The Little Syria of Deep Valley
By Jia Tolentino
The New Yorker
The writer Maud Hart Lovelace, who died in 1980, at the age of eighty-seven, is best known for her semi-autobiographical “Betsy-Tacy” children’s-book series—a fizzy, modish, cult-favorite cousin of “Anne of Green Gables” and the “Little House” books, centered on two best friends in the fictional Deep Valley, which Lovelace based on her home town of Mankato, Minnesota. Lovelace, like her character Betsy, was determined, imaginative, and a born writer; she published her first short story when she was eighteen, in the Los Angeles Times Magazine. (Tacy, circumspect and demure, was based on Lovelace’s best friend, Frances Kenney.) The ten “Betsy-Tacy” books span the time from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the First World War. Today, there’s an annual Betsy-Tacy convention and a Betsy-Tacy Society, which has turned Lovelace’s Mankato home into a museum. In times of strife, I sometimes return to my “Betsy-Tacy” books, escaping American political catastrophe for a world of ice-skating parties and Gibson girls. But I recently decided to reread something else by Lovelace: her one stand-alone young-adult book, “Emily of Deep Valley,” published in 1950, in which the shy protagonist of the title becomes Deep Valley’s premier advocate for the Syrian immigrants who live on the outskirts of town.
The book begins: “It’s the last day of high school . . . ever.” The year is 1912, and Emily Webster, who has just graduated, looks back at the red brick schoolhouse, sad to be released. She’s an orphan, and, since she lives with her elderly grandfather, who requires looking after, she won’t be going to college in the fall. Emily, in contrast with the gregarious heroines of the “Betsy-Tacy” series, is awkward and introverted: she has to buy her own graduation flowers, she’s never invited to coed parties, and she doesn’t know how to dance. She has a crush on an obnoxious boy named Don, who shares her interest in literature but seems determined to be rude. They see each other on Memorial Day, then called Decoration Day—the highlight of the year for Emily’s grandfather, who fought for the Union at Gettysburg. Don mocks Emily for feeling patriotic and sentimental. “It’s—part of growing up in America,” she tells him.
When fall comes, Emily throws a farewell party for her friends, who are headed to college. Self-conscious about her house, which is full of old-fashioned trinkets, she decides to jazz up the occasion by serving frogs’ legs—the raw materials peddled to her by two young Syrian boys named Yusef and Kalil. The dish is a hit. Then everyone leaves, and Emily is lonely. She writes letters that go mostly unanswered; she signs up for dancing lessons and puts together a study group on Robert Browning. One day in winter, she sees a group of boys throw Kalil to the ice on a frozen pond. “Dago! Dago!” they yell, running away. Emily helps Kalil up, as he shouts a “stream of unintelligible—something. What did the Syrians speak? Arabic?” She takes Kalil to her grandfather, who makes a sling for his arm, and then she walks him back to Little Syria, a neighborhood that she thought of as dirty and run-down, but which opens up to her with sudden warmth.
Kalil’s father, Mr. Mohamed, lavishes Emily with idiosyncratic Lebanese Christian blessings. “What a blessed day! You have come to my house! It is yours. You may burn it.” Kalil’s mother thanks her with figs and pistachios. (“ ‘Women,’ Kalil explained grandly, ‘don’t speak the English much.’ “) The Syrian kids—Kalil, Yusef, and Kalil’s sister Layla—stay in Emily’s thoughts, and, as Christmas approaches, she decides to throw them a party rather than hanging around her blithe, collegiate friends. Her plan draws mixed reactions. “Aunt Sophie knitted her brows. ‘Are they clean?’ ”
At Christmas, the kids are lovely—ecstatic, odd, formal—and Emily decides, “I’ll have them come here regularly. Maybe I ought to have some American children, too. That’s what they need most of all, to mix with Americans.” But the kids balk at the idea, saying that the American kids don’t like them. The next day, Emily’s grandfather tells her that the Deep Valley Syrians are Christians who came seeking religious freedom—“Just like our Pilgrim fathers!”—and that people who fear difference are more likely to be confused than cruel. Emboldened, Emily recruits two boys, both named Bobby, to join her new club. The first meeting is awkward: the Bobbys laugh at Kalil’s name, and laugh harder when he says that it translates to “Charles,” which he pronounces “Sharles.” Then Emily’s grandfather suggests that the boys wrestle to settle their disputes. Kalil trounces the Bobbys, earning their admiration. “Show me too, Charley!” one Bobby yells.
Emily keeps the club going; she teaches Layla to play the piano; she gives the Syrian women English lessons. She forgets about Don, her awful crush. She talks to some like-minded teachers at the high school about hosting night classes to help the Syrians become U.S. citizens. The government will finance these Americanization classes, a teacher tells Emily. (In 1912, the “Americanization” movement was in full swing: school boards and unions across the country convened regular classes, some of them state-mandated, to help immigrants assimilate.) But the school board is controlled by xenophobic Mr. Whitlock, who thinks the country is “too full already.” At the hearing, Mr. Whitlock rants, “I believe in America for the Americans. I believe that immigration should be restricted. Restricted!” The other board members start looking fearful. Then Emily delivers a rousing, reasoned speech about kindness and inclusion. Classes for the Syrians get the school board’s unanimous vote.
The current U.S. government has made it perfectly clear that it is not concerned with the well-being of Syrians. When Donald Trump issued the temporary ban on all refugees that is currently being held up by the judicial system, he singled out Syrian refugees for a ban to last indefinitely. Syrians became part of the American community a half century before Trump’s own mother immigrated from Scotland, in 1929.
The first Syrian-Americans, according to one popular narrative, were the Arbeelys: a family headed by the professor Joseph Arbeely, born Yusuf Hanna, in the town of Arbil, near Damascus. The Arbeelys sailed to New York in 1878, fleeing the unrest in Turkey and Egypt that would drive the first wave of Syrian immigration to the U.S. It’s possible, and perhaps likely, that the Arbeelys weren’t actually the first Syrian-Americans; prior to 1899, Syrian immigrants were designated as coming from “Turkey in Asia,” and they were frequently misidentified as Turkish, Greek, or Armenian. (Lovelace alludes to ethnic misunderstandings with those kids who shout “Dago!” at Kalil.) But the Arbeelys were educated and Christian and industrious, and the media loved them. They posed for a family photo in New York’s harbor; a sign in Joseph Arbeely’s arms read, “The children and I have happily found liberty.” They filed citizenship papers four days after they arrived.
From 1899 to 1919, the arrival of nearly ninety thousand Syrian immigrants was recorded. In 1924, Philip Hitti, a Lebanese-American professor and pioneer of Arabic studies, estimated that there were around two hundred thousand Syrian immigrants living in the U.S. by 1920. There was, in fact, a “Little Syria” in Mankato, where Marguerite Marsh—Lovelace’s inspiration for Emily Webster—lived with her grandfather and worked with the immigrant community instead of going away to school. Marsh, whose brother, parents, and grandmother all died before she turned fourteen, served with the Y.M.C.A. during the First World War, working in a canteen in France. “In many ways, that book told a true story,” Lovelace wrote to a friend, about “Emily of Deep Valley,” in 1973.
“The Syrian-Lebanese in America,” a history by Philip and Joseph Kayal, from 1975, notes general confusion about the identity of the early Syrian-Americans. They were Christian but were thought of as Muslim; they often looked white but were deemed nonwhite by the law; their mercantile savvy provoked suspicion, while their main economic activity—peddling—was viewed as a trade for the destitute. “Anti-Syrian resentment reached its peak in 1914-1915, the years following the highest immigration rates,” the Kayals write. “That a mere 10,000 immigrants a year could inspire such paranoid reactions among Americans indicates the general anti-immigrant climate prevalent at the country at the time.” That general climate produced the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, and then the Immigration Act of 1924, which reduced Syria’s yearly immigration quota to a hundred people. The law’s prohibitions on Asian and Middle Eastern immigration and naturalization remained basically in place until 1965.
It was a strange experience, rereading “Emily of Deep Valley,” picturing Emily Webster arguing in front of a Minnesota school board that the Syrian immigrants should be valued as part of their town, and thinking about the legal border that the current Administration has tried to erect to keep Syrians out, while they face inhumane danger in their home country. (More than fifteen thousand Syrian children have been killed in the country’s current civil war.) Emily’s story is simplistic: she goes from ignorance to curiosity to the conscious desire to strengthen and benefit from a diverse local community. It feels both old-fashioned and progressive, and makes one realize that progressive ideals in general seem suddenly old-fashioned.
In 1931, James Ansara wrote a Harvard doctoral thesis called “The Immigration and Settlement of the Syrians,” in which he suggested that any American town with a population of more than five thousand was likely to have Syrian residents. (He estimated that more than two thousand Syrians had settled in Emily Webster’s Minnesota.) Ansara described the wave of immigrants who fought the Revolutionary War, the wave of immigrants who fought in the Civil War, and, finally, the wave of immigrants who fought in the First World War. These last he called “perhaps the last to come in any great numbers.” He added, “Perhaps our last immigrants will be remembered as the people who made possible American greatness in industry, finance, and even culture. Just as in the past, so in the present, every element in America is contributing something to American life.”
