Back to the UCLA Americanist Research Colloquium (ARC) - Archive of Past Events

"Immigrant Nostalgia and the Dialectic of Value in Abraham Cahan's The Imported Bridegroom"
Sharon Oster, Visiting Lecturer, Department of English, UCLA
May 5, 2005

This essay proposes that we rethink the importance of "place" in American literary realism. It does so by demonstrating the inadequacy of the spatially-defined, nostalgic categories "local color" and "regionalism" for evaluating urban immigrant writing. Abraham Cahan may have been considered a local color writer, but his 1898 novella, The Imported Bridegroom, serves as a good test case for the limits of categories defined by place. I situate Cahan's work at the crossroads of several intersecting "cultures of letters"-post-Bellum regionalism, the local color movement, Howellsian realism, American progressive journalism and Yiddish folklore-to demonstrate his cross-generic complexity, and hence the difficulty of "locating" Cahan. Drawing on both Yiddish folk and Jewish theological sources, I argue that Cahan's story challenges our focus on "location" as a viable source of identity because it introduces temporal factors that escape discussions of space. Cahan disrupts the unity of space with characters that migrate between the Old and New Worlds, and the nostalgic backward glance with Jewish eschatological time. By importing religious Jewishness into a secular form, Cahan illustrates a dialectic between earthly and transcendent forms of value, and spatial and temporal forms of identity. His work suggests that studies of realism are incomplete without fully considering the temporal aspects of immigrant and ethnic literary experience. This essay thus finally asks if our current focus on place--whether the center or margin, local or border--works less to illuminate that experience than to locate our own critical nostalgia.