Lives in Between: The Experience of Marginalty in a Century of Assimilation

Book by Spitzer, Leo

The 19th century brought not only emancipation for black slaves, African colonials, and central European Jews, it also ushered in an age of assimilation. How each of those groups approached that process is the focus of Leo Spitzer's well-researched work Lives in Between. The author examines how three families--the West African Mays, the mulatto Reboucas of Brazil, and the Austrian Jewish Zweig/Brettauer clan--struggled to blend into dominant European cultures through various processes including religious conversation, embranquecemento ("whitening," or marrying into white families so that one's offspring would be more socially acceptable), and the gentile-oriented ideal of Verbesserung (self-improvement).

Although Spitzer chronicles the cultural and political accomplishments of these families, what is of interest to him is how they all deal with their marginality to both the lower classes they avoid and the elite classes they desperately try to join. "For subordinated individuals," writes Spitzer, "it generally reflected an attempt to join and gain acceptance in the system as defined by the dominant--to move in some degree from the status of 'outsider' to that of 'insider.'" The range of responses to the failure of assimilation that Spitzer outlines reveals a complex social phenomenon whose repercussions are still being felt today. --Eugene Holley Jr.