Anzia Yezierska
Anzia Yezierska was a notable Jewish American writer born around 1880 in Russian-occupied Poland. Immigrating to the United States at the age of fifteen, she settled in New York's Lower East Side, where her upbringing influenced her literary work, particularly her critiques of gender roles within traditional Jewish families. Yezierska experienced a challenging early life, balancing domestic work and education, including training in domestic science at Columbia University. She began her writing career in 1913, gaining recognition for her poignant stories that highlighted the struggles of Jewish immigrant women facing poverty, anti-Semitism, and patriarchal oppression.
Her most acclaimed work, *Bread Givers*, published in 1925, is a bildungsroman that explores the quest for identity and love amidst societal challenges. Although she enjoyed early success, including a brief foray into Hollywood, she ultimately distanced herself from the film industry, choosing instead to focus on her literary roots. Despite fading from public view before her passing in 1970, Yezierska's contributions were rediscovered in the 1980s, reaffirming her significance in the Jewish American literary canon. Her work remains a powerful testament to the immigrant experience, particularly that of women navigating cultural and societal expectations.
Subject Terms
Anzia Yezierska
Writer
- Born: c. 1880
- Birthplace: Płońsk, Poland, Russian Empire (now in Poland)
- Died: November 21, 1970
- Place of death: Ontario, California
Polish-born writer
Among the most significant Jewish American women writers of the twentieth century, Yezierska is known for her semiautobiographical portraits of gritty immigrant heroines struggling to find a home in America.
Area of achievement: Literature
Early Life
Born in Russian-occupied Poland around 1880, Anzia Yezierska (AN-zee-uh yeh-ZEER-skuh) came to the United States when she was fifteen years old, part of the great wave of Eastern European Jews who left their shtetls for America between 1880 and 1924. Her family settled on New York’s lower East Side, where her father, Baruch, studied the Talmud, while her mother, Pearl, worked to support the family. Upon immigration, the family name was changed to Mayer; Yezierska reclaimed her birth name in her late twenties.
Yezierska was the youngest daughter of nine siblings; her brothers were educated while her sisters were pressed to marry early. Yezierska had two years of elementary schooling before entering the workforce as a domestic and a sweatshop hand. The division of labor based on gender within the traditional Jewish family would later become a subject of intense criticism in Yezierska’s portraits of immigrant life.
In 1900, Yezierska moved to the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, where she trained in domestic science and won a scholarship to attend Columbia University Teachers College in 1901. There, while promising her patrons to focus her studies on home economics, Yezierska reportedly read Romantic poetry and only reluctantly pursued a teaching degree (her 1927 novel, Arrogant Beggar, offers a bitter critique of the condescending Americanization project of such institutions). After earning a degree in domestic science in 1904, Yezierska held various teaching positions until she wrote her first story in 1913.
Yezierska had two brief marriages. In 1910, she married Jacob Gordon, but, hoping for a companionate marriage and resistant to physical consummation, she asked for an annulment after one day. The following year she married Arnold Levitas, with whom she had a daughter, Louise, born in 1912. When her daughter was five, Yezierska renounced maternal custody and returned Louise to her father and his family. Yezierska and Levitas divorced in 1916. Louise Levitas Henricksen would go on to write a biography of her mother, published in 1988.
Life’s Work
Yezierska’s story, “The Free Vacation House,” published in 1915, launched her career as a chronicler of the Jewish American immigrant woman’s struggle to achieve personhood amid poverty, anti-Semitism, and patriarchal oppression. She met philosopher John Dewey in 1917, who encouraged her writing and pursued an affectionate relationship with her. Some have argued that this was the pivotal romantic (if unconsummated) relationship of her life—a relationship that was iterated in numerous fictional portraits of gentile professor figures who captivate and yet fail the immigrant girls to whom they are attracted.
Yezierska received great acclaim when her story “The Fat of the Land” was chosen for the Edward J. O’Brien Award and published in Best Short Stories of 1919. The publication of her short-story collection Hungry Hearts in 1920 was so well reviewed that it caught the attention of Hollywood, and she received an enormous advance and a train ticket west. Bitterly disillusioned when the film was turned into a Cinderella story of the ghetto, Yezierska left Hollywood and refused further involvement with the film industry. A film of her novel Salome of the Tenements (1923) was made without her involvement.
Yezierska’s seminal work, Bread Givers, a bildungsroman about a Jewish girl struggling to find love and personhood despite poverty, patriarchy, and the tension between traditional Jewishness and secular America, was published in 1925. She was quite prolific into the 1930’s, going on to publish two more novels and another story collection. After the publication of All I Could Never Be in 1932, Yezierska struggled to find meaningful work and an audience interested in her voice. She enjoyed a brief renaissance with the publication of her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (with an introduction by W. H. Auden), in 1950. She moved to live near her daughter near the end of her life, and Yezierska died of a stroke in 1970.
Significance
Dubbed the “Sweatshop Cinderella” after a brief stint in Hollywood, where a film based on her story collection Hungry Hearts was produced, Yezierska ultimately rejected the limelight, returned to New York to write of the poor Jewish immigrants from whom she sprang, and died in obscurity before being reclaimed by feminist and ethnic studies scholars in the 1980’s. Her depictions of the plight of Jewish American women immigrants struggling to claim personhood under the weight of patriarchal Jewish traditions and a dismissive dominant American culture remain among the most powerful literary accounts of the Jewish American experience.
Bibliography
Dearborn, Mary. Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York: Free Press, 1988. A fascinating account of the romance between Yezierska and Dewey, providing one of the strongest portraits available of Yezierska’s life and significance.
Gelfant, Blanche. Introduction to Hungry Hearts. New York: Penguin, 1997. A lively biographical exploration that includes literary analysis of the stories collected in Hungry Hearts.
Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988. A complicated exploration of her mother’s life, written by the daughter who was abandoned as a child by Yezierska.
Yezierska, Anzia. Red Ribbon on a White Horse. New York: Persea Books, 1950. Yezierska’s autobiography is maddeningly untrustworthy, as noted in the afterword written by her daughter (Yezierska fails to mention her marriages or the birth of her only child). Nevertheless, it offers an interesting reflection on Yezierska’s time in Hollywood and her struggles to craft an authentic voice as a Jewish woman writer.