SOURCE: “The Immigrant as Writer: Cultural Resistance and Conformity in Josef Škvorecký's The Engineer of Human Souls and Raymond Federman's Take It or Leave It,” in Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 92–104.

In the following essay, Karpinski analyzes the influence that immigrant status has on Škvorecký's The Engineer of Human Souls and Raymond Federman's Take It or Leave It.

The experience of immigration is usually a story of survival: the economic, political, cultural, or simply the personal survival of the individual who has been—by choice, accident, or necessity—thrown into a new existential context. Raymond Federman and Joseph Škvorecký are survivors in a double sense, as individuals and writers. Respectively Jewish-French and Czech by origin, both came to North America from the Holocaust-haunted or Communist-oppressed Europe and have become academics and teachers here. Indeed, immigration and writing are closely related...