Salom Rizk is a Syrian-American author, best known for his 1943 immigrant autobiography, Syrian Yankee, perhaps the best-known piece of Arab American

Arab American

An Arab American is a United States citizen or resident of Arab ethnic, cultural and linguistic heritage or identity, who identifies themselves as Arab. Arab Americans trace ancestry to any of the various waves of immigrants of the countries comprising the Arab World...

 literature in the middle part of the century. The book has been called "a classic of the immigrant biography genre", especially for the way Rizk's story portrays the American Dream

American Dream

The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States in which freedom includes a promise of the possibility of prosperity and success. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each...

 and the virtues of cultural assimilation

Cultural assimilation

Cultural assimilation is a socio-political response to demographic multi-ethnicity that supports or promotes the assimilation of ethnic minorities into the dominant culture. The term assimilation is often used with regard to immigrants and various ethnic groups who have settled in a new land. New...

 at the expense of his home country, which he finds loathsome when he returns for a visit. Rizk became well-known enough that Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...

 sponsored him on a lecture tour around the United States as "the quintessential American immigrant". He also sponsored a drive for the Save the Children

Save the Children

Save the Children is an internationally active non-governmental organization that enforces children's rights, provides relief and helps support children in developing countries...

 Federation, using advertisements in such magazines as Boys' Life

Boys' Life

Boys' Life is the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America . Its targeted readership is young American males between the ages of 6 and 18.Boys' Life is published in two demographic editions...

to request families send their extra pencils, so that these could be donated to needy school-children around the world as a way of promoting freedom and democracy and fighting tyranny.

Youth and journey to the USA

Rizk was born in Ottoman Syria (likely modern Lebanon) to an American Christian mother who died when he was young, leaving him in the care of an illiterate grandmother who did not tell him of his American citizenship, which he learns of only when he is twelve; it takes him five more years before he is able to obtain his passport. At the same time, he has been told "many wonderful, unbelievable things" about the United States by his teacher, who describes it as "a country like heaven...where everything is bigger and grander and more beautiful than it has ever been anywhere else in the world...where men do the deeds of giants and think the thoughts of God". Rizk realizes, even in his imagination, that America was "everything that my present life was not", especially given the horrors that befell Syria

Syria

Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....

 in World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

. As soon as he was able, he left Syria for the United States, joining the roughly 100,000 Arab Christian immigrants who came to the States between 1880 and 1914.

Syrian Yankee

Rizk's description of youth is interesting for several reasons: First, it was not common at the time for Syrian immigrants to depict their journey to the United States. Second, Rizk leaves out the obvious fact that his native language is Arabic and distances himself from the Muslim aspects of Syrian culture. Third, despite being dazzled by New York City, Rizk's depiction of America "resembles nothing so much as Hell"; it is not until he returns to his homeland and sees the problems facing both the Middle East and Nazi-era Europe (including the large numbers of Jewish refugees to Palestine) that he recognizes the fulfillment of his American Dream and begins to become a vocal advocate for American values, using his own immigrant status as the grounds for his expertise. In this regard he joined the company of such immigrant writers as Mary Antin

Mary Antin

Mary Antin was an American author and immigration rights activist.Born to a Jewish family in Polotsk, she immigrated to the Boston area with her mother and siblings in 1894. She married Amadeus William Grabau in 1901, and moved to New York City where she attended Teachers College of Columbia...

 and Louis Adamic

Louis Adamic

Louis Adamic was a Slovenian American author and translator.- Biography :Adamic was born at Praproče Mansion in Praproče near Grosuplje, in what is now Slovenia...

, who extol the virtues of assimilation

A revised version of the book was published in 2000 by Rizk's friend Rev. Harold Schmidt under the new title America, More than a Country.

Literary significance

Rizk's contributions to American literature come both from the time in which he wrote and from the way he wrote about America. As noted above, his book captures presents the American Dream as real, as something that immigrants do in fact achieve. He thus presents what may be called an extremely optimistic view of immigration and assimilation—a view that was not shared by all immigrant authors of this period. But his work is also important for the time in which it was written. At this point in Arab-American literary culture, the New York Pen League comprised such luminaries as Khalil Gibran

Khalil Gibran

Khalil Gibran Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān,Jibrān Khalīl Jibrān, or Jibrān Xalīl Jibrān; Arabic , January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931) also known as Kahlil Gibran, was a Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer...

, Mikhail Naimy and Elia Abu Madi

Elia Abu Madi

Elia Abu Madi was a Lebanese-American poet.-Life and career:Abu Madi was born in the village of Al-Muhaydithah, now part of Bikfaya, Lebanon, in 1889 or 1890...

(most of whom wrote in Arabic) had dissolved, and the subsequent generation of Arab American writers (mostly poets rather than novelists) was less cohesive and less interested in writing about their Arab heritage or identity. Rizk thus stands out as one of the few Arab Americans from the middle part of the century to achieve widespread attention. At the same time, the goals and achievements of the Pen League could no longer be followed, as the increase in anti-Arab racism (in the wake of the Arab-Israeli conflict then unfolding) made the writers' Arab heritage more of a burden to them, giving them a sense of a "dislocated past". Eventually, with the rise of ethnic pride movements in the latter half of the century, Arab American writers realized that Rizk's willingness to criticize his native culture was counter-productive, reinforcing ugly stereotypes and making Arab American readers feel even less free. Rizk thus stands as a testament to his age, to the changing tides of Arab American history and its vacillation between assimilation and diversity.