14 May 2016
I survived a Syrian immigrant’s commencement speech
Salmon Rizk was the commencement speaker at my high school graduation in the spring of 1965. The best selling author of Syrian Yankee, he spoke at many small town graduations, providing a sanctimonious but rather entertaining alternative to local politicians armed with clean jokes cribbed from the Reader’s Digest. He had something better than jokes: an interesting story and the blessing of DeWitt Wallace, Mr. Reader’s Digest himself, and, I suspect, co-author of Rizk’s book.
No one in the hot, steamy, gymnasium that night was more American than Rizk. Born in the middle east, possibly in that part of Syria which now is Lebanon, to an American Christian mother who died while he was a boy, he made his way to America after World War I, his journey financed by relatives in Iowa. Once here, he learned English. Not many years thereafter, he began his public speaking career.
In his forward to Syrian Yankee, Wallace wrote:
Members of the editorial staff of The Reader’s Digest first heard Salmon Rizk in April 1939, when Lowell Thomas introduced him to the New York Advertising Club as the “Syrian Yankee.” By now Salmon was devoting full time to lecturing on “The Americanization of an American,” and we were convinced that he had an important message, particularly for the youth of the United States.
During the 1930’s, high school and college discussion was so focused on correcting the faults of democracy that the advantages of the American was of life were seldom mention. Salmon’s talk, wherever heard, produced a dramatically quickened appreciation.
As a public service, The Reader’s Digest offered him to the high school of the United States. He has since told the strange tale, which is here expanded into a book, to over 1,012,000 boys and girls in 1495 schools.
Superintendents, principals and students have written us hundreds of letters saying that Salom’s passionately sincere talk was the most inspiring they had ever heard. A sentence from Father Flanagan of Boys Town, Nebraska, is typical: “Salmon Rizk has made my homeless boys proud of being Americans.”
With our entry into the war, Salom’s personal tribute to the privilege of being a citizen of hese United States added significance. It was obvious that his autobiography would have particular timeliness and value.
Syrian Yankee was released in 1943. It was, frankly, wartime propaganda as well as an immigrant’s autobiography and paean to his adopted country. Despite the war, no expense was spared in the book’s production. My copy, dated 1943, has a four-color dust cover, high quality paper that has neither yellowed nor become embrittled, and features high end typesetting (ligatures, old style figures). A glut must have been printed, as Rizk was selling autographed copies after my graduation ceremony concluded.
Propaganda or not, Syrian Yankee told a powerful story, which is why Rizk, 57 that spring, was still on the small town cap and gown circuit praising the United States and extolling the virtues of assimilation, presenting himself as living proof that immigrants did assimilate and did so willingly and joyfully.
Rizk received a standing ovation that evening in 1965, in a place a thousand miles from here. Were he alive today, at least in increasingly xenophobic western Montana, I think he would receive death threats, and that mobs of rural bigots who deny the possibility of assimilation would try to prevent him from speaking to 2016’s graduates.