THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN

Abstract

The 23.5 million Southern and Eastern Europeans who migrated to America between 1880 and the National Origins Act of 1924 formed what is known as the second great wave of immigration in American history. They were also the first to produce a substantial body of immigrant literature. Writers, particularly Jews, created autobiographical fictions that documented the collective immigrant experience through an individual's struggle. Abraham Cahan's Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925), both of which depict the ‘battle for breath’ that characterized New York's Jewish ghetto at the turn of the century, trace the passage of their protagonists from recently arrived immigrants to American ethnics.