Individualism v. Individuality.
Coming of Age in Young Adult Literature.
Kathryn Laskey’s Dreams in the Golden Country
And Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X.
Burton Weltman
Individualism and Individuality in Coming-of-Age Literature.
Adolescence is a turbulent time of changes for young people in our society. Coming-of-age literature tries to provide role models and exemplary situations to help guide young people through the changes. The genre is diverse but one of the ways I think it can usefully be categorized is between stories that promote self-development through individualism and stories that promote self-development through individuality. The difference is between emphasizing self-centeredness versus emphasizing social-centeredness, “me” versus “we.” I think that the former emphasis is harmful, the latter helpful. The purpose of this essay is to discuss that thesis.
“Individualism” is a popular word in the American lexicon. The word is almost as ubiquitous as apple pie in describing American culture. But I think that the practice of individualism is not so widespread as the word, and that people often misuse the word and misconstrue the idea when what they really mean is individuality. The confusion is unfortunate because I think that individuality is actually the attitude that best describes the core of American morals and mores.
E pluribus unum, “from many one,” was adopted by the Founders as the motto of the United States. The motto espouses the idea of individuality, of each individual and group making their particular contribution to the whole, and of unity through diversity. Although Congress made “In God we Trust” the country’s official motto in 1956, E pluribus unum remains the unofficial motto and, I believe, the actual credo of the country. And this is the case despite the widespread use of the word “individualism” to describe the American way.
Confusion between the ideas of individualism and individuality is not surprising. Both words stem from the same root word “individual,” and the two words look similar. They also have overlapping implications. Both emphasize the importance of the individual, the uniqueness of each individual, and the goal of individual self-development. As a result, many people use the words interchangeably and conflate their meanings. But they are not interchangeable in their underlying message as to how to respect individuals and promote individual self-development.
Individualism implies that people are self-made and self-sufficient. The word also implies that people are in continual competition with others, as they try to establish their individual identities against other people and elevate themselves above the group. Individualism is a theory and practice that emphasizes the precariousness of a person’s identity. In a regime of individualism, people are inevitably insecure as each struggles against the others for position.
Individuality implies a very different ethos, and it is the ethos that in practice has historically been predominant in America. Individuality implies interdependence and that you are a product of interaction with others. It also implies cooperating with others as you try to establish your identity with them and make your unique contribution to the group. An interdependent society that promotes individuality is inherently supportive. And despite the pervasiveness of the idea of individualism in the United States, the reality is that people working together made the country.
Confusing the concepts of individualism and individuality, and choosing to promote the idea of individualism over individuality, can have important psychological, social and political consequences. This is especially the case when you are trying to reach and reassure insecure adolescents struggling through a period of change, and trying to teach them how to make their way in the world. Promoting individualism exacerbates adolescents’ insecurity. Promoting the theory and practice of individuality can help adolescents secure their individual identities and work in the world. For these reasons, I think it is important for coming-of-age literature to distinguish between the two concepts and to promote individuality rather than individualism.
In this essay, I discuss Elizabeth Acevedo’s The Poet X and Kathryn Laskey’s Dreams in the Golden Country as examples of coming-of-age novels that respectively promote individualism and individuality. Both books have been highly acclaimed and widely assigned to middle and high school students. Both address the difficulties of the adolescent stage of life, but with different emphases. I think Laskey’s approach is better.
Coming of Age in Literature.
Every age is a transitional age, both in a person’s life and in the life of a society. And in every age, it is always the best of times in some ways and the worst of times in others, with the key being to make the best of the times that you have been given. In going through social transitions, we invariably look to other societies, past and present, as examples of the choices we might make in our current circumstances and what might be the consequences of making those choices. Likewise, in going through personal changes, we invariably look to others for examples of how they tried to get through similar situations and how we might try to get through our own.
Positive role models and negative examples can be found in both real life and fiction. Although factual examples may be more persuasive, fictional examples may in some ways be preferable because they are constant and consistent. They can never change from better to worse or disappoint. This is the rationale for coming-of-age literature for adolescents.
Adolescence, a person’s teenage years, has become an important transitional stage in our society. It is a turbulent period during which young people go through significant psychological and physiological changes, and are subject to significantly new behavioral expectations. It is generally considered that gaining a personal identity is one of the main tasks of adolescents.[1] Coming-of-age literature generally portrays young people struggling to gain a personal identity.
As adolescence has become a more clearly defined stage of personal development over the last one hundred years, adolescents have been encouraged by teachers and parents to read coming-of-age literature as a means of finding role models for their self-development. As a result, literature for adolescents has become a booming business, especially over the past fifty years. What was often previously considered an inferior form of literature produced by inferior writers has become a first-rate literary form produced by first-rate writers.
One way of analyzing and evaluating coming-of-age literature is to distinguish between literature that promotes individualism as the means of gaining a personal identity and literature that instead promotes individuality. The common starting point of almost all of this literature is the common complaints of almost every adolescent. Almost every adolescent feels misunderstood, overlooked, mistreated, underestimated, and disrespected. Almost every adolescent also feels that no one has ever been treated as badly as they are. Given this starting point, the question is how should a coming-of-age novel try to direct these feelings toward a mature adulthood?
Individualistic literature essentially goes with the flow of the egoism and self-centeredness that is a natural feature of adolescence. Identity and maturity in these stories come through asserting yourself against others and society, essentially through power-tripping. Literature that promotes individuality seeks, on the contrary, to counter and redirect self-centeredness toward cooperation and social-centeredness. Identity and maturity come, in this view. through developing yourself in the course of working with others, and establishing a role for your unique self as a member of a group. Sharing instead of controlling, and caring about yourself through caring for others, as a more productive way of getting through the adolescent stage of life.
The Seven or Whatever Stages of Life.
Humans have a penchant for seeing their lives and their societies as going through phases of development and decay, from birth to death, and sometimes thereafter. People at different times have divided their social history into different stages of development. And people in different societies have divided their lives into stages that reflect the circumstances of their times. In this context, adolescence is a relatively new phrase and phase of human life.
The character Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, for example, described what he called “the seven ages of man” as they appeared to Shakespeare in early seventeenth century England. His stages were infant, school boy, lover, soldier, justice, old age, and second childhood, the last of which he described as “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
In his list of stages, and in particular with his stage of “school boy,” Jacques differed from the way young people had generally been seen before his time in medieval England. In what we call the Middle Ages or the feudal stage of history, young people were generally seen as moving from the stage of childhood to the stage of adulthood in one fell swoop. No “school boy” phase.
Medieval children were generally treated as miniature adults who became full adults upon entering puberty. In Shakespeare’s time, which today is generally called the Early Modern Period or early capitalist stage of history, Jacques added “school boy” as a stage between childhood and adulthood. It is an addition that reflected the rise of elementary schooling for children as well as other social and economic developments in the early 1600’s.
That was not, however the end of it. Since the late nineteenth century, during what we call the Modern Period or post-industrial stage of history, adolescence has been added as yet another stage between childhood and adulthood, as a transitional stage following Shakespeare’s school boy stage and preceding adulthood. This new stage of development reflects a number of social, economic and psychological developments as well as the rise of secondary schooling and other formal training for young people beyond the elementary level.
Adolescence is still a relatively new stage in our conception of human life, and there is still a lot of controversy about how to deal with it. It is an age in which “Who am I?” and “What am I?” questions of personal identity are central concerns of young people. And, according to psychologists such as Erik Erikson, the identities that young people develop during adolescence generally stay with them for the rest of their lives. As such, how young people make their way through adolescence is important to them and to society.
Coming-of-age novelists try to tune in to young people’s striving for personal identity, to their desire to differentiate themselves from their parents and distinguish themselves from their peers. They differ, however, on whether adolescents should strive to be independent of others or interdependent with them, and whether adolescents should be encouraged to stand up to others or stand with them. The ethical and ideological choice is between promoting individualism and the cult of the individual versus promoting cooperation and the cultivation of individuality.
Popeye’s Problem: I am what I am but what am I?
I am what I am, and that’s all I am.” So sayeth Popeye the Sailor Man before he downs a can of spinach and goes forth to pummel some bad guys. With bulging forearms and enormous strength derived from consuming large quantities of spinach, Popeye was a popular comic strip super hero during the 1920’s, and a role model in right eating, thinking and acting for young people.
A precursor of the superheroes that emerged during the Depression years of the 1930’s, Popeye shared a key trait with Superman and most other superheroes from then to the present day: he had a belief in himself as essentially a self-made and self-sufficient individual. Popeye was his own man, an independent individualist, and there was no one on whom he depended.
But Popeye still seemed to struggle with his personal identity. We humans are seemingly among the few creatures on earth who are aware of ourselves as individuals. We are, in turn, plagued by persistent existential questions as to who and what we are. “I am what I am” was Popeye’s answer to the perplexing question of identity, which he repeated incessantly in an almost obsessive concern with reassuring himself and others that he was what he was, whatever that was.
Popeye’s was, however, a self-defeating way of establishing his identity since it seemed to require a continual reassertion of himself against others in order to sustain a belief in himself. Hence, Popeye’s almost compulsive need to find someone to punch. Popeye was, in my estimation, a perpetual winner who was inherently a loser in the struggle to establish his identity. He invariably defeated his foes and came out on top. But he invariably then encountered new foes who threatened his identity. His position was like that of the fast-draw gunslinger in conventional cowboy movies. Someone was always challenging his position. He could never by secure in his identity.
The mantra of the self-made man that Popeye represents was the product of a philosophical tradition dating back to the early 1600’s. It was a function of the rise of modern capitalist society in Western societies and the development of an individualistic ethos that has infused Western societies since then. Social, economic and political theories since then have almost invariably started with the isolated, independent individual and then tried to justify and explain the existence of society and its ways and means.
This has been true of even most socialist and communitarian thinking, despite being a starting point that puts cooperative theories and practices at a disadvantage. How do you have a cooperative society when your population is made up of ostensibly self-made and self-sufficient individuals? It creates social, political and ethical dilemmas.
The Ethics of Individuality and the Anxiety of Individualism.
There is an ontological dimension to the differences between individualism and individuality. “I am what I am,” Popeye proclaims, but ontologically how does he know what he is? I cannot know who or what I am by myself. In order to get to a self-conscious awareness of myself as a person, I must be aware of others and of myself as one among others. It is through comparing and contrasting myself with others that I get a sense of myself. There is, therefore, no such thing as a self-made or self-sufficient person. Without others, we have no identity.
This ontological dimension of self-consciousness leads to an ethical difference between individualism and individuality. In order to compare and contrast myself with others, I must recognize them as essentially the same as me and equal to me. If these others are completely unlike me, then I cannot see myself in them to make a comparison. If they are completely like me, then I cannot see myself as distinguished from them to make a contrast.
In any case, I must first see the individuality of others in order to see myself as an individual. And it is only from seeing others as unique individuals that I can establish my own individuality, that is, see myself as a unique “one” among a group of “many.” Self-consciousness, that is, an ability to say “I” and actually know what I am talking about, requires respect for others. In turn, respect for others is a catalyst for, and a measure of, my respect for myself.
It is from this circumstance, I believe, that what we refer to as the Golden Rule emerges as a statement of fact as well as an ethical ideal. Almost every major religious and philosophical doctrine incorporates some version of the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you if you were in their situation” and “Love thy neighbor as an extension of thyself” are common examples. These statements are not merely ideal prescriptions but are also descriptions of reality. The point is that the way we think of ourselves depends on how we think of others, and whether and to what extent we think of their well-being as well as our own.
If we think of the well-being of others as connected with our own, we are likely to think well of ourselves. If we disregard others’ well-being, we are likely to think poorly of ourselves. In turn, the way we expect others to treat us depends largely on how we treat them. If we treat others poorly, we are likely to expect them to treat us poorly, and they probably will. If we treat them well, we are likely to expect the same from them and are more likely to be treated that way.
Individualistic thinking generally disregards the well-being of others in favor of a competitive regard for oneself and for this reason, it fails both as a theory and as a practice. It fails in theory because we cannot know ourselves or be ourselves without working with others. There is no such thing as a self-made person. Our selves are made in conjunction with others. The idea of individuality recognizes that fact and cultivates it. The idea of individualism regrets it, denies it, and obfuscates the reality of human interdependence.
Individualism fails in practice because it promotes a never-rending competition against others as a result of which a person can never feel secure. It is an ethos of anxiety. Individualism pits people against each other and essentially encourages people to establish their identities by dominating others. The problem is that if you base your identity on competitive success against others, then you can never be secure in your identity. You are safe only until the next competitive encounter.
If, for example, you base your identity on being the best in something – say being the best musician in the world based on winning virtuoso competitions – that identity is secure only until the next competition. And there is always another competition and always someone coming at you to take your title and destroy your identity. If, instead, you base your identity on being part of a symphony orchestra and making beautiful music together with others, then your identity is relatively secure, so long as you keep practicing.
Individualism is a prescription for chronic insecurity and anxiety. You are continually competing for power and position against others who are trying to exert their individualism and establish their identities through beating you. Someone is always coming up trying to slam you from behind. The anxiety inherent in an individualist ethos would seem to be among the last things you would want to promote in congenitally insecure adolescents.
For these reasons, I think that coming-of-age literature that promotes individualistic rather than cooperative role models is harmful rather than helpful to adolescents. The recent novel The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo is an example.
The Poet X: Cooperating with Others versus Competing against Them.
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo is a critically acclaimed novel-in-verse.[2] Published in 2018, it is a charming and cleverly composed book. It has received many honors, including a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. The book is ostensibly the diary and the versifying of a teenage Latina girl in Harlem who comes of age in the novel as a champion poet. The girl is seemingly presented as a role model for adolescent readers to emulate. Her story is, however, an example of individualism triumphant. And that is what concerns me.
The Backdrop of the Story. The setup of the story in The Poet X is fairly conventional for coming-of-age literature. It features a rebellious adolescent who is troublesome for her family and getting into trouble in school. The girl is an outsider and to some extent an outcast among her peers. She feels she is misunderstood and mistreated by her parents, teachers and peers alike.
The setup is conventional but the execution is not, as the story is written largely in verse and has a heroine who is an emerging poet. Her problems are typical of adolescents but the way she overcomes them is not. She does it through poetry. That makes the book most interesting.
The girl, Xiomara or X for short, comes from a working-class family that has immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic. Her father lives in the home but is essentially absent from the family life. Her mother is an extremely strict Catholic who essentially runs the family and runs roughshod over her twin children, Xiomara and Xavier. The mother works long hours cleaning an office building in Queens, a long way from her Harlem home. She works hard to support her kids and expects them, in turn, to behave according to her standards.
X is a big, strong, physically well-developed fifteen-year-old who is continually being sexually harassed by men and boys. X’s twin brother Xavier, whom she calls Twin, is a nerd. He is intellectually strong but physically weak, personally timid and socially inept. X frequently comes to the rescue of her brother by fighting boys who harass him. Shades of Popeye.
X is for the most part a loner with one close friend, a girl named Caridad. X, Caridad and Twin hang out together. While X is an inveterate troublemaker in school, in church and at home, Caridad is a goody-goody who is always trying to calm X down when X gets agitated. Caridad advises X to follow the straight-and-narrow when X invariably strays off the conventional path. But she is also attracted by X’s rebelliousness, admires it, and seemingly, thereby, reinforces it.
X carries around a negative image of herself and a chip on her shoulder. She continually complains that everyone wants her to be the way they want her to be, with no regard for what she actually is or might want to become, and they come down on her when she won’t or can’t comply with their demands. She complains that “Mami [her mother] wants me to be her proper young lady. Papi wants me to be ignorable and silent. Twin and Caridad want me to be good so I don’t attract attention. God just wants me to behave so I can earn being alive. And what about me? What about Xiomara?”[3] In a typical lament of adolescents, X is essentially asserting Popeye’s mantra that she is what she is, and she wants others to recognize and accept that.
In the course of the book, X tangles with almost everyone around her except for Twin and Caridad. She fights with her mother over her mother’s efforts to control her and confine her to conventional behavior. She is hectored by her father who is continually angry with her about anything and everything, especially her nonconformity. She has crises of religious faith and argues with her priest.
These are problems with which most adolescent readers can readily identify in their own quests for identity and respect, both self-respect and the respect of others. In this book, almost all of them are portrayed as struggles to gain independence and stop being dependent on others. The situation is couched in terms of controlling oneself versus being controlled by others. Interdependence – working in cooperation with others – doesn’t appear to be an option, and that is my problem with the book.
The Story. In the beginning, X says she wants nothing more than to be left alone. “Every day I wish I could just become a disappearing act,” she moans.[4] But she isn’t left alone and really does not want to be. She likes sitting on the front stoop of the apartment building in which her family lives. She claims to find freedom sitting still on the front stoop. “There is freedom in choosing to sit and be still when everything is always telling me to move, move fast.”[5] But sitting on the stoop only makes her more conspicuous – she is in the way of people going in and out – so that people can’t help seeing her, talking with her, and often telling her to move.
The underlying reality is that X wants to be somebody and something, and she wants to be noticed for who and what she thinks she is. The storyline of the book describes her maturation as a person and a writer, and her coming of age as a poet. Her development proceeds in stages as she moves from angry and introverted loser to exuberant and extroverted champion.
In the first stage, X starts writing a diary which ostensibly becomes the book we are reading. And she increasingly writes it in poetry. As her diary writing proceeds, she develops her ability to express herself. Her goal is self-expression and to show in words what she is.
Meanwhile, one of her teachers, who runs a poetry club in X’s high school, repeatedly asks and encourages X to join the club. X is for a long time unwilling to join the club because she thinks her writing is not good enough and she doesn’t want to expose herself as a loser. But X shows some of her poems to Caridad and Twin, and they like them. Eventually X gives in to her teacher’s badgering and attends a club meeting.
X reads some of her poetry to the group and is flattered by the reaction of the students and her teacher. The teacher smiles and the rest of the group follow suit. “And everyone smiles,” X exclaims in her diary, “because they know that means I killed it.”[6] “Killed it” is a phrase used by X throughout the book to denote success. It is in common usage these days among young people. It means that she is the winner. That she has dominated.
X feels the power of her words and power over her audience. She celebrates to herself: “My little words feel important, for just a moment. This is a feeling I could get addicted to.” She is in essence on a power trip and it feels good to her.[7]
X has become a more social being but not a more cooperative person. Although she has joined a poetry group, poetry has not become a cooperative activity for her. The group is essentially a collection of individual poets who recite their poems to each other, and receive support from the group for their efforts, but do not work together in any significant way. There are other formats for writing groups in which people do work together, for example, starting their work with common topic prompts and critiquing each other’s writing.
Such groups are cooperative rather than merely collective, and people collaborate with each other in some significant way. The group becomes something of a joint venture in support of each person’s individuality, and everyone can feel some sense of achievement in a colleague’s success. When I was in high school many long years ago, I participated in a creative writing class that operated in this way. It was great. X’s group does not work that way.
The story of X’s coming of age as a poet proceeds from X’s willingness to expose her poetry to others in the poetry club to her willingness to submit herself and her poetry at an open-mic poetry event. At an open-mic event, people read their poetry but there is no group discussion or public reaction to the poems. A poet can, however, get a sense of the audience’s reaction from the way they listen, and can get some comments from people after the event.
X is very nervous before the open-mic event, but she overcomes her nervousness and performs well. The audience seems to appreciate her work. Afterword, Twin says “You killed that shit.” And she says to herself “I can’t wait to do this again.” Again, it’s her power over the audience that is the key to her feeling of success.[8]
In the course of the story, while she is struggling with her poetic self-confidence, X gets romantically involved with a young man and seemingly becomes dependent on his emotional support. But she breaks up with him when he stands by without doing anything as she is being sexually assaulted. She concludes from his failure to stand up for her that she must be able to stand up for herself and not depend on anyone else: “Because no one will ever take care of me but me.”[9] Independence becomes her credo.
Finally, X gains enough self-confidence and is sufficiently motivated by ambition to enter a poetry slam competition. A poetry slam is a competition organized into elimination rounds to determine who is ostensibly the best poet. Poets compete head-to-head in each round, with the winner going on to the next round and the loser going home. The winners of each round and the final winner are determined by the reaction of the audience. Members of the audience are supposed to cheer poems they like and boo poems they don’t like. It can be a brutal experience.
While most people think of poetry as an artform that promotes the peaceful contemplation of beauty, and inspires thought-provoking and emotion-provoking meditations, slams turn poetry into a form of aggression, a weapon to be used to defeat one’s opponent.
X feels ready “to slam” because she feels that her words “connect with people”[10] In this context, “connecting” means her ability to get people to applaud her poetry and reject her opponents’ poems. X wins the slam and sees herself as a winner. Winning is her identity, and it is her ability to defeat others that in the context of this book is the sign of her maturation and coming of age. The story promotes a paradigmatic individualistic message, and X is presented in this way as a role model for other young people to emulate.
X’s own conclusion, and the last words in book, is that her maturation has been the result of “learning to believe in the power of my own words.”[11] Power is the key word here. X has been on a power trip, and like Popeye, she has ultimately asserted that she is what she is, and has forced other people to recognize it. She is the winner. At least until the beginning of the next slam poetry competition when she will once again have to fight for her identity. Ad infinitum.
The story has a happy ending that is not quite believable and, if believed, is not laudable. X inexplicably gets back with her undependable boyfriend, seemingly a testament to her independence. Then her mother, father, priest, and boyfriend all rally around her and rejoice along with Twin and Caridad when X wins the poetry slam. All the people who have been on X’s x-list are suddenly behind her now that she is a winner and she has established her independence of them.[12] Winning is everything in the individualist world and that is X’s world.
But what are we to think of all the poets who did not win the slam? And what are they supposed to think of themselves? Losers all? Given that in any competition there can be only one winner, and the great majority of competitors lose, is it healthy to convey to insecure adolescents in a book such as this that winning is the only way to be someone?
The Moral of the Story. “Me,” “me,” and more “me” permeate the book. Granted that a story in the form of a diary is going to include a lot about the diarist, The Poet X is at the self-centered extreme of such stories. X even admits that she is unusually self-centered. She notes that almost all of the other poet slammers include social and political issues in their poems. Not her, she says, “the thing is, all my poems are personal.”[13] I am what I am and that is all I am.
But it does not have to be that way. There are plenty of coming-of-age stories for adolescent readers that are in diary form and that are not so self-centered as The Poet X. Kathryn Lasky’s Dreams in the Golden Country is an example.
Dreams in the Golden Country: We’re all in this together.
Dreams in the Golden Country by Kathryn Laskey is a coming-of-age story about an adolescent Russian Jewish girl who immigrates to America in the early 1900’s.[14] Laskey is an award-winning author of books for young people. Published in 1998, Dreams is written in the form of the girl’s diary. It is part of the Dear America series of fictional diaries of adolescents who supposedly lived in different times, places and circumstances during American history.
The Dear America books are highly regarded and have been widely used in middle school and high school American history classes. The books serve at least two important purposes. First: they portray for students the ways in which ordinary people lived. It is a way of teaching history from the bottom up, focusing on common people and common experiences as a complement to the usual way of teaching history through focusing on major events and major historical figures. It is also a way of appealing to students who might be able to identify with diarists who are young like themselves and who are just ordinary people like themselves.
Second, the books portray the ways in which adolescents came of age in different historical circumstances. First-person historical fiction of this sort can help young readers see themselves and their own struggles with adolescence in perspective. Comparing and contrasting their present-day problems and conditions with those of adolescents in past times and different places can help young readers understand the choices they face and the consequences of those choices.
Literature of this sort also encourages readers to adopt both an insider’s perspective and an outsider’s perspective on the events being portrayed in the book. Readers are encouraged to identify with the diarists as fellow adolescents but also distance themselves from the diarists as having lived in the past. Readers can, thereby, adopt an inside perspective on the diarist’s situation as a fellow adolescent and an outside perspective as a person of the present day.
This inside-outside perspective is an approach to events that can be helpful in dealing with a reader’s own problems. Adopting an inside view of a situation and an outside view at the same time can be a key to understanding the situation and making good choices in dealing with it. And reading fiction that encourages readers to take insider and outsider views of events can help readers to see their own situations in the same way.
The Backdrop of the Story. In Dreams in the Golden Country, the diarist, Zipporah Feldman, nicknamed Zippy, is a Russian Jewish girl who has emigrated with her family to the United States in 1903. She is twelve years old at the beginning of the book. Her family has left Russia to escape violent attacks on Jews that were being promoted by the Czarist government.
Large numbers of Russian and Polish Jews came to America at this time, as did large numbers of poor immigrants from other Eastern and Southern European countries. Almost all of these immigrants settled in major American cities where they worked in sweatshop factories or as day laborers. Zippy and her family settle on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City, which was a haven for immigrants and a major center of garment industry sweat shops.
The early twentieth century was a time of significant change in American society. The country was absorbing an influx of poor immigrants, struggling to manage rapidly growing cities, and trying to adapt to an industrial economy. American cities were conglomerations of foreign immigrants and American migrants. Most of them were peasants and farmers who had to adjust to each other’s differences, to living in close urban quarters, and to working in factories.
The United States in the early twentieth century was a steaming stewpot of ethnicities, races and religions, a stewpot in the sense of being a mixture of different peoples all trying to develop a common identity as Americans while, at the same time, retaining some cultural identity with their national origins.
The setup of Zippy’s story has some similarities with X’s but also some very important differences in the directions the stories take. Both Zippy and X are from immigrant families and belong to minority ethnicities, and both face adversity as a result. Both also have mothers who are strict religious traditionalists, and they struggle to get free of their mothers’ control. And both are outcasts at school, but with different implications. X overcomes her troubles through establishing herself a winner. Zippy overcomes hers through establishing herself as a helper.
The Story. Zippy’s diary records the ways she and her family adjusted to their new life. The diary reports on her first year and a half in America as she learns English, makes new friends from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, goes to public school, works at different neighborhood jobs, and watches the behavior of her parents and her sisters as they develop their new selves in their new world. As Zippy observes the people and the society around, her diary reveals her maturing awareness of the changes in her family, her circumstances and herself.
When the book opens, Zippy, her mother and her two older sisters are joining her father who had preceded them to America in order to find work and a place to live. Her father, whom she calls Papai, had been a well-known concert violinist in Russia. In America, he can find only menial work in a sweat shop garment factory.
Zippy’s mother, Mama, is a strictly Orthodox Jewish housewife who is upset by what she sees as the laxity in religious practices and outright secularism among Jews she sees in New York. She is outraged when her husband and her two older daughters become less observant, and she repeatedly berates her husband about this.
Zippy at first just watches the family dispute, but she eventually joins her siblings and father in abandoning some old-world religious customs as a means of becoming more American. She comes to see that her mother is afraid of changes because they might undermine her power in the family. To assuage her fears, Papa buys his wife a sewing machine to give her something to do and they all praise her work. “You are much better with a needle than I am” Papa tells her, and eventually she relents to some of the changes in her family.[15]
Zippy’s older sisters Tovah and Miriam are seventeen and fifteen respectively. It’s Zippy’s diary but the story is as much about her big sisters and how they navigate adolescence as it is about her. Unlike Zippy who goes to school, they both go to work in the garment factory with Papa. Each takes a different path to growing up and offers a different role model for readers.
Tovah, with whom we readers are seemingly expected to sympathize, is rebellious. She wants to become completely Americanized, and she becomes involved in labor union organizing and socialist political activities. Mama opposes these things, and Zippy tries to negotiate between her sister, whom she deeply admires, and her mother, whom she deeply loves. With Zippy’s help, Mama eventually comes to terms with Tovah’s politics.[16]
Miriam is quietly rebellious in a different way. She begins dating a Christian boy. Mama is apoplectic about this. When Miriam marries him, Mama declares Miriam to be dead in her eyes, says prayers for the dead for Miriam, and gets rid of all of Miriam’s things. Zippy initially sympathizes with Mama’s objection to the marriage, but is shocked by her mother’s harsh response to it. Over time, Zippy comes to accept and then approve of the marriage.[17]
Since Zippy does not initially know English, she is put into a class at school with seven-year-olds. She is deeply embarrassed and ashamed about this. But she practices English by teaching it to her mother, and by the end of the school year, she is back up to grade level. Unlike X who felt good when she was able to excel over her colleagues, Zippy feels good that she can now fit in with her classmates.[18]
In the same vein, Zippy records her interest in neighborhood, city-wide, national and international events. instead of focusing, like X, on herself and things that affect her personally. Unlike X who starts with herself and then discusses others and issues in relation to herself, Zippy starts with others and with issues, and then discusses herself in relation to them. It is the difference between self-centered individualism and cooperative individuality.
Zippy writes a lot about conflicts as does X. Conflict is a staple of adolescent life. But, unlike X who focuses almost entirely on personal conflicts, Zippy records and seeks to understand social conflicts involving others. She writes about conflicts between different ethnic groups, such as Irish Catholics against Russian Jews, and conflicts within ethnic groups, such Northern Irish against Southern Irish, [19] and German Jews against Russian Jews[20]
She writes about conflicts over whether and to what extent immigrants should assimilate, such as Jews becoming less orthodox so that they can work and live with other Americans. She writes about conflicts over interreligious marriages such as those between Jews and Christians. And she writes about class conflicts between bosses and workers.
Zippy struggles to understand these conflicts. She is torn between her mother’s primary identification as Jewish and as a member of “The Chosen People” and Tovah’s primary identification as American. Zippy reconciles her desire to maintain a Jewish identity while also becoming American with the conclusion that it is OK “to feel chosen, as Mama says, but not superior.” That is, it is OK to feel special as a Jew while recognizing the specialness of other peoples, and to welcome the specialness that all peoples share in common.
In this regard, Zippy seems to endorse the idea of America as a stewpot in which different peoples can cooperate together, maintaining their separate ethnic identities while sharing a common identity as Americans. E pluribus unum. She seems to endorse the idea of individuality, in which each person makes a unique contribution to the group, as opposed to individualism in which each person tries to dominates over others.[21]
Toward the end of the book, Zippy goes to work at the Hebrew Immigrant Aide Society which helps immigrants become settled in the United States. It is an example of how Zippy finds herself by helping others.[22]
The Moral of the Story. Whereas “me’ was the operative term for X, “we” is the operative term for Zippy. Zippy’s story has a happy ending that is too good to be believable but is not harmful to the message of the book. Zippy does some clerical work at a local Yiddish theater and parlays that into a small part in a play. After Zippy’s first acting performance, the whole family, including Miriam and her Christian husband, reunite and celebrate together. All is forgiven and seemingly forgotten.[23]
And the whole family does well in America. Zippy’s father is discovered by a touring Russian orchestra, is invited to play with the orchestra in a concert, and parlays his success in that performance into a job as a music teacher and part-time concert violinist.[24] Tovah becomes a big-time union leader in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and a political activist.[25] Miriam has a happy marriage and her mother loves her Christian son-in-law.[26] Zippy continues in the theatre and eventually becomes a famous actress and an avid philanthropist.[27]
Happily ever after. A stretch, but it is after all a story for young people, and it is an ending that reinforces the moral of the story: the importance of individuality and cooperation.
The Moral of this Essay.
Unlike many other animals, humans are not equipped to live individualistically by themselves. Rhinoceroses, for example, are solitary creatures who come together only for purposes of mating and otherwise survive and thrive on their own. Lions, on the other hand, need to band together for purposes of hunting, being individually very poor hunters. Humans are like lions in this regard and need to band together in order to survive, let alone thrive.
It is also the case that unlike many other animals, humans do not naturally conserve the environment in which they live. Gorillas, for example, are vegetarians who forage for food. They consume the vegetation in a place and then move on to another place nearby. But they leave behind them feces that contain undigested seeds. These fertilized seeds grow into more vegetation, replenishing what the gorillas have eaten. Gorillas generally travel about a half-mile per day in search of vegetation and make a big circle in the course of a year, eventually coming back to where they started. When they have returned, there is new vegetation for them to eat, vegetation that they effectively planted the year before. Gorillas are foragers but also farmers and conservationists.
Rabbits, on the other hand, will breed and consume themselves to self-destruction in Malthusian terms if not thwarted. They do not replenish the environment that sustains them. Humans seem by nature to be individually irresponsible like rabbits, but collectively they have been able to thrive and conserve their environment when they have cooperated. The moral seems to be that individuality through cooperation is the key to the success of humanity and the survival of the environment in which humans have thrived.
Adolescence should be a time of teaching social skills and social cooperation to young people, not a time of encouraging egotistical individualism. That is why I think books like Dreams in the Golden Country are preferable to those like The Poet X.
BW 11/21
[1] Erik Erikson Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1968.
[2] Elizabeth Acevedo. The Poet X. New York: HarperTeen, 2018.
[3] Acevedo. P.333.
[4] Acevedo. P.250.
[5] Acevedo. P. 247.
[6] Acevedo. P. 286.
[7] Acevedo. P.259.
[8] Acevedo. P. 279-280).
[9] Acevedo. P. 219.
[10] Acevedo. P.287.
[11] Acevedo. P.357.
[12] Acevedo. Pp. 252-255.
[13] Acevedo. P. 344.
[14] Kathryn Laskey. Dreams in the Golden Country. New York: Scholastic, Inc., 1998.
[15] Laskey. Pp.8, 35, 39.
[16] Laskey. P.79.
[17] Laskey. Pp.111-113.
[18] Laskey. Pp. 22, 42, 130.
[19] Laskey. P. 17.
[20] Laskey. Pp.22, 32, 75.
[21] Laskey. P.62.
[22] Laskey. P.111.
[23] Laskey. Pp. 150-151.
[24] Laskey. P.132.
[25] Laskey. P.153.
[26] Laskey. P.151.
[27] Laskey. P.143.
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