Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing [Hardcover]

Ilan Stavans (Editor)

Book Description

Release date: October 15, 2009

Immigration is the essential American story. From London or Lvov, Bombay or Beijing, Dublin or Dusseldorf, people have come to America to remake themselves, their lives, and their identities. Despite political obstacles, popular indifference, or hostility, they put down roots here, and their social, cultural, and entrepreneurial energies helped forge the open and diverse society we live in.
The history of American immigration has often been told by those already here. Becoming Americans tells this epic story from the inside, gathering for the first time over 400 years of writing-from 17th-century Jamestown to contemporary Brooklyn and Los Angeles-by first-generation immigrants about the immigrant experience. In sum, over 80 writers create a vivid, passionate, and revealing firsthand account of the challenges and aspirations that define our dynamic, multicultural democracy.
In nearly a hundred entries-poems, stories, novel excerpts, travel pieces, diary entries, memoirs, and letters-Becoming Americans presents the full range of the experience of coming to America: the reasons for departure, the journey itself, the shock and spectacle of first arrival, the passionate ambivalence toward the old country and the old life, and above all the struggle with the complexities of America. Arranged in chronological order by date of arrival, this unprecedented collection presents a collective history of the United States that is both familiar and surprisingly new, as seen through the fresh eyes and words of newcomers from more than forty different countries.

Features:Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, Gottlieb Mittelberger, St. John de Crèvecoeur, Phillis Wheatley, Lorenzo Da Ponte, John James Audubon, Fanny Kemble, Jacob Riis, Abraham Cahan, O. E. Rølvaag, Henry Roth, Claude McKay, Charles Chaplin, Felipe Alfau, Carlos Bulosan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Vladimir Nabokov, W. H. Auden, Frank McCourt, Edward Said, Charles Simic, Julia Alvarez, Czeslaw Milosz, Luc Sante, Eva Hoffman, Jamaica Kincaid, Chang-rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joseph Brodsky, Junot Díaz, Gary Shteyngart, Dinaw Mengestu, Edwidge Danticat, Norman Manea, Anita Desai, Lara Vapnyar, Richard Rodriguez, and many more...

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The writers in Becoming Americans have the miraculous gift of fresh eyes, able to see America for the first time, and to describe the new world they see. Their stories are our treasured legacy." - Maxine Hong Kingston --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College and the author or editor of numerous books.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 850 pages
• Publisher: Library of America; First Printing edition (October 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1598530518
• ISBN-13: 978-1598530513
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #852,663 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Love Letter to the United States December 11, 2009

By Robin Friedman HALL OF FAMETOP 50 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

In the most iconic of American poems, "The New Colossus", Emma Lazarus wrote about the meaning of the then-new Statue of Liberty:

"'Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!'"

Lazarus's poem frames "Becoming Americans", a new anthology from the Library of America which manages both to examine and to celebrate the American immigrant experience. The volume is edited by Ilan Stavans, professor of Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Stavans is himself an immigrant of unusual background. Born in Mexico City in 1961 to a Jewish family of immigrants from East Europe, Stavans immigrated to the United States in 1961. He thus is able to write of his own American experience from a unique Jewish-Latino perspective. Stavans wrote the introduction to this volume and also contributed a selection from his autobiography which describes his experiences as a Mexican Jew. In a revealing interview he gave to the Library of America upon the publication of this volume, Stavans described "Becoming Americans" as "my love letter to the United States, a tolerant, warm-hearted country that has been extraordinarily generous to me as an immigrant. Among other things, the country has allowed me to explore my talents to the limit."

The book consists of nearly 700 pages of text together with a chronology of immigration to America beginning with the settlement at Jamestown in 1607. The anthology includes selections from 85 writers describing their varied experiences in coming to the United States from 45 countries. The selection begins in 1623 with a letter from one Richard Frethorne to his parents setting forth the hardships of life at Jamestown. It concludes with a 2003 selection by Richard Rodriguez, the child of immigrants from Mexico, from his novel "Hunger of Memory", describing his childhood difficulties with the English language. Rodriguez is the only contributor to the volume who was born in the United States.

The materials are arranged in chronological order from date of arrival in America and are drawn from a variety of sources, including letters, diaries, essays, poems, stories, and novels. Each entry includes a short biographical sketch by Stavans to put the text in perspective. While the volume as a whole merits Stavans's characterization as a "love letter", the individual entries show little trace of illusion or sentimentality. Immigrants have faced difficult journeys, hard choices, and long struggles in the United States, and they are amply documented here. The book documents the ambivalences many immigrants experienced in coming to terms with the New World, including the inevitable choice each person had to face about the degree to which he or she would assimilate to the new land or attempt to maintain the traditions and values of the old land. The theme of coming to a new land with a different and difficult language, English, runs through many of the entries in this collection.

The selections vary in length and in interest. Taken as a whole, they capture a great deal about the immigration experience and about the United States itself, from New York to the Midwest, to Texas, California, and points between. Blanket generalization would be foolhardy. But I would like to mention some of the entries that I particularly enjoyed.

In the small group of entries from Colonial America, I liked James Revel's poem describing the experience of a felon transported to Virginia as punishment for theft as well as Phylis Wheatley's short famous poem "On being brought from Africa to America."

Early 19th Century selections include excerpts from John James Audubon, from Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, who came to the United States late in his life, and from Carl Schurz, a German immigrant who became a Civil War General and later the Secretary of the Interior.

Later selections include short poetry by unnamed Chinese immigrants arriving at Angel Island in San Francisco Bay. A selection from a novelist, Anzia Yezierska, who was unfamiliar to me, describes the conflict between a young immigrant woman who has managed to secure a college education and her traditional, unlettered parents. I would like to read more of this author. Other East European Jewish immigrants presented include Abraham Cahan, from his Autobiography, Henry Roth, from his novel "Call it Sleep" and and Issac Bashevis Singer, in his outstanding short story "A Wedding in Brownsville."

The collection includes a letter from Thomas Mann, explaining his decision to stay in the United States rather than return to Germany after WW II, together with good selections from Palestinian Edward Said, and Czeslaw Milosz. Among contemporary writers, I enjoyed the contribution of Jhumpa Lahiri, "The Third and Final Continent" describing the experiences of an educated immigrant from India and his new wife. Gary Shteyngart's comic "The mother tongue between two slices of rye", Gary Delanty's poem about immigration from Ireland, "We will not play the Harp Backward Now, No", and Stavans's own autobiographical essay were other highlights.

Cristopher Isherwood (1904-1986) came to the United States in 1939 with the poet W.H. Auden, both of whom are represented in this volume. The selection from Isherwood's diaries includes the following reflection which I thought captured something of the tone of many of the selections regarding the many-faceted, ironic, and outsider character of American immigrant life. Isherwood writes (p. 335):

"Actually, in my sane moments, I love this country. I love it just because I don't belong. Because I'm not involved in its traditions, not born under the curse of its history. I feel free here. I'm on my own. My life will be what I make of it."

So should the American ideal be for both immigrants and for those born in the United States: to have life "be what I make of it." For both natives and immigrants, this anthology helps explore the never-ending process and promise of "becoming Americans" and of the American dream.

Robin Friedman

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Ubi panis ibi patria. Where are your roots? In my suitcase September 20, 2012

By H. Schneider

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

An anthology of writing about immigration, including the involuntary kind, slavery and deportation. A phenomenology of immigration. Texts from memoirs, letters, journals, fiction, or poems. In many cases, the texts are frustratingly short, but briefness is the price of a broad scope. Many immigrants had to overcome hardships...some didn't. Many came for `bread', others for politics or survival. The focus is much more on arriving than on leaving. That does lead to some uniformity. A few texts stand out for their writing, are funny or otherwise interesting.

The collection starts with a letter home to England, 400 years ago, written by an indentured servant in Virginia, to his parents.
Then a poem by a Puritan.
A poem by or about a deported thief (Australia became the destination of deportation only after American independence).
The story of a young West African aristocrat who was enslaved 'by mistake' in 1730 and managed to get set free out of Maryland via England within 2 years. This is told by the man's lawyer. (As a plebeian, I find it rather unsettling that we see this kind of class privilege even in slavery.) A poem by the slave girl who became a poet.

A series of Europeans, some quite miserable, most on the search for better prospects. Some didn't stay, went back because their hopes were not realized or their reason to come had gone. Mostly unknown people, and some fictional characters, but also some outstanding ones.
The French birder who comes to the US after the revolution in Haiti.
The librettist of Don Giovanni, Columbia U's first professor of Italian.
The English actress who marries a slave holder and becomes an abolitionist (journal excerpts from her early acting years in New York; might have been more interesting during her slaveholding abolitionist years).
The German democrat who becomes a Union General, the first US Senator of German origin, and Secretary of the Interior.
The Danish jack of all trades who makes a name as a reporter and photographer of slum conditions in NY.

Hollywood immigrants. Asian immigrants. Hispanic immigrants.
Jewish immigrants, mostly refugees from pogroms and Hitlerism.
Other refugees from Hitlerism. Iron curtain refugees. Post iron curtain immigrants.

A broad canvas, but: some groups are left out entirely, like Armenians (except a poet born 1949), Cambodians, Rwandans. Given their tragic story and its size, that is relevant omission. Hard to see why they are not here.
Another question of weight distribution: slavery is decidedly underrepresented, as is later African and also Middle Eastern immigration.
A subject that is totally absent: illegal immigration. Unless I overlooked something. Also missing: the immigration of organized crime.

Among my favorite texts in this book is Isherwood's diary, which happens to be rather not concerned with emigration, but with Isherwood's identity problems. And Thomas Mann's letter of 1945, explaining to a German why he wouldn't return 'to help' Germany.
My point: as an anthology on 'becoming Americans', this works only half ways. Can such an anthology ever be fully `balanced'?
As a collection of interesting texts, it is quite good.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting read January 24, 2010

By Hazel L Jenkins

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm still reading this book so cannot give a deep review but what I've read so far is very interesting. One thing I don't like is just when I'm getting into someone's story the excerpt ends and I am left wishing I could read more The book is a good illustration of what some of our forebears had to deal with when they came to America, the land of Golden Streets and their frustrations when they arrived without much money, not speaking the language and needing to get a job to support themselves. Will continue to read.