Becoming American

By Alixa Naff. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University, 1985. 366 pp. $19.95.

Reviewed by Gregory Orfalea

A not-so-implicit indictment runs throughout Becoming American, and that is that the Syrian-Americans—quintessential adapters to the American way of life—for reasons ranging from self-advancement to self-avoidance, forgot their humble, doughty origins. Alixa Nall's social history of the early Syrians in the United States should go a long way toward filling that gap. The result of years of research, Nall's book is the most important of its kind since Philip Hitti's The Syrians in America, published in 1924.

In 1962, Naff saddled up her Volkswagen Beetle and traveled to cities in which the original immigrants lived. She seems to have favored Midwestern towns like Ft. Wayne, Indiana, Spring Valley, Illinois, and Detroit, Michigan. Twenty years later, when I visited Arab Americans in 20 American cities, there weren't many pre-World War I Syrian immigrants left. Naff got them at a ripe moment and they rewarded her with wonderful yarns which should charm the reader. There was Tafeda B. in Hartford City, Indiana, who had no idea what to do with an American toilet and ended up washing her feet in it! Or the peddler who wandered with his box of notions into a smallpox epidemic. Mistaking p for b, he wondered why people kept telling him to "go away, small box!" There's the Syrian peddler who kissed a Norwegian's beard as an Arab gesture of praise which, needless to say, was misinterpreted.

Peddling Led to Syrian Assimiliation

Nall's central thesis is that "The most fundamental factor in assimilation of Syrians in America was peddling." Although these first-wave immigrants—most of whom were Christian from Mount Lebanon and surrounding Syria—took up a variety of occupations, including farming and work in new England textile mills and Midwestern factories, Naff's emphasis is well-taken. A sizable majority of early Syrians from 1880 to 1910 did a stint hoisting the 50-pound peddler's pack or carrying notions cases, hawking their wares from Manhattan to the dirt roads of Iowa.

They learned English the hard, but practical way. They left their own settlements for weeks on end, lost with their packs in the countryside of "Hey podnar!" Cranky individualists back home (where the Ottoman Empire's decline had made Syrian villages isolated, clannish, unanchored by central authority), and with a sense of "impermanence," the Syrian peddler took to the roads. He wanted to make the proverbial bundle and hightail it back to Lebanon, where arable land was always in short supply.

But America had its Venus fly trap: Freedom. A chief intoxicant was the sense of limitless opportunity and the stout air of challenge. Too, you were paid more for more work. (Profits averaged around $200 a month peddling—five times the earnings in 1910 of a farmer, twice that of a manufacturer or miner or retail store owner). Others peddled then: Irish, Swedes, Jews. But, according to Nall, the Syrian identified most with it, and had a greater propensity for empty spaces. He seemed to thrive on the anonymity of the Dakota plains, the mountains of West Virginia and the bayous of the Carolinas. He learned a root dictum of capitalism: Be of use to those isolated from sources of supply. After the Great War, buses and cars put an end to the peddling era, but not before Syrians had charmed America, and been charmed enough by it to stay.

Unfortunately, the book's meatiest sections about peddlers—their mores, routes, clashes and communions with the American buyer, and final settlements off the road—are in the book's second half. Early chapters discuss in some detail the land, history and society of the Arabs of the Levant and their impetus for migration.

A Balance of Values

Naff discusses what she calls positive and negative "Syrian Traits and Values"—for instance, concern for public image, shame, and honor are counterbalanced by dignity, generosity and hospitality.

Though the book's value rests firmly in its unique portrayal of peddler life, certain special problems the early Syrians had receive intriguing development. For instance, it was easier for a Maronite Catholic to marry an Irish Catholic coreligionist than to marry an Orthodox co-ethnic. Further, some Syrians were refused citizenship before 1924 in the general fear of Asiatics that then focused on the Chinese.

Naff's love for the pluck, courage and strength of the first Syrian immigrants is evident. Her fear that it may all be forgotten was first voiced in 1927 by an immigrant named Saloum Moukarzel, who proposed a statue be erected in New York to the dauntless Syrian peddler. Although the statue was never erected, Becoming American is such a monument

Gregory Orfalea is the author of Before the Flames: An Arab American Search, to be published by the University of Texas Press in 1986.