Jewish Writers Focus on Holocaust Survivor Immigrants to the U.S.

The new immigrant novel, dealing with Jewish newcomers to America who survived the Holocaust, reflects a profound change in the outlook of American Jewish writers who portrayed the earlier mass Jewish immigrants in terms of an inevitable assimilation, according to an expert in the field, Dorothy Seidman Bilik.

Bilik, assistant professor in the German and Slavic languages and literature department at Maryland University, has spelled out the difference of the impact of the two streams of Jewish immigration on American Jewish writers in a new book, “Immigrant-Survivors, ” published by the Wesleyan University Press.

She noted that nearly two million Jews came to the United States from Europe in the first half of this century. They were eager, voluntary immigrants, working class people who hoped to escape poverty and persecution.

In contrast, she declared, the refugees who arrived after 1933 were richer and better educated people who had been shocked out of comfortable existences. She asserted that nowhere are these basic differences between those experiences so apparent as in the Jewish American fiction of this century.

She declared that, as recently as 1971, American critics had argued that, after the early immigrant novels and the “crisis of identity” novels of the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish American literature had exhausted its theme of assimilation and was in danger of declining into self-parody.

OUTLINES A COUNTER-TREND

In her book, Bilik outlined a counter-trend, a new subgenre of Jewish American literature, which she said was sought to come to terms with what is perhaps the major historical event of the 20th Century — the Holocaust. Instead of the assimilation focus, she reported, the new immigrant novel is “deeply concerned with the continuing importance of the Jewish experience” and can be thought of “as a manifestation by Jewish American writers of a delayed post-Holocaust consciousness.”

She declared that the “immigrant-survivors” are the fictional counterparts of those Jews who came to the United States after World War II, who survived the ghettoes, mass murders and death camps. She wrote “they represent what remains of the thousand-year-old Eastern European Jewish culture of Yiddish-speaking Jews from whom the overwhelming majority of American Jews are descended.”

Bilik views the immigrant-survivor as an alienated, unassimilated and haunted Jew. Whereas earlier fictional immigrants were able to exchange their collective identity for anonymous and private careers, the Holocaust survivor is thrust into a symbolic, sometimes redemptive role. The history of the survivor is collective history — one stands for many. He/she is witness, judge, teacher and transmitter of cultural values and of the past, she asserted.

DESCRIBES TWO MAJOR CATEGORIES

Examining the writings of Bernard Malamud, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and others, Bilik set forth what she called the two major categories of the post-Holocaust immigrant novel: The naturalistic or historical novel and the anatomical novel. She argued that the anatomical novel, which is discursive and philosophical, is most appropriate to the goals of the new immigrant novel because, she feels, the action that takes place in the minds of the protagonists is of greatest importance in post-Holocaust literature.

She contended that the figure of the immigrant-survivor, while painfully examining the past from a distant perspective, provides the Jewish American writer, who seeks comprehension of the Holocaust, with a voice, a center of consciousness, that allows him to express not only his horror and guilt but his sense of renewed connection with the past and the tradition of Jews.