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PAR TIS A N REV lEW
Sand's Garden," "Spyglass," "The Beggar on the Beach," "Voices of
Heroes," "The Unwilling Guest," poems that stand with the best
being written today.
John Thompson, Jr.
WEST OF ELLIS IS LAND
THE UPROOTED. By Oscar Handlin. Little, Brown. $4.00.
Mr. Handlin has made of the immigrant's story a parable
of alienation. Across the gulf that separates intellectuals from immi–
grants he has built a bridge founded on one thing they unmistakably
share: their estrangement from America, their experience of constant
pressure to make them something other than what they are. "No one
moves," he says, "without sampling something of the immigrants' ex–
perience-mountaineers to Detroit, Okies to California, even men
fixed in space but alienated from their culture by unpopular ideas or
tastes. But the immigrants' alienation was more complete, more con–
tinuous, and more persistent."
Previous historians of immigration, having accepted without ques–
tion the "nation" as it is seen from the proprietary perspective of
native stock, have made it their business to study the effects of immi–
gration upon the nation so conceived. Even historians who are entirely
sympathetic to the immigrants have expressed their sympathy chiefly
by dwelling at some length upon the "contributions" of various im–
migrant groups to American life-a method which is founded on the
same patronizing assumptions, since it omits to consider what American
life may have contributed to or taken away from immigrants. But
Mr. Handlin, taking the immigrant's experience as his foreground, has
made an imaginative reconstruction of what the immigrant wanted,
intended, attempted, felt, suffered. He has dispensed with all the
usual apparatus of the historian-documents, details, statistics and
specificities-to create an ideal type, the European peasant whose
adaptation to America became perforce an adaptation to the city as
well, and to trace the life history of this ideal-typical peasant's family.
It is one of the inevitable costs of this method, applied with as much
exclusiveness as it is here (one could construct several ideal types rather
than a single one), that some of the realities slip through one's fingers–
the diversities, in this case, that could be found in national variations,
in immigrant life on American farms and in small communities, in
the record of the minority of immigrants who came from urban back-
