T 1290.pdf - Pondicherry University DSpace Portal

their children might become Americans. The pressures of theAmericanizing process brought in new problems for the AmericanJewlsh wrlter. With dlsdain for h1s parents' ways, dress andaccent, he often apted for the new at the expense of the old.Traditlons, values, religion-all were subordinated to the needto emulate the Americans or the Jews who were no longer greenhorns. Writers since Cahan, in the first generation who helpedbrldge the two cultures in a host country, wrote of the ongoingbridging experience. Thelr literary talents explored thesoclologlcal dlmenslons of a mlnorlty group. As the ghettoliterature gave way to fiction as a llvlng form, the American-Jewlsh wrlter, who benefitted from the national andinternational processes, wrote of himself, his people, anti-Semitism, the War and the attempt to understand himself and thesociety he llved In. ;he fact that thelr quest for identity-theeffort to create a llterature In a non-WASP (Whlte Anglo SaxonProtestant) coitext helped to create a new genre In literature,thereby demonstrating that the Amerlcan Jew was beginning tofeel at home.By the 1920s America's now Amerlcan Jews, wlth one footIn the old country and the other in the new, put their ghettoproblem behlnd them, and were rebelling against their parents,struggling for their own identities, as did others. In the1930s, in the qrlp of the Great Depression, Jews moved into