ABSTRACT
Aleksandar Hemon appears in mass media as the epitome of the American Dream: the young writer from war-torn Bosnia, without good knowledge of English, struggled through hard work to become an awarded American author. However, in his novels, memoirs, and essays, Hemon offers a much more complex picture of this cultural imaginary; firstly, by deconstructing the neat story of upward mobility and success and then by reinventing the values, aspirations, and goals of immigrants’ Dreams. I argue that Hemon's most important contribution to the idea of the American Dream is his attempt to re-imagine it beyond its material aspect. His alternative vision of the Dream, which I name here the Humble Dream, is crucially connected to temporality. While the conventional Dream obscures immigrants’ past in favor of the future, Hemon's characters live both “there” and “here,” “now” and “then.” This overlapping fundamentally influences their Dreams, as past rituals and values define what they will seek in the new land. We could even say that Hemon “socializes” the American Dream by introducing cultural habits which are inseparable from the context of socialist Yugoslavia and its underpinning values.
