Reading Material: Contextualizing Clothing in the Work of Anzia Yezierska

Abstract

Throughout her fiction, the Russian Jewish immigrant writer Anzia Yezierska displays an acute awareness of the role of commodities in the lives of recent immigrants. For Yezierska, as for her contemporaries, the Jewish immigrant writers Mary Antin and Abraham Cahan, the commodity that most visibly signifies the seductive power of the early twentieth-century American marketplace is clothing, the factory-produced garments available at low prices to the masses. In the work of these writers, ready-made clothing is prized for its almost magical transformative power, its aura ,of instant respectability; it functions as testimony of an immigrant's new American status, the external proof of economic and cultural viability.(1) But historically, many Russian Jewish immigrants were both producers and consumers of ready-made clothing; for those immigrants, clothing often became an arena of highly-charged and conflicting signification, alternately a site of intense struggle and a source of pleasure. In certain texts by Anzia Yezierska--in her autobiographical writings and in two early short stories--she presents Jewish female garment workers who become profoundly alienated from clothing; in those texts, clothing is associated with the disheartening fixity of an exploitative American economic system. In contrast, in her 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements, Yezierska depicts a Jewish clothing worker who indulges in an intensely personal and erotic relation to clothing; in that novel, clothing is used as a vehicle to engage in a fascinating attempt to transgress and transcend forms of economic and social hierarchy. Since the reprinting of Yezierska's major works of fiction began in the 1970s, critics have largely focused on Yezierska's exploration of the difficult position of women in traditionally patriarchal Jewish families; the feminist implications of her work have been well explored. But what is not often recognized is Yezierska's fascination with the American class system and its signifiers. Indeed, her strategic construction of her own life story as a rags-to-riches narrative attests to her awareness of American ideologies of class mobility. According to her own representation of her history, she was born into poverty in Russia during the 1880s; at the age of ten she settled with her large family in New York's Lower East Side Jewish ghetto.(2) She labored as a servant and a factory worker before attending Columbia University Teachers College under the patronage of a wealthy philanthropist. After the publication in 1920 of Hungry Hearts, a short story collection that was subsequently made into a Hollywood film, she achieved popular fame. The measured success of such works as Hungry Hearts, Children of Loneliness, Salome of the Tenements, and Bread Givers during the 1920s can be interpreted as partially predicated on the legend of Yezierska's difficult early years in America, the sweatshop Cinderella story that was consistently used to publicize and promote her work. Throughout the rest of her life--her precipitous decline into obscurity during the 1930s and the partial recovery of her reputation during the 1950s--Yezierska continued to take life in the East Side ghetto as her subject matter. Yet, it was not simply Yezierska's fiction that formed a bridge to her past; it was also, by her own account, her attitude toward commodifies--chiefly clothing--that marked her difference from fully assimilated immigrants and mainstream Americans. When she was a child, ready-made clothing symbolized the conventionality she coveted; she recalled, felt like the village idiot in my immigrant clothes so different from the clothes of the other children (Red Ribbon 39). After she had achieved fame as a writer specializing in working-class immigrant fiction, she publicly performed her identity through her clothing: Why had I never dressed like other women? It wasn't just a matter of being poor. The poorest shopgirl with her mind on style managed to look as smart as other shopgirls. …