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Immigrant Experiences is a collection of interwoven personal narratives and psychological commentaries, assembled, edited, and with contributions by Paul H. Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn. All but one are written by psychotherapists and all, for the purposes of this volume, are written by psychohistorians. Seen as a whole, the fourteen articles resemble an American patchwork quilt, with diverse pieces of fabric (the narrative tales of emigration and the immigrant experience), loosely stitched together through psychological, and occasionally psychoanalytic analysis, creating a unity that is much more than the sum of its parts.
In the spirit of personal narrative, which thoroughly informs the book and which is the source of its powerful impact, I would like to share the happenstance that heightened the poignancy and underscored the relevance for me of reading Immigrant Experiences. When reviewing this volume, I was, at that moment, “reviewing” the “voluntary” emigration of the colonial settlers from Europe and the involuntary “emigration” of the Afro-American slaves with my thirteen-year-old, half-German, half-American-Jewish son for his seventh grade history midterm. The history of the evolution of the United States through immigration, the personal history of my ancestors' and my husband's emigration, and the mixture of cultural forces at play in the fabric of my own children's lives all came together for me as I read Immigrant Experiences, with its rich and varied personal accounts and sagas.
Paul Elovitz and Charlotte Kahn remind us in their foreword that now, as then, people all over the world “are on a trek,” not just to the United States. They remind us, too, that you do not have to be an immigrant to share a profund aspect of the experience of immigration. Whether the victim of xenophobia or not, it is possible to feel like an outsider even in one's own country, due to a multitude of economic and cultural determinants. Kahn's moving chapter on “Emigration without Le