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At the turn of the twentieth century, M. E. Ravage set off in steerage for America, one of almost two million Jews who, like millions of others from eastern and southern Europe, were lured by tales of worldly success. Seventeen years after arriving on Ellis Island, Ravage had mastered a new language, found success in college, and engagingly penned in English this vivid account of the ordeals and pleasures of departure and assimilation. Steven G. Kellman brings Ravage's story to life again in this new edition, providing a brief biography and introduction that place the memoir within historical and literary contexts.An American in the Makingcontributes to a broader understanding of the global notion of \"America\" and remains timely, especially in an era when massive immigration, now from Latin America and Asia, challenges ideas of national identity.

In this essay I discuss M. E. Ravage’s autobiography, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant (1917), a forgotten text in immigration literary history, and one of the most accomplished Romanian American Jewish autobiographies. I explore how the work of a first-generation immigrant writer and public intellectual contributes to contemporaneous debates about Americanization. I argue that, along with the cultural work of the immigrant press in the ideological context of the debates over what constitutes an American in the early twentieth century (the melting pot vs. cultural pluralism debate), Ravage’s text brings together consent to Americanization with simultaneous dissent. I show how Ravage rewrites not only the purported tragedy of the immigrant experience but also the genre of immigrant autobiography by challenging his readership to see instead “an American in the making,” a subject of literary production rather than an object of sociological inquiry and photojournalistic exposé. I suggest that the demands of the immigrant autobiography genre (established by the literary market) mirrored, in fact, the coercive demands of Americanization ideology at the beginning of the twentieth century.