Journal of American Studies of Turkey
8 (1998) : 81-83.Book Review
Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature. A Longfellow Institute Book. Edited by Werner Sollors. 1998, 409 pages. Available from: New York University Press, New York and London.
“The multitudes of texts written [in the United States] in languages other than English have quietly slipped from view” over the course of the twentieth century, Werner Sollors points out in the introduction to Multilingual America (5). Literary histories of earlier generations recognized that the “‘language and literature of the United States’ was a field not limited to English,” he notes (5), but such works “nowadays inevitably present English-only materials and often imply a monolingual Anglophone reader” (6).
Multilingual America is a varied and uneven collection of essays intended as “a first step” toward “a comprehensive history of multilingual literature of the United States” (7). Only time will tell if Sollors and his contributors are successful in inspiring the massive scholarly undertaking necessary to produce such a history, but as he suggests, such a project is one to which the international community of American Studies scholars is well suited to contribute. For while Americans on both the political Right and Left continue to promote the “English only” approach to education, rather than the “English plus other languages” approach that Sollors advocates, American scholars of the future will continue to overlook the large volume of non-English literatures produced in the US because of their inability to read many of them.
This volume itself is an impressive interdisciplinary and international collaboration, with contributors from Canada, China, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Norway, Turkey, and the United States. The book consists of twenty-seven original essays along with the Linguistic Society of America’s “Statement on Language Rights” (1996) and a brief essay offering suggestions for conducting research in the field using the Modern Language Association (MLA) Database. The essays are divided into seven parts. The first, “Literary History, Old and New,” offers several interesting and useful overviews of neglected non-English US literatures. Alide Cagidemetrio surveys forgotten prose and poetry published in the US in French, German, and Spanish in the first half of the nineteenth century. Michel Fabre discusses the nineteenth-century French-language literature by Creoles of color published in New Orleans. Orm Overland provides an enlightening discussion of perspectives on assimilation in Norwegian-American literature. Perhaps of special interest to Turkish readers, Aviva Ben-Ur surveys the nineteen newspapers in Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, published between 1910 and 1948 by and for Jewish immigrants to the US from the Ottoman Empire.
The essays in Part II, “The Many Languages of American Literature,” discuss more specific works. Turkish readers may be interested in Gönül Pultar’s essay, “Ethnic Fatigue: Baþçýllar's Poetry as a Metaphor for the Other ‘Other Literature.’” It begins with an overview of “Turkish Immigration to the United States and Literature Produced by Turks in the United States,” but acknowledges that “much literary archaeology still needs to be done to get a true picture of this particular genre” (125). She then offers an interesting introduction to Seyfettin Baþçýllar’s poetry and career. The third section of her essay, in which she “attempt[s] to contextualize the significance of ‘ethnic fatigue’ within the field of American studies” (135), lapses into the kind of jargon-ridden academic prose that, thankfully, most of the volume manages to avoid. Other essays in Part II include Sandra L. Dahlberg’s discussion of the tradition of the folk drama “Los Comanches,” performed near Alcalde, New Mexico, and Melinda G. Gray’s analysis of the Welsh novel Dafydd Morgan (1897) by R.R. Williams. Te-hsing Shan discusses a variety of issues related to the recent Chinese-American works of Yan Geling and Chin Yang Lee, especially the problem of situating such writing in Chinese among “Chinese literature, American literature, Chinese-American literature, and Overseas Chinese literature” (113).
Two of the most interesting and successful essays in the volume, at least for this reader, focus on different aspects of the same work: the novel by Abraham Cahan that was published first in Yiddish as Yankel der Yankee (1893) and then in English as Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1895). In his essay in Part II, Matthew Frye Jacobson places both editions in their historical and intellectual contexts and shows that the Yiddish version “engaged transnational debates regarding the essence of Jewish character . . . ; debates occasioned by the complex of crises known at the time as ‘The Jewish Question’” (104). Jacobson reminds us that “many immigrant writers counted themselves primarily emigrant writers, and it was not always the Americanness of the chapter that was foremost on their minds as they were writing” (110), a theme that is echoed in other essays. In her essay in Part III, Aviva Taubenfeld focuses more clearly on “linguistic borders and the immigrant author” (144) exploring the changes that Cahan made to his manuscript as he targeted different audiences and the resulting differences in language and perspective between the Yiddish and English editions.
Part III, “Yekl and Hyde: Different-Language Versions of the ‘Same’ Texts,” includes two other essays. Mario Maffi discusses “the strange case” of Luigi Donato Ventura’s short story Peppino (1885), which is “the story of the Italian street Arab Peppino, set in the immigrant Lower East Side of New York, . . . told by the Italian writer Ventura not in Italian but in French” (166) and published in a slightly different version in English in 1886. Xiao-huang Yin analyzes the differences in the writings in Chinese and English by Chinese-American authors. He argues that “Chinese-language writers have rarely published in English” because their experience has been that “creative writing in English often demands suppression and distortion of the Chinese sensibility that does not fit into the stereotyped portrayal of ‘Orientals’ that is popular in mainstream American culture” (178-179).
The essays in Part IV, “Multilingualism as a Way of Life,” explores how other literary genres negotiated and responded to the multilingual immigrant experience. In “Divine Comedy: The Jewish Orthodox Sermon in America, 1881-1939,” Menahem Blondheim describes the emergence in America of a new kind of Orthodox sermon characterized by a mixture of humor and reproof. Peter Conolly-Smith describes the career of German-American theater manager Adolf Philipp in an attempt to trace the complicated route from the immigrant stage to the mainstream American stage and the role of ethnic self-parody in that journey. Anna Maria Martellone discusses “The Formation of an Italian-American Identity through Popular Theater.” Karen Majewski examines Polish-language immigrant narratives of the migration experience and finds insights “into the formation of ethnic and national consciousness among Poles in America” (246).
With a few notable exceptions, essays in the remaining sections of the book are less successful. In Part V, “Melting Glots,” the subject is the “‘mixed languages,’” with essays exploring Germerican, Portingles or Luso-American, and the writings of Jeannette Lander. Part VI, “Multilingualism and English-Language Writing,” examines how multilingualism has affected writing in American English. The strongest essay in this section is Hana Wirth-Nesher’s “The Languages of Memory: Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl.” Part VII, “Languages and Language Rights,” includes essays that explore “the political issues of language loss, universal languages, and language rights” (351). The strongest essay here is Douglas C. Baynton’s “Out of Sight: The Suppression of American Sign Language.”
Multilingual America will be especially interesting and useful for students of American literature and culture, but social and intellectual historians interested in an introduction to and overview of non-English literatures in the US and the insights they offer into the perspectives, aspirations, and experiences of their authors, also will benefit from particular essays. Intellectual historians, for example, will be intrigued by Baynton’s discussion of how Darwin’s theory of evolution helped spark a debate over sign language between “manualists” and “oralists” that led ultimately to a late-nineteenth-century “campaign to eradicate” American Sign Language.