Synopsis
For nearly a century, the symbol of the American "melting pot" - namely that all cultures are transformed into a single American identity - has enjoyed considerable popularity. Bruce M. Stave and John F. Sutherland offer the reader an opportunity to explore and question this and other concepts in From the Old Country, an oral history comprising the voices of the early European immigrants - the Irish, Scandinavians, Italians, Jews, Poles, Slavs, and others - who came to America by the millions between the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.
The authors, both practicing oral historians, have compiled their interviews and others conducted by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s. This resulting blend is a new and enlightening, sometimes disturbing, perspective on the forefathers and foremothers who gave so much to the country that they have adopted as their own. Their interviews, combined with those of the WPA, enable the authors to offer the reader a perspective of at least three generations of immigrant experience.
From the Old Country presents the concept that while there were, and are, many common experiences encountered by the American immigrant, there are also experiences that are not shared by all ethnic groups and individuals. For example, the myth of the uprooted, sequestered immigrant is dispelled, and revealed are the support networks of friends and families that helped to find jobs, homes, and in general, helped to relieve the sense of alienation that was often felt by the newcomers. Especially intriguing is the candidness with which many of the WPA interviewees express the prejudices and bigotries felt towards other ethnic groups, and at times even of the internal suspicions that served to divide rather than strengthen.
Stave and Sutherland, in this clearly narrated collection of oral testimonies, follow the entire immigrant experience including the role that the family unit played, both economically and socially. Of special interest to women's studies is the place that the immigrant women held in the new world - the changing of traditional relationships between men and women, and within families, and ultimately the growing involvement with the political movement for women's autonomy.
Ending with a nontraditional roundtable discussion, the authors are joined by Aldo Salerno, a research assistant for this book. Together the three summarize and discuss the implication of the oral histories they have recorded, and their meaning for the study of immigration today. More important they bring to life the theme that the immigrant experience is not something of the past, but a reality of the present.
From the Old Country is an invaluable tool for any scholar, student, or individual who has the need to know, and to learn, more of what it means to be American today.
Reviews
A tapestry of firsthand testimony detailing the 19th and early-20th centuries' great wave of European immigration to the US- -dimmed, but not dulled, by merely serviceable commentary and an oddly self-limiting selection. This 12th in the publisher's Oral History Series, from Stave (History/Univ. of Conn.) and Sutherland (History/Manchester Community College), takes interviews gathered over the past 20 years by the authors' respective institutions and mixes them together with late-30's archives of the WPA Ethnic Group Survey. Emphasizing the fundamental disorientation of the immigrant experience, Stave and Sutherland find common bonds between diverse national groups in a thematic structure dealing successively with homelands and reasons for leaving them, the frequently traumatic journey to the New World, employment, family life, relations between the sexes, and interethnic tension. But in combining the national WPA material (the bulk of the book) with later studies, the authors keep the focus on their own state, leading to a jarring parochialism in which the end of the rainbow is always Bridgeport or Hartford or New Haven. Generally sketchy commentary adds little to the remaining material. The voices of the subjects themselves, however, prove inherently fascinating, by turns harrowing (two teenaged sisters, faced with factory layoffs and a brutal home life, drink poison and jump from a third-story window), magical (a penniless Austrian-Jewish arrival, sleeping under an ice wagon on a New York pier, is rescued by a Yiddish-speaking policeman), and genuinely poetic (a young Russian revelling in the New York of 1923: ``...this city appeared as a tremendous overstuffed roar, where people just burst with a desire to live''). Such diamonds--though in fairly rough settings--make a passable sparkler for oral history and immigration buffs. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The interviews appearing here are drawn from both the Work Projects Administration (WPA) Ethnic Group Survey conducted from 1938 to 1940 in Connecticut and more recent interviews conducted in the 1970s. They are divided into six chapters, which discuss the immigrants' experiences in their homeland, the transatlantic crossing, securing employment, family life, gender roles, and prejudice. Beyond the actual story of these immigrants, the book also gives good insight into the development and practice of oral history. Overall, this title dovetails nicely with David Cohen's America, the Dream of My Life (Rutgers Univ. Pr., 1990). Although limited in its geographical scope, this work is recommended for public libraries throughout the country with strong history collections.
- Daniel Liestman, Seattle Pacific Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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