Language Barrier

In "America and I" and a few of the other recent selections we've discussed the issue of the language barrier. In "America and I" we hear an American woman tell Yezierska that she must first learn English before she can be successful. Everyone was upset by this, and I was too. It didn't seem fair that Yezierska should have to learn English before she could find a job she loved instead of a job she needed for survival.
On the otherhand, I can appreciate what the woman who was "helping" Yezierska was trying to say. America is a collective mass of many cultures, but at some point those cultures have to reach a central point. There has to be something in common for all the different groups of people to identify with. This means that people coming from other places (which is all of us, or our ancestry) have to accept parts of a new culture in addition to their own.
The saying, "When in Rome..." comes to mind. When people come to any country, they are choosing to go there and to assume or violate the norms of the culture. It is naive to think that a whole country should modify itself for the newest members. Immigrants who choose to come to America can also choose to learn English or not, but the choice is theirs. If they choose not to learn English, they are rejecting their new culture. Their culture is not rejecting them.