T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

without the chance of ever having a home.In Mukherjee's books,everyone lives in a new world, (eventhose who never left home). As tradition breaks down, thecharacters must try to make lives out of the pieces. Newcompositions, suspicious but brave, they run off into the"alien American night", expecting shame, disaster, and gloriousriches. They get them, too, though never quite the way theyimagined. Immigration for Mukherjee needn't mean assimilation."The melting pot, yes, but it's the lumps that interest her.Assimilation implies forgetting, blotting out the past, but thepast is what the present is made of. If she weren't still anIndian Mukherjee wouldn't be the wonderful American writer she1s". (Shulman 1988,19)When Bharatl Mukherlee dedicated her last collection ofstories about immigrants, Darkness, to Bernard Malamud, she wasboth saluting an old friend and aligning hereself down in atraditlon. In modern Amerlcan flction, the immigrant hasclassically been Jewish; writers from Abraham Cahan throughHenry Roth to Malamud himself, have re-worked the facts oftheir history into a rich body of llterary mythology. InDarkness, Mukherjee successfully planted her own experience asan Indian on to that of the American Jews. Now, in ThpMiddleman, she hijacks the whole traditlon of Jewish-Americanwriting and flies off to a destination undreamt of by its