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Steven G. Kellman
Opposed to the teaching of other languages in her state’s public schools, Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who was elected governor of Texas in 1924, is said to have said, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for the children of Texas.” Ferguson likely did not make that preposterous claim, but the durability of the apocryphal anecdote is symptomatic of American linguaphobia. Although the United States is largely a nation of immigrants, the children of those immigrants often abandon their parents’ languages. The assimilated third generation usually speaks only what H.L. Mencken, in the title of a book published in 1919, at the end of an unprecedented wave of immigration, called The American Language. Most people in the world are multilingual, but because English is a global language and it is felt that no other tongue is needed, Anglophone monolingualism is the norm in the United States. During World War I, when the teaching of German was banned in American schools and some states even outlawed the teaching of any foreign language, monolingualism was endorsed by law.
The canon of American literature is, accordingly, usually regarded as written exclusively in the American language. Study of the literature of the United States is conventionally delegated to departments of English, academic units defined by their linguistic focus. (Since the Americas stretch from Nunavit, the northernmost tip of Canada, to Águila Islet, the southernmost tip of Chile, the term “American literature” is less precise than “literature of the United States.”) The reason that the works of John Donne, Chinua Achebe, W.B. Yeats, Zora Neale Hurston, Patrick White, Nadine Gordimer, and R.K. Narayan are all studied within a department of English and not scattered among seven departments is neither thematic nor geographic but rather linguistic. And it is conventionally assumed that anything that qualifies as American literature, from John Smith’s A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Hapned in Virginia Since the First Planting of that Colony (1608) and William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (1630–1651) to the latest issue of the New Yorker, is written in English. However, in 2011, the US Census Bureau found that 60.6 million people (21% of the population of the United States) speak a language other than English at home (Ryan 2013). And much of the literature of what is now the United States has long spoken a language other than English. That fact has begun to be recognized by individual scholars, journals, and universities. Through conferences, seminars, and publications, the Longfellow Institute at Harvard University (Longfellow n.d.) has been a leader in the study of what it calls LOWINUS (Literature of What Is Now the United States) in Languages Other Than English.
Just as authentic American history does not begin with the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, American literature begins much earlier, with oral compositions in indigenous tongues. Travel narratives by Spanish explorers – such as La relación of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542) – and French explorers – such as Des Sauvages: ou voyage de Samuel Champlain, de Brouages, faite en la France nouvelle l’an 1603 (1604) – predate texts in English in America. The subsequent four centuries have produced a rich body of writing – by travelers, exiles, immigrants, and natives – in dozens of languages other than English. They refute Theodore Roosevelt’s contention, in 1907, that “We have room for but one language in this country, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house” (Roosevelt 1926: 554).
The motto on the Great Seal of the polyglot United States, E pluribus unum, is in Latin, as are the official mottos of more than 20 states. The motto of California is Greek (Eureka), of Hawaii is Hawaiian (Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono), of Maryland is Italian ( Fatti maschii, parole femine ), of Minnesota is French ( L’étoile du Nord), of Montana is Spanish (Oro y plata), and of Washington is Chinook (Al‐ki). Such place names as Alaska, Anaheim, Baton Rouge, Brooklyn, Honolulu, Los Angeles, and Mississippi constitute fossilized evidence of the presence of languages other than English. Despite sporadic movements to promote “English only,” the government of the United States has never sanctioned a single official language. Details of the Declaration of Independence were first made public in Der Pennsylvanische Staatsbote, a German newspaper, on 5 July 1776, a day before the English‐language press reported the story. At the time, about half the population of Pennsylvania spoke German and, as Marc Shell points out, “In 1776, after all, only about 40 percent of people living in what was then the United States were anglophone” (Shell 2000: 688). After the Revolution, hostility in the former colonies toward English, a vestige of their subservience to London, led some patriots to propose a new tongue for the new nation; French, German, Greek, and Hebrew were briefly considered (Baron 1992: 37). A formidable body of writing – belles‐lettres as well as utilitarian prose – in those and other languages would be produced in the United States during the next three centuries.
The Ethnic Press
Der Pennsylvanische Staatsbote is an early example of the German‐language newspapers that proliferated in the United States. Though it went out of business after a year, even Benjamin Franklin published one, Die Philadelphische Zeitung. By 1890, there were more than 1000 newspapers – in Philadelphia as well as Baltimore, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and elsewhere – publishing in German, catering to a huge influx of European immigrants during the nineteenth century. More than 170 German‐language newspapers were at one time or another publishing in Cincinnati alone. Founded in 1835 in St. Louis, Anzeiger des Westens for a while had the largest circulation of any newspaper in any language in Missouri. World War I cast a pall over all things German, and advertising dried up. In addition, the readership disappeared as immigration slowed to a trickle, and German Americans assimilated to English. Founded in 1834, the New Yorker Staats‐Zeitung, whose circulation once exceeded that of all but two English‐language papers in New York, is one of the few German‐language newspapers that survived into the twenty‐first century.
The Yiddish press, whose readership of Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in the United States later in the nineteenth century than the Germans, is another dramatic example of the presence of writing in languages other than English. At the height of their influence, Yiddish newspapers representing a wide spectrum of political and religious affiliations were published daily to large, devoted readerships. Der Tog, which ceased publication in 1971, prided itself on its sophistication and featured fiction by Peretz Hirshbein and Joseph Opatoshu. Morgen Freiheit, which ceased publication in 1988, was affiliated with the Communist Party USA, and included Mike Gold among its contributors. The most influential and durable of the Yiddish newspapers was Forverts (The Forward), a socialist publication that featured Morris Rosenfeld, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Elie Wiesel. At its peak, in the early 1930s, Forvarts had a daily circulation of 275 000 (Forward n.d.), though by 2013 it had become an English‐language newspaper with a biweekly Yiddish edition.
Several newspapers with differing political orientations have served overseas Chinese in North America. Founded in 1976 in New York, the World Journal is, with a circulation of 350 000, the largest daily newspaper publishing in Chinese in the United States. Founded in 1981 in Monterey Park, California, International Daily News is generally more sympathetic toward the Beijing government than the World Journal. Published in San Francisco from 1900 to 1951, Chung Sai Yat Po generally maintained a neutral political stance.
The first Spanish newspaper in what would become the United States was probably El Misisipi, founded in New Orleans in 1808, but it was soon followed by another New Orleans publication, El Mensagero Luisianés, in 1809. La Gaceta de Texas and El Mexicano were begun in 1813 in Nacogdoches, Texas and Natchitoshes, Louisiana, respectively. Commenting on the profusion of Spanish publications in subsequent years, Nicolás Kanellos notes, “It is estimated that some 2500 periodicals were issued between 1808 and 1960, to carry news of commerce and politics as well as poetry, serialized novels, stories, essays, and commentary both from the pens of local writers as well as reprints of the works of the most highly regarded writers and intellectuals of the entire Hispanic world, from Spain to Argentina” (Kanellos 2002: 3). Newspapers in Arabic, Bengali, French, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Vietnamese, and other languages have served similar functions of informing and connecting their respective linguistic communities in the United States.
Travelers and Exiles
Several notable authors have made important literary contributions in their native languages while temporary residents of the United States. While touring the young United States in the 1830s in order to inspect penal institutions, Alexis de Tocqueville formulated the trenchant observations about the new American society that would become his classic De la démocratie en Amérique (1835; Democracy in America). Though Gottfried Duden is no longer nearly as well‐known or respected, the practical impact of his writing is undeniable. During the three years he lived on a farm in Missouri before returning to Germany in 1827, he wrote Bericht über eine Reise nach den westlichen Staaten Nordamerika’s (1839; Report of a Journey to the Western States of North America), a book that offered such a glowing, romantic account of the Missouri River valley between St. Louis and Hermann, Missouri that tens of thousands of German immigrants flocked to the area.
The most celebrated of Cuban poets, José Martí, composed his collection Versos Sencillos (1891; Simple Verses) while living in exile in New York. Mariano Azuela drew on his experiences as a participant in the Mexican Revolution when he wrote his novel Los de abajo (1915; The Underdogs) in El Paso, Texas, where the counterrevolutionary forces of Victoriano Huerta forced him into temporary exile. The Spaniard Federico García Lorca was studying at Columbia University in 1929–1930 when he composed the poems that would be published posthumously in 1940 as Poeta en Nueva York (Poet in New York). Many significant works of what the Germans call Exilliteratur, works composed in exile from Nazi Germany, were written in German while their authors found refuge in the United States. Both Bertolt Brecht and Thomas Mann spent the war years in Santa Monica, California before returning to Europe. It was there that Brecht wrote his play Der Kaukasische Kreidekreis (1948; The Caucasian Chalk Circle) and Mann his novels Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (1947; Doctor Faustus) and Der Erwählte (1951; The Holy Sinner). It was in southern California that Franz Werfel wrote his final play, Jacobowsky und der Oberst (1944; Jacobowsky and the Colonel), and Hermann Broch completed his final novel, Der Tod des Vergil (1945; The Death of Virgil), in Princeton, New Jersey. The French aviator and author Antoine de Saint‐Exupéry spent more than two years of World War II in New York, during which he wrote Pilote de guerre (1942; Flight to Arras), Le Petit Prince (1943; The Little Prince), and Lettre à un otage (1944; Letter to a Hostage). It was during a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Iowa that Luisa Valenzuela wrote El gato eficaz (1972; Cat‐o‐Nine‐Death) and later, in New York, during a 10‐year exile from the military dictatorship that had taken over her native Argentina, that she wrote Cola de lagartija (1983; The Lizard’s Tail). After fleeing Cuba, where he had been imprisoned as a dissident and homosexual, in 1980, Reinaldo Arenas continued writing in Spanish – books including Antes que anochezca (1992), an autobiography that achieved success in its English translation as Before Night Falls (1993) and as a 2000 film directed by Julian Schnabel. After being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1974, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent 17 years on a 52‐acre estate in Cavendish, Vermont, where he composed the ambitious cycle of novels called Кра&c.acute;сное колесо&c.acute; (The Red Wheel), before returning to Russia in 1994.
It is probably as much of a stretch to appropriate these examples for the literature of the United States as to claim The Sun Also Rises (1926), which Ernest Hemingway wrote in Paris, for French literature or Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984), which Gore Vidal wrote in Ravello, for Italian literature. But the temptation to do so testifies to the bureaucratic impulse to assign nationalities to books as though they were travelers in need of a passport.
Spanish
At more than 17% of the population, Hispanics or Latinos – people whose background is in a Spanish‐speaking culture – are often said to be the largest minority in the United States. Many are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants from such varied origins in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and Spain that it is difficult to generalize about the literature they have produced. Others who live in a wide swath of territory from Florida to California that once belonged to Spain or Mexico did not emigrate but instead were absorbed by the United States. Therefore it is no surprise to find Spanish texts written within what is now the United States. Because of the magnetic power of mainstream American culture, it is also no surprise to find Hispanic writers abandoning Spanish entirely or else mixing it with English.
The journals kept by Juan Ponce de León during his exploration of Florida in the early sixteenth century mark Spanish as the first European language to be written within what is now the United States. Other explorers, conquistadors, missionaries, and settlers in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, before those territories were absorbed into the United States, wrote in Spanish. Composed between 1606 and 1607, Alonso Gregorio de Escobedo’s 22 000‐verse epic La Florida is probably the first poem composed in and about a part of what is now the United States. In 1610, Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá published his Historia de la Nueva Mexico, an epic of 11 891 unrhymed hendecasyllabic lines that recounts the expedition into New Mexico led by Juan Oñate to convert the Indians to Catholicism. Later works in Spanish include Los Comanches, a play attributed to Pedro Bautista Pino and composed between 1774 and 1780 that reenacts the final campaign, led by Juan Bautista de Anza, to subdue the marauding Comanches; it continues to be performed ritualistically every Christmas in Alcalde, New Mexico. Corridos, popular, topical ballads, continue to be composed in Spanish and performed along the Mexico border.
However, Latinos in the United States have increasingly turned to English as their medium of expression. When Juan Seguin, a Tejano hero of the Texas Revolution and later mayor of San Antonio, wanted to restore his reputation after being forced to flee Texas by bigoted, violent Anglo newcomers, he explained his case in English in a book he titled Personal Memoirs of John N. Seguin (1858). Most of the most prominent contemporary Latino writers, including Julia Alvarez, Rudolfo Anaya, Sandra Cisneros, Junot Díaz, Cristina García, Oscar Hijuelos, Cherríe Moraga, Alberto Ríos, and Gary Soto, write – and live – primarily in English. Nevertheless, there are remarkable exceptions. One of the foundational texts of modern Chicano fiction, …y no se lo tragó la tierra (1971; And the Earth Did Not Devour Him), Tomás Rivera‘s autobiographical stories about childhood as a migrant farm worker, was written in Spanish. In Miguel Méndez’s Peregrinos de Aztlán (1974; Pilgrims of Aztlán), a retired 80‐year‐old general who now makes a living washing cars in Tijuana uses highly wrought Spanish to tell stories that encapsulate Chicano experience along the border. Though she has been living in California since 1989, prolific, popular Chilean‐born Isabel Allende has written all of her books, including Retrato en Sepia (2000; Portrait in Sepia) and La Isla Bajo el Mar (2009; The Island Beneath the Sea), in Spanish. Ariel Dorfman, another Chilean based in the United States, in North Carolina, publishes in both Spanish and English. He is best known for La muerte y la doncella (1990), a play about the aftermath of a brutal government regime, which he translated himself as Death and the Maiden (1991). Dorfman wrote his memoir in English as Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey (1998), but then a few months later reconceived it in Spanish as Rumbo al Sur, deseando el Norte (1998). Similarly, Esmeralda Santiago published two versions of her autobiography, writing When I Was Puerto Rican (1994) in English before producing Cuando era puertorriqueña (1994) in Spanish.
In his Klail City Death Trip Series, a cycle of 15 novels depicting life in a fictional county in the Rio Grande Valley throughout the twentieth century, Rolando Hinojosa employs both Spanish and English – the Spanish his characters would have spoken early in the century ceding to the English that comes to dominate in later years. Many contemporary Hispanic writers employ code switching – mixing both Spanish and English in a single work, even a single line of poetry, as in the work of Lorna Dee Cervantes, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Pedro Pietri, and Tino Villanueva, among others. In “How to Tame the Wild Tongue,” a chapter in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa refuses to be confined to a single language and celebrates the eight different registers of English and Spanish that constitute Chicano identity: standard English; working‐class and slang English; standard Spanish; standard Mexican Spanish; northern Mexican Spanish dialect; Chicano Spanish; Tex‐Mex; and pachuco/caló.
Yiddish
Yiddish is the Ashkenazi language that, though written with the Hebrew alphabet, is derived from German and blended with elements of Russian, Polish, and other tongues. For centuries, Jews throughout Eastern Europe used it as their common vernacular, preserving the ancient, sacred Hebrew language exclusively for liturgical and scholarly purposes. In the late nineteenth century, Yiddish began to develop a vibrant secular literature, but a century later, as a result of the extermination of most of its speakers and the assimilation of the children and grandchildren of immigrants, Yiddish literature was moribund. The historical irony was that, once the primary language of socialists, atheists, and other secularists, Yiddish now survived principally as the vernacular of Haredim, pious, insular Jews who refused to profane Hebrew with everyday functions. Leading lives focused on the Torah and its commentaries, they had no use for what the outside world regards as creative writing. By 1978, when Isaac Bashevis Singer, who had been living in the United States since 1935, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he recognized that he was likely to remain the only Yiddish writer ever to receive that supreme honor. Nevertheless, he explained that “Yiddish may be a dying language but it is the only language I know well. Yiddish is my mother language and a mother is never really dead” (Singer 1978a). In his Nobel Lecture, Singer praised Yiddish, the language that, despite fluency in English, he continued to write his stories and novels in, as “the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity” (Singer 1978b: 165).
Between 1881 and 1924, Yiddish was emerging as a supple medium for outstanding poetry, fiction, and drama. That same period coincided with the massive migration to the United States of about 2 500 000 Yiddish‐speaking Jews, mostly from Russia, Poland, Romania, and Austria (Goldstein 2008: 70). The center of gravity for Yiddish began to move from Europe to America, a process facilitated by the extermination of most of Europe’s Yiddish speakers. And when, a year before his death in 1915, Sholem Aleichem, the most beloved of Yiddish authors, whose stories about Tevye the dairyman later inspired the musical Fiddler on the Roof, moved across the Atlantic to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it signaled the displacement of Warsaw by New York as the center of Yiddish literature.
The most popular form of Yiddish literature was drama, and after Russia banned Yiddish theater in 1883, the leading Yiddish actors, playwrights, and impresarios began to make their way to the United States. Second Avenue in New York became the Yiddish theater district, catering to working‐class immigrants with relatively inexpensive tickets to a wide variety of unsophisticated entertainments as well as attempts at more elevated art. Gerald Sorin reports: “By 1918 the city boasted 20 Yiddish theaters, which, in a single year – before the inroads of movies – attracted two million patrons to over a thousand performances” (Sorin n.d.). Moreover, between 1890 and 1940, audiences were attending productions by more than 200 Yiddish troupes based in other cities or performing on tour throughout the United States (Fisher and Londré 2008: 529).
Yiddish theater tended to treat themes – immigration, assimilation, generational conflict – close to the experience of its audiences. It also often translated or adapted works by canonical European authors such as Goethe, Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. However, it was actor‐centered more than text‐centered, and audiences were drawn to histrionic stars such as Jacob Adler, Maurice Schwartz, and Boris Thomashevsky who often took considerable liberties with the plays they were performing. Texts were not often published, but Jacob Gordin, who moved to New York in 1891, stood out among Yiddish playwrights for, among other works, his adaptations Der yidisher kenig lir (1892; The Yiddish King Lear), Der folks faynd (1896; An Enemy of the People), Mirele Efros, oder di yidishe kenigin lir (1898; Mirele Efros or the Jewish Queen Lear), and Di Kreytser sonata (1902; The Kreutzer Sonata). David Pinski, who emigrated to New York in 1899, is the author of Yenkel der Schmid (1906; Yankel the Smith), Der Eibiger Yied (1906; The Eternal Jew), and Gabri un die Froen (1908; Gabri and the Women).
Urban audiences were drawn to Peretz Hirschbein’s evocation of rural life in Grine felder (1916; Green Fields). But the most popular of Yiddish plays was probably the reworking of a Jewish folktale in Der Dybuk (1919; The Dybbuk), which S. Ansky first wrote in Russian and then translated himself into Yiddish. In Der Goylem (1921; The Golem), H. Leivick reworked another Jewish legend. Though Yiddish theater has been revived at various points after World War II, most of its audiences have had to rely on surtitles and on nostalgia for the vanished historical context.
“The best achievements of American Yiddish literature were,” according to Benjamin and Barbara Harshav, “in poetry” (Harshav and Harshav 2007: 7). Most of those best achievements were the product of young immigrants confronting the modern urban world of North America and ambitious to situate their own efforts within cosmopolitan literary movements of the time. They also register a keen awareness of the marginality and vulnerability of the language that they, multilingual, chose as their medium of expression. If it is necessary to impose categories to make sense of one of the richest bodies of American literature in a language other than English, it might do to begin with the “sweatshop” poets, writers such as Morris Rosenfeld, Dovid Edelshtat, and Morris Winchevsky, who respond to the harsh conditions of blue‐collar jobs in New York. The movement known as “Di Yunge,” whose members included younger poets such as Moyshe‐Leyb Halpern, Zishoy Landoy, H. Leivik, and Mani Leyb, pursued an aesthetic of art for art’s sake. “In Zikh” (“The Introspectivists”) were a self‐conscious avant‐garde who flaunted their rejection of conventional forms and their freedom to explore non‐Jewish themes; leading Introspectivists included Yankev Glatshteyn, A. Léyeles, and J.L. Teller. “Di Linke” were poets such as Menke Katz, Malke Lee, and Moyshe Nadir who aligned themselves with the communist left and regarded their poems as instruments of revolution. Many notable American Yiddish poets, particularly women such as Celia Dropkin, Aliza Greenblatt, Anna Margolin, and Malka Heyfets‐Tussman, elude facile classification.
In her 1969 short story “Envy; or Yiddish in America,” Cynthia Ozick anticipated the reaction among neglected, embittered Yiddish writers when Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize nine years later. Singer had been thrust out of obscurity in May, 1953 when Partisan Review published his story “Gimpel Tam” (“Gimpel the Fool”) in a translation by Saul Bellow. Singer’s mastery of short fiction also became evident in such other works as “Der spinozist dersteylung” (“The Spinoza of Market Street”), “Der bal” (“The Gentleman from Cracow”), “Yentl der yeshive‐boher” (“Yentl the Yeshiva Boy”), and “A kroyn fun federn” (“A Crown of Feathers”), all of which evoke the vanished world of European Jewry, as do such novels as Di familye Mushkat (1950; The Family Moskat), Der kunstnmakher fun Lublin (1961; The Magician of Lublin), and Der bal‐tshuve (1983; The Penitent). Singer provided a contemporary American setting for some later work such as Sonim: di geshikhte fun a libe (1972; Enemies: A Love Story) and Gloybn un tsvefl (1981; Lost in America). Criticism of Singer as a perverter of Yiddishkeit preoccupied with the sensuality and superstition of his benighted characters intensified as his international acclaim intensified. Some insisted that his older brother, I.J. Singer, who had proven his mastery of the family saga with Di mishplke Ashkenazi (1936; The Family Ashkenazi) and Di mishpokhe Karnovsky (1943; The Family Carnovsky) was the greater artist. However, I.J. died in New York in 1944 at age 50, perhaps before fulfilling his literary potential.
Another contender might have been a more reticent figure, Chaim Grade, author of novels such as Di agune (1961; The Agunah) and Tsemakh Atlas (1967–1968; The Yeshiva), novels that depict the lives of pious Jews in Eastern Europe. A prolific specialist in historical fiction, Sholem Asch created controversy when, in a trilogy of novels drawn from the New Testament – Der man fun Natzeres (1939; The Nazarene), Der Apostel (1943; The Apostle), and Mary (1949) – he painted a sympathetic portrait of early Christianity.
Chinese Literature
Signed into law in 1882 and not repealed until 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act not only shut off immigration from China but, in its expanded provisions, prohibited exit and reentry of Chinese already in the United States and even immigration of Chinese from any other country. It effectively impeded the production of Chinese literature in the United States for more than half a century. However, some Chinese did manage to make their way to American soil, and some of the most powerful examples of Chinese literature in the United States are the poems carved into the wooden walls of the Angel Island Immigration Station. A government facility near San Francisco, Angel Island is where from 1910 to 1940 approximately one million immigrants from Asia were processed and, under the terms of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese arrivals were held for as long as three years while their identities were verified. Of the more than 135 mostly anonymous and undated poems that have been preserved, most evidence a sophisticated familiarity with Chinese literary traditions. Written in classical T’ang dynasty forms, most of the poems – consisting of four or eight lines with five or seven characters per line – were composed in the Cantonese or Toisanese dialect. Some are eloquent expressions of sorrow and longing, and some advise future immigrants to work hard, cherish their opportunities in America, and remember those left behind. “Imprisoned in this wooden building, I am always sad and bored,” reads one. “I remember since I left my native village, it has been several full moons. / The family at home is leaning on the door, / urgently looking for letters. / Whom can I count on to tell them I am well?” (Yin 2000: 40).
Following the lifting of regional immigration quotas in 1965, the presence in the United States of overseas Chinese increased dramatically, numbering almost four million by the twenty‐first century. Like offspring of other immigrants, ABC (American‐born Chinese) assimilated into English, but a continuing influx of newcomers made Chinese, with more than two million speakers, the third most widely spoken language (after English and Spanish) in the United States. While Frank Chin, David Henry Hwang, Maxine Hong Kingston, Li‐Young Lee, and Amy Tan have gained prominence in Anglophone literature, a substantial corpus has been produced in Chinese. Nevertheless, it has not been the medium even of every Chinese immigrant. Ha Jin, for example, arrived in Boston in 1985 and began writing in English in 1989, after the Tiananmen Square massacre. By 1999, he was proficient enough in the language to win the National Book Award for his novel Waiting. However, many others wrote in their native Chinese even after emigration. Some found popular success with both overseas Chinese and readers in China and Taiwan. Translations of their works into English, by the author or someone else, enabled some to reach American readers without Chinese backgrounds. Immigrants come from a wide variety of regions and speak dialects – Cantonese, Mandarin, Min, Wu, and so forth – that are mutually unintelligible, but, because the dialects employ the same characters, writing has helped create a coherent community of Chinese in the United States.
Overseas Chinese who write in English often feel wary of creating or confirming negative stereotypes of their people that outsiders might be inclined to embrace. However, those who write in Chinese and thus beyond the radar of gweilos (“foreign devils”) feel free to represent more sordid experiences of Chinese in America than are found in the works of Anglophone Chinese writers. Many Chinese‐language novels have lacked any inhibition about exposing the poverty and crime of American Chinatowns. Many have portrayed the ordeals of characters who dared violate the taboos of interracial romance and have challenged conventional views of Chinese as the “model minority.” In Chinese American Literature Since the 1850s, Xiao‐huang Yin notes that, in contrast to English‐language writers, “Chinese‐language writers deal more with compelling issues grounded in an immigrant sensibility, such as the agony of displacement, the dilemma of assimilation and alienation, and the hardship and struggle of daily life in a strange land” (Yin 2000: 167). A striking example is Luo tuo Xiangz (1936), Lao She’s classic story of the hardships that beset a man who tries to make his living pulling a rickshaw in Beijing. In 1945, Rickshaw Boy, an unauthorized translation into English that sanitized the language and plot and substituted a happy ending for the bleak conclusion of the original, became a bestseller in the United States. In Kaoyan (1982), translated as The Ordeal (1993), Yu Lihua depicts the racial animosities complicating a Chinese academic’s struggle for success at an American university. Cao Youfang examines the plight of workers in Chinese restaurants, while Yi Li takes on the exploitation of women in Chinatown sweatshops. Even while focusing on problems unique to the experience of Chinese in America, Chinese‐language writers can, because of the increasingly wide reach of media and the vastness of the Chinese‐speaking population in Asia and the Chinese diaspora, reach a global readership.
French
A French presence in what is now the United States began in 1524 with Giovanni da Verrazzano, who, though Florentine, sailed under a French flag while exploring the Atlantic coast. French literature in what is now the United States could be said to have begun with the letters that Verrazzano sent to his royal patron, François I. The 1763 Treaty of Paris that concluded what Canadians call La guerre de la Conquête and Americans the French and Indian War formally ended French control over much of North America but not use of the French language. One of the most frequently anthologized voices from the post‐Revolutionary period of American history is J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a native of Normandy who settled on a large farm in Orange County, New York and celebrated the virtues of a pastoral life in North America in an influential volume of essays that he called Letters of an American Farmer (1782) and that he revised and expanded in a French edition titled Lettres d’un cultivateur américain (1784). A naturalized American citizen, Crèvecoeur moved between the United States and Europe and published an additional, three‐volume book in French about his travels in Pennsylvania and New York, Voyage dans la haute Pennsylvanie et dans l’État de New York (1801).
Even after the 1804 Louisiana Purchase, when Napoleon Bonaparte sold what would become all or part of 15 states of the United States to Thomas Jefferson, a Francophile who used Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours, a French émigré, as diplomatic intermediary, French remained widely spoken. It was the principal language of Victor Séjour, a native of New Orleans whose first published work, a short story called “Le Mulâtre” (1832; “The Mulatto”), is thought to be “the first published short story by an author of African ancestry born in the United States” (Shell 2000: 147). Moving to Paris in 1836, Séjour found success as a poet and playwright with the ode “Le Retour de Napoléon” and the plays Diégarias (1844) and La Tireuse de Cartes (1859). Another native of New Orleans, Alfred Mercier was a poet, novelist, and playwright best remembered for L’Habitation Saint‐Ybars, ou Maîtres et esclaves en Louisiane (1881; The Saint Ybars Plantation, or Masters and Slaves in Louisiana), a novel of antebellum slave society.
The most notable example of literary Francophonie in the United States in the twentieth century was Julien Green, who was born in Paris to parents from the American South. The first non‐French national (he declined an offer of French citizenship from President Georges Pompidou) elected to the Académie Française, he resigned from that hallowed institution as an affirmation of his American identity. Green wrote most, but not all, of his books in French, but most, like Mont‐Cinère (1926; Avarice House, 1991), Moïra (1950; Moïra, 1980), and the “Dixie” trilogy of Les Pays lointain (1987; The Distant Lands, 1993), Les Etoiles du sud (1989; (The Stars of the South, 1996), and Dixie (1994) are set in Georgia or Virginia.
The son of French Canadian immigrants to Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac, who spoke only French until age six, became famous in English as one of the leading novelists and poets of the Beat movement. However, during the productive period in which he was composing Doctor Sax (1952), The Subterraneans (1953), and On the Road (1957), Kerouac was also writing two novellas in joual, Quebecois French. He wrote La Nuit est ma femme in 1951 and Sur le chemin in 1952 but, not discovered until 2006, they would not be published until 2016.
Born in Montrouge, a suburb south of Paris, Raymond Federman emigrated to the United States after World War II and became admired in the American avant‐garde for unconventional metafictions that he wrote in English or French or occasionally German, sometimes translating himself. Federman’s work in French includes Amer Eldorado (1974; Take It or Leave It, 1976), the bilingual novel The Voice in the Closet/ La Voix Dans Le Cabinet De Débarras (1979), and La Fourrure de ma tante Rachel (1996; Aunt Rachel’s Fur, 2001).
Hebrew
The language of the ancient Israelites, Hebrew ceased being a spoken tongue during the two millennia of the Jewish Diaspora. It remained dormant, reserved for liturgical and scholarly purposes while Jews instead employed local languages or a lingua franca such as Yiddish or Ladino for mundane communications. At the turn of the twentieth century, in an extraordinary feat of linguistic revival, Hebrew was restored to life as the vibrant language of millions of native speakers and eventually the principal language of the state of Israel. The resuscitation of Hebrew happened to coincide with the mass migration of almost three million Jews from Eastern and Central Europe to the United States. Most of them spoke Yiddish, and most were eager to learn English. However, a few quixotic newcomers to the United States attempted to fashion Hebrew into a modern literary instrument, despite the fact that it was alien to the urban America they now called home. Inspired by American literature enough to translate Walt Whitman and Robert Frost into Hebrew, the American Hebraists were estranged from what they saw as the crassness of American society but also cut off from the vibrant Hebrew culture that was flourishing in Palestine.
The stubborn dedication to Hebrew by immigrant poets such as Hillel Bavli, Shimon Ginzburg, and Abraham Regelson is contemporaneous and somewhat analogous to Juneco kaj Amo (1929; Youth and Love), a novel set in Venice that Edward Saxton Payson wrote in the artificial language Esperanto while living in Lexington, Massachusetts. Their linguistic utopianism anticipated the 691‐page volume Capti: Fabula Menippeo‐Hoffmaniana Americana (2011), which its author, Stephen Berard, wrote in the state of Washington and proclaimed “the first novel written in Latin in more than 250 years” (Wilkes 2011). From modest apartments in New York City, Hebrew authors idealized rural America and took a special interest in the extinction of the American Indian, in whom they saw a parallel to their own marginal situation as Jewish immigrants. Several epics were written in Hebrew about those vanishing tribal Americans – including Benjamin Nahum Silkiner’s Mul Ohel Timurah (1910; Before the Tent of Timurah), Israel Efros’s Vigamim Shotqim (1933; Silent Wigwams), and Ephraim Lisitzky’s In Medurot d’akhot (1937; Dying Campfires). The movement produced at least one remarkable novel, Shimon Halkin’s Ad Mashber (1945; Until a Crisis). But the attempt to graft Hebrew poetry and prose onto the literature of the United States seemed to have reached a dead end by the time the last of the major American Hebraists, Gabriel Preil, died in 1993.
In later decades, literary emigrants from Israel would return Hebrew to American soil. In 2015, Reuven Namdar, a resident of Manhattan’s Upper West Side for 15 years, angered nationalists when his novel HaBayit Asher Necharav (2015; The Ruined House) became the first book written outside Israel to win the prestigious national Sapir Prize. Though based in northern California, Maya Arad, who grew up on Kibbutz Nahal‐Oz, writes her fiction, including the bestselling Makom Akher, ViEer Zarah (2003; Another Place, And a Foreign City), in Hebrew. And two prominent Palestinians who left Israel for the United States, Anton Shammas and Sayed Kashua, write in Hebrew.
German
The largest ethnic minority in the United States (“Latino” is a somewhat artificial amalgam of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican, and other groups), German Americans number 46 million according to a 2013 report by the Census Bureau. They are also one of the most fully assimilated; fewer than 5% speak German (“Silent Minority” 2015). Yet the German language was so widely spoken during the early days of the American Republic that in 1794 it took a close 42–41 vote in Congress to defeat a bill mandating the federal government to print laws in German in addition to English. The failed revolutions of 1848 dramatically encouraged German departures to the United States (during the peak decade of immigration, the 1880s, 1.5 million Germans arrived), and German newspapers and publishing houses proliferated throughout the country. With some exceptions, such as Ludwig von Reizenstein’s Die Geheimnisse von New‐Orleans (1853; The Mysteries of New Orleans 2002), most writing in German was journalistic or scholarly.
World War I incited antipathy to all things German. Not only was “sauerkraut” renamed “liberty cabbage,” but the teaching of German was discouraged, even prohibited in some states. Although such writers of German descent as Theodore Dreiser, H.L. Mencken, Henry Miller, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck, and Kurt Vonnegut made their marks in American literature, they did so in English, not German. One exception is Margot Scharpenberg, a poet and fiction writer who was born in Cologne in 1924 but settled in New York in 1962 and published almost two dozen volumes of poetry in German, in addition to short fiction such as the volume Ein Todeskandidat und andere Erzählungen (1970; A Goner and Other Stories).
Und So Weiter
A thorough discussion of multilingual literature in what is now the United States would require many volumes of detailed analysis. More than 250 first languages of the continent, those of the Indigenous peoples, fall outside the scope of a discussion of written literature. American Indians such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor have made important contributions to English‐language writing, but tribal cultures expressed themselves most effectively orally and in their own languages – stories, chants, speeches that were not written down because those languages lacked alphabets until relatively recently. Nor were they created as belles‐lettres the way Cormac McCarthy, for example, conceived Blood Meridian (1985). The Cherokee syllabary was invented by Sequoyah in the 1820s, the same decade in which missionaries devised a 13‐letter alphabet to transcribe Hawaiian, but Navajo was not reduced to writing until the late 1930s. Access to narratives and other verbal creations in Inupiak, Tlingit, Zuni, and other Amerindian languages depended on ethnographic transcriptions, translations of wind into ink.
Literature in Arabic in the United States goes at least as far back as 1831, when Omar ibn Said, who was abducted out of West Africa into slavery, wrote an account of his life in that language. Another Arabic‐speaking transplant, from Lebanon, Khalil Gibran is best known for The Prophet (1923), one of the most widely read books of poetry in any language. Gibran wrote it in English, but his popular Arabic writings include Al‐Ajniha al‐Mutakassira (1912; The Broken Wings).
One of the most admired accounts of pioneer experience in the Upper Midwest is Giants in the Earth (1927). Novelist Ole Edvart Rølvaag, a Norwegian transplant to Minnesota, first published it in two volumes, in Norwegian, as I de dage (1924; In Those Days) and Riket grundlæges (1925; The Kingdom Is Founded), before assisting in its English translation. During more than 20 years spent in Austin, Texas, Lars Gustafsson established his reputation as one of the leading Swedish writers, with poetry and fiction including Världens tystnad före Bach (1982; The Stillness of the World Before Bach, 1988), Bernard Foys tredje rockad (1986; Bernard Foy’s Third Castling, 1988), and En kakelsättares eftermiddag (1991; A Tiler’s Afternoon, 1993). Another Swedish author of note was Siv Cedering, who immigrated to San Francisco at age 14 and wrote in both English and her native Swedish, including the novels Leken i grishuset (1980; Play in the Pig House) and Oxen (1981). In his first book of poetry, Fjernt fra Danmark – Minder og Stemninger (1925; Far from Denmark – Memories and Moods), published five years after his emigration to the United States, Jens Thorgaard uses Danish to express longing for his distant homeland.
Among books in less commonly spoken languages, Dafydd Morgan (1897), a novel written by R.R. Williams in Michigan in Welsh, is of particular interest. And Stratis Haviaras should be mentioned for νεκροϕάνεια (1972; Apparent Death), a poetry collection written in Greek, as should Seyfettin Başçillar, who published several volumes of poetry in Turkish after trading Anatolia for New Jersey. Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Vietnamese, among many others, have also been employed by writers in the United States. But the examples cited must stand as synecdochal reminders that English is only the starting point for an appreciation of the full range of multilingual literature in what is now the United States.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 1 (MAGAZINES, LITTLE AND LARGE); CHAPTER 23 (JEWISH AMERICAN LITERARY FORMS).