On Special Sorrows

This is an interesting little book, although nowhere near as sophisticated as his Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Here, Jacobson re-frames discussions of immigrants to the United States, arguing that immigrants experienced the process more as dislocation and exile from their homes than settlement and producing new lives. Although both are important, historians have traditionally emphasized the importance of forging new selves once in the host country than the loss of old selves in the mother country.

By nature of his subject, tracing immigrant experiences of emigration is a really difficult task. Although he is unable to follow specific experiences in the mother country, Jacobson spends time thinking about linkages between the two through the lens of nationalism—Irish nationalism, Polish nationalism, Zionism, and Yiddish labor nationalism are all included here. While he does not make the case the nationalism was a hegemonic part of immigrant communities, he does make the case that daily life was imbued with the language of nationalism and national identity, allowing immigrants to produce selves that were both American and Old World nationalist.

More than any other part of the book, I thought the last two chapters were fascinating. In it, Jacobson analyzes immigrant responses to the Spanish-American War. He finds that, as rebellions were breaking out in the Philippines and Cuba, immigrants framed them in their own cultural terms. The Spanish, for instance, was framed by Jews as the “inquisition country,” while Irish-Americans called them “Iberian Orangemen.” The nationalist press was largely in favor of the United States going to war against the Spanish to liberate the peoples of the Caribbean and the Philippines from the “Spanish yoke,” but they turned against their host country’s policy when liberation turned to expansionism. A large part of this is that they wanted access to the same liberation for their countrymen at home—the linkages between immigrants and fellow Irishmen, Jews, and Poles were never really broken, and Jacobson does a good job of illustrating that.

That being said, I’d be interested to know exactly how pervasive nationalist ideas were. Jacobson reiterates throughout the book that nationalist ideas were not everything, but they are a stand-in here for immigrants’ connection to their homelands. Is this a useful way of gauging connection to home? I’m not sure, and I’m honestly rather skeptical of the whole premise. This one is worth skimming, but I wouldn’t spend too much time on it.