New Immigration Stories
By Hazel Rochman and Bill Ott

Leaving home is not what it used to be. It’s no longer a one-way trip across borders to a self-confident, optimistic America; rather, the immigrant journey today is a more ambiguous process involving constant travel back and forth, physical and emotional. Thanks to cell phones and air travel, national boundaries are less rigid today, and the break with the Old Country is not as final. Writing in 1968, in an introductory note to When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw, Isaac Bashevis Singer lamented that “in our time, literature is losing its address.” His concern was that our stories had lost their sense of home and, with that, their identity. Today, the issue is a little different. Literature has multiple addresses. Today’s immigrant narratives reflect their creators’ belief in what Héctor Tobar, author of Translation Nation, calls “a transnational identity,” the notion that “bodies and souls can live between two countries, that the physical border need not exist in the mind.”

But if the authors of the new immigration narratives welcome the ability to cross and recross borders, holding onto the old while embracing the new, they also recognize that balancing multiple worlds and multiple selves takes a psychic toll. Whether they are writing for adults or youth, many of today’s writers on the immigrant experience dramatize the conflicts they feel about “becoming American.” In “Staying On Past Canal Street,” an essay by Linda Sue Park published in the January 2002 issue of Booklist, the Newbery Medal–winning author of A Single Shard discusses the implications of the hyphen in Korean-American. Instead of being a connector, that hyphen somehow implies for Park that she is less American, her background alien, her loyalties perhaps divided. And she says that most hyphenated writers of color resent the implication: “Our ethnicity is assumed to be our only valid subject,” she says, “when like all writers, we have countless interests.”

Questions of ethnicity, race, and prejudice have always been central to immigration narratives, and they remain so today, as do many other themes familiar from such classic immigration novels as Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep: the break from the old country, the journey itself, the shame children feel over their parents’ failure to learn the language or accept a new culture, the longing for “back home,” and the search for roots.

Today’s authors are also reinterpreting or expanding the familiar stories of past immigration, both forced and otherwise, telling the old stories in new ways and finding new stories that earlier writers were unable to tell. In this list, we limit our focus to the new immigration story, but there is another list waiting to be compiled of contemporary retellings of old stories. Such a list would include, for example, Julius Lester’s The Old African, in which the tragic story of Africans sold into slavery is vivified through a combination of brutal history and stirring magic realism; Frank McCourt’s best-selling Angela’s Ashes, which strips the sentimentality away from the story of an Irish family’s travails in both old and new worlds; Graham Salisbury’s YA novel Eyes of the Emperor, which tells a rarely told World War II story about a 16-year-old Japanese American who overcame virulent racism to serve in the U.S. Army; and Louise Erdrich’s recent children’s book The Game of Silence, which re-imagines the story of displaced Native Americans forced to “migrate.”

But that list will have to wait. The annotated bibliography below, a core list including books for adults, young adults, and children, is limited to titles published since 1990 whose subject is immigration today—in a world in conflict with itself, a world where straight lines, whether mapping a journey or connecting cause and effect, have all but disappeared. We make no claim for completeness; a core list, by definition, is only a starting point. To extend our range, we have listed numerous anthologies, collecting excerpts from novels, stories, and memoirs; all of the works included in these anthologies could be placed in the next tier of any immigration reading list. Original publication dates are listed for all titles, but publisher and price information is limited to in-print editions.