Anzia Yezierska

Anzia Yezierska (October 29, 1880 – November 20, 1970) was a Jewish-American novelist. She was born in Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire, the youngest of nine children. She emigrated as a child with her parents to the United States and lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side ghetto. Her depictions of turn-of-the-century Jewish-American life—Hungry Hearts, Salome of the Tenements, and Bread Givers—won her acclaim in the 1920s, and she briefly worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood.

There are those who consider her the female equivalent of Abraham Cahan, editor of the Yiddish Jewish Daily Forward.

Personal life

Yezierska was born in 1880 in the shtetl of Płock (Yiddish: Plotzk) in the Russian Pale of Settlement. Her parents were (Baruch) Bernard and Pearl. The Yezierski family emigrated to the United States in the early 1890s, looking for a better life, following in the footsteps of her eldest brother, who had arrived in the States a few years prior. They lived in a tenement on the Lower East Side.

The family was Jewish Orthodox and assumed the surname "Mayer" while Anzia took Harriet, or Hattie, as her first name (in her late twenties, she reclaimed her original name, Anzia Yezierska). Her father was a full time scholar of the Torah and Talmud and her mother worked to support the family. Her parents encouraged her brothers to pursue higher education, but believed Anzia and her sisters had to support their husbands and families. Anzia rebelled against the role she was thrust into, and left home in 1900.

She lived for a while at the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, where she studied domestic science. She won a scholarship in the domestic science program at Columbia Teachers College, which she attended until 1905. Following graduation, she taught home economics, first at the Lower East Side's Educational Alliance, and then in New York City public schools.

In early 1910, she fell in love with Arnold Levitas, but instead married his friend Jacob Gordon, a New York attorney, in November of that year. The marriage to Gordon was quickly annulled, and she then married Levitas in a religious ceremony to avoid legal complications. He was the father of her only child, Louise, born in May 1912.

Around 1914, Yezierska left Levitas and moved with her daughter to San Francisco, where she was employed as a social worker. Overwhelmed with the chores and responsibilities of working while raising a daughter, Yezierska gave up maternal rights and transferred custody to Levitas. In 1916, she and Levitas officially divorced.

She then moved back to New York City. Starting in 1917, she had a romantic relationship with philosopher John Dewey, a professor at Columbia University. Both Dewey and Yezierska wrote about one another, alluding to the relationship.

Yezierska was encouraged by her sister to pursue her longtime interest in becoming a professional writer. She devoted the remainder of her life to it.

Yezierska was the aunt of American film critic Cecelia Ager. Ager's daughter was journalist Shana Alexander.

Anzia Yezierska died November 21, 1970, of a stroke in a nursing home in Ontario, California.

Writing career

Yezierska wrote about the struggles of Jewish and later Puerto Rican immigrants in New York City's ghettos particularly from the female perspective. She highlights the struggles against patriarchy, poverty, "old world" practices, Antisemitism, and especially the hardships endured by women coping with childcare and crowded conditions, while being financially dependent.

In her fifty-year writing career, she explored the cost of acculturation and assimilation among immigrants. Her stories provide insight into the meaning of liberation for immigrants—particularly Jewish immigrant women. Many of her works of fiction can be labeled semi-autobiographical, as she drew from her life growing up on the Lower East Side. Her works feature elements of realism with sharp attention to detail; she often has characters express themselves in Yiddish-English dialect. Her highly idealized characters, along with occasional passages of sentimentalism, have prompted some critics to classify her works as romantic.

Yezierska turned to writing around 1912. Turmoil in her personal life prompted her to write stories about problems faced by wives. In the beginning, she had difficulty finding a publisher. But her persistence paid off in December 1915 when her story "The Free Vacation House" was published in The Forum. She attracted more critical praise the next year when her tale "Where Lovers Dream" appeared in Metropolitan magazine. In 1919 her literary endeavors received increased recognition when her rags-to-riches story "The Fat of the Land" won the Edward J. O'Brien award for Best Short Story of the Year and was published in the book Best Short Stories of 1919. Yezierska's early fiction was eventually collected by publisher Houghton Mifflin and released in a book titled Hungry Hearts (1920). Another collection of stories, Children of Loneliness, followed two years later. These stories focused on the children of immigrants and their pursuit of the American Dream.

Some literary critics argue that Yezierska's strength as an author can best be found in her novels. Her first, Salome of the Tenements (1923), was inspired by her friend Rose Pastor Stokes, as well as by Yezierska's romance with John Dewey. Rose Pastor had gained fame in 1905 as an impoverished young Jewish immigrant woman who, in what was characterized in newspapers as a Cinderella story, married a New York millionaire from a prominent Episcopalian family.

Yezierska's novel Bread Givers (1925) explores the life of a Jewish-American immigrant girl, Sara Smolinsky, who struggles to live from day to day while searching for her place in mainstream society. The novel has been reissued multiple times and remains Yezierska's most well-known work.