Immigrant Coping and Adaptation

Book Review of Paul H. Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn (eds.), Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ISBN 0838636918, 289 pages, $ 43.50.

Paul H. Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn have, in Immigrant Experiences: Personal Narrative and Psychological Analysis, brought us a gripping compilation of intimate narratives, intertwined with psychological analysis, of the immigrant experience. Twentieth-century history comes alive as editors Elovitz and Kahn present two kinds of narrative. One is their authors’ personal experiences of immigration or their being affected by the immigrant experiences of the family. The second is their authors’ descriptions of the experiences of their patients as immigrants. For the most part, this anthology — punctuated by discrimination, persecution, and genocide — brings together case studies of traumatic dislocations that have consequences not only for the immigrant and his or her family but also for extended members of the family for several generations. There is, therefore, much heuristic value in Immigrant Experiences.

In the mid-1970s, as the “roots” movement was flourishing in the United States (reflected particularly in black and feminist consciousness), mental health professionals were becoming responsive to the psychological consequences of ethnicity on the well-being of individuals and families. An additional layer — immigration — has its own impact on adaptation. Elovitz and Kahn bring a unique perspective to the growing body of literature on ethnicity, a literature that often describes pathology of minority groups. Immigrants in America can be understood through patterns of coping and adaptation rather than mental illness, which makes this book a significant contribution to the growing literature on ethnicity and mental health.

Furthermore, contributors to Immigrant Experiences are sensitive to the historical-political situations of past and present, which is illustrated by the dynamic nature of living as a foreigner in America and simultaneously being motivated by the current as well as the past situation in a person’s indigenous country. For example, those who left Cuba in 1965 are to this day influenced in their daily life by politics in Cuba and by Americans’ reactions to the Castro regime.

The narratives begin dramatically with a firsthand account by a child of a German SS officer who learned about his father’s role in the Holocaust 30 years after liberation. As the taboos against “breaking the silence” have eroded, more and more children of Nazis are confronting their family

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history, particularly of their fathers’ activities during the Third Reich. As a youth, Peter W. Petschauer, a professor of history at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, did not witness the extreme persecution of Jews in Berlin because he migrated to the German-speaking area of Northern Italy a few months before the outbreak of World War II. After the war, Petschauer’s father was in American prisons for three years, and his mother was under house arrest in Italy. In the late 1940s Peter attended monastery schools in West Germany and Holland. When his parents divorced, Peter felt he could no longer live with his mother and welcomed the opportunity afforded him to emigrate to the United States. One does not get the sense that Petschauer lives with the daily angst and conflicts of a child of Nazis, unlike the children of Nazis who remained in Germany as explored in accounts such as Born Guilty edited by Jean Steinberg and Peter Sichrovsky (1988) and Legacy of Silence by Dan Bar-On (1989). He also seems to be empathic of the choices his father faced during the Nazi reign.

As a contributing author, Charlotte Kahn, whose family escaped Germany right before World War II and eventually arrived in America, draws a sharp contrast between the experience of Peter Petschauer, who is accepted and given good guidance to develop professionally in the United States, and that of herself as a child ridiculed by Jewish classmates for speaking German. In Germany she was persecuted as a Jew and in the United States she was ostracized for being a German.

The stories of some of these immigrants leaving their native countries read like suspense novels. Olga Marlin, today a psychoanalyst, left Prague when the Iron Curtain was dividing Europe in two parts. She describes how Western societies represented “the image of freedom [which] was connected with … conscious and unconscious fantasies and dreams.” America “symbolized a great land for unlimited possibilities and unlimited freedom….” In 1966 Marlin obtained a tourist visa and joined a group of factory workers who were on a three-day trip to Vienna. She took a small suitcase so as not to be noticed, eventually excused herself from the group, and found her way to the American Consulate, all the time living with the fear of being caught and arrested. What was most difficult, she poignantly describes, was crossing “the inner border of fear inside of me. “Marlin knew she could not return home; to her, the move was final. However, after the democratization of Czechoslovakia in 1989, Marlin was invited to teach psychoanalysis at her alma mater, Charles University in Prague. After grappling with the issues of loss and mourning discussed in her chapter, Marlin returned.

In the United States foreigners and naturalized Americans are closely attuned to their country of origin. The question of “going back” frequently arises. Hector Sabelli, who left his native Argentina to accept a fellowship in Chicago, returned to teach at the University of Rosario only to leave again when the military junta took over. His political views differed from those of his mother, who remained in Argentina and continued to live her bourgeois life. Sabelli identifies with his Hispanic culture and it is that identity that enables him to embrace his new American society. The most painful — indeed, often tragic — legacy of these political regimes in which freedom of communication is denied is the breakup of families. But immigrants mourn not only people who were lost to them, but also their countries of origin. It matters not how oppressive conditions may have been in those countries. The country of origin is like a mother. No matter how difficult she is, she is still your mother.

The chapter on Israeli emigrants is especially interesting in this regard. Israeli emigrant Danielle Knafo (with the Israeli Ariella Yaari) explains the ongoing guilt and shame that Israelis feel when they come to the United States. Despite the political strife in the region, most immigrants do not leave Israel because of the hardships of politics; their reasons are much more personal. Israelis maintain their Israeli culture and do not necessarily embrace Americanization. Israelis often think of — and talk about — going back to the “Promised Land.” After writing her chapter, Knafo left her Manhattan psychology/psychoanalysis practice and returned to Israel.

While for Israeli emigrants the longing is for the land and the people, for others it is a need to understand what happened. Charlotte Kahn returned to Germany five times to interview East and West Germans who were children during the Third Reich. She was able to witness the difference in communication before and after the Berlin Wall came down. Kahn introduces the interesting concept of how a person can feel like an émigré without leaving his or her country of origin. Kahn discusses, first, intellectuals who opposed the Nazi regime but did not flee. These people felt

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detached from their immediate environment the way immigrants often feel in a new country. Second, East Berliners felt that they were in a different country after the Wall came down, even though they did not emigrate. Such an intriguing concept might fruitfully be applied to other groups caught in the rapid changes of modern history.

The authors of Immigrant Experiences did not fall into the trap of stereotyping those in their ethnic group with the one exception of Roberta Ann Shechter, who writes about the influence of Jewish culture on psychotherapy. Schechter, the descendant of 19th-century immigrants, concludes that “conscious and unconscious beliefs form a pattern that makes the average Jewish patient vulnerable to the development of masochistic personality trends.” Her chapter is unfortunately filled with one platitude after another, to wit,

In the boroughs of New York City everyone feels marginal … in the New York metropolitan area [are] second or third generation Americans, whose Jewish identity has never faced the challenge of the dominant culture…. In surface behavior they may seem very American, but the cultural inner structure coloring their intrapsychic conflicts is not.

One might well ask, what is “American”?

The personal essays in Immigrant Experiences convey the transforming experiences of the authors. Their research and therapeutic work is unique because of what each author experienced. The book’s peroration to the reader is that the key to an adaptive immigration is not an elusive “melting pot” — which does not exist in a pluralistic America, anyway — but in integrating one’s own immigrant past with a pluralist present. Immigrant Experiences helps illumine this path.

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