A Woman Is No Man

The question of assimilation has bedeviled immigrants for as long as they have arrived on American shores. How much assimilation is necessary for survival in a new country, and how much tradition should be preserved for successive generations? Is some assimilation necessary to maintain some sense of national cohesion? During the great waves of immigration to the United States, Ellis Island was rife with stories of lost or altered identities, changed to sound more “American.” In fact, immigrants who wanted to assimilate quickly often gave their children American-sounding names. The characters in A Woman Is No Man struggle greatly with these questions. The men—especially Adam—have embraced the American work ethic, seeing it, as many Americans do, as the path to upward mobility. Unlike many Americans, however, they have not embraced the notion of gender equality. In this culture at least, gender roles are fixed and absolute.

Immigrants have tended to form their own clustered and insular communities within the United States. Scandinavian and German immigrants, for example, established large communities in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and evidence of those cultural communities exists to this day. Fareeda and Khaled live in Bay Ridge because it contains a large concentration of Palestinian immigrants.