“The Love of Colour in Me”: Anzia Yezierska’s <i>Bread Givers</i> and the Space of White Racial Manufacture

Abstract

could beat them all if I only let loose love of colour in me. --Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (181) Philosopher Charles W. Mills's observation that race as a system has to be maintained through constant boundary policing (77) aptly speaks to phenomena of early-twentieth century when a new onrush of European migration to US threw white racial identity into chaos again and required a formidable amount of surveillance and negotiation to effect its coherence. Scholars such as Kenneth T. Jackson, George Lipsitz, Carlo Rotella, Nancy A. Denton, and Douglass S. Massey have detailed carefully how New Deal legislation such as Federal Housing Act and GI Bill provided imprimatur and material resources by which white ethnics could distance their residences from nonwhites living in American cities. Their research, however, is not as informative about subjective processes of racialization these state-sponsored segregationist initiatives advanced. (1) They explain how American institutions engineered racially homogeneous spaces, but they do not account for all psychic concessions that led particular white ethnics to accept formation of pan-European whiteness in US. Neither do they focus on extent to which these probationary white groups (Jacobson 8) saw space as key to this formation and their sense of American belonging. Critics have examined Anzia Yezierska's writing as epitome of ethnic modernism; as a sample of burgeoning, yet unrealized, urban immigrant feminism; or as a case study in modern writer's ambivalent encounter with market values of Hollywood's emerging film culture. (2) Yezierska's Bread Givers (1925) provides ideal text with which to examine consolidation of ethnic whiteness in 1920s. Such whiteness was a phenomenon that was simultaneously racial and spatial. Although spaces and places through which narrative proceeds are fictive, actual ghettoized life of Jewish immigrants on Lower East Side of 1920s New York inspired vicissitudes of tale. The enclave novel imagines proffers unique access to spatial psyche of people who served as models for Yezierska's characters. Moreover, novel's Jewish female protagonist, Sara Smolinsky, appears to be a prelapsarian immigrant subject, a character who exercises free will and makes existential choices before serendipitous production of pan-European white identity. Also, Yezierska's novel defies conventional spatial parameters of what Michael Denning describes as the ghetto pastoral. Denning posits that in these proletarian tales of communal immigrant life in New World, there is little crossing out of ghetto milieu (247), and these tales remain faithful to their regional boundaries and imagined intimate geography in which their narratives unfold. The central feature of Bread Givers, however, is ever-shifting location of female protagonist within urban space. If we heed geographer Doreen Massey's claim that mobility of subjects, institutions, or states is redolent with sociopolitical significance (150), we can see Yezierska's heroine as prototypical pre-white immigrant whose movements within and beyond fictional New York tell much about desires and psychic processes that abetted spatialization of race. Bread Givers maps its protagonist's anguished voyage from working-class immigrant girlhood to white American femininity, a voyage that necessarily passes through way station of commodity culture. As primary means by which immigrants Americanized themselves, mass culture became a source of peril and imagination for newcomer. On one hand, immigrants were vulnerable to how commodities such as fashion and cosmetics could deceive observer (the individual may not be who/what he or she appears); on other, it was precisely commodities' ability to disguise appearance of ethnic foreignness that could facilitate immigrants' acceptance by modern American mainstream. …