Teaching Autobiography
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The History of Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States
The summer of 2006 I had the opportunity to teach special graduate section at Brooklyn College to social studies teachers in the New York City school system. Here are some of the assignments:
1) 3) If I had had the time, I would have used Ben Reisman along with Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams, a Vietnamese refugee's deeply conflicted, very rich memoir of cataclysm in two worlds. Sometimes the woundedVietnamese past collides with the American Dream of affluence and acceptance in Lam's adopted home in San Francisco--at great cost to his family. Sometimes the "parochialness" of place--Vietnam--and the long history in that place where, evocatively, Lam's umbilical cord is buried, stand against the new cosmopolitan transnational who transcends particularist, increasingly porous boundaries of our new globalized world. The Viet Kieu, members of the Vietnamese diaspora, return for a time but their visits never quench their thirst for home. Their Vietnam is broken. There is only the memory of place Lam seems desparate to integrate into his present, and no wonder: in the boundary-less world in which he moves, memory of place is perhaps his only home. Through the supreme act of conjuring that is the memoirist's task, he wants to make memory real, somehow to bring back the photos he burned at his mother's behest in his final act before escaping to Guam as a boy of eleven, and he assures us that he can bring them back. But even if he could, photos are only photos, imprints of what was. As immigrant narratives, the stories in My Future Is in America evoke that same tension between past and present, but the American Dream stands in for the possibilities of the present and future more than the transnational vision of Lam's account.
2) Selections from the autobiography of Chaim Kusnetz, pp. 251-3, in which he describes the famine in the Volga region in the early 1920s.
This served a number of purposes: primary source documentation of the relationship among hunger migration and Jewishness the students read about in Hasia Diner's book, Hungering for America; evidence of "remittances" in a discussion of transnationalism; prolonged family separation; the relationship between upheaval of the Russian Civil War and the spike in Jewish migration just before immigration restriction in 1924.
3) Selections from the autobiography of Chaim Kusnetz. Pp. 260-262: about his conflict with his father over his religious observance upon his arrival in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1923 (this section also works well with Diner as there's lots about food and its abundance); pp. 265-267: the conflict over religion between Kusnetz's father and mother; p. 275: the resolution of the conflict between the parents.
We looked at conflict within the family during the process of migration that involves separation of several years. We studied the Jewish situation in the 1920s next to a contemporary case, Peggy Levitt's Transnational Villagers, a study of the migration of townspeople from Miraflores in the Dominican Republic to Boston (and, often, back).
To my mind, Transnational Villagers is a devastating portrait of the dependency of Miraflores on its migrant community. There is a direct parallel with many shtetlekh of eastern Europe in the inter-war period, which were almost completely dependent on the philanthropy of their landslayt (people from the same hometown or region) in the United States.
The History of Immigration and Ethnicity in the United States
The summer of 2006 I had the opportunity to teach special graduate section at Brooklyn College to social studies teachers in the New York City school system. Here are some of the assignments:
1) 3) If I had had the time, I would have used Ben Reisman along with Andrew Lam's Perfume Dreams, a Vietnamese refugee's deeply conflicted, very rich memoir of cataclysm in two worlds. Sometimes the woundedVietnamese past collides with the American Dream of affluence and acceptance in Lam's adopted home in San Francisco--at great cost to his family. Sometimes the "parochialness" of place--Vietnam--and the long history in that place where, evocatively, Lam's umbilical cord is buried, stand against the new cosmopolitan transnational who transcends particularist, increasingly porous boundaries of our new globalized world. The Viet Kieu, members of the Vietnamese diaspora, return for a time but their visits never quench their thirst for home. Their Vietnam is broken. There is only the memory of place Lam seems desparate to integrate into his present, and no wonder: in the boundary-less world in which he moves, memory of place is perhaps his only home. Through the supreme act of conjuring that is the memoirist's task, he wants to make memory real, somehow to bring back the photos he burned at his mother's behest in his final act before escaping to Guam as a boy of eleven, and he assures us that he can bring them back. But even if he could, photos are only photos, imprints of what was. As immigrant narratives, the stories in My Future Is in America evoke that same tension between past and present, but the American Dream stands in for the possibilities of the present and future more than the transnational vision of Lam's account.
2) Selections from the autobiography of Chaim Kusnetz, pp. 251-3, in which he describes the famine in the Volga region in the early 1920s.
This served a number of purposes: primary source documentation of the relationship among hunger migration and Jewishness the students read about in Hasia Diner's book, Hungering for America; evidence of "remittances" in a discussion of transnationalism; prolonged family separation; the relationship between upheaval of the Russian Civil War and the spike in Jewish migration just before immigration restriction in 1924.
3) Selections from the autobiography of Chaim Kusnetz. Pp. 260-262: about his conflict with his father over his religious observance upon his arrival in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 1923 (this section also works well with Diner as there's lots about food and its abundance); pp. 265-267: the conflict over religion between Kusnetz's father and mother; p. 275: the resolution of the conflict between the parents.
We looked at conflict within the family during the process of migration that involves separation of several years. We studied the Jewish situation in the 1920s next to a contemporary case, Peggy Levitt's Transnational Villagers, a study of the migration of townspeople from Miraflores in the Dominican Republic to Boston (and, often, back).
To my mind, Transnational Villagers is a devastating portrait of the dependency of Miraflores on its migrant community. There is a direct parallel with many shtetlekh of eastern Europe in the inter-war period, which were almost completely dependent on the philanthropy of their landslayt (people from the same hometown or region) in the United States.
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