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BOOK REVIEW By RICHARD J. SHEREIKIS (with excerpts) When Chicago was young Jones, Peter d'A. and Holli, Melvin G., eds. AN APOCRYPHAL anecdote tells of a immigrant to the city who moves into a neighborhood and somehow manages to assemble the money to rent a store front and open a little restaurant. He works hard, learns the language and prospers as word spreads through his neighborhood. Soon he needs to enlarge and remodel, and needs money to do so. He journeys downtown an alien country to him to a recommended bank, and waits nervously to speak to someone about a loan. Finally an official motions him over, and the restauranteur begins to tell of his business and his need. The banker gapes at him, astonished at the unintelligible and exotic dialect the man is speaking. The banker can't understand a word, but it sounds like somethings he's heard an echo of before. It takes an hour and a half for the staff of the bank to figure out the problem, but finally a blonde-haired teller named Johnson comes to the rescue: the restaurant man has learned to speak Swedish, the language of the neighborhood he settled in. That could never happen again, of course, what with radio and television blaring standard English at you day and night, and the gradual disappearance of neighborhoods where languages other than English are the lingua franca. But that Chinese businessman was experiencing simultaneously the effects of both assimilation and cultural pluralism, the divergent routes traveled by all ethnic groups that have come to Chicago. And those two routes comprise the major organizing principle for a new book on ethnics assembled and edited by two history professors at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. In Ethnic Chicago, Peter d'A. Jones and Melvin G. Holli have produced a worthy sequel to their earlier work, The Ethnic Frontier (1977), which contained essays on disparate ethnic groups with some emphasis on their historical roots. This new book, tighter and more coherent as a volume, is composed of eight essays organized under the two major headings of "Cultural Pluralism" and "The Melting Pot." The first group contains essays on the Irish from 1870-1900, on Jews in Chicago and their migration through various neighborhoods and to the suburbs, on how Greeks have used both formal and informal education to maintain their ethnic identity, on Ukrainian nationalism in the city, and on the growth and development of a close-knit Italian community in Chicago Heights. As the heading suggests, these are accounts of ethnic groups which, more or less, managed to maintain their separateness despite the inevitable dilutions of national identity which result from living in an amorphous country like ours. In most cases, especially among the Irish in the latter part of the 19th century and, more recently, among the Jews and Greeks, it was the religious and nationalistic prejudice of the host culture that served, paradoxically, to weld the minorities into coherent community forces. As Michael Funchion writes about the effects of anti-Irish sentiment in Chicago: ". . . it constantly forced them (the Irish) to defend their own traditions, as well as their loyalty to the United States, and, in the process reinforce their ethnic identity." Funchion's essay, like the others in this section, is rich in lore and detail about the various civic, religious and social organizations that gave support to groups which sought to keep alive their native traditions. And Irving Cutler's essay, "The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb," is outstanding for its vivid description of the Jewish dispersion from the Maxwell Street area to various parts of the South Side, to Greater Lawndale on the West Side, on to the North Side and more recently to suburbs like Lincolnwood and Skokie. The "Melting Pot" section of the book is shorter, yet equally disparate, touching on the Irish again (from a political perspective), on the downfall of German Kultur during World War I, and on the remarkable story of Chicago's Japanese-Americans, most of whom came to the city in the aftermath of their internment in the notorious camps during World War II. Concluded on next page
October 1981 | Illinois Issues | 15
Continued from page 15 Paul Green traces the development of the predominantly Irish political machine that was set running, ironically, by Anton Cermak, a Bohemian. Green's account of the development of what was essentially a multi-ethnic machine is interesting for some of its political detail, but that very detail also makes "Irish Chicago" almost tedious, confining itself so narrowly to the political machinations of a seemingly endless list of local functionaries. Melvin G. Holli's "The Great War Sinks German Kultur" is a fine and thorough piece on the rising and then falling fortunes of the sizable German community in Chicago prior to and during World War I. Using quotations from contemporary foreign language newspapers, Holli shows how the German community waxed hot and heavy-handed about the inferiority of Slavs and other eastern Europeans in the earliest years of the war before the U.S. involvement. But after a round of German atrocities and attacks on civilians (such as the sinking of the Lusitania in 1918), the Germans became the persecuted in Chicago and their language disappeared from the public schools. Masako Osako's account of the assimilation of Japanese-Americans in Chicago reveals another facet of the results of prejudice, this time racial. Osako traces the early Japanese migration to the west coast of the U.S., and then reminds us of those shameful internment camps of World War II. The Japanese community in Chicago burgeoned in the aftermath of those camps, growing from only 390 in 1940 to 10,829 by 1950, and to about 15,732 now. Osaka's text is supplemented with pictures and graphs that tell a story of assimilation that is very different from the pattern in the Chinese-American community a contrast that Osaka analyzes rather fully. Ethnic Chicago, in short, is an uneven but generally helpful and interesting blend of essays. Most of the authors have roots in the ethnic groups they write about, and in most cases that gives their works a feel of substance and authenticity. Some essays could stand some infusions of anecdote or humor, the kinds of things that might render more fully and colorfully the values and traditions that Chicago's foreign-born citizens have brought to the city over the years. But every essay is full of information, and the whole, like the city, is really larger than the sum of its parts. Richard J. Shereikis is associate editor of Illinois Issues and associate professor of literature at Sangamon State University. He grew up on the south side of Chicago. 16 | October 1981 | Illinois Issues |
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