Book Review

Since 1977 the British Association for American Studies has published a series of pamphlets "designed to make widely available the fruits of recent research and current thinking on major problems in all areas of American Studies." The series is aimed at the student rather than the scholar. Further information on the series may be had from BAAS Pamphlets, University of Durham, Durham DH1, 3JT, England. The pamphlet reviewed here, T h e Immigrant Experience in American Literature, is written by Edward A. Abramson, University of Hull. Abramson's "main research interest" is Jewish-American writing and this interest is clearly reflected in the pamphlet. The pamphlet is divided into two main sections, each covering one of "two distinctive traditions in ... immigrant writing, each of them focussing on one of the two essential destinations of the immigrant the land or the city. It is of course no accident that the Scandinavians were primarily responsible for developing the literature about immigrant settlement on the land, especially in the West, nor that Jewish immigrant writers took for their preserve the American city with its promise of freedom and problems of assimilation and secularization. The contribution of these two literatures to American thought and culture is incalculable, and it is with them and associated works that this essav will primarily concern itself' (p. 6). This statement raises two auestions that are not dealt with in the pamphlet. The Scandinavian contribution to "literature about immigrant settlement on the land" may not be an "accident" (whatever that word should mean to a historian), but the reasons for the bulk and quality of this contribution are not so obvious to me as Abramson's "of course" suggests. In the context of the third sentence in the quotation, "incalculable" has a meaning roughly synonymous with "very great." I would suggest, however, that the Scandinavian contribution is literally incalculable in the sense that it is for the most Dart written in one of the Scan-