collective ethico-aesthetic norms, ―love is [. . .]
the barbaric emotion, for love brings forgetfulness of pride, decorum, dignity,
and family duties toward others‖ (242). Sadly, as well as ironically, while Kim
exalts these values over romantic love because they maintain social cohesion,
he himself has capitulated to
―the barbaric emotion‖ in his love for the American Helen
Hancock, who, in turn, upholds the very Confucian values Kim promotes in
refusing to marry him out of a sense of duty to her upper-class New England
family who finds his race unacceptable.
Kim, like Abraham Cahan‘s Naphtali,
the atheist who doggedly continues his devotion to Talmudic recitation,
nevertheless recognizes his need for the beauty and clarity provided by
Confucian ritual forms even though he cannot embrace any enduring philosophical
position:
Buddhism and I both died in the land that gave us birth.
Still its candles, so my candles [he pointed] burn over the shrines of
strangers [. . . .] Let us not doubt: once under that pippala branch and
morning star, the mystic dawn did come to that ascetic Gautama. But that was
long ago. In the twentieth century on the cold hard pavement, worlds and
centuries away, what of it? Here we are in the agony of that dreadful night,
dream-haunted, solitary, as the babe that has never smiled, yet filled with the
lonely experience of weary old age. Empty grumblings, rhythmic rumblings. Sight
may not come again. Old man, poor man. . . dawn is too far ahead. But bow. We
should bow to our ancestral candles. (273) As this passage indicates, for the
alienated Kim, ritual may provide something similar to that which he suggests
is produced by art: ―something beyond the form of things, though its importance
lies in preserving the form of things‖ (234).[55]
At
thirty-five, Kim is approximately the same age Kang was when he wrote East
Goes West. In Kim‘s
discussions with the eighteen-year-old Chungpa Han, Kang thus engages in a
dialogue between his older and younger selves, and, in the fate of Kim, deals
perhaps with the too-sensitive aesthete within himself whom he had to sacrifice
in order to make his pilgrimage to America successful. For, after a few years
during which he loses track of Kim, Chungpa stumbles upon him again, now
impoverished due to the failure of his family‘s business under Japanese
occupation, cut off from his beloved Helen due to the racial prejudice of her
family, and lost in nihilism and despair. Chungpa feels himself infected by
Kim‘s death wish to the point that he runs from him. He later discovers a
newspaper notice of the suicide of a ―Japanese‖ on Bleeker Street, whom he
believes is Kim. When he goes to Kim‘s old apartment to inquire, he finds all
of Kim‘s precious works of art have been burned, and his landlady cannot even
tell him where Kim is buried (393). The novel ends indeterminately with Chungpa
Han still alone, still caught between East and West and unsure of where he
belongs, hoping that his recent dream of being burned alive means, according to
Buddhist tradition, the hope of a happier reincarnation (401).
Kang‘s original title for East Goes West was Death of
an Exile (Kim 287, n. 34), suggesting that the figure of Kim may once have
been the novel‘s major focus. Elaine Kim claims that the novel evinces Kang‘s
belief in Eastern decay and Western rebirth (33), but, given the importance of
the character of Kim and the ambivalence of the ending, the novel seems much
more skeptical than that. Elaine Kim
also suggests that the novel does not speak for the majority of Asians in
America and that its chief value lies in its being the first full-length book
written in English by a Korean and in recording the experience of the many
Asians who worked as domestics, waiters and cooks, and who studied at American
universities (43). More significantly, she categorically states that
Kang ―remained unable to fully analyze the
significance of his American odyssey‖ (43).
Such statements fail to appreciate the larger purposes Kang‘s
novels serve for the Asian and the American, as well as their irony and deep
philosophical vision.
While it is true that Kang‘s novels do not
depict the grueling physical toil endured by countless Asians who built and
served America, they do accomplish some extremely important goals for the
Asian-American. Kang deftly returns the American gaze at the Asian and refutes
stereotypes of primitive, dirty hordes of Mongols in his presentation of a
small group of lonely Korean exiles, men of culture, dignity, decorum, and
delicate sensibilities who are devoted to poetry, art, and scholarship, men who
do not struggle with the English language but speak it with impressive
eloquence. Further, in looking back at American conceptions of the fitting act,
Kang reveals the American as the reverse image of Madison Grant‘s most
cherished notions. It is the American
who is now unaesthetic, a carbon-copy of the next man, yet deeply lonely, whose
heart/mind is devoted not to wholeness and completion but split by the
specialization required by capitalism, dedicated not to collective harmony but
to beating his competitor at the economic game—and, most importantly for this
study, engaged in questionable aesthetic and moral pursuits that have no ritual
patterns for refining the sensibilities of the inner man but instead destroy
the soul in the interests of class, race, and acquisition.
On a broader scale, the second novel in
particular deserves to be read as a chronicle not only of the Asian experience
but also of the existential exile of all human beings who have been dislocated
by the experience of modernity and the loss of collective patterns of
existence. When Kang tells us, ―I
mused on change in the world. I felt that nothing lasts. Where was the ancient
habitation of my fathers, where were its ordered ways and everlasting laws?
Gutted by time‖ (127), and when he exclaims, ―ah, individualism! It is a
lonesome world‖ (349), the voice is not simply that of the displaced Oriental
but of fragmented modernity itself. In this respect, the novel deserves
recognition for allowing the Asian voice to speak its particular experience
while also serving as a universal voice of existential loss. East Goes West shows us the difficulty
of discerning the fitting act in a world in which universal forms and patterns
no longer exist, where the ways in which such forms may be imposed upon us by
others are less easily discernible than those used in a Confucian temple, where
the morality of the orders and instruments of power who do impose their forms
upon the rest of us is less easily evaluated, and where such power is
increasingly difficult to challenge. In The
Grass Roof and East Goes West,
Kang reveals to us the increasing irony of modern attempts to pass by the tiger
armed only with a poem.
Through their
use of ritual‘s subtle interplay between aesthetics and morality, all of these
novelists demonstrate, for better or worse, the problematic relationship
between the aesthetic and the moral in the American capitalist order as well as
the complex role of ritual aesthetics in maintaining moral integrity. For Steiner, the encounter with the beautiful
in ritual practice can become a dangerous form of moral anaesthesia, deadening
its participants to the worldly ethical requirements they symbolically enact in
beautiful gestures. Steiner‘s novel suggests that, although morality without
aesthetics may be less enjoyable, aesthetics without morality is
dangerous. Conversely, for Yezierska, to
deny the aesthetic needs of the individual is to weaken the moral sensitivity
of the soul and to impoverish a potentially richer experience of the moral
life. Furthermore, Yezierska argues, if beauty is indeed the province of
the Anglo-American elite, then the Jew, and, by extension, all other
ethnicities, should have equal access to it.
Similarly, for Kang, the beautiful, especially when cultivated through
the forms and patterns of ritual practice, is necessary to a complete
understanding of the good, but, like Steiner, Kang suggests that the aesthetic
can falsify the moral when it is separated from it and used for purposes other
than the creation of a harmonious social order. While Kang recognizes the human
need for a unified society supported by beautiful patterns of ritual practice
and laments their destruction by a system conditioned by greed and
ethnocentrism, he also realizes, however, that such pleasures may simply no
longer be possible for modern men and women whose moral, cultural, and
epistemological underpinnings have been irrevocably compromised and whose powerful
and competitive economic structures now require
them to sacrifice the comforts of aesthetic experience
and social harmony for individual survival.
The recurring ritual scenes in the fiction of these
immigrant novelists reveal the power of ritual, with its exploration of the
fitting act through symbolic gesture, its strategic use of sensory appeals, and
the imposition of forms and patterns upon the world, to express multiple
concerns regarding the question of how to define the kalon-agathon in capitalist America. In their portraits of the
immigrant‘s quest for the fitting act, these novelists implicitly take up the
question of whether it is better to have one conception of the beautiful and
the good that applies to all Americans or to try to accommodate different
notions under one national umbrella. In their different ways, these writers
also manifest the perennial frustration experienced by ethnic groups for whom
ideas of beauty, and access to it, are conditioned by the expectations of one dominant
race or class in the socio-economic power structure. Each novelist asks us to
consider whose definitions of beauty
and goodness should predominate and the dangerous ways in which those
definitions might be sullied by other, less noble concerns.
As all three novelists demonstrate, the positive or
negative effect of ritual‘s aesthetic power is ultimately dependent upon the
moral integrity of those who use it.
Since ritual asserts boundaries, it enacts subtle yet powerful messages
regarding our notions of the fitting
act versus their notions. And as the
Nazi rituals at Nuremberg in the 1930s made clear, our notions can sometimes be grotesquely wrong. Therefore, the use
of aesthetics and other powerful strategies in ritual, as these novelists
suggest, requires us to look carefully at the motives behind their use. For the
immigrants, their rituals, which asserted the aesthetic and moral legitimacy of
their bodies and actions, could be a means of reassurance, aesthetic pleasure,
and cultural resistance within a system that viewed them as deformed appendages
to the Nordic American social body. Yet,
even within these immigrant groups themselves, the artistic strategies of
ritual did not always function in behalf of all participants equally and could
be used to impose forms of social hierarchy that were unjust.[56] Thus, as Eagelton suggests, while the
separation of the aesthetic from the moral achieved by the development of
capitalism has indeed resulted in serious injury to human wholeness and
dignity, perhaps that separation is necessary for the achievement of a
reconciliation of the two in a higher economic and moral order in which human
beings can express a utopian vision that reunites the beautiful and the good in
ritual
and in society at large while
also continually subjecting that vision to unflinching moral scrutiny. These novels implicitly suggest the
importance of such a difficult quest as well as the powerful human need to feel
part of a ritual order through which one can achieve a sense of security,
belonging, and justification—a sense of redemption. As the final chapter will
explore, this proved to be true not only for immigrants but for a large number
of native-born Americans as well.
Chapter Five: Immigrant
Ritual, Immigrant Identity, and Redemptive Hegemony
As the July Fourth ceremonials at
the Columbian Exposition of 1893 were about to begin, the planning committee
had a serious problem. Because they had somehow neglected to schedule a
Protestant minister to officiate at the event, there was no one to ask God‘s
blessings on the American nation at this most important occasion. In
desperation, the committee summoned at the last minute a Muslim imam, one Jamal Effendi, from the Cairo
Street mosque, to stand in. A reporter for the Chicago Tribune later described with ambivalence the patriotic
ceremony at which this Muslim cleric, before a hushed crowd, ―turned his face
toward the East and raised his hands in supplication,‖ ―chanting a prayer to
Allah for his blessing on the United States, the flag above him, and the
Exposition in Chicago,‖ while ―half-naked Soudanese [sic], longgowned Arabs, Chinamen, and Turks‖ looked on, and ―at
every break in his prayer the Mohammedans united in a loud amen.‖ According to
the reporter, following Effendi‘s prayer, ―the Cairo Street men led a rousing
cheer for the U.S.‖ Not knowing what to make of the sight of an imam standing beneath the American flag
asking blessings on a Christian nation from a Muslim deity while a motley group
of foreigners attempted to partake in an American civic ritual, the reporter
finally ended his account with a summary description of the Columbian July
Fourth celebration as ―patriotic and beautiful‖ but, at the same time,
―grotesque‖ (Chicago Tribune 4 July
1893). The
spectacle of the July Fourth ceremonials, at which the American flag flew over
the ritual chant of a Middle Eastern cleric to the discomfort of native-born
Americans, presents in microcosm the ironies and complexities at work in
native attempts to construct America as an Anglo-Protestant temple of national
worship by means of the cult of a monolithic civil religion at the very moment
when immigrants were entering its portals with multiple forms of religious
practice. While the imam offered his
ritual chant in good faith beneath the American flag, his Muslim religious
practice positioned him as an outsider to Anglo-Protestant American civil
religion, unsettling the nativeborn, who saw his attempt to sanctify America by
means of a strange appeal to a lesser deity as somehow grotesque. The
reporter‘s ambivalence suggests that while the cheer for the United States that
erupted after the imam’s prayer may
have been a joyous affirmation of national unity by multiple ethnic groups,
some Anglo-American witnesses may have experienced some relief when it drowned
out the troubling Middle Eastern tones that rang in the clear Midwestern air,
for such music raised discordant questions regarding the identity of the
American community and the nature of the religious symbols and practices that
should be allowed to speak for that community.
Beneath such questions lay the still more troubling presence of masses
of immigrants with religious practices that enacted alternative sets of
loyalties and implicit obligations that stood in the way of their assimilation
into the American civic order.
As
we have seen, ritual establishes boundaries and defines the identities of
communities by displaying and reinforcing the ultimate loyalties of its
participants. For that reason, it served as a particularly effective medium
through which immigrant writers could interrogate issues of divided loyalties
and the clash of competing redemptive orders in America. In their novels, immigrant protagonists
repeatedly become entangled in multiple bids for dominance by competing orders
of power as they seek to define themselves in the American context. Ritual
moments, in turn, become markers of their identity, signifying their proximity
to or distance from their ethno-religious communities and the larger American
civic order. Furthermore, as we have
already seen in the case of Yezierska‘s Bread
Givers, these rituals can sometimes even become points of crisis at which
the immigrant must choose between conflicting allegiances. In these critical moments, these immigrant
writers also provide insight into the fundamental relationship between ethnic
religion and American identity.
The theologizing experience of
immigration that Timothy Smith has described was one that often intensified the
immigrants‘ preoccupation with the ethical dimensions of their faith and their
need for a religious community in which to define those dimensions (1175). Smith argues that many immigrants came to
America partly as a result of religious and political awakenings in a rapidly
changing and pluralizing Europe that propelled them toward radically new goals
of ―autonomy, self-realization and mobility‖ and increased their sense of the
religious and ethnic nuances of a newly emerging sense of individual identity
(1162-5). According to Smith, the immigration experience contained three
important factors that intertwined issues of identity, ethnicity, and religious
practice for the immigrant: it increased
the religious boundaries of the immigrants‘ understanding of their own
peoplehood, intensified the psychological basis of theological reflection and
ethno-religious commitment, and revivified their sense that the goal of history
lay in the creation of a universal brotherhood (1161). The last two
developments, according to Smith, made the relationship between religion and
ethnicity dialectical, often resulting in a tension between a desire for
inclusion in a universal brotherhood and a commitment to ethnic particularity.
―Even while affirming that the unity of all mankind was the goal,‖ Smith
writes, ―intensified religious commitment defined more sharply the boundaries
of subcultures and communities‖ (1161).
Immigrant fiction explores these tensions as some protagonists
face a choice between the particular concerns of their immigrant groups and
inclusion in a larger order perceived as somehow universally redemptive, while
others attempt to live in the margins between the two.
Such tensions were perhaps inevitable for
religious immigrants whose break with the past caused them to face tremendous
psychic challenges (1174). Upon their
arrival in the United States, immigrants confronted the difficult process of
defining themselves while being defined by a startling variety of communities.
As Smith observes: Each immigrant had to determine how to act in these new
circumstances by reference not simply to a dominant ―host‖ culture but to a
dozen competing subcultures, all of which were in the process of adjustment to
the materialism and the pragmatism that stemmed from the rush of both newcomers
and old timers to get ahead. This complex challenge to choose among competing
patterns of behavior affected immigrants in all periods of American history;
and they persisted in dealing with it on religious terms. (1175)
Immigrant religious bodies felt these same pressures on a
collective scale. Jay Dolan makes the important observation that the
socio-political situation in capitalist America created an atmosphere that
encouraged religious division. According to Dolan, ―Religious freedom meant
that as many religions as the people wanted would be able to compete in the
marketplace. Such competition not only nurtured division, but it also meant
that each group had to define itself clearly so that its identity would be
recognizable in the midst of the religious marketplace‖ (The American Catholic Experience 238). Such competition between
religious groups meant that individuals within those groups were forced to
reevaluate what it meant to be a member.
The repeated use of ritual in immigrant
fiction suggests that this pattern continued even in the literary world, as
writers themselves struggled with self-definition among competing communities.
Recognizing the dramatic economy of the ritual moment, immigrant writers thus
frequently chose to use religious rituals as nodes around which they could
entangle and untangle issues of identity, personal ethics, and
insider/outsiderhood. Often, as in the case of Cahan‘s David Levinsky,
immigrant characters will confront a situation exactly like that described by
Smith:
Which cultural home should a young man
choose? The tradition-oriented group that had preceded him here from the old
country and presented itself as guardian of a past he sensed must disappear?
The value system of the Americanizing culture-brokers living on the fringes of
his own community? The culture of what he perceived to be a ―successful‖
immigrant group that settled here earlier than his own? One or another of the
―native‖ American subcultures shared by persons of his religious faith? Or the
secular and hence non-ethnic culture of the wider
―urban community,‖ which he identified with mass
communications, politics, popular entertainment, and a soulless economic order?
When one personal crisis or another prompted fears of the dissolution of the
person the young immigrant thought he had been, ordinary questions of behavior
led into more profound ethical ones, setting the terms by which the religion of
his forbears had to respond. (1176)
One of the ways in which the
religions of their forebears could respond to crises of identity among
immigrants was through their ritual practice, which, by its strategic ability
to subsume questions of identity, ethical responsibility, and
insider/outsiderhood under the concerns of the larger socio-religious order and
to
―nurtur[e] those morally transforming experiences that the
whole membership perceived to be saving‖ could be one means by which ethno-religious
communities could lay claim to the loyalties of their members and thus preserve
their collective identity in the face of powerful cultural forces ( 1178).
On the most fundamental level, the
periodicity of ritual serves to reinforce individual identity by providing a
sense of continuity in linking the present with the past and the future and in
reassuring participants that they, and the world they live in, are essentially
the same as they were and that they will remain so (Kertzer 10). However, when
a ritual participant leaves one world behind and enters another, or is subject
to experiences that radically alter his or her sense of identity, as was often
the case with immigrants, those rituals that were meant to ensure continuity
and stability can become anguished moments of epiphany that reveal the degree
to which one‘s former life has been lost.
Furthermore, ritologists Jan Platvoet and
Karel van der Toorn maintain that identity is first and foremost a product of
the community to which one belongs and is largely a valuation of social
position. Since it is in the interest of the cultural majority to maintain its
stability by determining who is ―in‖ and who is ―out,‖ the rituals of the
culture are often used to establish the boundaries of that community and to
create distinctions between its members and the rest of the world (349-60). The
pursuit of identity is therefore often allied with the pursuit of a sense of
empowerment within the boundaries of the community. At the same time, as Victor
Turner has contended, rituals also create communitas,
a human association apart from ordinary time and space in which the usual
distinctions of the dominant social realm are temporarily abolished.
Thus, as Barbara Boudewinjse observes, ―rituals may [also]
afford relief from the unremitting pursuit of social prestige‖ (125). This was
often the case with immigrants, as well as other social groups, who could
experience within the boundaries of the ritual order a sense of empowerment
that they lacked in the larger American social order.
Catherine Bell has called ritual‘s power to bestow a sense
of identity on its participants through their fulfillment of the moral demands
of the community ―redemptive hegemony‖ (Ritual
Theory, Ritual Practice 83).[57]
Bell defines redemptive hegemony as ―the way in which reality is experienced as
a natural weave of constraint and possibility, the fabric of day-to-day
dispositions and decisions experienced as a field for strategic action. It presents a biased, nuanced rendering of the
order of power so as to facilitate the
envisioning of personal empowerment through activity in the perceived system
(84, emphasis added). In other words,
rituals strategically set up an order of power, often given authority from some
transcendent source, which is subtly placed in opposition to other orders of
power.[58]
The participant, in turn, simultaneously absorbs the assumptions and
obligations the ritual order imposes while discharging his or her obligations
to it, leaving the ritual with a sense of personal redemption. Bell suggests
that ritual ―aligns one within a series of relationships linked to the ultimate
sources of power,‖ and that ―it always suggests the ultimate coherence of a
cosmos in which one takes a particular place. This cosmos is experienced in a
chain of states or an order of existence that places one securely in a field of
action and in alignment with the ultimate goals of all action‖ (141), thus
providing a sense of security for the participant. Finally, Bell claims that
ritual and the strategy of ritualization in general are ―particularly effective
in situations when the power is claimed to be from God, not from military might
or economic superiority‖; it is also ―a way for people to experience a vision
of a community order that is personally empowering‖ (116). By means of ritual, therefore, immigrants in
the midst of the theologizing experience of uprooting, liminality, and
marginality in American society at the turn of the twentieth century could turn
to ritual as a means of achieving a sense of personal redemption.
While Bell examines the social and
psychological strategies by which ritual creates the experience of redemptive
hegemony, in Ritual, Politics, and Power,
ritologist David Kertzer examines the role of ritual in the dynamics of power
between large nation states and their own marginalized subcultures. Since rituals carry messages not only to
insiders but to outsiders as well, their strategies can be employed by both
dominant and marginalized groups to negotiate power relations in subtle and
complex ways. In
reproduces itself in the image of the symbolically
schematized environment that has been simultaneously established‖ (110).
addition, Kertzer argues, ―ritual is used to constitute power,
not just reflect power that already exists‖ (25). Thus ritual can be an
especially effective tool for reinforcing collective identity and achieving a
sense of mastery for groups threatened with dissolution in a larger order.
―Lacking the formal organization and the material resources that help
perpetuate the rule of the elite,‖ Kertzer writes, ―the politically deprived
need a means of defining a new collectivity. This collectivity, created through
rituals and symbols, [. . .] provides
people with an identity different from that encouraged by the elite‖ (181).
Kertzer maintains that since ritual has the power to bind together multiple political
groups, it often happens in large nation states that ritual paradoxically can
be used in the political struggles of competing factions and subsocieties at
the same time that it is used to uphold nationalism and societal chauvinism
(69). This was the case in the United
States during the period of social upheaval at the turn of the twentieth
century when multiple groups with often sharply contrasting agendas turned to
ritual as a means of sustaining collective identity and the individual
identities of their members.
The historical record reveals that the
period of heaviest immigration was one of political, economic, and cultural
instability during which even native-born Americans experienced troubling
questions over identity. Of the tensions faced by Americans during the period
of immigration, Joseph Cosco writes:
It was the misfortune of the [. . .] new immigrants to seek their promised land
in a country then experiencing an ―age of anxiety,‖ when many native-born
Americans were nervous and insecure about a host of perceived threats to the
nation‘s economic, social, cultural, and racial health. American debates over
immigration and assimilation would occur in a charged atmosphere of economic
upheaval and recessions, tense race, class, and labor relations, and dizzying
social change associated with the late-nineteenth century‘s rapid advances in
industrialization, urbanization, and communication [. . . .] Social reform movements and the flood of
utopian writings reflected and fed the country‘s unsettled state and psyche.
(11-12)
As a result, immigrants were not the only group for whom
ritual eased a sense of uprooting and liminality. The record shows that, even
as mainline Protestantism deemphasized ritual as the relic of a superstitious
and divisive religious mindset, a surprising number of native-born Protestants
were also engaging in secret rituals of their own, which resulted in an
efflorescence of secret societies, all of which engaged in elaborate rituals.
The list is long, and the names are often splendid: The Order of the Alhambra,
The Foresters, The Good Templars, The Mystic Order of the Veiled Prophets of
the Enchanted Realm, Job‘s Daughters, the Rosicrucians, The Ancient Order of
Sciots, The White Shrine of Jerusalem, and The Ancient Arabic Order of Nobles
of the Mystic Shrine. William Whalen‘s Handbook
of Secret Organizations, which defines such an organization specifically as
one that ―includes the criterion of a secret ritual and initiation ceremony‖
(v), provides descriptions of no fewer than forty-seven such groups and states
that in the late-nineteenth century more than six hundred were founded (2).
Whalen argues that, although secret societies may seem to modern-day Americans
as the hobby of eccentrics, they have in fact exerted a major influence in
American national life (8).
Many of these organizations, such as the
Masons, the Elks, and the Red Men, were fraternal orders that provided a
much-needed religious outlet for masculine energies and personal transformation
for turn-of-the-century men whose rites of passage had been neglected in favor
of the capitalist project of economic conquest, and whose religious authority
had been undermined by women‘s increased power in the church (Carnes 14).
Many others, however, were formed precisely
in response to the influx of immigrants.
Organizations such as the American Protective Association, the
Patriotic League of the Revolution, and the Minute Men of New York City arose
in direct opposition to the growth of Irish Catholic populations in eastern
cities and to the burgeoning numbers of
Polish and Italian Catholic immigrants (Davis 181).[59]
Henry Bowers, the founder of the A.P.A, borrowed the black and yellow regalia
and elaborate ritual of the Masons and used the lure of exotic ritual to gain
as many as half a million members by the late 1890s (Higham 80-1). Alarmed by
what they perceived as papal interference in American affairs of state and by
the increased power of the immigrant vote, in 1893 the A.P.A disseminated their
own ―papal encyclical,‖ a document in which the pope supposedly ordered
American Catholics to kill all heretics, and spread paranoia about the current
economic depression and industrial violence, which they portrayed as part of a
papal plot to take over the United States (181). Apparently the A.P.A., a secret ritualistic
society, saw no irony in its portrayal of the Roman Catholic Church as a secret
ritualistic society intent upon ruling America.
Undoubtedly, the most powerful and the
most frightening of these secret societies was the Ku Klux Klan, particularly
in its second incarnation, which began to emerge in 1915 in Atlanta, just a few
months after the lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish manager of an Atlanta pencil
factory (Higham 186). William Simmons, the founder of the new Ku Klux Klan, had
been a professional joiner of secret societies, and belonged to more than a
dozen, including the Knights Templar, the Masons, and the Woodmen of the World (287).
He consequently recognized the power of ritual to combat the sense of
disenfranchisement that many white southern males experienced in the face of
what they perceived as threats to Anglo-Protestant dominance from
African-Americans, Jews,
Catholics, and immigrants in general. Higham tells us that Simmons‘s first act as
Imperial Wizard was to ―draw up the high-sounding ritual of the Kloran, create
a galaxy of Kleagles, Kligrapps, Cyclops, Geniis, and Goblins, and summon his
little band of followers to Stone Mountain, where they dedicated themselves
before a flaming cross and a flag-draped altar to uphold Americanism, advance
Protestant Christianity, and generally maintain white supremacy‖ (287-88).[60]
The Klan‘s use of symbol and ritual demonstrates the
ability of rituals to empower groups who feel themselves to be lacking in other
sources of political power. Often,
Kertzer notes, groups will rummage through the ritual symbols of older
religions and appropriate them for their own purposes (42). This is, in fact,
what Simmons did. The Klan adopted numerous symbols drawn from other
traditions, including the sacred altar, the fiery cross, hooded robes, the
robed horse, the Holy Bible beneath crossed, unsheathed swords, and the flag of
the United States (Quarles 66-68). The
Klan also engaged in highly stylized and intricate ritual practices as set
forth in the Kloran, its book of ritual. Most of the Klan‘s rituals were
created by Simmons and were, like its symbols, adaptations of the rituals of
other religions and secret societies.[61]
Even more interesting, however, was the Klan‘s use of the
symbols and rituals of the very groups it despised. Like the A.P.A. who, although anti-foreign in
its platform, repeatedly used the symbols of Jewish patriarchy and ancient
Middle Eastern religion inherited from the Masons, the anti-Catholic Klan used
rituals and ritual objects borrowed from Roman Catholicism. For example, ―Klan
Water,‖ supposedly ―blessed‖ by the Imperial Wizard, was sold for use in
initiation ceremonies for the ―baptism‖ of Klan converts. At the initiation
rite, a bottle of Klan Water was placed beside the Bible, the American flag,
and two crossed swords (62). Klan Water was even used as ―holy‖ water at some
churches (62).
That the elaborate rituals of the Klan were
used to empower a group that, like many immigrant groups, perceived itself as
vulnerable and marginalized, is born out by the Constitution and Laws of the
Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (Incorporated), published in 1915, which declares its
first priority to be protection ―of the weak, the innocent, and the defenseless
from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the
brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed; to succor the suffering and
unfortunate‖ (Quarles 220).[62]
Indeed, the rituals of all of these organizations, whether fraternal or
nativist, served, for better or worse, to create redemptive
hegemonies for groups of Americans who perhaps, like the immigrants, also found
themselves disinherited and confused by societal changes at the turn of the
century and who were perhaps unable to experience a secure sense of personal
redemption within mainstream Protestantism or American civil religion. Ironically, and perhaps significantly, the
initiation rites of many of these groups placed the initiate in the role of
―wayfarer, stranger, pilgrim, intruder,
[. .
.] alien‖ (Whalen 5).
On a broader scale, while immigrants and native-born
Americans sought to fortify themselves by performing their rites in the transepts
of the state cathedral, so to speak, the high altar was reserved for the
patriotic rites of American civil religion and the creation of ―true
Americans.‖ The mythos of American nationalism itself evolved out of the
theologizing experience of immigration undergone by the Puritans and the
Enlightenment project to create a citizenry that transcended previous
nationalities and ethnicities (Boelhower 17). In order to ensure the dominance
of this version of the experience, ―a super-identity was projected as the
solution to ethnic anarchy‖ (Boelhower 19), through the introduction of a
number of patriotic rituals when the influx of immigrants began to destabilize
older notions of the true American. Hobsbawm suggests that ―making Americans‖
was the purpose behind these rituals, particularly those used in connection
with national holidays and those in the public schools (280). As noted in a previous chapter, for example,
the Pledge of Allegiance was initiated at the time of the Columbiad, along with
several other ceremonial events designed around the Columbian myth and the
Classical/Christian symbols of American civil religion. Memorial Day services
became more elaborate with ritual observances dedicated to mourning the deaths
of American soldiers who died in defense of the sacred nation state. With a
conscious agenda to assimilate immigrants in order to avoid threats to American
security, the Americanization Day Committee, beginning in 1915, implemented
more ritualized naturalization ceremonies and July Fourth celebrations (Higham
244). Patriotic rituals flourished in the private sector as well, as was the
case with Henry Ford‘s English school graduation ceremonies, which included a
―baptism‖ at which immigrants dressed in their native clothes and carrying signs
identifying their homelands filed into a huge ―melting pot‖ in the center of
the stage out of which another line of men emerged dressed in identical
business suits and carrying American flags (248).
Because, according to Hobsbawm, American identity, unlike
that of the English or French, was established chiefly by a choice of beliefs,
behaviors, and loyalties, that identity had to be maintained by the
introduction of rituals that implicitly defined the ―un-
American‖ as ―an internal enemy against whom the good American
could assert his or her Americanism, not least by the punctilious performance
of all the formal and informal rituals, the assertion of all the beliefs
conventionally and institutionally established as characteristic of good
Americans‖ (280). In accord with the theories of Platvoet, van den Toorn, and
Kertzer, ritual was thus an important social and political strategy for
determining who should be included within the national identity. This strategy
was complicated, however, by a problem that existed for both America and the
nation states of Europe in the nineteenth century: a ―challenge to the legitimacy of new states
and regimes [. . .] chiefly represented, singly or in combination, by the
sometimes linked, sometimes competing, political mobilization of masses through religion (mainly Roman
Catholicism), class
consciousness (social democracy), and nationalism‖ (Hobsbawm 267, emphasis
added). Thus the rituals of immigrant groups, such as Roman Catholic Italians
and Orthodox Jews, appeared to support a set of allegiances that transcended
the quasi-religious project of creating a nation of true Americans. Since, as
Bell states, the goal of ritual is the ―ritualization of social agents‖ who
have internalized schemes which cause them to ―reinterpret reality in such a
way as to afford perceptions and experiences of a redemptive hegemonic order‖
(123), when immigrants engaged in their rituals, there was the perceived danger
that those rituals might inculcate loyalty to a redemptive hegemony different
from that of civil religion, prompting them to remain in the transepts of the
state cathedral, refusing to engage in the cult of the nation before the high
altar. Kertzer succinctly sums up the problem of immigrant rituals for the
assimilationist agenda: ―Rites can create and maintain an identity in conflict
with the political hegemony‖ (117).
Immigrant performance of ritual, then,
was charged not only with religious but also social and political significance.
When immigrant writers presented ritual in their fiction during this period,
therefore, they did so in the context of multiple orders using ritual, all of
which presented themselves as somehow redemptive, the most dominant one being
that devoted to the nationalist agenda. The novels of Bernardino Ciambelli,
Edward Steiner, and O.E. Rölvaag employ a variety of strategies involving the
use of ritual to reveal the difficulties in negotiating among these competing
orders of power within American society. While Ciambelli subordinates Roman
Catholic ritual to American nationalism in the context of the Spanish-American
War to combat notions of Italians as dangerous to American ideals and to
legitimate the Italian community to itself, Steiner uses ritual as a sticking
point in his project to validate the Jewish immigrant‘s religious heritage
apart from Christian religious hegemony. Rölvaag, on the other hand, evokes a
darker and much richer picture of ritual‘s problematic ability both to enhance
and to restrict life.
At the time Ciambelli published I misteri di Bleeker Street in 1899, the
Italian community in the United States contained a significant number of
political exiles, Italian nationalists, radicals, and socialists. Rudolph
Vecoli reports that in the mid-nineteenth century, ―an intellectual proletariat
of doctors, teachers, and journalists,‖ established itself in America, and
although it eventually became a minority within the larger southern
Italian migration of the late nineteenth century, it ―occupied
a strategic position in the political and cultural life of the Italian
colonies‖ (223). Many Italians in this early community of intellectuals became
known as mangiapreti (priesteaters)
because of their vehement anti-clericalism. Italian Socialist newspapers such
as Il Proletario, La Parola dei Socialisti, and L’Unione Italiana frequently fulminated
against the powers of the papacy, calling the pontiff ―the Grand Tyrant, the butcher of liberty‖
(Vecoli 224), and Italian newsstands often displayed antipapal slogans and
grotesque caricatures (Vecoli
224). The Italian intellectual community cheered the
occupation of Rome in 1870 by Italian troops and continued to celebrate the
anniversary of its seizure with parades and dinners, to the indignation of
American Catholics who considered their attitude a sacrilege and denounced such
Italian nationalist figures as Victor Emmanuel and
Garibaldi as ―brigands who had stolen the
Papal domain‖ (222).
Even those southern Italians who later
arrived professing Roman Catholicism had difficulty in accepting American Catholicism. As we have seen,
when they reached American soil in the 1880s, many immigrants from the Mezzogiorno, having endured injustice at
the hands of priests and bishops, had already developed a deep suspicion of the
clergy, which was further enflamed by confrontation with Irish domination of
the church, its insistence upon reverence for the clergy, and its contempt for
Italian religious practice. Italian Catholics, in unison with other non-Irish
Catholic immigrant groups, therefore, increasingly resented what they perceived
as a forced agenda of
Americanization practiced upon them by the Irish-dominated
clergy. To Protestant Americans outside the Catholic and Italian communities,
however, the Italian, regardless of divisions within the church, still carried
the stigma of Catholicism (which meant, as Josiah Strong expressed in Our Country, loyalty to the Pope above
all), as well as the tendency to criminality, radicalism, and violence.
The project to Americanize Italian
immigrants became more urgent, however, as more and more immigrants poured into
the country during the last decade of the nineteenth century and American
nationalism became more and more strident. As a result, Americanists like
Bishop John Ireland, who perceived the Catholic religious body as an outsider
to American society, desperately wanted to be incorporated into the mainstream
and thus, along with his project to modernize the Catholic church in
America, also promoted a project among immigrants of ―filling
up of the heart with love for America and for her institutions [. . .] and
failing in nothing to prove our attachment to its laws, our willingness to
adopt, as dutiful citizens, all that is good and laudable in its social life
and civilization‖ (qtd. in Dolan The
American Catholic Experience 302).[63]
But the Americanization project was a two-edged sword that placed immigrant
Catholics between competing demands for loyalty—to the American democratic
political order on one hand and the spiritual monarchy seated at the Vatican,
which had become concerned about growing forces of modernism among American
Catholics, on the other.74
In the context of such rivalries,
therefore, the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 was an especially
significant event, since it inspired men like Ireland, who saw the war as ―a
golden opportunity to persuade Vatican authorities that the United
States was a power to be reckoned with,‖ to apply American
ideals to the church in Europe (Dolan The
American Catholic Experience 315). Bishop Ireland launched a campaign in
1899 outlining the ideology of his crusade to transform the Catholic Church to
meet the needs of a new age. Across the Atlantic, however, conservatives viewed
the war as a battle between revealed tradition and the arrogant self-deception of
modernism, with the United States posing a serious threat to the political and
theological power of the
Mother Church.75
Thus, Ciambelli‘s juxtaposition of Catholic ritual to the nationalist
agenda of the Spanish-American War in I
Misteri di Bleeker Street calls up conflicts between Church and State that
would have resonated on many levels with Italian immigrants who were caught
between American suspicions of criminality and radicalism,
Church as liberals and conservatives struggled over
the true identity and loyalty of the American Catholic, even as
Anglo-Protestants like Josiah Strong engaged in their own debate about the same
issues (Dolan The American Catholic
Experience 306-9).
74
For example, when a French
translation of a biography of Isaac Hecker was published in 1897, inspiring
French Republicans to raise cries for increased separation of church and state,
French conservatives launched an attack on American forces of modernism in the
church with the support of authorities in Rome (315).
75
Accordingly, the same year, Pope Leo XIII issued Testem Benevolentiae, condemning the ideas of the Americanist
movement, including its emphasis on active virtues, tolerance of Protestantism,
the Church‘s need to adapt to the times, and especially the idea that American
Catholicism was in any sense superior to European Catholicism. The encyclical
effectively ended Ireland‘s initiative (316).
Irish Catholic fears of Italian paganism and anti-clericalism,
and power struggles between American and European Catholicism within the Roman
Catholic church.
I
Misteri, we will recall, concerns the abduction and supposed murder of Ada
Rains, the daughter of Civil War veteran William Raines and his Italian wife.
After Ada survives the first attempt on her life and takes up residence with
Clara and Enrico Arnoldi in the working-class neighborhood of Bleeker Street,
she falls in love with Enrico and the two plan to be married. Ada, however, is
not yet safe from the plot to destroy her but is abducted yet again. This time
she is taken to a brothel, where she fights off the advances of its lesbian
proprietor and comes close to losing her maidenhood to a lascivious old man
(211-223). Ada manages to escape, however, and is rescued by the gypsies, who
take her, now in a state of shock and amnesia, on their journey to Uruguay and
later to Cuba (224-5). When Enrico learns of her disappearance, he searches
everywhere, but to no avail. In despair, he prepares to kill himself but is
saved at the last minute by the good
Italian priest Father Francesco, who convinces him that he
must go on living for Ada‘s sake (282).
At this moment, the novel tells us, increasing political
tensions between America and Spain erupt. The USS Maine is blown up in Cuban waters, and one hundred U.S.
marines die. Everywhere, in theaters and at public events, the national anthem
is played amid frenetic expressions of national pride. While the whole country
cries for war,
Congress gives an ultimatum to the Spanish to free Cuba, which
they ignore. Hearing that Teddy Roosevelt has now ordered the formation of a
corps of cavalrymen that he will command himself, Enrico feels his path is now
laid out for him. Instead of ending his life in suicide, he can now offer it in
service of America. Ten days later he puts on the uniform of a Rough Rider and
departs under the command of Roosevelt to defend his country and the oppressed
in Cuba (334).
Meanwhile, Ada‘s father, General Rains, who has been
unable to move or speak since he was stricken upon hearing of Ada‘s supposed
death, has been taken to Uruguay for a rest cure. While on a riverboat
excursion to the port, General Rains, the American Civil War hero, silently
watches from his wheelchair as the American battleship Oregon prepares for war. When the battleship raises the American
flag, Rains is overcome by patriotic fervor. Suddenly, he rises from the chair
and cries out ―Long live America!‖
(305).
Family and friends look on in disbelief as Rains is miraculously healed.
When the
Oregon pulls up
alongside Rains‘s boat, the crew takes Rains on board, and the captain presents
General Rains as the noble hero who was cured by the American flag. The sailors
shout ―Hurrah!‖ while the flag is lowered and raised three times and the
cannons thunder. Rains‘s doctor stares dumbfounded at this cure that has eluded
his expertise for months (306). The band then plays the national anthem, and no
eye is left dry. Paul Messbarger has
noted that in American Catholic fiction in the nineteenth century, heroes often
pray to St. Anthony, say the rosary, or wear the badge of the Sacred Heart. In
particular, he notes that Civil War soldiers often protect themselves from harm
with a medal of the Blessed Virgin (140). In Ciambelli‘s Italian Catholic
novel, however, it is the flag, the symbol of American power and ideals, rather
than the symbols of the church, that protects and cures the Civil War veteran.
At home in America, Enrico has finally
received his orders to ship out with Roosevelt for Santiago. Upon their arrival,
Roosevelt has the flag raised while all of the soldiers pass in military
review, after which the men are given orders to advance on San Juan Hill. When
Roosevelt asks for a brave volunteer to capture the Spanish cannon, Enrico
eagerly comes forward, anxious for a chance to give himself in honor of his
country (359). The cannon are on high ground, which will make the task very
dangerous, but Enrico insists on leading the company of volunteers, crawling on
his belly in the heat and fetid air. The
Rough Riders charge in for a heated battle as the Spanish begin firing. As the
battle rages, Enrico rushes to the front of the assault and is shot but
continues fighting. Through his heroism, the Rough Riders are able to take San
Juan Hill. After the battle, when Roosevelt tells his wounded men to go to the
field hospital for treatment,
Enrico insists that Roosevelt send him back to his post,
claiming his wound is only minor (361). Impressed by his patriotism, Roosevelt
makes him a captain on the spot, and the whole company cheers Enrico as the
hero of San Juan Hill (361).
Enrico continues to fight heroically in hand-to-hand
combat as the company attempts to take the town of San Juan. Finally, he is
shot in the chest and falls, critically wounded. When the Spanish retreat, they
try to take Enrico as a prisoner, but since he shows no signs of life, they
wrap him in an American flag and leave him for dead in the shade of a cocoa
tree (363). During the night, Enrico regains consciousness and lies cocooned in
the flag throughout the tropical night, thirsty and in pain. In another one of
the amazing coincidences in the novel, the gypsies who rescued Ada are camping
in the area. They discover Enrico and take him to their camp where both Ada and
Enrico recover from their physical and psychological wounds when they are
reunited (377). The next day, Roosevelt comes to the camp looking for Enrico,
for whom he has developed a special fondness.
When he sees Enrico, Roosevelt embraces him and tells him this is the
most beautiful day of his life. He then has the flag of the regiment brought to
Enrico, and, while all salute, he addresses the flag: ―Glorious flag, we
believed that you were lost to the hands of the enemy. This thought marred our
victory. You have returned to your
defenders, carried by him who saved you and baptized you with his blood‖ (379).
Roosevelt speaks here as the priest of
American civil religion, while the blood of an
Italian hero becomes the consecrating element
in a sacrament of American patriotism. In
Ciambelli‘s vision, the stain of Italian immigrant blood
symbolically sanctifies, rather than pollutes, the American nation.
When General Cervera finally surrenders, the troops are
sent home, and Enrico is honored everywhere as a war hero. The most important
of these events is that held by the Italian associations at the statue of
Columbus on 59th Street in New York City, in which Italian and
American nationalism are joined as Enrico and other honorees watch Italian
soldiers march proudly in an American patriotic celebration. As the band plays
the Hymn of Garibaldi, Italian veterans of the Risorgimento, their chests
covered with medals, pay their respects to the American hero to general public
acclaim (453).
Ciambelli‘s continual emphasis on the
power of American national symbols for the faithful citizen prepares us for his
unusual use of ritual at the end of the novel. After much celebration, the
star-crossed Enrico and Ada are finally free to be married at the
Church of the Madonna of Pompei, where they process down an
aisle ―transformed into a true garden of flowers‖ to the great altar adorned by
rich candelabra, while the choir sings a magnificent hymn (455). Before the altar, Father Francesco,
―assisted by many priests,‖ chants the wedding Mass, joins the couple, and
blesses the marriage. At the last minute, however, the Catholic ritual and the
priestly office are superseded by the sudden arrival of Colonel Teddy
Roosevelt, ―followed by many officials,‖ who, as the priest of American civil
religion, gives his own blessing to the marriage of the SpanishAmerican war
hero before the crowd (455). Roosevelt then processes with Enrico and Ada
through the streets to cheers and applause and cascades of fresh flowers thrown
by the factory workers of Bleeker Street.
In the last lines of the novel, Ciambelli
uses the same strategy once more to bolster his Italo-American nationalist platform.
The narrative tells us that Ada and Enrico have retired to Italy for a time,
with General Rains and the rest of their family, where Ada gives birth to a
son. Father Francesco has joined the family in Italy, where, as Ciambelli
briefly notes, he baptizes her son according to the rites of the Church.
Ciambelli then quickly moves on to the final scene in which the old family
servant teaches the tiny boy the art of combat so that he can continue the
family‘s line of American military heroes.
Just as Ciambelli gives Roosevelt the final word at the wedding
ceremony, he subordinates the Catholic ritual of initiation and redemption to
that of American nationalism by overshadowing the Catholic baptismal ritual
with the child‘s initiation into the war games of the American soldier. As the
novel concludes, the family exults in having produced ―yet another one to
fight!‖ (462).
Thus, in I Misteri di Bleeker Street, published the same year that Bishop
Ireland launched his Americanist campaign, and just a few years after the
A.P.A‘s ―papal encyclical‖ and the lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans, Ciambelli uses ritual to maneuver
between a complex array of competing redemptive orders and visions of Italian
loyalties. First, since Ciambelli was
writing for an audience comprised of literate, largely northern Italians, who
had not suffered greatly under the Irish/American Catholic project for
Americanization, his agenda involved asserting the northern Italian‘s sense of
legitimacy and pride of place in the American civic order as a means of
maintaining an Italian nationalist stance against the powers of the Vatican.
Furthermore, the novel creates an immigrant Italian hero who, through his
service to America in the SpanishAmerican War, embodies ideal Italian identity
and combats American stereotypes of the Italian as dangerous and disloyal. By
depicting an Italian Catholic who is willing to kill Spanish Catholics in the
service of America, Ciambelli recreates the image of the Italian as a true
patriot and defends the Italian community against suspicions of its loyalty
aroused by such documents as the A.P.A‘s ―encyclical.‖ Finally, by having
Theodore Roosevelt perform the offices of American civil religion, and by
raising its symbols and rituals to a status equal if not superior to
Catholicism, Ciambelli subtly offers the American civic order as an antidote to
an ecclesiastical power that sought to maintain its hold on immigrant
Catholics.[64]
Even more complicated than the array
of contending redemptive orders within Little Italy was the kaleidoscope of
interpenetrating religious and ideological universes among which Jewish
immigrants sought to forge their new identities in America. Orthodox Judaism,
Reform Judaism, Zionism, Socialism, Anarchism, Jewish fraternal orders, and
even Christianity offered themselves as means to fulfill the newly arrived
immigrant‘s need for inclusion and fulfillment within a meaningful community,
an array of choices for which the immigrant was in many ways unprepared because
of the restrictions placed upon him in his former life. Howe describes the
immigrant‘s previous life in the shtetl as
one in which the Jews‘ only real choice lay between the Sacred and the Profane,
and in which the round of ritual observance, combined with the realities of
Russian law, inevitably led them to the conclusion that the former was the most
desirable (8). Indeed, from the beginning, Jewish identity was largely based
upon a separateness achieved, not by a commitment to certain articles of faith,
but by a faithful fulfillment of a ritual law that in itself was
―paradigmatically expressive of Jewish chosenness‖ (Frank 4).77
Consequently, except for those intellectuals who had been exposed to the ideas
coming out of the European Enlightenment, most Jews had lived an almost
completely collective existence prior to their encounter with American
individualism and did not have the same concept of themselves as autonomous
beings.78
Howe describes the crisis of identity
that many of these Eastern European Jews experienced as they were cut adrift
from the collective patterns that had previously shaped their identity:
No controlling norms or institutions, neither rabbinical
nor communal, could now be accepted as once they had been; no myths of
tradition or even slogans of revolt. Those who wanted to remain faithful to
traditional Judaism—and in these years many did—had now to make a special
effort. Pressures of the city, the shop, the slum, all made it terribly hard to
stay with the old religious ethic. The styles
77
Frank states, ―It is through ritual, not dogma, that
Judaism has tended to define itself through the ages‖
(4).
78 The shtetl, according to Howe, ―was a highly
formalized society. It had to be. Living in the shadow of lawlessness, it felt
a need to mold its life into lawfulness. It
survived by the disciplines of ritual. The mitzvot, or commandments, that a pious Jew must obey, which stated
such things as the precise way in which a chicken is to be slaughtered; the
singsong in which the Talmud is to be read; the kinds of goods to serve during
the Sabbath; the way in which shoes should be put on each morning; the
shattering of a glass by the groom during a marriage ceremony—these were the
outer signs of an inner discipline. In
so heavily ritualized a world there was
little room for individuality as we have come to understand it, since the
community was the manifestation of God‘s covenant with Israel‖ (World of Our Fathers 13, emphasis added).
and rituals of traditional Judaism had been premised
on a time scheme far more leisurely, a life far less harried than urban America
demanded. [. . . .] Those immigrants who stood fast by religion found whatever
solace it could offer, those who turned to secularism gained the consolations
of new theory. But the masses of
immigrants who rarely thought to call religion into question yet found it
harder and harder to regard it as a system illuminating the totality of existence—what
was left to them? Fragments of a culture, a parochialism bred by centuries of
isolation, and a heritage of fear, withdrawal, insularity. Except for those who
clung to faith or grappled toward ideology, the early immigrants consisted of
people who were stranded—stranded socially, morally, psychologically. (70)
Howe‘s moving
description reveals the extent to which Jewish identity was affected by the
loss of an environment conducive of ritual observance. Indeed, Nathan Glazer
makes explicit the point to which Frank and Howe allude: that the development
of Jewish identity in relationship to ritual practice rather than to a body of
beliefs may have made Orthodox Jewish immigrants particularly vulnerable to the
powerful lure of other redemptive orders.[65]
Coming from a culture that had had to
adapt to complex social structures throughout its long history of oppression,
some Jews attempted to overcome their sense of marginality by simultaneously
carrying multiple allegiances and identities.
Writer Harry Roskolenko, who sold newspapers on the Lower East Side
during this period, later recalled:
[I]deas about God, the synagogue, the union, intermeshed.
It was difficult, then, for me to see how men could be two things—like
Zionist-anarchists; or Zionists who were also atheists; or Socialists who were
Zionists and atheists. It was like a chess game—with no rules [ . . . .] Who
was not at least two or three separate spiritual and physical entities on the
Lower East Side? My father managed Socialism, Orthodoxy, and Zionism, quite
easily, and so did the kibitzers and the serious. (190)
Abraham Cahan, on the other hand, presents a different
picture, describing his socialist cohort in a newspaper article as an
intransigent group of intellectuals who looked down on ordinary religious Jews
and refused to accede to their superstitious practices: One must not sit at a
Seder; one must extend no sympathy to the honest, ignorant mother who sheds
tears over her prayer book [. . . .] In truth, our early unbelievers were, in
their own way, just as fanatical, just as narrow minded, just as intolerant as
the religious fanatic on whom they warred. (The
Jewish Daily Forward 22
April 1911)
Cahan‘s complaint suggests that those
Jews who, like the socialists and anarchists, grappled with ideology within the
centrifugal forces of the American experience were attempting to define
themselves in the ideological marketplace by differentiating themselves from
those who practiced orthodox religion (105). Since ritual practice was so
central to Orthodox Judaism, this often meant that radicals focused their
rejection of orthodoxy on Jewish ritual itself. Most notable for their bitter
antagonism toward Jewish ritual were the anarchists, who placed the religious
question at the heart of their zealous critique of the social order. Marcus
Ravage recalls being attracted to anarchism because of ―the absence of every
trace of sect exclusiveness in the movement, at least on its intellectual side‖
(155), yet ―we were all missionaries and some of us were quite genuine bigots‖
(156). The anarchists often concentrated an unusual amount of energy on the
very rituals they had rejected, particularly in their yearly ―Yom
Kippur Balls,‖ at which, on the most solemn of Jewish
holidays, they would hold parties, parades, stage theatrical performances, and
publish parodies of Jewish prayers in their newspapers (105). Howe maintains that these parodies only
served to prove how well the anarchists knew their prayers, and that the false
bravado of the anarchists only revealed their own sense of abandonment and
unrequited longing for the old religious rituals and the haunting beauty of Kol
Nidre (106). Thus, deeper than the intellectual defenses put up by those who
had been disappointed by religion, ―the past remained vivid to those who
attacked it as obsolete [. . . .]You could denounce the voice of religion as
superstition and worse, but the Yom Kippur service shook the heart‖ (18).
At the same time that Orthodox Jewish
immigrants were resisting the attacks of both radicals and Reform Jews on their
religious practice, they were also besieged by Christian missionaries who stood
on the corners of the crowded streets of the religious marketplace on the Lower
East Side, waiting to offer them, sometimes quite aggressively, yet another
redemptive community through which to create a new American identity.[66]
Evangelicals believed, contrary to traditional Christian views, that Christianity
was not the alternative to Jewish
identity but the fulfillment of
Jewish identity (Ariel 15). Thus, along with their policy of providing relief
services to poor immigrants, they evolved a set of cultural and theological
strategies aimed at appealing to Jewish tradition in order to make Christianity
less disruptive to Jewish experience.
They climbed onto wagons and preached on the street corners in Yiddish
while distributing Yiddish tracts. More significantly, missions deliberately
appealed to Jewish sensibilities by limiting their use of specifically
Christian symbols and decorating their mission houses instead with Jewish
symbols, even going so far as to hold Christian services on Saturdays in order
to reduce Jewish anxiety over neglecting their Sabbath obligations (16).[67]
In addition, evangelical journals like Our
Hope, Prayer and Work for Israel, and Immanuel’s
Witnesses continually published articles on the significance of Jewish
rituals and of the Jewish people to Christian history (15-16).
The reaction of Jews to Christian efforts
to proselytize their co-religionists was
generally one of indignation. Irving Howe observes that few
Christian agencies supporting the missions realized how deeply their actions
offended the feelings of the Jews. For many Eastern European immigrants, such
tactics recalled bitter memories of forced conversions in Russia (73-74).
Convinced that in their form of Judaism they had achieved a rational monotheism
that was itself the model of a future universal American religion,
German-speaking Reformed Jews felt no need to cast aside their own tradition
(59), and found in the missionary agenda a challenge to what they considered to
be their rightful place within the American civil redemptive order (68).
For this reason, Jewish converts who
became missionaries were often the most reviled by Jews as ―traitors twice
over,‖ who had not only abandoned their faith but were attempting to entice
other Jews to do the same (60). Some Jewish missionaries had personal failings
that made it easy for the Jewish community to defend itself by exposing them as
frauds. [68]
Those Jewish converts who claimed to have been former rabbis posed a much
greater problem. The only means of defense in such cases was to cast aspersions
upon their biographies.[69]
The traditional Jewish attitude to apostasy can be best understood in the
literal translation of the Jewish word for an apostate: meshumed— literally, ―one who has destroyed himself.‖ Ariel claims
that most Jews considered converts to be ―the scum of the earth, the rotten
fruit on the Jewish tree, picked by the enemies of Judaism, who were unable to
reach any of the good fruit‖ (64). While most Jewish families did not cut off
their Christian members completely, many did sit shivah for them, and their conversion placed great emotional
strains on family relationships (46). Ultimately, the Christian concept of
creating a new identity through individual choice struck at the core of Jewish
conceptions of ethno-religious identity, which was believed to be determined at
birth and collectively reinforced by the rituals and mitzvoth of the
Torah, through the fulfillment of which ―the
Jew engages in his own self-realization‖
(Golding 236)84
Jewish converts who were most susceptible
to the Christian message were generally those young, single, Orthodox males who
sought ―new moral and communal frameworks‖ that would enable them to establish
an identity in the new world (Ariel 15). Since, as Glazer notes, Orthodox
Judaism, with its emphasis on ritual observance, did not provide the answers
many young Jewish immigrants needed in the unsettling and emotionally
challenging experience of adjusting to a secular society, many, like Edward
because of its ability to negotiate between the two
redemptive orders of Christianity and Judaism without injuring the dignity of
either one.
84 Abraham Cahan published a fascinating story about a Jewish
convert to Christianity entitled ―The
Apostate of Chego-Chegg‖ (1899), which recounts the
tale of Rivka, a Jewish woman who embraces Christianity in order to marry the
man she loves, but who, in the process, loses her family ties and becomes
lonely and isolated. Longing to return to her Jewish community and the
religious practices that had previously supported her identity, she tries to go
home to reconnect with her family but cannot because she loves her husband too
much to renounce him in accord with her family‘s wishes. Rivka winds up a
wandering, tormented soul who has lost her place in the world. Thus, Cahan,
though a secular Jew, implicitly recognizes the pain associated with the loss
of Jewish identity in presenting Rivka according to the traditional Jewish
model of the meshumadeste, the one
who has destroyed herself.
Steiner, found strength in the embrace of Christianity (Ariel
58).[70]
Yet, such conversions, while perhaps providing possible answers to questions of
identity in America, did not always provide an experience of peace, since
family relations became quite strained in the process. The choice to convert
thus often carried with it intense emotional upheaval, as the personal
statements of Jewish converts indicate. Edward
Steiner‘s memory of his decision to convert suggests the agony
associated with attempting to overcome a sense of homelessness through allying
oneself with a redemptive hegemony one‘s family saw as a threat to the survival
of the Jewish people:
I tried to find a way through the confusion of ideas
and the mixture of motives [. . . .] It
was [. . .] mental and physical torture. At the one end of it the mother who
bore me in bodily and mental agony; at the other end this homeless and useless
self [. . . .] Then too, I had a horror of the so-called converted Jew, who
often changes his faith for convenience. (From
Alien to Citizen 213-218)[71]
Jewish convert Henry Hellyer recalls his decision as equally
guilt-laden: ―I could see my mother and my sister and brother looking at me in
terror, and my townspeople pointing their fingers at me in their rage; I could
hear the entire Jewish race shouting at me in true fury‖ (qtd. in Ariel 40).
For some, the decision bore too great an emotional cost, leading to a
debilitating inner conflict and a confusion regarding their true identity that
caused many to retract their conversions (51). Ariel suggests that while
―conversion was a radical move‖ that subverted many traditional Jewish values
and placed younger Jews in conflict with their parents, it ―put them in even
greater conflict with themselves‖ (40), as they wrestled with their twin
desires for inclusion in the evangelical community and for retention of some
sort of identity within Judaism (47). This, in turn, led to dilemmas over how
to maintain Jewish heritage and which of its formal aspects they could retain
(47).
Ironically, the issue of Jewish ritual,
the very backbone of Jewish identity became, in turn, a central focus for
questions of Christian identity. In 1903, the Hebrew
Christian Alliance, a group of Jewish Christians, held its
first meeting at Mountain Lake Park, Maryland, out of a desire to evangelize
their people whom they believed had a special identity within Christianity as
―mediators between the church, the Christian faith and the Jews‖ (48). Within
this group, as was the case within the missionary movement as a whole, there
were some who believed that Jews should retain their ritual practice, while
others saw it as detrimental to Jewish hopes of achieving a real place within
the Christian redemptive order (19). Although it could bolster Jewish comfort
with Christian religious practice, once again ritual, with its
boundary-producing strategies, became a stumbling block to the larger
evangelical project of subsuming Judaism under Christianity. While some non-Jewish evangelicals supported
the idea that Jews should retain their ritual practice and should not have to
blend in with the gentile Christian community (there were even a few small
congregations of Jews who did retain their ritual observance and were called
―Messianic Jews‖), the majority of Christians felt that it was not admissible
to combine Christian faith with Jewish ritual, a belief they often justified by
references to a fundamental difference they perceived between Judaism and
Christianity in Paul‘s admonition that it was futile to observe the law when
one had been given the gift of grace (49). In addition, the idea of maintaining
their distinct Jewish liturgical heritage was frightening to Jewish converts
who believed that they had to demonstrate their sincerity and loyalty by strict
adherence to Christian norms in order to avoid resentment, suspicion, and even
rejection by the non-Jewish evangelical community (49-50). Thus conversion to Christianity generally
meant assimilation into mainstream American culture.
Ultimately, however, the most powerful
lure of American culture for immigrants probably lay, not in its Christian
religion, but in its invitation to material success. At the turn of the
century, an Eastern European Jewish bourgeoisie arose, as many immigrants like
David Levinsky chose the path of the ―allrightnik‖ not only as a means of
survival but as a way of becoming American, a way to overcome the liminality
and marginality of immigrant life. Yet, such a path did not necessarily yield
the sense of personal reclamation within a social group that the immigrant
sought. One Jewish immigrant by the name of Louis Borgenicht, who may have
influenced Cahan‘s conception of his protagonist, started out with a pushcart
and dreams of owning his own store, eventually working his way into the
clothing business and gaining great success by underselling German Jews. In the early days of his prosperity, he
remained attached to the culture of the Lower East Side, sharing his riches
with poor Jews, sending his sons to Hebrew school, keeping a kosher home, and
closing his factory on the Sabbath. But, over time, change set in. Borgenicht
joined an uptown Hungarian synagogue, struggled to get rid of his Yiddish accent,
and hired a tutor to teach his children German. In the end Borgenicht, though
visibly successful, found himself a stranger to both worlds and to himself
(Howe 161). Thus, ―insofar as [the Jews] accepted the secular cultures of their
time, they risked the loss of historical identity, a rupture with that sacred
past which could stir the skeptics almost as much as the believers‖ (18).
Edward Steiner‘s novel The Mediator repeatedly uses ritual
moments to mark the passages of one such Jew who throws off his historical
identity out of religious enthusiasm rather than materialism only to realize
the importance of the sacred past. In the course of these passages, he must
make agonizing choices. As discussed in the previous chapter, Samuel Cohen
grows up in the environment of Orthodox Judaism, where ritual is strictly
observed but other human values such as aesthetics and the content of faith are
not given equal importance. Following the pattern described by Glazer, Samuel
becomes entranced by the beauty of Catholic ritual and the inspiring ideal of
Christian love, only to desert his father in order to become a
Catholic monk and a priest. When he returns to his village after fourteen years
to celebrate his first communion, he sparks a terrible pogrom that results in
destruction and death in the Jewish quarter. Afterward, in a crucial scene, now
completely broken and disillusioned, Samuel prepares to leave for America. As
he walks out of his village, he enters the cemetery where his mother is buried
to say goodbye. Standing before his mother‘s grave, he hears the distinctive
chime of the church bell signaling the time to say the Angelus, a Catholic ritual that reenacts the angel Gabriel‘s
encounter with the Virgin Mary three times daily in honor of the Incarnation. At various points in the ritual, the Hail Mary
is recited. Since Samuel has engaged in this ritual devotion for fourteen
years, his lips automatically begin to mouth the words ―Hail, Mary! Full of
grace,‖ but at this moment ―something seemed to give way within him, as if a
dried-up spring had suddenly received back its ceaseless flow, and he cried
out, almost defiantly, the prayer of the Jewish mourner: ‗Yisgadal,
Yiskadash, Schmeh raboh‖ (130). In this moment, Jewish ritual breaks the
redemptive hegemony imposed by Christian ritual and asserts its own power.
Having witnessed the atrocities committed
by Christians against the very people through whom the Word of God became
incarnate, Samuel is now no longer the same person who previously said the Angelus without fail. If rituals
proclaim that ―we are as we act,‖ as Jennings suggests, then for Samuel to say
the Angelus at this point would be to
falsify his very being. Samuel‘s identity has undergone a radical shift. Since
Samuel now perceives the redemptive hegemony maintained by Christian ritual as
that of a cruel and oppressive elite, its ability to affirm his former identity
is now defunct. In his recoil from the
ritual enactment of the Christian mystery of the Incarnation, Samuel in a sense
becomes reincarnated as a Jew, which
means he must make a choice between redemptive orders. Consequently, Samuel
stops the Christian ritual prayer, choosing instead to say
Kaddish, the Jewish ritual prayer for the dead, over his
mother‘s grave. As Kertzer suggests, the ritual empowers a sense of identity in
Samuel over against that of the elite. The symbolism of his choice of rituals
further indicates that Samuel now symbolically chooses to return to the Jewish
matrix out of which he sprang by choosing his flesh-andblood Jewish mother over
the Blessed Mother of Catholicism and the Mother Church.
Steiner tells us that the tones of the prayer were ―notes of
defiance [. . . .] rather than those of comfort,‖ emphasizing the political
choice between redemptive orders that Samuel is making in this exchange of
rituals. From this moment on, Samuel, despite his unwavering love for Christ,
will no longer identify himself as a Christian but as a Jew.
While
on his journey to America, Samuel meets the Bruce family, wealthy
Protestants whose mission it is to convert the Jews in
expectation of the Second Coming. Mr. Bruce and his daughter take a keen
interest in Samuel, seeing that he would be of great use to their program as a
Jewish missionary. However, even though he is in love with the lovely young
Jane Bruce and longs for the comfort and sense of personal redemption he used
to receive from Christianity, Samuel now completely refuses to accept the role
of Christian. Instead, he takes on a much more difficult identity that situates
him on the margins of both Christianity and Judaism—that of a Jew who
recognizes Christ as the Messiah, a figure he now identifies only by the name
of Love. In a manner similar to that indicated by the historical record, Samuel
attempts to carry multiple allegiances, a project that puts him immediately at
odds with both Jews and Christians.
For example, when he comes upon Mr.
Bruce, who is preaching with a Jewish missionary from a wagon adorned with
banners displaying Bible verses written in Hebrew letters, Samuel notices that
the men are surrounded by an angry mob that accuses the Jewish missionary of
having been baptized for money. When the Jewish man tells them in Yiddish that
Jesus is the Prince of Peace, the mob angrily asks why Christians attack Jews
if their Messiah is the Prince of Peace. Just then, a newsboy calls out the
headlines of the latest edition of the news: The Massacre at Kishinev. This
pushes the crowd over the edge. They begin throwing stones at the two
missionaries and tearing down the banners from the wagon. Samuel jumps onto the
wagon to defend the two men and faces the crowd, identifying himself as a Jew
and insisting that the mob leave the two men alone. But the crowd furiously
condemns him as a Jewish apostate. Another member of the crowd shouts out that
Samuel himself is a baptized Jew, a traitor who deceptively converts Jews to
Christianity by calling Jesus by the name of Love. Samuel cries out three
times, ―I am not a Christian‖ (248-9). At this, his father, who is standing in
the crowd with Dr. Roznik also cries out in joy at what he believes is the
return of the son whom he considered dead to the religion of his fathers. But
immediately thereafter,
Samuel continues: ―I am a Jew! In every fiber of my soul a
Jew! But, men of Israel, I believe that Jesus is the Messiah‖ (249). At this,
Samuel‘s father collapses in grief, and
the crowd stones Samuel until he lies
unconscious in the street.
Ironically, Samuel‘s loyalty to the
Jewish Christ places him outside the Christian community as well. When the
Bruces take the injured Samuel into their home, he lies semi-conscious for
several days, confessing his guilt and confusion in his delirium:
―Tateleben Tate, my father, my father! I am a Jew, yes I am a
Jew. Forgive me, father, Christ forgive me! Oh! Mother of God, pray for me! No,
no!‖ (256). Dr. Roznik confides in Jane about Samuel‘s condition, explaining to
her that Samuel is physically exhausted by the heavy work in America and
emotionally exhausted from his quest for an identity through his spiritual
struggle. Dr. Roznik diagnoses Samuel as a man whose head injury will improve
with time but whose heart will never recover, since he is suffering from
Affectionitis Judaica, ―an
old disease, as old as Abraham, and there is no cure for it‖ (257). Dr. Roznik
perceives that Samuel is attempting to work out his salvation in a secular
society that has neither time nor sympathy for a man‘s spiritual struggles. He
compares the immigrant‘s love of America to the love of a man for a lion that
is swallowing him—―he has no choice in the matter‖ (258).[72]
When Samuel finally regains his strength, Mr. Bruce approaches him about
becoming a Christian missionary to the Jews, but Samuel refuses, saying, ―I
can‘t wipe out of my own soul Israel‘s ancient battle-cry: ‗Hear! Oh Israel!
The Lord thy God is one
God!‘ and I will not, and cannot, wipe it out of Israel‘s
consciousness‖ (286). When Mr. Bruce accuses him of being a Unitarian rather
than a Christian, Samuel expresses his sense of being stripped of all former
categories of identity as he calmly replies, ―I don‘t know what I am, Mr.
Bruce. I only know that I love this Christ, born of my race, and that I cannot
think of my life without Him. I shall preach Christ. I shall live Him if I
can—and as I can, and take upon myself the consequences. [. . . .] I am a
Jew—but I am more than that—I am a human being! Christ has made me that!‖
(286). In this statement, Samuel denies that Christianity is the fulfillment of
Jewish identity, while also affirming Christ, apart from the Christian
hegemonic order, as the fulfillment of human
identity.
Two years pass. Samuel has succeeded in
opening a mission house in the Jewish ghetto that works in the marginal space
between Christianity, Judaism, and Socialism.
After he endures a period of abuse by the community, Samuel‘s
commitment to the relief of suffering wins over the hearts of all three groups.
He becomes renowned for his selfless service to the ghetto and succeeds in
building a new hospital for its poor. But
Samuel‘s father wanders miserable and alone through the same
ghetto, lamenting not only the son who has destroyed himself but also the
increasing secularization of Jewish life in America, where Jewish businesses
remain open on the Sabbath and Jewish children now confuse the ritual practice
of Yom Kippur with that of Passover (233). Abraham Cohen walks through the
streets on the Sabbath, lamenting the loss of the ritual observances that have
been sacrificed to the American custom of milling about and displaying one‘s
finery (236).[73] He now copies Jewish scripture in elegant
calligraphy onto scrolls that no one will read, bitterly brooding over his
son‘s apostasy.
Through the final ritual scene in the
novel, however, Steiner achieves Samuel‘s reconciliation with his father and,
to some degree, with his religious heritage. One day, as the old man wanders
the streets, some hoodlums attack him. When Samuel sees his father‘s bleeding
form carried into his new hospital, he is overcome with grief and longs to be
reconciled with him. Abraham Cohen briefly regains consciousness on Yom Kippur,
feebly insisting on fulfilling his priestly duties for the solemn holy day. A
friend brings his bag with the ram‘s horn and the grave clothes required by the
rite. Samuel comes to him, and the two are finally reunited. Having received
kindness at the hands of the Christians who have rescued and treated him,
Abraham now has a vision of their old village of Kottowin, where the creek that
used to divide the Christian and Jewish quarters is now gone. As his life ebbs away, Abraham draws the
prayer-mantle from his bag and spreads it over his son‘s shoulders. He then
instructs Samuel in folding his hands and lifting them above his head, and
Samuel obeys ―as if moved by a mechanical and irresistible force‖ (354). Then
Abraham asks Samuel to chant with him the great blessing upon Israel, which
they intone together: ―May He bless thee, the Eternal One, and preserve thee,
may He make His face to shine upon thee and be gracious unto thee. May He lift
up His face unto thee and give thee peace‖ (355). Abraham falls back crying faintly
for someone to blow the ram‘s horn. The horn sounds, ―a wild weird note, a note
of pain—Israel‘s historic note—the note of sacrifice. And with that sound Reb
Abraham‘s soul was wafted to its maker‖
(355).
In the ritual of Yom Kippur, father and
son experience atonement, and Samuel receives the mantle of priesthood from his
father. Samuel‘s return to Jewish ritual once again signifies his solidarity
with politically deprived Jews who needed collective empowerment within the
lion‘s mouth of American assimilation as well as a sense of distinction within
the competitive religious marketplace. The scene, coming as it does after a
period of intense psychological anguish on the part of Samuel, reveals,
perhaps, Steiner‘s own Affectionitis
Judaica and his longing to be redeemed from his own guilt at having chosen
Christianity over his patriarchal heritage. But Samuel now wears the mantle,
not simply of Jewish priesthood, but of a new priesthood that will chant a
blessing upon America as a new Zion and mediate between Christians and Jews by
consenting to suffer the dialectic between the two communities.
The strains placed on the immigrant soul
by competing claims of multiple redemptive orders as exemplified in the
conflicts between Christians and Jews amid the secularizing influences of the
Lower East Side are recapitulated between Catholics and
Protestants in Their Fathers’ God
(1931), the final book of O.E.
Rölvaag‘s trilogy, which focuses on a family dilemma over ritual aroused by
conflicting worldviews at the heart of Lutheranism, nineteenth-century
devotional Catholicism, and American secularism on the Dakota prairie. When the
thoroughly secular Peder Holm marries the devoutly
Catholic Susie Doheny and brings her to live with his equally
pious Lutheran mother, Rölvaag presents the reader with the national problem of
creating unity in diversity through a family insolubly triangulated by the
demands of three competing redemptive orders, no single one of which can
suffice for the others, yet each of which excludes the others. In addition, Rölvaag uses this conflict over
ritual to assert the importance to human life of learning how to live
simultaneously in two equally necessary but often contrary modes—the rational
and the poetical.
The Catholic Church to which Susie Doheny
belongs, according to Jay Dolan, was essentially an immigrant church that saw
itself as an outsider to a culture it viewed as hostile to Catholicism,
decadent in its secularism, and dangerous in its anti-authoritarian impulse (The American Catholic Experience 222).[74] In response, Roman Catholic officials
attempted to shore up the church‘s defenses against both American and
European assaults on its authority through such measures as
the Declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870 and the promotion of a
devotional Catholicism that reinforced the powers of the church through an
emphasis on ritual practice. Dolan describes the Catholicism of the nineteenth
century as characterized by four important features: a culture of authority, an
emphasis on sin, a sense of the miraculous, and a preoccupation with public and
private ritual practice that encouraged the belief that ―the divine was
accessible only through ritual‖ (231).
Whether or not such belief was completely
orthodox, it was in the public performance of rituals like the Mass, baptisms,
weddings, and funerals, and in private devotions like the Rosary and devotions
to the Sacred Heart, that immigrant Catholics were able to define themselves as
Catholics in the United States through the fulfillment of obligations seen as
divinely ordained within a redemptive order that transcended a society by which
they were considered outsiders (231). Of the symbiosis of ritual, ethnicity,
and religion in the development of immigrant Catholic identity, Dolan
states:
Devotional Catholicism thus became a means of social
identity; it gave people a specifically Catholic identity in a Protestant
society. Certainly ethnicity, or one‘s nationality, was a vital trademark with
which both the first and second generation identified. But religion was such an
essential part of ethnic identity that, in the
United States, religious affiliation became the ―organizing impulse‖ among immigrants. (238)
The rituals of devotional Catholicism,
however, supported a culture and ethos that often contrasted sharply with the
traditionally masculine values of individual freedom, progressivism, and
rationality embraced by the liberal American Protestantism and civil religion
of the period. Devotional Catholicism
was marked by what Dolan calls
―emotionalism and sentimentalism‖ (231), fostered values of
docility and submission, displayed an uncritical acceptance of supernatural
cures and miracles, and utilized an array of religious items, such as prayer
cards, statues, scapulars, saints‘ pictures, and religious imagery in general,
that were associated with the realm of the feminine at the turn of the
twentieth century (231). In Roads to Rome,
Jenny Franchot describes at length the ways in which gender conflicts were
conflated with religious conflicts as American Protestants confronted what they
perceived as Catholic transgression of traditional gender norms in celibate
male and female bodies and in the ―feminized‖ depiction of male religious
devotion. Thus, nineteenth-century
Catholic religiosity challenged many mainstream American notions of religious,
behavioral, and sexual norms.
Yet, devotional Catholicism was an
especially powerful milieu for immigrant
Catholics for a number of reasons. On the most basic level, as previously
mentioned, the church fostered this type of Catholicism as a means of
strengthening reliance on the clergy during a period in which the powers of the
church were being challenged. Further, advances in the printing industry
allowed for wide dissemination of written devotional material, and the use of
the vernacular in private devotions empowered Catholics who were otherwise at
the mercy of the Latin-speaking clergy (238). On a deeper level, however, the
elevation of suffering to a high level of spiritual significance in devotional
Catholicism gave expression and meaning to immigrant suffering; its culture of
the miraculous allowed immigrant Catholics to experience the hand of God in
their lives; and its ritual practice created a redemptive order that empowered
a group who, while making up the religious majority numerically, experienced
itself as a cultural minority that endured ethnic and religious discrimination
in a society that considered religious belief an essential component of
American identity (239).
The
Norwegian Lutheran Church in America, on the other hand, though
upholding its doctrinal inheritance in its allegiance to the
inerrancy of scripture and strict adherence to the confessional writings of the
church (Lovoll 144-5), was marked by controversy almost from the beginning, as
Lutherans, now freed from the secular authority of the state church of Norway
sought to create an authentic Lutheran church in America (143). Odd Lovoll describes this transition
from state-church to free-church as ―fraught with deep disharmony from the
beginning,‖ much of which was exacerbated by ―an almost undisciplined sense of
freedom and opposition among the immigrants‖
(144), as they came in contact with the sectarian impulse
within American religious life. The result was almost continuous conflict over
doctrine, practice, organization, and language as the church endured splits and
new formations on the prairie (143). Unlike the Catholic Church in America,
which experienced perhaps too great an oversight by the Vatican, the Lutheran
Church often felt like the orphaned daughter of the mother church in Norway,
receiving little interest or guidance from the homeland (143). Nevertheless,
despite abandonment by the mother church and dissension within their own church
body, many Norwegian Lutherans saw their project of establishing a ―Lutheran
Zion‖ as a glorious work requiring a vigorous application of religious values
to the transformation of civil life, something that had not been possible in
Norway. ―Here,‖ one Lutheran wrote to his pastor, ―our weak voice is not a
voice in the wilderness; here there is no fruitless speculation and
theologizing while everything remains nicely as it was, but here all public
speaking becomes action and takes shape and is changed into practice!‖ (qtd. in
Lovoll 144).
Peder Holm, raised in the Lutheran Church
on the prairie, and in the American common school, is thus the recipient of a
double impetus to strive for the transformation of the public sphere. Peder,
who once held long conversations with God as a child, has relinquished what he
sees as puerile superstition in favor of common sense, science, and the
skepticism he finds in the writings of Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll, which
he promotes with an energy that borders on religious fervor (91-3). Peder now
sees religious devotion, which he has experienced as oppressive in his mother‘s
pietistic practices, as the province of women and children whose lives are
predicated upon fear, a view that becomes even more pronounced when he
encounters his wife‘s unquestioning devotion to Catholic ritual. With his new practical
vision, Peder views the stories of the Bible not as existential parables told
in poetic language but as purblind ―fish stories,‖ spun by the clergy to
subjugate human energy to their stifling code of moral behavior. Having turned his eyes away from the heavenly
world as an illusion, Peder now concentrates his energies on what he envisions
as an American, and essentially masculine, project of building the new country
through devotion not to religion, the occupation of ―old women,‖ but to the national
ideals of freedom of conscience and progress (56). Like his father, Peder views
the past as salt on the wings he would use to fly into the glorious
American future. ―No matter where we‘ve come from,‖ Peder
explains, we all have the same job—to push together for the goal that mankind
has been seeking ever since it was morning the first day. Our task is here to
build up a happiness so great and so wonderful that the glory of it will
brighten up the far corners of the world. But before we can hope to reach the
goal we‘ve got to clear the road of a lot of worm-eaten barriers. I mean all
those silly superstitions and prejudices that centuries ago should have been
dumped into the sea. These prairies will never be beautiful until we finish the
job. (55)
Peder‘s newfound ideology leads him to speak out at a town
meeting against the town‘s gullibility in employing a rainmaker to end a
prolonged period of severe drought, to preach a new gospel of common sense
whenever he is given the opportunity, and to ridicule the town priest Father
Williams, who is dear to his wife, as a humbug. Now the subject of gossip and
ridicule for having impregnated and married a Catholic girl,
Peder endures Lutheran taunts that he will forsake the
Lutheran church and become Catholic, only to return to the farm and work
feverishly while dreaming of personal fulfillment outside the church as a
statesman in the American civil realm.
Beret Holm, widowed and aging, has now turned
the farm over to her son and lives with Peder, Susie, and their newborn son
Petie, whom she adores, having for the most part reconciled herself to Peder‘s
marriage to a Roman Catholic Irish girl.[75]
No longer tormented by her former psychological demons but still melancholy,
she lives a quiet, sober, and pious life, seeking only to be of service to her
son and to maintain the cultural and spiritual connections of the family to the
past and to each other. Beret does mourn
her son‘s loss of his spiritual roots and his access to the deeper truths of
life, which she feels can only be imparted through the poetic symbols and
practices of his religious heritage. In one particularly telling moment that
encapsulates the divide between Peder and his mother, Peder has just come from
his friend Tambur Ola‘s house where the two men have been complaining about the
failure of superstitious religion to grasp the simple commonsense truth that
human beings need only to be kind to one another in order to create the Kingdom
of Heaven, and he steps onto the porch of the house where his mother sits
watching the sunset. Out of the twilight, she says quietly, ―Tonight the hand
of God is painting beautifully‖ (98).
Susie, who like her mother-in-law Beret,
conceived her first child out of wedlock, enters the Holm household with the
worldview instilled in her by devotional Catholicism and continually suffers
the pangs of conscience brought on by her failure to conform to Catholic models
of female purity, her marriage to a Protestant, and her subsequent neglect of
the rites and sacraments of the Church.[76]
Furthermore, living in a Norwegian home for the first time, Susie is alienated
by a culture she perceives as cold, rigid, and overly punctilious, and by a
language to which she must continually listen but cannot understand. Thus she
turns to the rituals and symbols of the Roman Catholic Church, especially her
devotions to the Virgin Mary, for emotional support and a sense of personal
redemption in order to maintain her own identity and to relieve her feelings of
loneliness and spiritual failure.
Peder, however, views these rituals and
symbols with scorn as manipulative tools of the clergy, impediments to human
freedom and social progress. For
example, he calls the crucifix and font of holy water Susie installs in their
bedroom ―idolatry‖ (199),
Susie‘s confessions and communions
―skullduggery‖(148), her rosary ―black magic‖
(23), and the Virgin Mary ―an old witch up in the sky‖ (222),
causing Susie to say the rosary in private when Peder is either absent or
asleep. Peder believes it is his duty to stamp out Susie‘s superstition
―because I can see the truth and I am stronger,‖ even when he sees his wife‘s
visible joy at having participated in the rites of the church (83). When
Father Williams, who is Susie‘s main connection to her
spiritual roots, attempts to maintain the church‘s influence over her by
admonishing Peder to respect her religion and allow her access to it, Peder
tells the priest that his only obligation to Susie is to use his common sense
to ensure that they get along (80-1). In private, Peder insults Father Williams
before Susie at every opportunity, and, finally, in a fit of anger, tells the
priest that if he does not stop interfering in the couple‘s relationship, ―I
shall have to kill you, grind you under my heel as I would a venomous snake. I
tell you now, once and for all, that your God is not my God!‖ (283).
Peder‘s refusal to support the ritual
practices of either Lutheranism or Catholicism means that his wife and mother
come to view his son‘s spiritual welfare as their responsibility. Because they
come from two different religious traditions with a history of mutual suspicion
and misunderstanding, however, neither woman can discuss the issue with the
other. Susie worries about the fate of her child‘s soul in a Protestant household,
going so far as to place a Catholic medal around the infant‘s neck (100-1) and
to make the sign of the cross under his back whenever she gives him to Beret or
takes him from her arms (73).[77] Beret worries equally about the fate of her
grandson‘s soul, especially about the possibility that Petie could be baptized
in the Catholic Church or even die without undergoing the rite of baptism at
all. She therefore begins nagging Peder about having Petie baptized in the
Lutheran church, warning him of the consequences of neglecting his son‘s
spiritual welfare (84). Peder
continually puts the baptism off, ostensibly because he dislikes Reverend
Gabrielson, the Lutheran minister, and because of the greater problem he fears
he would have with Susie over the ritual; fundamentally, however, Peder‘s
postponement of the baptism stems from the fact that he simply does not believe
it matters.
When she
becomes convinced that Peder‘s evasion will eventually lead Susie to
have the child baptized into the Catholic faith, Beret takes
it upon herself to have him baptized in secret. Just as Peder was baptized by a
beloved friend of the family when Beret and Per Hansa were in extreme
circumstances and had no access to a minister, Beret calls upon her friend
Sörine to baptize Petie while Peder and Susie are away from home, telling her
that the misfortune of being baptized into Roman Catholicism ―is not going to
happen to any of mine as long as I am on my feet and in my right mind!‖ (88).
Beret prepares Peder‘s baptismal gown, now yellowed with age,
spreads a white cloth on the table and sets a bowl of water on it, then places
the hymn book in Sörine‘s hands, telling her ―You say what the book tells you
to say. You know how it is to be done. The name is Peder Emmanuel‖ (89). The
narrative then tells us:
Sörine lowered her eyes to the book and in an unsteady
voice spoke the words of the baptismal ritual, letting handfuls of water drip
on the head of the child, saying solemnly: ―Peder Emmanuel, I baptize you in
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.‖ As she did so
her whole body trembled so violently that she feared she would fall in a faint;
she hastened through the Lord‘s Prayer, said the Amen, and threw herself down
in a chair. Her face was wet with cold perspiration.
―Praise
be to God, now it is done. May it be
pleasing in His sight!‖ sighed
Beret. (89)
In this scene, Sörine‘s anxiety over taking over an office
reserved for an ordained priest, as well as Beret‘s relief at having
accomplished the baptism, suggests the degree to which rituals can exert power
over their participants, creating an overwhelming sense of obligation as well
as anxiety over failure to perform them according to the manner prescribed by
the redemptive order. Yet Rölvaag also
tells us that God ―looked with favor on Beret‘s act of Christian solicitude,
for, immediately after Petie‘s baptism, ―a heavy mantle of clouds was cast over
the entire sky [. . . .] and before nightfall it was raining, quietly but with
unmistakable certainty [. . . .] And now, when the drought had once been
broken, there came rain in abundance‖ (90), indicating a fundamental correspondence
between the powers of ritual and the fertilizing forces of the natural world.
Meanwhile, Susie, like Beret, also suffers remorse over
her failure to have her son baptized according to the rites of the Church. At
one point she confesses to Father Williams that she cannot baptize her son
without Peder‘s knowledge because he would never forgive her. ―I can feel it in
me,‖ she tells him, ―He just doesn‘t understand‖ (131). Yet, her conscience
continues to torment her to such a degree that when her father injures himself
and must be taken to town to see a doctor, Susie uses the opportunity to go to
confession and to have Petie baptized by Father Williams. Father Williams, in
turn, is so worried about the effects of Susie‘s marriage to a Protestant upon herself
and her son that he offers to baptize the child with water from the River
Jordan, which he collected in a silver flask while on a pilgrimage years
earlier.
Rölvaag describes the Catholic ritual
of baptism in detail, noting in particular the effect it has on Susie, who,
having lived without the rites of the church for several months, now receives
the experience with special intensity:
From the moment [Father Williams] met her in the aisle with
―What do you ask of the Church?‖ and she had answered meekly, ―The Faith,‖ and
until she had stood by the baptismal font, it was as if step by step she had
been approaching the very throne of Omnipotence. She could not have explained
what happened to her and her child, because it was all so wonderful. [. . . .]
Here a higher power was addressing her; she was only a lost child who in
humility accepted that which was given her. Her son, flesh of her flesh and
blood of her own heart, she presented for holy baptism; the son that she had
got in sin, committed in the frivolity of youth, she now surrendered into the
hand of Omnipotence. Willingly she delivered him up, and felt at the same time
a strange pain and unspeakable sweetness. (135-6)
Rölvaag‘s narrative emphasizes the power of ritual to create
redemptive hegemony by instilling certain values in the participant while
simultaneously offering the possibility of exercising those virtues in
discharging one‘s obligations to the ritual order. More particularly, the
ritual scene reveals what virtues were expected of the good Catholic by the
devotional cult of the turn of the century.
Yet Rölvaag does not simply suggest the beauty of the ritual, but he
also evokes its power over the human mind, thus raising questions as to whether
Susie is participating in a legitimate sacrament of initiation and redemption
or whether she is being manipulated by the persuasive strategies and aesthetic
power of the ritual into accepting the authoritarian rule of the church. After
the baptism, Rölvaag tells us this:
Susie stood with her child in her arms, a great effulgence
enfolding her. Her child, her very flesh and blood, had been inducted into the
communion of saints and had received sonship from God the Father. Now little
child angels were ringing the bells of heaven in honor of the occasions. Susie
stood in the doorway of the church; she had forgotten all about the others. In
the western sky shone the bright afterglow of a great sun that had just now
sunk into the prairie . . . Out there were all the fairy angels . . . now they
were hurrying home, back to their sweet mysteries! (135-6)
Here again, Rölvaag presents Susie‘s Catholicism as somewhat
childish and sentimental, yet he tells us that after the baptism, Susie‘s
father is miraculously healed of his injury, just as after Beret‘s baptismal
rite, a fertilizing rain ended the drought.
The issue of the baptism lies dormant until, later in the
novel, it comes to life again in the ritual of confession, when Beret, having
suffered a hip fracture, lies dying of heart failure and wishes to confess her
sin against Susie before receiving Communion for the last time. Now realizing
the wrongness of her actions in robbing Susie of the right to baptize her own
child, she feels she must tell her the truth before departing this world.
After Beret‘s death, Susie accuses her to Peder of having
tried to steal her son‘s soul, to which Peder‘s cries out, ―Can‘t you
understand that she had to do it?
That her God demanded it of her? . . . That she had to do it to satisfy him?‖
(262), indicating the degree to which the redemptive hegemony created by ritual
has imparted to Beret the fear of failing to sustain it. Susie, on the other hand, has done the same
thing that Beret did, but remains silent about her own machinations.
Once the truth has been confessed and Beret has been
removed from the scene, it would seem that the matter of Petie‘s baptism would
be closed for good. But Peder‘s error in believing that the ritual did not
matter comes back to haunt him. When Peder decides to fulfill his dreams of
running for political office by entering the election for county commissioner,
he finds himself running against Tom McDougall, an Irish Catholic candidate.
Susie assures Peder that she is working to convince her Irish family and
friends to vote for Peder, but he hears rumors that the Dohenys consider an
Irish Catholic vote for a Norwegian Lutheran a sacrilege. When Peder returns
from speaking on behalf of the Republican Party on the campaign circuit, he
learns that his opponent will be giving a speech about Peder himself, and that
although Susie knew about it, she has not told him. Peder attends the meeting
so that he can defend himself against
McDougall‘s criticism, only to stand in disbelief as he
listens to McDougall describe Peder as a cold-hearted free-thinking Norwegian
Lutheran who cruelly refused to allow his wife to have their child baptized,
forcing her to have him baptized secretly (333).
Peder learns of his wife‘s duplicity for the first time at a
public event meant to humiliate him. The sacred ritual of human redemption has
thus been used to exclude Peder from the redemptive order to which he so
desperately wants to belong.
Peder, overcome with nausea at the import
of what he hears, returns home. The ritual and the conditions under which the
baptism has been performed have brought the fundamental differences between
Peder and Susie to a crisis point. In a cold rage, Peder enters Susie‘s room,
rips her crucifix off the wall, smashes her font of holy water, and grinds the
beads of her rosary, which he calls ―the root of all the evil,‖ under his foot
(337). The next morning, Peder discovers that Susie has taken Petie and returned
to the Doheny farm. Peder is now left alone, bereft of mother, wife, and
child.
The
failure of the marriage between the freethinking Norwegian Lutheran and the
orthodox Irish Catholic over a ritual of initiation and redemption says much
about the enmeshment of religion and ethnicity in America‘s history. The crisis
in the Holm family over a ritual that will mark the identity of the next
generation is ultimately a crisis of identity and loyalty for each of its
members. In their moves to determine who the child will be, whether Catholic,
Protestant, or common sense Freethinker, they all attempt to define their own
identities by discharging their obligations to a redemptive order they perceive
to be salvific. Because religion and ethnicity are so intertwined in America,
especially in immigrant America,
religious questions inevitably call up ethnic questions and the degree to which
personal identity and the sense of redemption in America is related to
membership within one‘s ethnic community. Even more important for the American
projects of civil liberty and freedom of religion, Rölvaag forces us to
consider how far it is truly possible to maintain unity in diversity, and at
what spiritual and cultural cost. As Paul Reigstad suggests, ―That Peder can so
easily reject his heritage to marry his Irish-Catholic sweetheart, Susie
Doheny, attests to the failure of church, school and state to insist upon the
special characteristics of immigrant cultures‖ (135). Reverend Kaldahl, who replaces Reverend
Gabrielson as the pastor of the Lutheran church in Spring Creek, also warns
that America‘s tendency to dissolve ethnic difference will inevitably result in
its becoming ―the most impoverished land spiritually on the face of the earth‖
(Their
Fathers’ God 210).
At the end of Their Fathers’ God,
Rölvaag presents Peder, who has attempted to adopt a redemptive order that
ignores both religion and ethnicity, as the very embodiment of such
impoverishment.
The novel also speaks to gender concerns as Peder‘s pursuit
of identity through prominence in the American civic order contrasts sharply
with the adherence of his mother and his wife to ritual practice within the
Christian redemptive order. Peder sees religion as a feminine project that has
confined him for most of his life, an attitude he most cruelly evinces in
grinding Susie‘s rosary to pieces. Peder
thus seeks to throw off
―feminine‖ religion in favor of recognition and power in the
―masculine‖ world of politics. He is free to seek such power because he is
male, whereas Beret and Susie have no such empowerment outside the ritual
order. Because they are able to gain the experience of personal empowerment
through their fulfillment of the obligations imposed by their respective
rituals, Beret and Susie confirm Boudewinjse‘s theory that ritual can indeed
provide an alternative to the pursuit of identity through social prestige.
Finally, while Peder assumes that his masculine common sense is superior to the
mystical superstitions of the women in the household, they have access, despite
all of its human distortions, to a transcendent order that invests the drudgery
of their life on the prairie with luminescence.
What may be most striking about Rölvaag‘s
presentation, however, is his ability to capture the problem of ritual,
particularly in pluralistic societies like America. Rölvaag makes apparent
Beret and Susie‘s narrow-minded allegiance to the demands of their religion.
Each sins against the other out of a blind belief that her failure to appease
those demands will result in either Petie‘s or her own damnation. Susie‘s
spiritual advisor, Father Williams, is almost exasperatingly kind in the face
of Peder‘s rebukes, yet he inhabits an office from which ―since the day of
creation God‘s wind and gracious sunshine must have been shut out‖ (281).
Beret‘s commitment to the rituals of her Lutheran faith does not save her from
hubris in asserting the supremacy of her own rituals over those of the child‘s
mother. Susie‘s devotions to the Virgin
Mary do not save her from a failure of courage and from deceit. Viewed from
this perspective, ritual seems to do nothing more than promote spiritual
blindness and ethnic division. Yet, both baptisms somehow minister to ―the
hidden life of the heart‖ (210). Both Susie and Beret experience spiritual
empowerment through the exercise of ritual; afterward, a fertilizing rain falls
on the parched earth, and the lame walk. In comparison, Peder‘s commonsense
life seems sterile, a sojourn into what Reverend Kaldahl calls ―the perfect
democracy of barrenness.‖ Rölvaag offers an alternative to both extremes,
perhaps, in the figure of Nikoline Johansen, a Norwegian girl who visits the
prairie for a while. In contrast to Susie‘s childlike helplessness and
emotional extremes, Nikoline has a level head and a full heart and is able to
distinguish clearly between illusion and reality. She also receives spiritual
sustenance from the cultural riches of her heritage without being the victim of
religious dogma. Because she represents the fulfillment of both sides of
Peder‘s nature, the head and the heart, Peder feels an intense attraction to
her. Significantly, however, Nikoline
returns to Norway because she finds life in America unsupportive of those who
seek to blend the two modes of existence.
Rölvaag wrote Their
Fathers’ God at the end of his life, during a period of illness and
despair. For that reason, Reigstad
claims the novel shows his bitterness and impatience with human folly (138).
Rölvaag intended to write a fourth novel in which he brought Peder back to his
heritage and the fulfillment of his destiny.
In its indeterminacy, what proved to be his last novel perhaps speaks
more eloquently to the problem of ritual practice in a modernizing and
pluralistic society and to more fundamental issues of ethnicity, religion, and
identity in American life.
At the heart of the novel‘s conflict is a
double bind with regard to religious signification that continues to the
present day: the need for common rituals and symbols to nourish the American
community even as they intensify and even create divisions within that
community. In its examination of the paradoxical soaring of the soul within the
confines of a ritual order than can fetter it in ordinary life, Their Fathers’ God confronts head-on the
difficulties of living with religious ritual in a multicultural society while
also suggesting that there is poverty in living without it. And as to whether
the cult of the nation state can take its place, whether the cheer for national
unity can replace the chant of the imam,
Rölvaag makes plain the spiritual insufficiency of the cult of
American civil religion to provide adequately for the soul‘s
often painful and lonely peregrinations into, through, and out of this life.
Rölvaag‘s novel encapsulates the very dilemma voiced by William James to a
modernist colleague who criticized him for his focus on the non-rational
aspects of religious belief: ―Your bogey is superstition; my
bogey is desiccation‖ (Letter to L.T. Hodhouse, 12 August, 1904).
In their protagonists‘ quests for
identity in America, all of these novels in some way manifest the constellation
of concerns and the tensions posed by the conflicting urges toward universality
and ethnic difference that Timothy Smith has described as characteristic of many
immigrants: Ciambelli‘s project to redeem Italian identity through heroic
action within the larger American patriotic order, while also fostering Italian
nationalism, reflects these tensions.
Samuel Cohen‘s identity crisis springs largely from a longing to
identify with a universal brotherhood coupled with an equally powerful sense of
his ethnic particularity brought about by the psychological challenges imposed
by Christian hypocrisy and anti-Semitism, and his uprooting through
immigration. The resulting intensification of his theological reflection causes
him, in turn, to refuse total identification with either Judaism or
Christianity, while still striving to fulfill their common ethical
demands. Similarly, Peder Holm‘s
struggle simultaneously to dissolve and maintain the boundaries of his
ethno-religious identity stems from his confrontation with the conflicting and
oppressive obligations imposed by his mother‘s Norwegian Lutheranism and his
wife‘s Irish Catholicism as he experiences them beneath his overarching vision
of redemption from ethnic particularity through absorption into the
super-identity of the American citizen.
The importance of these novels lies not
only in their unflinching presentations of the problem of immigrant identity
but also in their ability to resurrect the archetypal patterns and
instabilities at the core of American identity in general. As William
Boelhower has observed, ―the quest for an identity and the
search for a patria go hand in hand‖
(78). Since Americans are not rooted in
the land in which they were born, they no longer possess the old categories of
nature and geography that were once used to determine identity (19), and are
thus privileged, or doomed, to search for their identity in a country that is
always yet to be. Therefore, these immigrant
protagonists—liminal beings who continually search for reintegration into a
community that does not exist— stand for all
Americans. Their unresolved fates
represent not only immigrant
liminality, but American liminality
as well: Enrico Arnoldi distinguishes himself before the
American public as a military hero, yet curiously remains
outside American territory at the novel‘s end.
Samuel Cohen, despite his reconciliation with his father, is not
completely reconciled to Judaism or Christianity and remains outside the
boundaries of either community. The reader last sees Peder Holm leaving his
house to enter the undifferentiated space of the American prairie—an outsider
to all of its existing communities. Thus, as did Boelhower, these novels
suggest that the true answer to
Crevecoeur‘s question of ―What is an American?‖ may indeed be
―a questioning gaze‖ (77). Finally, in their insistence upon religious ritual
as a central frame for ethnic semiosis, these novels exhume the sign of ethnic
spirituality from its Native American burial ground to suggest, as did the
ambivalence of nativist secret societies toward
―ethnic‖ ritual practice, that ―American‖ religion cannot be
divorced from ―ethnic‖ religion. More importantly, perhaps, in the light of
current events in the Middle East, they assert that, despite the national
project of salvation through ethnic dissolution in the waters of the national
font, ethnic religious signification is in fact central to American religious
identity. If such is the case, the choice to have an imam face the East and chant a blessing beneath the American flag
at the Columbiad was indeed inspired.
Conclusion
In ―The Place of Ritual in Our Time,‖
Susan Mizruchi states, ―it may be that for our time religion will be the grand
‗multicultural scene,‘ the great pluralist case‖ (467). The novels of the
immigrant writers chosen for this study, in which ethnic religious practice is
used to raise multiple concerns regarding religion, ethnicity, and plurality in
America, clearly support Mizruchi‘s claim. If for no other
reason, these novels deserve attention for bringing the great pluralist case of
religion before the American public and for revealing the degree to which
questions of ethnicity are bound up with the desire to maintain the boundary
between the Sacred and the Profane in American life. However, while their
depictions of ethnic ritual are particularly effective hieroglyphs of the grand
multicultural scene, their importance extends beyond that, anticipating the
work of modern writers and inviting the contemporary reader to consider
significant historical, cultural, and theological questions.
First, in their continual portrayal of
its use in religious signification, these writers offer the ethnic body as a
legitimate medium for the construction of spiritual meaning in America. The Italian religious processions of Ciambelli
and Forgione, for example, wherein bodies considered outside the boundaries of
mainstream religious expression become the central means of demarcating a path
of reverence, prompt us to reconsider our assumptions about the place of ethnic
bodies in the American socio-economic order and our historically conditioned
theological assumptions about the body in American religious practice.
Furthermore, these novels, in which human life is sanctified through contact
with the dumb ministers of the physical world— bread, wine, phylacteries,
rosary beads, an ancestor‘s grave, or a bowl of water on a white cloth—offer a
counter-vision of materiality in which body and spirit are placed on one
continuum, a vision that serves as a literary attempt to overcome the American
split between the material and the spiritual which has resulted in the
exploitation of the physical world for profit that has been characteristic of
our economic practice both at home and abroad. If the material world, including
the human body, is potentially sacramental, then it cannot be so easily reduced
to articles for purchase and consumption or machinery for labor (as is
currently the case with Latino immigrants) without regard for the symbolic and
spiritual capital it possesses.[78]
Written within a few years of the
massacre at Wounded Knee and the Kishinev pogrom, however, these novels also
disturb us with visions of the sacrifice of ethnic bodies, whether through
religious suicide, as is the case in Ezra Brudno‘s The Fugitive, or through shame and alienation, as is depicted in
Cahan‘s David Levinsky. Brudno‘s
fixation on the Blood Libel and his sanguinary dream sequence, with its
depiction of the martyrdom of Jewish bodies in response to Christian violence,
anticipate later novels like Bernard Malamud‘s The Fixer, which also uses the Jewish body in connection with the
myth of the Blood Libel and ritual sacrifice to inquire into similar questions
of ethnicity, faith, and human dignity. Furthermore, Brudno‘s novel anticipates
the horrors of the Holocaust as well as the modern-day spectacle of Islamic
suicide bombers, whose fragmented bodies testify to the consequences of the
power struggles between East and West, and the confusion regarding the
boundaries between the Sacred and the Profane in the modern world.
As their immigrant protagonists struggle
with the place of their ethnicity within Anglo-American territory, these novels
further mirror dilemmas of the globalizing present, when ethnic communities
more and more often live outside of national and geographical boundaries and
the problem of asserting transnational communal identities has become more
urgent (Jacobson 17). Their repeated use of religious ritual as a marker of
ethnic boundaries among people who have been displaced from their homelands
reveals a pattern similar to that of the present in which, ―with social space
no longer fixed and geographic, other boundary markers come to the fore‖
(19). At the same time, as in Rölvaag‘s Giants in the Earth, in which landmarks
and boundaries figure so prominently in ethnic competition for a place in
America, they prompt us to consider our current fixation on territorial
boundaries and their relationship to the ethnicity of those who would cross
them. As Joseph Nevins suggests, now that the old racial taxonomies that were
once used to distinguish insiders and outsiders have become politically
unacceptable, American anxieties over the racial characteristics of intruding
aliens have now been buried in a coded rhetoric devoted to an emphasis on the
discursive categories of territorial boundaries and the ―illegal‖ (96). In
painting the struggle of displaced immigrants who quest for a place in American
sacred space, the fiction of immigrant writers invites us to look upon those
―trespassers‖ among us in a more compassionate light.
The controversies over the purity of
ethnic language in these novels also call to mind current efforts to preserve
ethnic purity through linguistic purity, such as those of the Academie Francaise intended to stop the
infiltration of English words into the French language and those of Americans
who wish to define American identity by excluding Spanish from its national
linguistic base. In addition, the preoccupation of immigrant writers with the
religious significance of particular languages and their importance to the
identity of the ethnic community anticipates modern novels like John Updike‘s Terrorist (2006), in which a young Arab
American devotes himself to the study of the Quran in Arabic, a language which
he considers the zenith of religious expression and which must be preserved at
all costs from the sullying effects of translations into English—the language
of infidels (101-7). As they probe the relationship between religious language
and ethno-religious discrimination, these novels also bring up the problem of
the ways in which ritualized language is perceived in the mind of the American
public, as television news reports introduce continuing accounts of Muslim
violence with haunting melismas from the minaret, tactics that play upon
American associations of ritual with the primitive and with the effort to
suppress human freedom.
Mizruchi
has argued that the Enlightenment project to rationalize religion resulted in
an increasing disregard for the alternative and indeterminate language of
ritual in which logically distinct categories and taxonomic indicators invade
and overlap one another (489). Such blurring of rational thought was, and still
is, deemed dangerous to the project of creating a just and equal political
order based on the values of individual freedom and conscience. These novels
lay bare this problem. Yet, through their use of ritual as an alternative language that empowers the
oppressed and expresses the inexpressible, they also reflect Wittgenstein‘s
assertion that certain levels of religious discourse express truths that cannot
be expressed at any other level (32), making us pause to consider what human
insights might be lost if ritual were eventually removed from the religious
landscape of an increasingly secular and rationalized world in the interest of
political stability.
Such
quandaries inevitably bring up the problem of ritual‘s use of aesthetics to
influence and persuade, an issue that the novels of Kang, Yezierska, Steiner,
and Rölvaag probe at some length. While
Kang and Yezierska suggest the moral consequences of splitting off aesthetics
from morality, Steiner and Rölvaag warn of the consequences of giving up one‘s
powers of moral discernment under the spell of ritual‘s aesthetic strategies of
persuasion. In addition, all four writers give us insight into the ways ethnic
ritual can be perceived according to prevailing notions of aesthetic value,
allowing us to ponder the ways in which assumptions akin to those of Captain
Bourke regarding the aesthetic and the moral in ethnic religious signification
might still underlie the American vision of such phenomena as Islamic prayer
services and parades of self-flagellation.
Herman
Melville, who traveled the world and witnessed exotic rituals in the South
Seas, later wrote in Billy Budd, a
story revolving around military ritual, ―With mankind, forms, measured forms,
are everything and that is the import couched in the story of
Orpheus with his lyre spellbinding the denizens of the wood‖
(501). In their use of ritual, these
immigrant travelers to America, like the world traveler Melville before them,
address the interrelationship between the moral and the aesthetic through the
larger philosophical problem of ordering life by means of human forms, showing
us on the one hand the human need for rituals and their symbols of
transcendence to sustain and vitalize individual and collective life, as well
as the dangers of being led by claims that ―strong men, thinking men, can get
along without symbols if necessary‖ (Tobenkin, God of Might 64). On the other hand, they expose the harrowing
personal consequences (as in Their
Fathers’ God, for example) of attempting to legislate whose symbols should represent the whole in a pluralistic
society.
In their
focus on ritual and the symbolic life in connection with aesthetics and
morality, the work of immigrant writers makes an interesting counterpart to
that of the modernist writers beneath whose literary shadow they took their
place. At the same time that modernists like Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and
T.S. Eliot were probing the capacity of art to compensate for the supposed
death of religious ritual and symbols in the West, immigrant writers were
struggling to articulate and interpret the appropriate relationship of those
rituals and symbols to groups for whom they were still very much alive.[79]
Both groups of writers saw the role of the artist as similar to that of the
priest, although they ministered to different congregations and, perhaps, had
different conceptions of their duties.
In comparison to their immigrant counterparts, the modernists assumed a
more introverted and contemplative stance, fulfilling their priesthood through
a vertical relationship with their artistic muse which they, in turn, expressed
in complex forms created for an international audience of the elite who had
eyes to see and ears to hear. Immigrant writers, however, coming from social
orders that stressed group consciousness, appear to have envisioned their
priestly duty as arising out of their relationship with their ethnic groups,
and thus focused on the task of defending and dignifying their experience, both
to themselves and to outsiders, articulating their fears, and mirroring the
particular pain of their collective soul‘s journey in America.95 Ultimately, however, both modernists and
immigrant writers sought to address the problem of forms, whether aesthetic or
religious, and the role of those forms in relationship to the modern experience
of dislocation, whether physical, religious, or philosophical. Both groups
recognized, as Melville did, that while these collective forms, particularly
religious forms, may be necessary to impose order on experience and to save us
denizens of the wood from spiritual and epistemological chaos, as human
constructions they are indeed imperfect and, when rigidly imposed, can
sometimes contribute to the tragic sacrifice of what is best in humanity.
Although
these novels present the performance of ritual by ethnic Others in
American society, their focus on the use of ritual to overcome
the immigrant‘s sense of liminality in the American milieu further prompts us
to consider to what extent the experience of liminality may also be fundamental
to American experience in general. To recall Victor Turner‘s theory, rites of
passage involve three distinct movements— separation, liminality, and
reintegration into the community.
Observing traditional societies, Turner and his forerunner Van Gennep
based their theories on ritual patterns within cultures that changed very
slowly over time. The experience of immigrants was different, however, from
that of these relatively stationary, monocultural groups. When we compare the
immigration experience to a rite of passage, we find one essential ingredient
to be missing: the third phase of re-incorporation. Since their former
societies were no longer available to them and immigrants were hardly accepted
into American society, they never truly experienced this final phase of
reintegration in their rite of
passage to America. Thus, as these novels
indicate, most immigrants remained in the
did some of his immigrant colleagues. Interestingly,
both writers wrote about exile from home. It would be interesting to discover
whatever mutual exchange may have occurred between Wolfe and Kang.
liminal state—the state of betwixt and between. Of course, as heirs of the immigration
experience whose ethnic roots do not lie in the land in which they were born, all Americans share in the liminality of
the immigrant, continually recapitulating what
William Williams calls the quintessential
American experience, one which has
―establish[ed] a pattern that is replicated
in almost every aspect of American life‖ (19).
Americans, therefore, ―unbounded by history, family, and even
our own experiences [remain] always on the move, immigrating physically,
socially, culturally, sexually, and/or spiritually in search of new shores of
selfhood‖ (22). This pattern, coupled with the continual press toward the
vision of the millennial future that is the legacy of Puritan culture (itself
in many ways a product of the immigration experience), has doubly sealed the
fate of Americans to carry a sense of being betwixt and between. Consequently, the
liminal status of such immigrant protagonists as Peder Holm, Samuel Waterman,
Samuel Cohen, David Levinsky, and Chungpa Han at the ends of their respective
tales ironically may serve as the best indicator of their having become truly
American. Since, as Oscar Handlin has suggested, immigrant history is American
history, the ritual moments in these immigrant novels should not, therefore, be
read simply as exotic examples of ethnic culture, or even as strategies of
cultural resistance (although they often were), but as American ritual dramas
enacted in order to overcome a fundamental liminality at the base of all
American experience. In this respect, the immigrant rituals portrayed in these
novels, deeply connected to ―nostalgia in its most literal sense: [. . .] a
longing to the point of sickness for return, for home‖ (Mizruchi 467-8), can be
seen as particularly appropriate forms of American religious signification that
address a culturally unacknowledged sense of homelessness. [80]
To acknowledge liminality as part of American experience, as these novels
invite us to do, might, in turn, make the question of territorial borders today
seem less pressing and the immigrant stranger who crosses them seem less like
an invader and more like a brother.
Finally, these novels also bring to life a
particularly important episode in
America‘s long and problematic relationship with the
―ritualized Other.‖ As we have seen, from the beginning of America‘s religious
history ritual has been something of an anomaly. To Protestant settlers who
sought to free themselves from any vestiges of Roman Catholicism in the New
World, Native American ritual, the lineaments of which failed to conform to
their models of religious expression, became part of the forest to be cleared.
When, in turn, later generations adopted the Puritan myth as the American myth, endorsing a project that
involved the dislocation of the American religious self from the ritualized
ethnic Other, they, in effect, completed the burial of the Native American,
with his ritual, in the national religious unconscious. The resulting national
religious identity could perhaps best be expressed through William Boelhower‘s
formula for American ethnic identity— A(non-A)— with the parenthetical
ritualized Other continually haunting and destabilizing American religious
consciousness (77).[81]
What began in the Puritan project, in turn, was intensified after the
Enlightenment as religion became
―exceedingly rational in its irrationality‖ and the
interpreter of religion became the anthropologist who viewed ritual as an
exotic medium for contemplation with curiosity and wonder (Mizruchi 488).
Similarly, those turn-of-the-century American heirs of the
Enlightenment, both Christian and Jewish, who ―pictured and
intended a single main line of rational development and progress,‖ (Marty 208)
viewed the indeterminate language of immigrant ritual not as a special form of
religious signification which expresses a level of truth that cannot be
expressed otherwise but as a sign of religious atavism that would best be
rooted out if religion itself were to endure (Douglass 22). It can be argued, then, that ritual, as part
of the rejected ethnic Other, may be a shadow element within American religious identity, a means of religious
signification that immigrant writers resurrected, along with other marginalized
American literary groups like the regionalists, after its disappearance from
mainstream American fiction around the time of the Civil War.98 In
positioning their ritual practice at the foreground of American religious
experience, therefore, these novelists participate in the inauguration of a
literary project to restore a lost part of America‘s national religious
identity.
Gary Gerstle
has discussed the similarity of current fears of the religious practice of
aliens to other episodes in American history, arguing that ―we are once again
living in an intensely religious age more akin to the nineteenth century than
to the twentieth, and [. . . ] in this
current age, many Americans are once again talking about the threat that a
foreign religion, in this case Islam, poses
to American values, traditions, and security‖
Chingachgook, engages in ritual practice. Similarly,
although Twain presents his actions in a satirical light, Huck Finn‘s friend
Jim repeatedly engages in ritual performances designed to protect him from bad
luck. 98 Rölvaag may have
sensed this connection in choosing to locate an Indian grave on the hill behind
the home of the immigrant Holm family, where so many rituals are
performed.
(90). Yet the religious practice of ―aliens‖ was part of the
earliest American encounter with the New World.
If, as Mizruchi argues ―what you don‘t know about your past, your
spiritual history, is sure to get you‖ (486), then an encounter with the ritual
performances of ethnic Others in these novels should perhaps prompt us modern
readers to investigate our own complex history with regard to this figure in
order to understand better the nature of the religious drama currently being
played out on the international stage and to ask whether or not we might
somehow, to borrow from William James, be using the
―superstitious‖ East to carry part of the religious life of
the ―desiccated‖ West. In their use of ritual practice,
these novels offer us a portal into a lost but significant part of our own
religious history and an opportunity to consider the political implications of
incorporating the ritualized Other into American religious and cultural
identity. At the same time, they invite
us to consider the question of whether or not it is possible for a democratic,
pluralistic society to achieve Mary Douglass‘s vision of ―a cross-cultural,
pan-human pattern of symbols‖ that is truly redemptive and does not inevitably
create an Other against whom its rituals are played out. American dedication to
individual liberty and freedom of religion will always mean that religious
practice cannot be legislated. For that reason, it may be that what Douglass
sees as ―one of the gravest, problems of our day [. . .], the lack of
commitment to common symbols‖ (19) without the rites that engage us with symbols, will continue to remain a problem. If
American religious culture were able to own its roots in the ritual practice of
the ethnic Other, however, the mutual gazes of the modern American and the
ritualized practitioner of the
Middle East might be irrevocably changed.
Timothy Smith has argued that ―the ethnic
springs of modern American religiosity have given the national culture not a
backwater of static dogmas and rituals but a many-channeled stream of
conviction that mankind must become one people‖ (1183). These novels written by
immigrants to America bring to life the human challenges, costs, and anguish
involved in their struggle to follow the stream of that conviction into the
common national life. These novels also show, however, that the backwater of
ethnic ritual practice, stagnant though it may have appeared, could also
conceal deep currents of human consolation, eddies of personal transformation,
pearls of spiritual transcendence.
339
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VITA
Laura Samal was born in Nashville,
Tennessee. She attended the Juilliard
School of
Music in New York City, after which she
received a B.A. in Music and English from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
She later attended Vanderbilt University
Divinity School and Western Carolina
University where she received her M.A. in 2000.
She received her Ph.D. from the University of
Tennessee in 2008. She currently lives in
Asheville, North Carolina.
[1] Thomas Jefferson, while
nominally an Anglican, was theologically more akin to the Unitarian, and was
profoundly influenced by the work of Joseph Priestly, the founder of
Unitarianism. Like his Deist compatriot Benjamin Franklin, Jefferson considered
the truth of Christianity to consist in the moral teachings of Jesus that lay
beneath the irrational distortions and ―abracadabra‖ that the church had
introduced. Jefferson, who went so far as to cut out all parts of his copy of
the New Testament except the life and teachings of Jesus, rejected rituals and
sacraments as the proper form of worship in favor of acts of love toward his
fellow human beings (Holmes 85).
[2] Theodore Jennings, ―On Ritual
Knowledge.‖ The Journal of Religion.
62.2 (1982): 120. Jennings defines the fitting action as ―world in act,‖ or
―ontological praxis‖: an action which corresponds to the world of significant
action, seeks both to mirror and transform the world, and serves as a paradigm
for significant action outside the ritual itself. 119-120
[3] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (London:
Cambridge UP, 1977). Bourdieu provides a detailed account of his theories in
Chapter Three.
[4]
Franz Boas, letter to Professor J.W Jenks, 3 September 1908, The Shaping of American Anthropology
1883-1911: A Franz Boas Reader, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (New York:
Basic, 1974): 206. Boas specifically suggests that Southern Europeans and East
European Jews, along with the ―Centre Europeans,‖ have physical characters
quite different from the type of the North Western European.
[5]
Letter to J. W. Jenks, 31 December 1909, The
Shaping of American Anthropology, 213. Boas recognized that the problem of
environment and race involving immigrants was more deeply related to the
question of ―the mixture between Negro and white‖ in America. Boas addressed
nativist fears as they took shape in the identification of the southern Italian
with the Negro when he anticipated that
―With the large immigration from southern Europe, the time is not
distant when the problem of racial intermixture between these two types will
become acute.‖
[6] This association extended
into church policy. Rudolph Vecoli reports that Italians were often seated with
Negroes at the back of the church, denounced as ―Dagos‖ from the pulpit, and
told they were unwanted.
―Prelates and Peasants:
Italian Immigrants and the Catholic Church.‖ Journal of Social History 2.3 (1969): 230.
[7] Vecoli reports that ―the folk
religion of the contadini did not
accord with the standards of religious conduct prescribed by the Church in the
United States,‖ and that ―Americans, Catholics and Protestants alike came to
regard the Italian immigrants as little better than pagans and idolaters,‖ Prelates and Peasans: Italian Immigrants and the Church, 233.
[8] Vecoli records a passage in a
Jesuit journal that reflects the prevailing attitudes of American Catholics:
―Piety does not consist
in processions of carrying candles, in prostrations before a statue of the
Madonna, in processions in honor of patron saints of villages, but true piety
consists in the daily fulfillment of the religious duties exacted of us by God
Almighty and His Church [. . . .] In these points, no matter how numerous be
the Italian processions, no matter how heavy the candles, no matter how many
lights they carry, the Italian immigrant seems very deficient,‖ 234.
[9] The importance of the
Madonna‘s body to southern Italian Catholic religious belief and the intimate
connection between her body and the bodies of the faithful is expressed in the
sacrifices made by impoverished Italians to honor it as well as the offerings
of representations and paraphernalia of wounded bodies laid at her feet. Orsi
describes the first gown of the Madonna del Carmine as ―decorated with rings,
watches, earrings, and chains, all given to her by men and women who believed
she had helped them in a moment of terrible difficulty or pain; and her statue
[. . .] was surrounded by canes, crutches, braces, and wax body parts left
there as signs of their gratitude by people she had healed.‖ Madonna of 115th St. 12.
[10] Ann Corneilson recounts an
incident when a young midwife in a New York hospital attributed the stoicism of
Italian women in childbirth to the fact that ―peasant women feel less pain and
suffer less from what they do feel than ‗other women.‘‖ Such prejudice against
immigrant women fails to understand the expectations they faced in their daily
lives. The Women of the Shadows: Wives
and Mothers of Southern Italy. (South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Press, 2001)
110.
[11] The films of Italian
American director Martin Scorsese continue this preoccupation with the female
body as icon of purity in a corrupt and violent world in need of redemption.
His first major film—Mean
Streets—includes a religious procession through Little Italy and
part of the plot focuses on the Madonna/whore complex Italian men project onto
Italian women. In addition, Taxi Driver,
Raging Bull, and Casino all
involve male characters who suffer a passion of sorts, which takes place in
connection with a woman presented as angelic and ethereal who is often first
seen dressed in white.
[12] Cf. Heinrich Bornstein‘s The Mysteries of St.Louis, Emil
Klauprecht‘s Cincinnati, or the Mysteries
of the West, and Baron von Reizenstein‘s The Mysteries of New Orleans.
[13] Incest, according to Girard,
along with patricide and fratricide, is one of the primary symptoms of a
society experiencing loss of degree. Additionally, Walter Benn Michaels‘ Our America describes the importance of
the symbol of incest in novels such as Faulkner‘s The Sound and the Fury in relationship to prevailing nativist
beliefs of the period.
[14] Enrico Sartorio wrote Social and Religious Life of Italians in
America in 1918 to depict the experience of Italians from the point of view
of a fellow countryman. Concerning the importance of ritual to the Italian in a
culture perceived as profane, Sartorio writes ―In place of the [. . . .]Festa
Patronale (the feast of the patron
[15] Ardito states the Statue of
Liberty was sometimes called ―The Madonna of Liberation‖ 133.
[16] Leonard Glick, ―Types
Distinct from Our Own: Franz Boas on Jewish Identity and Assimilation.‖ American Anthropologist 84 (1982):
545-565.Glick provides a fascinating discussion of Boas‘ complex position on
Jewish immigration, which ―advocated assimilation to the point of literal
disappearance for Jews,‖ a position strangely at odds with the cultural
relativism of his anthropological theory.
[17] In Chapter Two of The Jew’s Body, Sander Gilman discusses
the Jewish foot as the sign of Jewish physical and mental pathology in European
medical discourse: ―[the] theme of the weakness of the Jews‘ feet (in the form
of flat feet or impaired gait) becomes part of the necessary discourse about
Jewish difference in the latter half of the nineteenth century‖ (40).
[18] Gilman also discusses
medical treatises written by Western European Jews of the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, which accepted non-Jewish assessments of the Jewish
body, but in an attempt to divert prejudice toward Western Jews as carriers of
the corruptions of the city, projected it onto Eastern European Jews, linking
physical ―deformity‖ to their excessive use of tobacco (The Jew’s Body 38-59).
[19] The concerns of Israel
Abramowitch adumbrate the problems of Robert Cohen in Hemingway‘s novel The Sun Also Rises. Cohen‘s obsessive
dedication to boxing reveals his need to defy stereotypes of the
Jewish body as weak:
―There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who
was snooty to him‖ (3). Cohen takes pride in his broken nose as a badge of
physical prowess, but Hemingway promptly undercuts this sign of Jewish power by
submitting it to non-Jewish aesthetic values, adding, ―it certainly improved
his [Jewish] nose‖ (3).
[20] Steiner goes on to state,
―[The Jew] presents too solid a differentiated group, will retard proper
adjustment and increases existing race antagonisms. His attitude towards the
manifestation of the religious spirit in our public schools, his intolerance
towards certain religious practices which are fundamentally ethical and social,
but not necessarily sectarian, will more and more alienate those Americans who
have been most hospitable towards him and upon whose good will he is dependent
economically and socially, if not politically. [. . . .] [A]nd if the Jew is as
shrewd as he is painted, he will look to their healing; while if the American
is as charitable as I think him to be,
he will give the Jew full time for reconvalescence.‖ 2889.
[21] Steiner had met Tolstoy
several times and frequently acknowledged the impact Tolstoy made on his life.
One of the most important effects of his encounter with Tolstoy was his
pacifism during World War I, for which Steiner experienced a great deal of
public acrimony.
[22] Smith provides a complete
discussion of these concepts in Drudgery
Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late
Antiquity (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990), 121-42.
[23] The Narrative of the Captivity of Mary Rowlandson, for example,
intertwines the liminality of her
―wilderness condition‖
with Native American ritual practices that she interprets as the work of Satan
in contraposition to the eschatological promise of salvation at the end of
history. Of the Wampanoag rituals
Rowlandson writes, ―Oh the roaring, and singing and dancing, and yelling of
those black creatures in the night, which made the place a lively resemblance
of hell‖ (The Norton Anthology of
American Literature. Sixth Ed. Vol A. Ed. Nina Baym (New York: Norton,
2003). Rowlandson‘s account of her resistance to Native American ritual
practice is in essence a testimonial to the triumph of Protestant salvation sola fide over Roman Catholic salvation ex opere operato.
[24] In a letter to G.E.
Woodberry in 1892, Aldrich described the writing of the poem and the feelings
he meant to express in it as follows: ―I went home and wrote a misanthropic
poem called ‗Unguarded Gates‘ in which I mildly protest against America
becoming the cesspool of Europe. [. . . .]My Americanism goes clean beyond
yours. I believe in America for Americans; I believe in the widest freedom and
the narrowest license, and I hold that jail-birds, amateur lepers [. . .] and
human gorillas generally should be closely questioned at our gates. [. . . .]
Rudyard Kipling described the government of every city and town in the United
States when he described that of New York as being ‗a despotism of the alien,
by the alien, for the alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of decent
folk.‘‖ Greenslet, Ferris. The Life of
Thomas Bailey Aldrich. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), 168-9.
[25] Gutman notes the importance
of wakes, saints‘ days, funerals and burial rituals as strategies for the
transmission and maintenance of ethnic communities in the New World. Work, Culture, and Society in
Industrializing America. (New York: Knopf, 1976), 43.
[26] Lovoll states, ―The homeland
never took the initiative to attend to the immigrants‘ spiritual and physical
needs. Norwegian authorities did not consider this to be their responsibility.
[. . . .] Because the hierarchy in the Church of Norway showed little concern
for the emigrants, the university-trained pastors who wanted to work in the
Norwegian colonies acted on their own. And later, when organized religious life
was established, they went to the Midwest at the request and calling of
Norwegian-American congregations. Motives might vary, of course, but there is
no doubt that many felt a strong mission call [. . . .] Still, most clergymen
preferred to await an appointment in Norway rather than seek an insecure future
among their compatriots in America.‖ The
Promise of America. (Minneapolis: U of Minneapolis P, 1999), 75-6.
[27] Eliade‘s analysis includes
an interesting example that directly relates to Rölvaag‘s presentation of the
character of Per Hansa as both American Adam and Scandinavian god: ―What is to
become ‗our world‘ must first be created, and every creation has a paradigmatic
movement—the creation of the universe by the gods. When the Scandinavian
colonists took possession of Iceland (land-nama) and cleared it, they regarded
the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as human or profane work.
For them, their labor was only the repetition of a primordial act, the
transformation of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation. When they
tilled the desert soil, they were in fact repeating the act of the gods who had
organized chaos by giving it structure, forms, and norms.‖ The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 31.
[28] Eliade states, ―The profane
experience [. . .] maintains the homogeneity and hence the relativity of space.
No true orientation is now possible,
for the fixed point no longer enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears
and disappears in accordance with the needs of the day. Properly speaking,
there is no longer any world, there are only fragments of a shattered universe,
an amorphous mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less neutral
places in which man moves. The Sacred and
the Profane, 24.
[29] Rölvaag‘s biographer Paul
Reigstad indicates that this ritual moment was seminal to the conception of the
novel. In 1923-4, while sequestered in a cabin he had built on a lake in
Minnesota, Rölvaag wrote to his in-laws, asking when the first religious
service was held in the area, and added this to his diary: ―Have something very difficult to work out:
about a birth on the Dakota prairie in the winter of 1873 and the baptism of
that child at home.‖ Rölvaag: His Life
and Art (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982) 102.
[30] Howe describes the am olam (Eternal People) as a movement
originating in the desire to obtain release from the economic rootlessness
imposed on Jews through the founding of utopian agrarian communes that combined
the ideas of Owen, Fourier, and Tolstoy with those of the kibbutz. These communes were largely unsuccessful in America
because they were poorly financed, too far from other Jewish settlements, and
[31] In this observation, I draw
on Jacob Neusner‘s discussion of the use of Hebrew and Aramaic in the Talmud,
where ―the very language in which a statement is made therefore forms a part of
the method of thought and even the message of discourse of the document.‖ Talmudic Thinking: Language, Logic, Law (Columbia:
U of South Carolina P, 1992).
[32] Martin Marty provides a
thoughtful and informative discussion of the modernist movement as it emerged
from the seminaries of Christianity and Judaism in Modern American Religion, Vol 1.
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 1-92.
[33] See Ritual, History, and Power: Selected Papers in Anthropology
(London: Athlone Press, 1989).
[34] Austin‘s theory is best
represented in How to Do Things with
Words (NY: Oxford, 1965).
[35] As Lovoll reports, ―in the
different Lutheran synods the percentage of services in English increased from none in 1900 to 22 percent in 1915. Of
the young in Sunday school and confirmation classes in 1915, 27 percent
received their instruction in English‖ (327).
[36] Lovoll relates an amusing
story of an American pastor attempting to console a Norwegian parishioner at a
funeral. The pastor tried to provide assurance of the resurrection of the
flesh, which he translated with the
Norwegian word ―flesk.‖
Unfortunately, though similar in sound, the translation came out as ―the
resurrection of the pork‖ (327).
[37] On January 1, 1988, the
American Lutheran Church merged with two other Lutheran church bodies (the
Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches and the Lutheran Church in
America) to form The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA.org).
[38] Paul Reigstad, Rölvaag‘s
biographer, records a speech that Rölvaag made on May 17, 1907, Norwegian
Independence Day, to a Norwegian-American audience on the losses entailed when
Norwegians give up their culture in favor of assimilation. One of the most
important of these losses, according to Rölvaag, is ―the intimate spiritual
communion between the individual and his people‖ that comes from a common
language, customs, and traditions. Rölvaag also urged Norwegians to preserve
their language but not to live in isolation from Americans. Rölvaag:
His Life and Art (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982) 35.
[39] One of the most famous early
debates over Jewish language took place during the Renaissance, when the Talmud
became notorious in the Reuchlin controversy, when Johannes Reuchlin defended
it to the Church against the accusations of the newly converted Jew Johannes
Pfefferkorn, who fulminated against its language as evidence of the inherent
blindness and corruption of the Jews and advocated depriving them of their
Talmud altogether. Although Reuchlin, like many intellectuals of his time, saw
the Talmud, like the Kabbala, as a window into a world of exotic wisdom that
could be opened up by Gentile intellectuals, he tolerated its creators as
protectors of the Word only, denying to Jews any capacity to interpret it
because of their inherent blindness to the truth (44). Only Christians, through
the revelation of the Word made Flesh, had the insight to perceive the truth
veiled by Hebrew language and ritual. Reuchlin confronted church officials,
saying that, unlike many other Jewish writings that openly denied Christ, the
Talmud and the Kabbala did not; therefore, he wished to rescue these documents
from the Jews for Christian exegesis. A number of humanist intellectuals came
to Reuchlin‘s defense, publishing Letters
of Obscure Men, a
[40] Buber‘s Tales of Rabbi Nachman and Legends
of the Baal Shem Tov present the world of Eastern
European Chasidism as more
ancient than the rationalist Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn, even though the Bal
Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidism, was his contemporary. Buber used his new
form of mauscheln in his German
translation of the play Eisik Scheftel
(Jewish Self-Hatred 275).
[41] Similar concerns can be seen
in the work of Franz Kafka. Kafka, whose relationship with the world of the
Eastern Jews was highly ambivalent, became interested in his Jewish identity
largely through having heard Buber speak on Jewish mysticism in Prague in 1913
and submitted and published stories in Buber‘s literary journal The Jew
(282). One such tale—“A Report to
the Academy”— concerns an ape taken from the jungle that acquires language
in order to earn the right to be released from his cage. Yet, even though he
acquires language and writes his story in perfect academic German, the ape can
never transcend his image as an ape in the eyes of society. Gilman detects a
strong parallel in Kafka‘s story between the ape‘s dilemma and that of European
Jews, who, in attempting to write in the language of the dominant culture,
worried that there was something ―Jewish‖ in their discourse, a hidden mode of
expression that produced ―a specifically Jewish tone, a Mauscheln‖ (283).
[42] This prejudice against
Yiddish as ill befitting religious observance also apparently existed among
educated Russian Jews. Cahan relates an incident that occurred when he was a
boy. One summer he was taken to the synagogue
with the student body of his school to pray because ―prayers of children are
looked upon with favor by the Almighty‖ (26). When they began to leave,
however, several students started to sing in Yiddish, ―God, God, send down
raindrops for the little children!‖ ―We were stopped at once,‖ Cahan remembers;
―A prayer in Yiddish was a mock prayer‖ (27).
[43] Although Cahan was at first
appalled by Americanized Yiddish, he later saw it as a means for immigrant
adaptation to American life, and he freely used it in The Jewish Daily Forward. In one article for an American newspaper,
Cahan composed a typical Yiddish-American sentence to illustrate the admixture
of Yiddish and English in daily life: ―Ich vel scrobbin dem floor, klinen die
vindes un polishen dem stov‖ (The
Education of Abraham Cahan 355-6).
[44] Sterner presents Cordova as
a Rumanian Jew of Spanish descent, linking him to Sephardic Jews who were the
first Jewish immigrants to arrive in America in the 1600s. Spanish and
Portuguese Jews enjoyed special caste status as the aristocratic top tier of a
hierarchy of Jewish nationalities in America, and their vernacular, Ladino, was
held in similar esteem.
[45] The novel also shows that
piety and spiritual devotion based on the power of the word were not limited to
Jewish male practice. A devout Jewish
woman in Antomir named Shiphrah Minsker, whose daughter is the first love of
David‘s life, provides food for eighteen poor Talmud students because ―eighteen
is the numerical value of the Hebrew word for life‖ (58).
[46] David‘s words anticipate
those of Old Testament scholar and theologian Abraham Heschel, who later
described his experience of the Talmud‘s ability to transport the reader to
heights of spiritual experience in a similar way: ―Carried away by the mellow,
melting chant of Talmud-reading, one‘s mind soared high in the pure realm of
thought, away from this world of facts and worries, away from the boundaries of
the here and now, to a region where the Divine Presence listens to what Jews
create in the study of His word‖ (qtd.
in Howe 13).
[47] David also describes reading
with Reb Sender ―in duet‖ and Reb Sender as gesticulating with his snuffbox
―much as the conductor of an orchestra does his baton‖ (30).
[48] Although Grant‘s book was
published in 1916, John Higham reports that the book became most influential
after WWI when, during the 1920s, it was used to support the racist agenda of
such prominent figures as Henry Ford. Strangers
in the Land. (New Brunswick: Rutgers, 1988) 266.
[49] Yezierska‘s daughter and
biographer Louise Henriksen reports that Yezierska went to Dewey directly,
claiming that she was being denied a teaching position even though she held a
degree from Columbia University because she was ―a non-Anglo-Saxon, an
immigrant with not-so-neat ways‖ (88). Henriksen also claims that during the
interview Yezierska‘s disheveled appearance was part of the unconventional
charm that attracted Dewey to her. Anzia
Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1988) 88.
[50] A particularly tense moment
occurred during this period when white farmers attacked Korean orange pickers
who were legally camped on the property of Mary E. Steward with stones and
rocks and threatened to kill them. Arming her employees with guns, Mrs. Steward
told them to shoot if they were attacked. White farmers demanded that she fire
the Koreans immediately, but Mrs. Steward remained firm, declaring the Koreans
to be ―hard-working, diligent and honest people who are struggling for a decent
life‖ (Choy 109).
[51] Kang tells us that his
grass-roofed house ―had eight pillars on the porch, each with a beautiful poem
which was changed every New Year‖ (59).
[52] During Chungpa‘s first job
as houseboy to the wealthy woman on Long Island, he complains of the amount of
dusting he must do because of the quantities of unnecessary furniture in the
house, saying ―In Korea, the beauty of a room is in its free space‖ (65).
[53] Kang‘s identification with
the plight of African Americans, as well as the numerous points of comparison
between East Goes West and Ralph
Ellison‘s later novel Invisible Man,
suggests the possibility of its influence on Ellison‘s novel. East
Goes West concerns the coming of age of a man of color who arrives in the
Northeastern United States with hopes for success, engages in a variety of
positions under different mentors which ultimately reveal to him the emptiness
of many forms of American life, concludes with the protagonist in an
underground room, and even contains a character by the name of Rhinehart.
[54] To cite just a few examples:
In The Grass Roof, Kang explains that
he once cut off his long hair because ―I wanted to do something like a baptism‖
(183). Before he and his grandmother begin their Buddhist pilgrimage, they
undergo a baptism in a tank of water to cleanse themselves. In East Goes West, Chungpa Han talks of
being ―baptized in the roars of Manhattan traffic‖ (13), of being baptized into
the world of sales by Mr. Lively (154), and of his longing to jump into a river
near Boston to ―wash off all the dirts and and send them down to the sea, becoming
a child again‖ (253).
[55] Kang puts a similar
sentiment regarding the importance of ritual forms in the mouth of an
ItalianAmerican, Chungpa‘s friend Dimassi, who explains that he remains a
Catholic because ―It was a pattern or tune needed to make life ordered and
harmonious. Many Americans missed that [. . . .] He preached to me one day
about becoming Americanized and losing all sense of values‖ (262).
[56] Kang, for example, describes
the Confucian order in Korea as extremely discriminatory toward women, the
young, and the poor, who were not allowed to participate in ritual observance.
[57] To coin her term, Bell
borrows concepts from Kenelm Burridge (the ―redemptive process‖) and Antonio
Gramsci (―hegemony‖).
[58] Bell elaborates on the
strategies by which ritual creates redemptive hegemony, explaining that ritual
―temporally structures a space-time environment through a series of physical
movement thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both
validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing. It interprets its own schemes as impressed
upon the actors from a more authoritative source, usually from well beyond the
immediate human community itself. Hence, through an orchestration in time of
loosely and effectively homologized oppositions in which some gradually come to
dominate others, the social body
[59] The American Protective
Association was founded in 1887, just one year after Josiah Strong had warned
of the dangers of ―Romanism,‖ which, in its allegiance to the pope, stands in
direct opposition to the principles of the American republic, he argues in his
immensely popular book Our Country
(59-88).
[60] Just as immigrant writers
recognized the dramatic potential of ritual to encapsulate multiple concerns,
writer and Ku Klux Klan sympathizer Thomas Dixon also used ritual in his novel The Clansmen to portray the drama of the
Klan crusade to protect Anglo-Protestant culture from Negro and Northern abuse.
Dixon includes a powerful ritual scene in which the Klan meets in a cavern before
a high altar, fills a silver flagon with the blood of southern women who were
supposedly violated and killed by a Negro man, lights a flaming cross and then
extinguishes it in the blood of the victims. This ritual, in turn, incites the
Klan to rally in a violent campaign to wrest power from the hands of the ruling
black establishment, executing the black man and throwing his body on the lawn
of the black Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina (318328).
[61] There was a curious
interchange between fiction and reality in the ritual construction of the Ku
Klux Klan. Dixon‘s novel portrayed rituals that the original Klan, in fact,
never practiced. In turn, the new Klan adopted rituals from the novel. For
example, on Thanksgiving Day in 1915, Simmons took his followers to the summit
of Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta
and engaged in a revival service that included a crossburning according to the
model presented by Dixon in The Clansman.
According to Chester Quarles, the Stone Mountain ritual was probably the
first cross-burning rite performed by the Klan (55).
[62] In Dixon‘s novel, the Grand Cyclops of the Klan reads
these words during the cave ritual.
[63] The Vatican identified
Americanism with modernism. In the early to mid-nineteenth century, two
American Catholic thinkers, Isaac Hecker and Orestes Brownson, introduced ideas
of religious liberty, separation of church and state and progressive notions of
history that later in the nineteenth century, through the pervasive influence
of Darwinism, led to calls for the church to evolve by adapting itself to its
new American environment and to visions of a new, reinvigorated Catholicism
that could usher in America‘s true Manifest Destiny. The implied superiority of
American Catholicism over that of the Mother Church in Rome led, in turn, to
the Vatican‘s determination to reassert its power over the American
Church. From the 1880s
onward, therefore, a storm of controversy raged within the American Catholic
[64] Ciambelli‘s Americanism is
not blind, however. In one of several nods to his socialist readers, he
describes the outcome of the American victory in the Philippines, saying,
―America that declared war to liberate the oppressed, became in turn the
oppressor. Strange, the destiny of nations!‖ (461).
[65] In reference to Cahan‘s
David Levinsky, Glazer maintains that ―Jews in Eastern Europe, as in Germany,
tended to ignore everything that might be considered theology. Only the
practices of Judaism were taught. One was brought up to observe the
commandments, and, for this reason, as soon as one came in touch with a kind of
thought which questioned fundamentals, one was at a loss. In other words, it
may be said Jews lost their faith so easily because they had no faith to lose:
that is, they had no doctrine, no collection of dogmas to which they could
cling and with which they could resist arguments. All they had, surrounding
them like an armor, was a complete set of practices, each presumably as holy as
the next. Once this armor was pierced by
the simple question, Why? it fell away, and all that was left was a collection
of habits‖ (6970). Mary Antin, who, relates that upon seeing her father break
the Law by touching a burning lamp on the Sabbath her whole faith began to
evaporate, is another case in point (The
Promised Land 103-106).
[66] The Christian evangelical project
in the Jewish ghetto had antecedents in missions to Jews during the early
1800s, but until the 1880s, when Orthodox Jews began pouring into the streets
of the Lower East Side, little time had been spent on Jewish conversion (Ariel
9). The catalyst for the explosion of interest in evangelizing the Jews was the
rise of a premillenial dispensationalist belief among Protestants after the
Civil War, which taught that Christ would only return to earth after the Jews
were restored to Israel and 144,000 Jews had accepted Christ as the Messiah.
According to Biblical prophecy, when the Jews establish a nation in Palestine,
they will endure a time of great suffering under the
Antichrist during which the
previously converted 144,000 Jews will lead their brothers and sisters to full
acceptance of Christ as the Messiah. At this point Christ will return to the
earth to set up his kingdom in which the Jews will then serve as his governors
(Ariel 10). As a consequence of this
belief, beginning in the 1870s, evangelical Protestants took a keen interest in
the Jewish people and Zionist activities. In the 1890s, the Hope of Israel
mission began working to spread the gospel to Jews on the Lower East Side
(Ariel 9). By the time World War I began,
there were more than two hundred Jewish converts working as evangelists to
proselytize the Jews (45). While some scholars argue that such Protestant
efforts were actually aimed at assimilating Jews into mainstream American
culture, Yaakov Ariel maintains that such arguments fail to recognize the power
of dispensationalist belief within the movement (12).
[67] Ezra Brudno‘s The Fugitive contains a scene in which a
Jewish convert uses Jewish mealtime rituals in his attempts to convert the
novel‘s protagonist Israel Russikoff to Christianity (345).
[68] Reverend Jacob Frehsman was
one of the first to proselytize on the Lower East Side in the late 1880s. He
was later followed by Hermann Warszawiak, the son of a Polish rabbi, whose
oratorical skills were powerful but whose moral fiber was questionable. Howe
reports that Warszawiak was especially hated in Jewish streets, and that the
Yiddish press accused him of buying converts. Warszawiak solicited funds from
wealthy Protestant patrons for the construction of a large building to be
called ―Christ‘s Synagogue and Jewish Missionary Training School,‖ but he never
got around to building it (73).
[69] This was the case with
Leopold Cohn, one of the most controversial figures among Jewish missionaries,
who operated the Williamsburg Mission under the auspices of the American
Baptist Home Mission Society. Cohn
claimed to have been born in Hungary and to have been ordained a rabbi at
eighteen, after which he left for America, where he converted to Christianity.
Cohn maintained that he then studied theology at Edinburgh. Jewish opponents
countered with claims that Cohn was actually an orphan who later became a
saloonkeeper and who fled to America from charges of forgery (28-9). Whatever
the true story may have been, Cohn wrote excellent English and was
exceptionally knowledgeable about Christian theology and scripture. He was also
gifted at negotiating large contributions from wealthy American patrons who
wanted to convert the Jews (29).
Although he was despised by many of his own people, he created one of
the largest missions to the Jews in America and succeeded in converting far
more than any other mission in the 1890s and 1910s (30). Cohn was a proud Jew,
who retained Jewish practices in his own household and ―openly declared that he
did not wish for converted Jews to assimilate and disintegrate into the general
Christian society‖ (33). Ariel suggests that Cohn‘s Williamsburg mission was
successful
[70] In The Fugitive, Ezra Brudno presents a Jewish convert who describes
his former religion as ―that old Judaism with its mystic ceremonies, and absurd
formalities. A pure monotheistic belief, shrouded in a cloud of ceremonies and
symbols may be beautiful but it is by no means tenacious on the human mind‖
(346).
[71]
Steiner‘s reference to the ―so-called converted Jew‖ reflects the practices of
some Jews who coped with their difficulties and the pressure tactics of
Christian missionaries by ―converting‖ multiple times, with different
organizations, in exchange for food, clothing, and even money. Ezra Brudno
depicts such a character in The Fugitive (367-8).
[72] In an interesting parallel,
Josiah Strong used the same metaphor with a completely opposite intention in
his chapter on the perils of immigration in Our
Country. Strong compares America‘s unwilling reception of hordes of
immigrants to a lion who ―without being consulted as to time, quantity or
quality, is having the food thrust down his throat, and his only alternative
is, digest or die‖ (58).
[73] Marcus Ravage‘s description
of the decline of Jewish devotion on the Lower East Side throws the figure of
Abraham Cohen into even sharper relief: ―Cut adrift suddenly from their ancient
moorings, they were floundering in a sort of moral void. Good manners and good
conduct, reverence and religion, had all gone by the board . . . The ancient
racial respect for elders had completely disappeared [. . . .] Tottering
grandfathers had snipped off their white beards and laid aside their skull-caps
and their snuff-boxes and paraded around the streets of a Saturday afternoon
with cigars in their mouths, when they should have been lamenting the loss of
the Holy City‖ (79).
[74] Dolan states, ―Catholics
grew up believing Protestants were a ‗perishing and debauched multitude of
heretics and infidels‘, and were continually urged to avoid contact with them.
Consequently, many Catholics grew up never knowing any Protestants‖ (228).
[75] Rölvaag‘s trilogy suggests
that there were indeed tensions and competition between the Irish and the
Norwegians on the prairie. In the beginning of the first book Giants in the Earth, Per Hansa removes
the landmarks of a group of Irish immigrants, suggesting that there was a
question about which group would dominate the region. In Peder Victorious, Beret moves Peder to a different school to get
him away from the Irish and continually discourages Peder‘s friendship with
Charlie Doheny and his sister Susie. That these tensions were real is attested
to by the fact that the anti-Catholic A.P.A. movement in the Midwest was in
large part made up of Scandinavians (Desmond 9).
[76] Dolan reports that marriages
between Catholics and Protestants were relatively uncommon at the turn of the
twentieth century and, while they were not completely forbidden, were looked
upon by the church as ―a threat to one‘s salvation and the salvation of the
children as well‖ (228). Catholics were allowed to marry Protestants only ―for
just and grave causes.‖ Susie‘s pregnancy out of wedlock would surely have been
considered such a cause (228).
[77] Dolan reports that the
Catholic Church and much of Catholic fiction of the period stressed the
especial peril of mixed marriages to the souls of children (The American Catholic Experience 228).
[78] A similar idea can be seen
in the film El Norte (1983), directed by Gregory Nava, in which
Guatemalan bodies are shown engaged in mourning rituals of great dignity only
to be exploited later as machines in the American workplace.
[79] Eliot‘s later turn to the
rituals of Anglicanism suggests that, along with some of the immigrant writers
discussed, he found a depth of experience in religious ritual that he did not
experience in art per se. 95 Of all the immigrant writers, Younghill
Kang seems to have been closest to the modernists in his awareness of himself
as an individual artist. Perhaps, through his devotion to both Eastern and
Western learning and his association with Thomas Wolfe, Kang absorbed more of
the currents of modernism than
[80] Mizruchi locates the
etymological roots of nostalgia in the words nostos (―return to home‖) and algia
(―pain‖ or ―sickness‖)
(467-8).
[81] An interesting ambivalence
in the American literary consciousness regarding ritualized Others can be seen
in the work of Hawthorne and Melville. Hawthorne implicitly connects ritual
with evil in the figure of Roger Chillingworth, the villain of The Scarlet Letter, who emerges from the
woods after his Indian captivity, during which he learned obscure medical
practices among a ritualized band of Others. He also practices alchemy, the
procedures of which were highly ritualized. Melville, on the other hand, who
had significant exposure to ritual practice in his travels in the South
Pacific, includes an important scene in Moby-Dick
in which Ishmael, a Presbyterian, worships an idol with his friend Queequeg in
a room in the Spouter Inn. Much has been
made of Ishmael and Queequeg as examples of the A(non-A) pairing throughout
American literature. Less has been made, however, of the fact that most of the
ethnic Others in these pairings also practice ritual. Queequeg is a South Sea
Islander, who, like Natty Bumppo‘s friend
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