Politics & Power Quote by Irwin Shaw

A nation built on self-invention will always end up arguing about who gets to claim the label, and Shaw slips a blade neatly into that argument. By pointing out that Isaac Bashevis Singer is Polish-born and doesn’t even write in English, Shaw foregrounds the usual gatekeeping metrics - birthplace, language, assimilation - then dismisses them with a curt, almost defiant “Still.” The sentence is engineered like a courtroom objection: the evidence is admitted, the verdict is unchanged.

The intent isn’t to sentimentalize immigration; it’s to redefine Americanness as a cultural relationship rather than a biological fact. Singer wrote in Yiddish, a language that carries the whole drama of diaspora in its grammar. Shaw knows that’s exactly why Singer matters to America: he embodies the country’s real literary engine, which has always run on translation, hybridity, and argument. Calling him “an American” is less a compliment than a provocation to nativist common sense.

Context matters. Mid-century America was busy congratulating itself on being a melting pot while policing the terms of belonging - through quotas, suspicion of outsiders, and, in the cultural sphere, a narrow idea of what “American writing” should sound like. Shaw’s line exposes the contradiction: the U.S. wants immigrant genius, but prefers it stripped of foreignness. Singer’s foreignness is the point. Shaw’s “Still” insists that the passport of the imagination outranks the passport in the drawer.