Death of a Salesman: Deracination and Its Discontents *.
By American Jewish History
- Release Date: 2003-03-01
- Genre: Social Science
Description
A primary function of the theater is to perform social fact, to express it in terms of fictive yet truthful personal experience. With the passing of the years, social fact becomes historical fact, and the drama, particularly the realistic drama, stands as an often-invaluable record of what history felt like to those who actually lived it. The great subject of American Jewish drama--defined for our purposes as plays written in English by American Jews about Jewish experience--is the great subject also of the historians and sociologists of American Jewry: the encounter with America, the complex question of Americanization, acculturation, assimilation. America is famously a nation of immigrants. In Oscar Handlin's words, "the immigrants were American history." The "history of immigration," he went on to say in his most famous book, significantly called The Uprooted,
