13 - Was Modernism Antitotalitarian?

Summary

For the immigrant and ethnic narratives from The Life Stories, The Promised Land, and Giants in the Earth to Call It Sleep, Laughing in the Jungle, and Mount Allegro the decisive international connections were those that linked “Americans in the making” with various countries, or villages, of origin. For Antin, it was Polotzk, for Rölvaag, the island of Dönna, for Saroyan, Bitlis in eastern Anatolia, and for Roth’s David, the village Veljish. In the last two chapters in Mount Allegro, Mangione returned to his mother’s birthplace Realmonte (or “Munderialli,” as the natives called it), his father’s original home in Porto Empedocle, and other places in the vicinity of the Sicilian city Agrigento.

The Native’s Return: An American Immigrant Visits Yugoslavia and Discovers His Old Country (1934) took Louis Adamic, on a Guggenheim fellowship he received with the help of Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken, back to his birthplace in the Slovenian village of Blato. His first home seemed much smaller than the emigrant had remembered it, for now he had the “consciousness of the Empire State Building and the interior of the Grand Central in New York City.” Adamic was impressed, however, by the “bright green of the meadows” with “big splashes of buttercups and purple clover ahum with bees” as well as “forgetmenots in abundance” and “more lilies-of-the-valley in one spot” than he had seen in “nineteen years in America.” America seemed to stand for the impressive scale of its man-built environment, while Blato had nostalgic value as pure nature, and Adamic clearly cherished both.