Anzia Yezierska and the Experience of the Assimilated Jew

Abstract

Anzia Yezierska first received national attention when her short story, “The Fat of the Land,” won the prestigious Edward O’Brien Best Short Story award in 1919, which led to the publication of her first collection of short stories, Hungry Hearts. The Hollywood studio Goldwyn immediately noticed her potential, paying generously for the film rights to her work and also hiring her as a scriptwriter. Goldwyn’s tremendous publicity campaign made Yezierska an overnight star, hailed in newspapers around the country as the “Sweatshop Cinderella” who had managed to move “From Hester Street to Hollywood.”1 Articles in popular magazines and journals repeated this glamorous fairy tale, describing how a poor immigrant from the Lower East Side ghetto, who had at various times been a scrub-woman, servant, and factory worker, had been instantly transformed into a great novelist and Hollywood success.2 She soon became “the recognized mouthpiece of New York’s Jewish East Side”3 and quickly gained a reputation as an assimilationist in the vein of Mary Antin, who used a crude immigrant idiom to protest the poor social conditions of the ghetto and to articulate the immigrant’s desire to live the American Dream. Yezierska’s second work, the novel Salome of the Tenements (1923), was also made into a film, but by this time she had left Hollywood disgruntled, turning down a lucrative contract with William Fox.KeywordsShort StoryFairy TaleVacation HouseHappy EndingFree VacationThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.