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.

Personal life Yezierska was born in 1880 in the shtetl of Płock (Yiddish: Plotzk) in the Russian Pale of Settlement. 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.

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 struggling 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. 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. The novel has been reissued multiple times and remains her best-known work. As portrayed in the book, she identified as an immigrant and never felt truly American, believing native-born people had an easier time. It was the last novel she published before falling into obscurity.

Yezierska and Hollywood The success of Anzia Yezierska's early short stories led to a brief, but significant, relationship between her and Hollywood. Movie producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to Yezierska's collection Hungry Hearts. The silent film of the same title (1922) was shot on location in New York's Lower East Side. It starred Helen Ferguson, E. Alyn Warren, and Bryant Washburn. In recent years, the film was restored through the efforts of the National Center for Jewish Film, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, and the British Film Institute; in 2006, a new score was composed to accompany it. The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival showed the restored print in July 2010. Yezierska's 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements was adapted and produced as a silent film of the same title (1925).

Recognizing the popularity of Yezierska's stories, Goldwyn gave the author a $100,000 contract to write screenplays. She was uncomfortable with being touted as a symbol of the American Dream. Frustrated by the shallowness of Hollywood and by her own alienation, Yezierska returned to New York in 1925. She continued publishing novels and stories about immigrant women seeking to establish their identities in America.

Revival of interest Her fictionalized autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), was published when she was nearly 70 years old. The fact that she left her husband and struck out on her own spoke to feminists, as well as the poverty and dilemmas faced by immigrant woman. As these new readers find inspiration in Yezierska, scholarly interest has continued to grow and many of her works have been reprinted. In 1975 Bread Givers (1925) was reprinted by Persea Books. They later repirnted copies of many of Yezierska’s other works and other publishers printing them in later years.

Works

Hungry Hearts (short stories, 1920) Salome of the Tenements (novel, 1922) Children of Loneliness (short stories, 1923) Bread Givers: a struggle between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New (novel, 1925) Arrogant Beggar (novel, 1927) All I Could Never Be (novel, 1932) The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection edited by Alice Kessler-Harris (New York: Persea Books, 1979) . Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story (autobiographical novel, 1950) How I Found America: Collected Stories (short stories, 1991)