"Dot' sh a' kin' a man I am!" Abraham Cahan, masculinity, and Jewish assimilation in nineteenth-century America.
While the study of "masculinity," particularly "American manhood," has flourished in the academy of late, there has been relatively little inquiry into how millions of non-Christian immigrants to America in the nineteenth century negotiated the collision of their native gendered religious and cultural identities with existing notions of American manhood. In fact, most prominent histories of American manhood, even ones focusing on late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century America, largely omit any reference to Jewish immigrants. (1)The tension between assimilation and holding on to traditional religious and ethnic identities was intense among the masses of Jews immigrating to America at the turn of the century. Of the approximately twelve million immigrants who arrived in America between 1880 and 1910, almost 2.5 million of them were Jews, increasing the number of Jews in America tenfold (Miller and Faux 101-02). While many non-Jewish immigrants during this period, such as Italians, often immigrated to make money for a few years and then return home, the Jews had no intention of returning to Europe. Instead, they were fleeing the Russian pogroms beginning in 1882, political persecution, military conscription, and ingrained anti-Semitism that made staying behind in the shtetl (2) untenable to thousands each year. As Andrew R. Heinze asserts, "More than for other groups of immigrants, America represented for Jews a promised land, a mysterious place of redemption from the accumulated iniquities of the past" (39). Due to the Jews' notion of America as a redemptive refuge from persecution, entire Jewish families often immigrated from every echelon of society desperately seeking a true home in America. Without an option to return to Europe, and a fresh life available in the New Jerusalem of America, "To be an American, dress like an American, look like an American, and even ... talk like an American" (Howe 128) became a goal for thousands of Jewish newcomers each year.
Although many Jewish immigrants were committed to assimilating into American society, the act of assimilation was extremely complicated for Jews because of the indistinguishability of traditional Jewish cultural identity from Jewish religious faith. Jules Chametzky notes that "religion was an important part of the [assimilation] process, and for Jews greatly so since the Jewish religion is so much more a cultural phenomenon than simply a body of doctrine" (24). Allan Guttmann adds, "Judaism has traditionally been concerned for ritualized behavior rather than for creeds" (5). What a Jew wore, ate, and did with his or her free time, among a myriad of other details of daily life, directly reflected his or her adherence to the Judaic faith. In this sense, acting "like a Jew" helped constitute a Jewish identity more than any other quality; however, for Jewish immigrants this performance was a challenge. For the many Jews who came from a shtetl, Talmudic law was the only law, religious study was the most prestigious calling imaginable for young men, and daily life moved to the rhythms of the synagogue. Assimilating into an overwhelmingly urban, consumer-oriented, and rapidly secularizing environment--such as the Lower East Side of New York--was thus extraordinarily difficult. Every act of assimilating into modern American culture (no matter how seemingly small), such as a woman uncovering her head in public, a man shaving off his beard, or someone taking a carriage ride on the Sabbath--carried profound religious significance. Will Herberg explains that for Jews in America, "rejection of foreignness meant rejection of Jewishness and Judaism" (386). Some Jews saw American culture simply as treife (3) and resisted any aspect of assimilation; others, who either already had or did abandon their formal faith, assimilated wholeheartedly; yet the majority struggled to come to terms with what it meant to be a Jew living as an American and an American living as a Jew.
No Jewish immigrant expressed more eloquently and publicly the ambivalent nature of Jewish assimilation in America than Abraham Cahan. Arriving in 1882 from eastern Russia at the age of twenty-two and settling in the Lower East Side, Cahan went from knowing only a few words of English to being the acknowledged literary spokesman for the immigrant generation by his death in 1951. In his first novel, Yekl (1896), the collection, The Imported Bridegroom and Other Tales of the New York Ghetto (1898), his most acclaimed work, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), and his editorship of the Yiddish newspaper Forward for over fifty years, Cahan was at the center of the tenuous relationship between Jewish identity and Americanization. Although Cahan, a secular Jew before immigrating to America, was staunchly for assimilation, he never lost sight of the acute tensions many Jews faced as they struggled to preserve, discard, or balance their religious faith in the face of assimilation. Equally, Cahan's assimilationist stance and love of America never interfered with his ability to criticize his adoptive home or to write of the sense of loss many Jews felt as their traditional religious identity was replaced by a more secular, consumer-oriented one in America. Sam B. Girgus sums up Cahan's attitude: "Cahan provides a model for the Jewish intellectual who begins as an alien to America but turns into a convert while even being a critic" (66). The central trait of Cahan's fiction concerning immigration is its exploration of both the positive and negative aspects of it. Louis Harap observes, "one of the main contradictions" of Cahan's life and fiction is that "Cahan, the Americanizer of the ghetto, projected the frustrations and unhappiness that issue from Americanization" (497). Cahan equally shows the allure of American assimilation and the pain of losing traditional Jewish culture. Thus, many of his fictional immigrants are unfulfilled whether they resist assimilation or give up their traditional Jewish identity.
Perhaps one of the most compelling--if least explored--aspects of Abraham Cahan's fiction is how he envisions American manhood as his characters attempt to negotiate their status as Jews in America. Recently, scholars of Jewish assimilation in America have noted the important dynamic of gender in Jews' relationship to America. Riv-Ellen Prell argues that existing gender expectations "were critical to Jews' creation of gender identities that became powerful emblems of their Americanness" (4). Paula E. Hyman asserts that Jews "played to their ambivalence about their own identity as Jews in non-Jewish societies in gendered terms," (9) and Warren Rosenberg specifically references ideas of manhood: "For Jewish male immigrants entering America between 1880 and 1920, and for those growing up in teeming urban ghettos, Americanization largely depended on their adapting to [the] masculinizing process" (22). This increased attention to gender as a fundamental dynamic of cultural assimilation addresses a crucial point that has often been overlooked: there is no generic American identity independent of existing gender roles, and each immigrant encountering American society brings established gender codes from his or her native culture that mix, and often conflict, with evolving American gender codes.
It is crucial, then, to study the fiction of Abraham Cahan in light of the relationship between Jewish assimilation in America and existing and imported gender codes. As Jules Chametzky notes, Yekl "is the first novel ... by an immigrant wholly about the immigrant experience" (57). Understanding this landmark work of American fiction provides a rare look at the tumultuous assimilation process millions of Jews faced in America and how integral issues of gender were to this experience. More specifically, Yekl gives us valuable insight into the construction of notions of American manhood in the late nineteenth century. The novel contains characters who approach assimilating into the norms of American manhood with varying degrees of enthusiasm and resistance, but importantly, they approach it as outsiders, looking at the existing contours of masculine gender identity in America from this unique perspective. Instead of conceiving masculine gender identity in America as something natural or inherent, as a native might, Cahan and his Jewish characters understand the constructed nature of American manhood, consider what does and does not constitute manly behavior in America, and often consciously embrace or reject these gendered roles.
Significantly, Cahan portrays the assimilation experience for Jewish immigrants in terms of a gendered performance. Judith Butler argues that all gendered identities are "performative," because "there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender" (25). In other words, we see "gender" because we place individual behaviors into constructed gender categories that are fortified through repeated obligated performances. Cahan adds to this performative aspect of gender the cultural categories "Jewish" and "American," as his characters place into these cultural categories certain gendered behaviors. As Allen Guttmann notes, "the strain of Americanization" felt by Jewish immigrants was precipitated by "the gap between old and new customs" (45). For Cahan's Jewish immigrants, performing these gendered customs--ritualized performances involving dress, diet, and other activities--could identify someone as a Jew or a Yankee. Although cultural categories such as American and Jewish are imprecise, ever evolving, and in no way exclusive of one another, many immigrants felt that to "act American" was in a sense to not "act Jewish." Cahan explores the indeterminacy of gendered and cultural identities through his immigrant male characters negotiating (at times clumsily) between behaviors that identify them as an American man and those that mark them as Jewish.
The male immigrants central to Cahan's Yekl ultimately never arrive at an unambiguously American or Jewish identity. Instead, their behaviors associated with Jewish and American manhood ultimately alter each other, rendering attainment of either identity in some pure and isolate sense impossible. Sanford E. Marovitz observers that in Cahan's "fiction it is not the pious Jew who suffers the pangs of longing and loneliness, but the secularized individual who becomes ... 'a Yankee'" (114). This is because the Jews who cling to their traditional cultural identity and religion don't have their identity sharply challenged by American gender expectations--a challenge that Cahan shows can never successfully be met. In Cahan's novel, the male immigrants can never fully assimilate because their previous status as Jewish men precludes this; but what adds to these characters' feelings of loss is that once they try actions to become American men, they never regain their previous status as Jews. Although in his public life Cahan was the foremost spokesman for Jewish assimilation into American culture, Yekl reveals Cahan's ambivalence about the price immigrants pay by attempting assimilation. Ultimately, for his male immigrants, this price includes losing a Jewish male identity while failing fully to attain an American one.
Jake's American Manhood
Abraham Cahan's short novel Yekl explicitly documents the young immigrant Jake's painful pursuit of an identity as an American man as he purposefully shuns any association with his Jewish past. Having come to America three years ahead of his wife and child, (4) he adopts the American name "Jake" over his given name "Yekl," completely secularizes, and portrays himself as a single "Yankee" to all the admiring girls on the Lower East Side. Only his father's death back in Russia sparks enough guilt in Jake to borrow the money to buy his wife and child's passage to New York. Once his wife, Gitl, and little boy arrive in America, Jake is disgusted by his wife's "greenhorn" (5) dress and attitudes. Jake's disenchantment with Gitl eventually results in his divorcing her and marrying Mamie, a coarsely Americanized Polish Jew whom Jake often flirted with before Gitl's arrival. As the story concludes, Jake comes to realize his hasty marriage won't confirm his status as an American man, and Cahan hints of Gitl's ultimate triumph as she marries the bookish Bernstein and considers opening a grocery.
Self-consciously positioning himself as a fully assimilated American man--declaring for all to hear, "Once I live in America ... I want to know that I live in America. Dot' sh a' kin' a man I ami" (5)--Jake defines American manhood in terms of intense personal freedom, aggression, materialism, and success in attracting many different women. With each of Jake's actions, he seeks to prove that he is a secular man of the world, as opposed, in Jake's words, to "a bedraggled greenhorn, afraid to budge out of Heshter Shtreet" (6). As Jake's pejorative declaration shows, he associates Jewish men with a timidity and a narrowness of experience. This touches upon the popular image of Jewish men as being introverted, academic, and controlled by their women; Paula E. Hyman remarks that a burden on immigrant men "was the conflation of Jewishness and femininity in Western societies, with the consequent anxiety of Jewish men about their own masculinity" (9). Jake's actions in America, then, are clearly meant to prove his identity as an American man, which he defines directly against actions and attitudes he identifies as Jewish.
Scholars of American manhood, such as Michael Kimmel, have noted that while the American man of the nineteenth century was supposed to be "mobile, competitive, and aggressive," this outward confidence belied the "restless, chronically insecure" desire to "achieve a solid grounding for a masculine identity" (17). Thus, to prove their status as "true" men, by the turn of the century "masculinity was increasingly an act, a form of public display" (100). Warren Rosenberg stresses that the gender expectations of "Western masculinity" made "becoming fully accepted Americans ... a particularly difficult struggle" (22) for Jewish men. If American manhood was an anxious performance for native men, for immigrants the anxiety over their status as Americanized men and the compulsion to prove it through public acts were greatly intensified. In Yekl, Jake absorbs the gendered expectations for native men during his three years in America, and almost all of Jake's actions consist of proving to his fellow immigrants what a passionate, aggressive, and successful American man he is.
One of the most indicative aspects of Jake taking actions to clearly identify himself as an American man is when he changes his name from "Yekl" to "Jake" upon arriving in America. Cahan writes that in Russia, "he had not even suspected the existence of a name like Jake, being known to himself and to all Povodye ... as Yekl or Yekele" (10). However, we are told, "Soon after his arrival in Boston his religious scruples had followed in the wake of his former first name," and three years later, "the thought of ever having been a Yekl would bring to Jake's lips a smile of patronizing commiseration for his former self" (11-12). As Jake consciously seeks to separate himself from actions that identify him as a Jew, like "his religious scruples," he realizes his name is a crucial marker for his identity. A name is a label for public consumption, and a clearly Jewish name, like Yekl, affixes Jake's identity in his new American surroundings as a Jew. Jake's "American" actions would carry less weight because his name would essentially announce his Jewish identity wherever he went; he would always be "a Yekl." By changing his name to "Jake," he attempts to fashion himself into "a Yankee," as his new name creates a potential American identity that matches the types of behaviors he wants to be known by, helping constitute his identity as an American man.
Moving beyond just his name, Jake publicly presents behavior designed to offset the popular American notion that "Like women, Jewish men were ... weak," "soft and rounded" (Hyman 137). Jake tries to exhibit his overtly manly qualities by contrasting them with his bookish, clearly unassimilated Jewish coworkers in the sweatshop. For example, one is described as "cadaverous" and "absorbedly sway[ing] to and fro droning in the Talmudical intonation" over a socialist magazine (1). Anxious to set himself apart from a group so alien to the precepts of American manhood, Jake demonstrates his knowledge of the American male pastimes of baseball and boxing while engaging in "performances" and a "display" that allow him to show off his "brawny arms and magnificent form," which creates the image of "manly force" (3). Jake cajoles his coworkers by calling them "greenhorns" and defends his own American habits and values by declaring "Dot' sh a' kin' a man I am!" Joe L. Dubbert notes that "while European men theorized and planned," American men by the turn of the century contrasted these "feminine" traits by being "action-oriented," and proved their manhood through their "primitive instincts" and "individual abilities" (30). None of Jake's coworkers are described, like Jake, through such theatrical terms as "performance" and "display," just as none of the others declare what type of man they are: Jake attempts to assert his difference from them--his Americanness--by providing demonstrations of how well he has mastered behavior considered manly by Americans.
Despite Jake's overt actions intended to identify him as an American man, his immigrant coworkers in the sweatshop see his actions in the same theatrical terms that Cahan describes them and are unconvinced of Jake's assertions of his Americanness. During Jake's "American" routine they sarcastically declare, "Look at the Yankee!" and comment, "He thinks that shaving one's mustache makes a Yankee" (6). Jake's coworkers are not calling into question the performative aspect of identity; to the contrary, they are calling into question Jake's mastery of the actions that will make him the American man he so dearly desires to be. Jake believes an identity can be substituted or switched with relative ease by mastering a few simple performances: shave off a beard, adopt an American name, and talk about boxing and baseball. However, as Jules Chametzky relates, "[Jake] succumbs to the superficial and only partially understood aspects of the larger culture" (57). Jake's coworkers are alluding to the complicated, subtle, and ever-evolving nature of identity that Jake simply does not grasp. Jake's simple, and incomplete, understanding of identity and American manhood haunt Jake throughout the story as he grows more desperate to assert his identity as an American man.
Possibly the area where Jake most fully identifies himself as an American man is in his "proved knack with the gentle sex" (25). A crucial aspect of Jake performing his American identity is asserting that he is a single, sexually available man. Lori Lefkovitz notes that Jewish men were popularly considered feminized due to the notion that they were "ruled by their women" (20). Jake's roguish behavior with women undercuts this stereotype in the eyes of the immigrant community and helps Jake establish the case for his American manhood. Jake notes to himself that men who aren't married are "free" (16),--one of the central values of American manhood--which suggests that as long as Jake can escape the Jewish identity embodied by his wife, Gitl, he is free to remake himself into an American man through his romantic interaction with other women.
Several passages in the story directly speak to Jake's belief that his relationships with the women of the Lower East Side supply him a stage which allows him to display his American manhood. Among Jake's favorite places for displaying his manly prowess with women are in the dancehalls that populate the Lower East Side. Cahan describes Jake's dancing with Mamie, a Polish immigrant: "They spun along with all-forgetful gusto; every little while he lifted her on his powerful arm and gave her a 'mill,' he yelping and she squeaking for sheer ecstasy, as he did so; and throughout the performance his face and his whole figure seemed to be exclaiming, 'Dot' sh a kin' a man I ami'" (20). As Jake engages in this performance, which Sanford E. Marovitz describes as "hypermasculine," (Abraham Cahan 77) a "cluster" of women stand in the corner "admiring or begrudging the antics of the star couple" (21). Here, too, Jake's actions while being described in overtly masculine terms are also likened to theatrics, for Jake realizes that his status as an American man is ultimately dependent on the success with which he plays the role. His reputation as public gigolo gives Jake the attention needed to publicly thwart Jewish male stereotypes and embrace American ones.
Gitl and the Loss of American Manhood
The arrival of Jake's Russian wife and son threatens to destroy his precarious position as an American man because they jeopardize Jake's ability to act in ways he feels ensure his American manhood, tying him to the Jewish identity he is attempting to undermine. Eric Homberger remarks that "in Cahan's fiction," American assimilation "often takes the form of a hostile and bitter-sweet abandonment of what are perceived as restricting and indeed unpleasant qualities designated as being 'Jewish'" (170). For Jake, this restricting Jewish influence is embodied in his Russian family. Upon Jake's first meeting with Gitl in three years, he feels she is "one great obstacle dropped from heaven, as it were, in [Jake's] way." It is not coincidental that Jake feels the oppressive presence of his wife and child as something "from heaven," because they are representations of the religious and ethnic identity that Jake has furiously been denying since his arrival in America. Chaim I. Waxman remarks that "In Jewish history and tradition, the family is considered to be the most important institution for shaping ethnic and religious identity and transmitting Judaism's basic norms and values.... it is the institution primarily responsible for Jewish continuity" (59). Continuity with his Jewish past is exactly what Jake is trying to break from as he changes his name from "Yekl" to "Jake," pretends to be single, and self-consciously mimics the behavior he feels will show him as a fully Americanized man. However, the arrival of his obviously "foreign" family from Russia tethers Jake to the Jewish identity he has been straining against for three years.
The connection between Jake's family and his Jewish identity is strengthened when we consider that Jake only took the effort to bring them to America when the death of his father in Russia prompted in him a "devout mood" (32). During Jake's previous three years in America, he was unable "to reconcile" the memory of his wife and child "with the actuality of his American present" (26), which is undoubtedly why "he would consciously let his mind wander off to other topics" (24) when he considered saving enough money to buy his family their ticket to America. However, upon the death of Jake's orthodox father, "his native home came back to him with a vividness which it had not had in his mind for a long time" (29), and he decided to pray that night before going to sleep, although "since he had settled in America he had hardly ever had an occasion to so much as think of bed prayers" (32). It is at this point that Jake makes the decision to borrow the money to buy Gitl's ticket. It is telling, then, that Gitl's arrival in America was not brought about by Jake's heartfelt feelings of love for his wife and child, but rather out of a spasm of guilt and piety precipitated by the death of his devout father. That Jake expresses this guilt by an overtly Jewish act--praying for nearly the first time in three years--and buying Gitl's ticket illustrates just how closely she is related in Jake's mind to the Jewish religion and culture of his native home. Like all impetuous things, Jake's religious devotion doesn't last long (we never see him praying again), and likewise his devotion to Gitl and his Jewish roots quickly dissipates as soon as they begin to impede his ability to assert his American identity.
The first moment Jake sees Gitl after her arrival in America, he feels disgust at her overtly Jewish dress and customs and embarrassment at his association with them. Cahan writes that Jake's "heart had sunk at the sight of his wife's uncouth and un-American appearance. She was slovenly dressed in a brown jacket and skirt of grotesque cut, and her hair was concealed under a voluminous wig of a pitch-black hue" (33). Jake can only think to himself, "Jake the Yankee, with this bonnet-less, wigged, dowdyish little greenhorn by his side i That she was his wife, nay, that he was a married man at all, seemed incredible to him" (36). Here, Jake directly contrasts his "Yankee" status with his "uncouth," un-American wife, but significantly, he also connects them by sensing that his status as an independent American man is jeopardized by Gitl's presence. Through the ties of marriage and family, Jake's ability to disassociate himself from his Jewish identity has been nearly destroyed, and he fears Gitl's greenhorn persona will attach to him as if by marriage. Through Jake's relationship to Gitl, Cahan is illustrating the difficulty of divorcing oneself from an established identity. Identities cannot be dispensed with as easily as Jake dropped his Jewish name and habits, and he is finding out the difficulty of attaining his status as an American man when he is still very much married to his Jewish identity.
Gitl's presence immediately stifles Jake's ability to act the role of the swaggering, single, American man of the world. Before Gitl's arrival, Jake's American identity was built on the lie and the performance of his "single" identity. Gitl's arrival alerts the immigrant community to Jake's "double" identity and thus to the artifice of the American persona he has attempted to build. Jake's shaky identity as an American man is further weakened because having a family to support and pay attention to, Jake is unable to "go to Joe's [dance school], nor to the theater, nor anywhere anymore" (60) and receive the attention from "Mamie and of all the dancing-school girls, whose society and attentions ... seemed to him necessities of his life" (44). Unable to participate in the actions that Jake hopes will confirm his status as an American man, he is associated with its antithesis, summed up by his former dance partner, Mamie, who now calls him "a henpecked husband and an old-fashioned Jew" (60).
Mamie and "A Defeated Victor"
To the panicking Jake, Mamie, his old dance partner from the flirtatious days before Gitl's arrival, seems to be his only hope for salvaging his American identity. Mamie agrees to pay for Jake's divorce from Gitl if he will in turn marry her, which on the surface appears to rescue Jake from the greenhorn Gitl, divorcing him from his Jewish identity and providing him with a wife that marries him to an American one. Although Mamie's appearance in Jake's apartment suggests to him someone of impeccable Americanness, her "overdone" American accent, "cloud of cologne" and ostentatious clothing appears to the reader as something overwrought and overacted. Mamie is exhibiting the same coarse understanding of American identity as Jake does through her obviously constructed persona as an "American lady." Jake, significantly, can't see through Mamie's extravagant dress, makeup, and cloud of perfume to understand that her actions are just rough caricatures of an American lady, as he believes Mamie's act thoroughly. Although Mamie is more fluent in American culture and values than the recent immigrant Gitl, Cahan's description of her as she tempts Jake away from Gitl stands as a clear warning that siding with Mamie and the crass assimilation she represents is a mistake.
Cahan pointedly portrays Jake's infatuation with Mamie in more negative ways than simply through her cumbersome American persona. Jake's attraction to Mamie is described by Cahan in terms reminiscent of an infection or maddening drug: Jake "felt as if Mamie had breathed a delicious poison into his veins, which was now taking effect, spreading a devouring fire through his soul, and kindling him with a frantic thirst for more of the same virus. His features became distended, as it were, and acquired a feverish effect" (60). This further speaks to Jake's artificial and potentially harmful quest for recognition as an American undertaken through Mamie. Rather than gradually learning actions and values identified with American manhood, Jake is attempting to seize the label "Yankee feller" all at once through his divorce of Gitl and marriage to Mamie. Mamie being likened to a drug taking effect speaks to the almost hallucinogenic result of Mamie's presence, convincing Jake of an identity that doesn't exist. Mamie's influence working like a poison alerts the reader to the danger associated with such simple assumptions about the construction of identity that Jake is making. Jake's features become distended in the sense that his feverish search for an American identity is warping and distorting the person he presently is.
Jake regrets his marriage to Mamie as he ultimately feels disconnected from his Jewish identity yet does not feel he has attained an American one. As with Jake's situation at the end of Yekl, Susan K. Harris comments, "Cahan's stories often tend to deconstruct all the possible values, so that no position is finally presented as preferable, although almost all are viable" (137). This is evidenced in the final chapter of Yekl, "A Defeated Victor," when Jake divorces Gitl and is on his way to marry Mamie: "instead of a conqueror, he had emerged from the rabbi's house the victim of an ignominious defeat" (89). Jake's paradoxical situation of being both victorious and defeated lies at the heart of Cahan's understanding of Jewish assimilation in America: the immigrants' connection to their Jewish identity, no matter how strong or tentative, makes their full attainment of an American identity impossible, yet their desire for an American identity makes their traditional Jewish one unsatisfying. Jake only marries Mamie because he believes there is no alternative: he doesn't have the money to divorce Gitl himself, and he feels he can't stay with Gitl and continue to perform successfully as a "Yankee feller." In this sense, his Jewish past drives him to the rash action of marrying Mamie.
However, Jake's answer to his Americanization problem--his marriage to Mamie--is equally problematic because, as Jake realizes all too late, Mamie too will inhibit his ability to act American. Sanford E. Marovitz comments that, in addition to the clear financial control Mamie's saved fortune will give her over Jake, her "domineering personality will give her full control over him and their marriage" (Abraham Cahan 71). Additionally, not only will Mamie compromise the freedom Jake feels is so valuable to his American manhood, but her heavy-handed understanding of American values and norms will insure Jake's progression into an American manhood that will encompass only its most coarse and half-formed practices. Thus, we see Jake unwilling to associate himself with his Jewish identity if he is to realize his goal of American manhood, but that very Jewish identity inhibits his ability to freely Americanize as he would wish. Instead, we see an unhappy Jake caught between two worlds: neither a part of the Jewish identity that he has forsaken, nor recognized as the American man, which he so badly desires.
Cahan brings the pitfalls of assimilation into more striking relief by contrasting Jake's ending in "defeat" with Gitl's more positive outcome. At the divorce proceedings Gitl's "rustic 'greenhornlike' expression was completely gone from her face and manner," and "there was noticeable about her a suggestion of that peculiar air of self-confidence with which a few months' life in America is sure to stamp the looks and bearing of every immigrant" (83). Still, she has not attempted to secularize or self-consciously Americanize herself. In fact, during the course of the story Gitl's only outward attempt to make herself American, such as the awkward attempt at cutting her hair and changing her clothes, came when she was still trying to please Jake's "Yankee feller" sensibilities, not her own Jewish ones, and this attempt only made her feel more alienated and confused than before. Part of Gitl's newfound confidence comes from her joining with one of Jake's former coworkers and tenant, Bernstein, and their joint planning to open a "grocery business ... with the money paid to her by Jake" (89) for the divorce. Gitl's partnership with Bernstein is ironic because at the beginning of the story Jake chided the bookish Bernstein as a greenhorn for his studious ways and failure "to budge out of Heshter Shtreet" (6), while Jake demonstrated his knowledge of boxing, baseball, and other American affairs. David M. Fine concludes that "As Cahan's heroes outwardly assimilate into American life, they become increasingly alienated from themselves. The outer self comes into conflict with an inner self which will not be stilled" (122). This perfectly sums up the situation in Yekl, because the more Gitl and Jake struggle to become Americans apart from their Jewish background, the more they are thwarted, but in different senses. Jake continues to struggle against his Jewish identity throughout the story, ending with his hasty marriage to Mamie and dubious prospects for the future; however, Gitl, after being left by Jake, remains confident in her inner self and Jewish identity, and her inner serenity reflects this. Thus, the paradox of Americanization that Cahan explores becomes more profound as the immigrant who most consciously and vigorously pursues an American identity, Jake, is left feeling disconnected from both. Conversely, the scorned greenhorn, who never wished to assimilate, ends the story with self-confidence and hope, personal and financial, for the future.
Yekl explores the contradictory, passionate, and sometimes confused environment of Jewish assimilation in America at the turn of the century. As many commentators of Cahan's fiction have noted, the ambivalence that permeates his fiction on immigration matches Cahan's personal contradictions and tensions. One of the most useful, yet unexplored, aspects of Cahan's ambivalence is how immigrant Jews reacted to existing American gender codes. In Yekl, we see notions of American manhood approached not as something inherent, natural, or universal; rather, conceptions of American manhood are interacted with and viewed by Cahan's immigrants from their unique position as outsiders. The various ways that the immigrants' identities alter and are altered by notions of American manhood help us better understand the dynamics of both immigrant assimilation and American manhood at the turn of the century.
DOI: 10.1353/ajl.2011.0006
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Clay Motley, Western Kentucky University
Notes
(1) For example, there is no mention of Jews in Bederman; Carnes and Griffen; Gorn; or Kimmel. Only a couple of pages reference Jews in Rotundo.
(2) A Yiddish word referring generically to a small Jewish village in Eastern Europe or Russia.
(3) Unclean, not kosher.
(4) Irving Howe relates, "If an emigrant wanted to bring his wife and children, he had to lay out what for him was a small fortune. Often it was necessary for husbands to go first and bring their families later. Some husbands never did bring their families later" (39).
(5) "The new immigrants were called 'greenhorns' because they were ignorant of American ways; it was used as a term of ridicule by earlier immigrants toward the naive and embarrassed newcomers, who wanted to outgrow its stigma as quickly as possible" (Marovitz, Abraham Cahan 17).
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| Author: | Motley, Clay |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Studies in American Jewish Literature |
| Article Type: | Critical essay |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Jan 1, 2011 |
| Words: | 6329 |
| Previous Article: | The Paul Goodman Reader. |
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