Anzia Yezierska Research Articles

The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. EducationFashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature

The Autobiography of Citizenship: Assimilation and Resistance in U.S. EducationFashion and Fiction: Self-Transformation in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Charity institutions as networks of power: how Anzia Yezierska's characters resist philanthropic surveillance

At the end of the nineteenth-century, American private institutions took the charge of spreading national values due to the massive wave of eastern European immigration. These institutions, especially charitable organizations, supported the integration of immigrants, however, from a classist perspective. According to the Polish-American author Anzia Yezierska (1885-1970), their apparently inclusive programs actually hindered the fulfilment of the discourse of the American Dream, which is based on the premise of preserving individual differences. By comparing those charitable institutions to Michel Foucault’s panoptical prison, this research attempts to demonstrate how the similarities between both structures help understand up to what extent the benefactresses in charge accurately managed to influence the newly arrived immigrants. The hierarchy of power established between them would determine the latter’s difficulties to achieve the recognition of their individualities from their intersectional experiences. The alternative to the monitoring network, thus, appears in the act of solidarity, a kind of resistance that allows ghettoized characters to perform their cultural distinctiveness away from Americanization.

Sarah Schulman’s Empathy, Ties that Bind, and the Possibilities of the Stranger

In her novel Empathy (1992), Sarah Schulman imagines what it means to be caught between the assimilation of Ashkenazi Jewish Americans and the otherness of Eastern Europe. Schulman’s protagonist Anna O. traverses many landscapes and, unlike other characters in the novel that work to transcend their stranger identity, Anna O. makes a new life for herself through negotiating what I will call a liminal identity. For Schulman, the task of illuminating the stranger condition that her main character inhabits is a tricky one. While characters of earlier Jewish American texts by writers such as Anzia Yezierska were readily understood as strangers working towards ‘becoming American’, it is implicitly accepted that Anna O., living in queer 1990s New York City, is already a completely assimilated American. Schulman uses a variety of narrative strategies that culminate in a somewhat messy palimpsest attempting to convey the nuanced experience of the stranger. The resulting textual fragmentation removes any stable point of reference so that scholars and readers of Empathy must reconstruct various narrative elements in trying to make sense of Anna O.’s world. One is left to consult volumes of critical work that hardly get to the heart of Anna O.’s Jewish queer experience, to piece them together into a patchwork that may, by its end, accomplish the task of excavating Schulman’s postmodern stranger. In this article I argue that inhabiting the position of the stranger allows Anna O. the possibility of creating some sort of coexistence between, and cohabitation of, her queer and Jewish identities. In this way, Schulman constructs the stranger as a subject position replete with possibility rather than as a liability that must be shed in order to acculturate onself to American life.

The Salome Ensemble

The Salome Ensemble

Tricksterism and Humor in Bread Givers (1925) by Anzia Yeziaska

This paper deals with the trickster narrative and humorous characterization in Bread Givers (Anzia Yezierska, 1925). It starts first with characteristics typical of tricksterism, which is divided into two parts, trickster narrative and humorous characterization. Then the social and cultural circumstances are introduced of the early 20th-century decades where Anzia Yezierska stood out as a unique Jewish writer with her masterpiece, Bread Givers. The trickster narrative of the female protagonist is explored, followed by the humorous characterization of Reb Smolinsky, her father. To conclude, tricksterism and humor serve their thematic and moral functions in the novel: they help the characters tide over poverty, sexism, and racism, and ultimately enable Sara, the narrator protagonist to rise from ghetto to a middle class career.

The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzio Yezierska, Sonya Levin, and Jetta Goudal by Alan Robert Ginsbergt

Reviewed by: The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzio Yezierska, Sonya Levin, and Jetta Goudal by Alan Robert Ginsbergt Lara Vapnek (bio) The Salome Ensemble: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzio Yezierska, Sonya Levin, and Jetta Goudal. By Alan Robert Ginsberg. Syracuse University Press, 2016. xxiv + 363 pp. How does the modern woman measure her worth, by the money she earns, or the man she marries? This dilemma lies at the heart of Salome of the Tenements, a novel (1922) and movie (1925), and it pulses through the biographies of four women who collaborated on this cultural production: Rose Pastor Stokes, Anzia Yezierska, Sonya Levien, and Jetta Goudal. Alan Robert Ginsberg's engaging new book The Salome Ensemble analyzes the Salome narrative and explores the possibilities for self-invention available to immigrant Jewish women during the first third of the twentieth century. In the United States, Ginsberg argues, Stokes, Yezierska, Levien, and Goudal "learned that identities are multiple, plural, and elective" (1). All four of these women changed their names, pursued creative careers, and became romantically involved with gentile men. Like the biblical Salome, they made strategic choices [End Page 311] about what to reveal and what to hide as they engaged in a complicated dance with American popular culture. The story begins with Rose Pastor Stokes (1879–1933), who went to work rolling cigars in Cleveland at age eleven. In 1901, a letter to the Yiddishes Tageblatt describing her life as a working girl set her on the path to journalism. On assignment in New York City, she met James Graham Phelps Stokes, a wealthy socialist. Their 1905 wedding became a tabloid sensation. Rose's fame as the "Cinderella of the Sweatshops" obscured her leftist labor activism, as well as her work as a playwright and translator of Yiddish poetry. World War One divided the charmed couple. J.G. Phelps Stokes became a patriot and Rose a communist. Like many radicals, she was charged with espionage for critiquing the war. The couple divorced in 1925. Rose married a younger Jewish communist man before succumbing to breast cancer in 1933. Anzia Yezierska (1885–1970) met Rose Pastor Stokes at the Jewish Alliance in 1902 or 1903 and watched with fascination as Stokes's marriage lifted her into wealth and fame but ultimately chafed against her idealism. According to Ginsberg, Yezierska saw Stokes as "a new kind of Salome, a dangerous, subversive, defiant, and inspiring woman who wielded feminine power to impose her will and achieve her goals" (56). This observation, combined with Yezierska's own quest for acceptance and her affair with the philosopher John Dewey informed Salome of the Tenements. Coming of age on the Lower East Side, Yezierska aspired to artistic and professional achievement typically denied to women. She hated her jobs as a servant, cook, and sewing machine operator, and she saw her mother and sister as enslaved by the expectations of Orthodox Jewish marriage and motherhood. Determined to be a writer, Yezierska "fled the responsibilities of personal relationships while nevertheless pressing others for emotional or professional support" (101). In a similar vein, Sonya Vrunsky, Yezierska's protagonist in Salome of the Tenements declares, "My life is one endless running away from the things that drag me down" (85). Publication eluded Yezierska until age thirty-five, when she got a break from her friend Sonya Levien, a protégé of Stokes who worked as an editor at Metropolitan Magazine. Yezierska felt uncomfortable with the trappings of success and rejected the compromises required for lucrative work in Hollywood. In contrast, Sonya Levien (1888–1960) gracefully scaled the ladders of assimilation and professional achievement. Ginsberg suggests that Levien shied away from confrontation because her anarchist father, Julius Opeskin, had been sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, but the negative examples of her friends may have been equally as powerful. Stokes suffered public [End Page 312] disgrace and financial hardship due to her dissenting political views. Yezierska, who dwelled on the contradictions between the old world and the new, seemed perpetually unhappy. In the early 1920s, Levien, her husband Carl Hovey, and their four children (two from Hovey's previous marriage) moved to Hollywood, where Levien established herself as a leading screenwriter...

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

Edith Wharton in Washington, 2–4 June 2016

“The Kindling Breath of Another Mind”:

ABSTRACT I argue that Bread Givers and the broader body of Anzia Yezierska's writing gather a strong and persistent critique of how American education reinforces social stratifications, rather than engaging the lived experiences of students. Her fiction dramatizes students’ hope for acceptance and dialogue, and she reveals the currents of social containment that run against Progressive education's emphasis on democratic participation and tolerance of diversity. By depicting encounters with a variety of educators and learned people, Yezierska intimates an ideal educational environment in which students’ knowledge and experiences are essential and respected, and social and cultural hierarchies suspended. I suggest that the force of Yezierska's critique of American education, and more specifically the tensions within Progressive education, remains underappreciated because of the critical attention given to her personal relationship with John Dewey and because of the perception among some readers that she is more of an assimilationist than a social critic.

Beyond Gatsby: how Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and writers of the 1920s shaped American culture

Preface Introduction: The Twenties Chapter One Beyond the Wasteland: T.S. Eliot, the Lost Generation, and the Postwar World Chapter Two Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald: Friendship and Rivalry Chapter Three William Faulkner: A Southern Voice in the Age of Modernism Chapter Four Modernism and Popular Culture in the Age of Ezra Pound and James Joyce Chapter Five Midwest Vision and Values: Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather Chapter Six Sounds of the City: Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Anzia Yezierska, Langston Hughes Chapter Seven History and Mythmakers: Edith Wharton, Stephen Vincent Benet, William Carlos Williams, John Steinbeck Notes Bibliography Index About the Author

Of Science and Excess: Jacob Riis, Anzia Yezierska, and the Modernist Turn in Immigrant Fiction

This essay examines the writing of Jacob Riis and Anzia Yezierska to make an argument about the work of immigrant writers as artist-ethnographers, whose observations often straddle the line between science and romance, participant and observer. Riis’s realist, documentary style is paralleled and contrasted with Yezierska’s ethnic avant-gardism to show the very different ways in which both relied on affect – emotion, sentiment, and sensory language – to animate immigrant lives and spaces for a burgeoning American middle class readership. While Riis uses affect to appeal to his readers’ sense of charity and fear – alternating between images of social distance and physical proximity – so that they might be moved to contribute to the amelioration of the living conditions of their encroaching immigrant neighbors, Yezierska instead uses this same kind of affective language and imagery to show that the emotional excess of a community cannot and should not be reined in by scientific and sociological studies that seek to distance and contain immigrant groups. While both writers perform social activism through images and imagistic language, Yezierska’s later writing works to disrupt Riis’s earlier vision of ordered reform by using affect and sentimental language alongside realist conventions and ethnographic practices. This strategic marriage of art and science represents a hybrid modernism that worked to naturalize a new generation of Americans.

If data could talk back: Anzia Yezierska, Paul de Kruif and thousands of pages of 'research'

If data could talk back: Anzia Yezierska, Paul de Kruif and thousands of pages of 'research'

If data could talk back: Anzia Yezierska, Paul de Kruif and thousands of pages of ‘research’

If data could talk back: Anzia Yezierska, Paul de Kruif and thousands of pages of ‘research’

Cyrillic Cycles:

Cyrillic Cycles:

The Matter of Identification: Yezierska's Arrogant Beggar and the Gendered Injuries of Class

Anzia Yezierska’s early story, “The Lost Beautifulness,” movingly depicts the “injuries of class” that afflict Eastern European Jewish immigrants in early twentieth-century New York. The text focuses on Hanneh Hayyeh, a pushcart peddler and laundress whose overriding “ambition” is to “have a white-painted kitchen” like the one in the “old Stuyvesant Square mansion” of Mrs. Preston, whose “fine silks and linens” she has washed for years. 1 Aligned with Hanneh’s point of view, imbued with psychic immediacy by incorporating the cadences of Yiddish speech, the story records the affective intensities—the desire and longing, as well as the anger, disillusionment, and grief—produced by the conflict between the beautiful “chimera” (92) of American democracy and the systematic inequities of class. Seduced by domestic intimacy with Mrs. Preston, who assures her that wartime’s heightened nationalism “means that everybody in America is going to be with everybody else” (69), Hanneh sees in the women’s “friend[ship]” (68), rooted in a surrogated kinship, the equalizing force of cross-class identification and the promise of mobility. Here as elsewhere in Yezierska’s oeuvre, this promise is fueled by a visual culture of mass consumption. Hanneh aspires to social inclusion through what Lizabeth Cohen calls “consumer citizenship”: 2 the gendered counterpart to her son’s enlistment in the army (an identification signaled in the story’s first paragraph), Hanneh’s embodiment of consumerist norms of “respectability” constitutes a bid for recognition as a national subject—a means to, in Hanneh’s words, “make myself for an American” (68). Repudiating the passion for fancy dress exhibited by contemporary “working girls” and resisting more transient pleasures such as an ice-cream soda or “a

"When the Sun Goes Down": The Ghetto Pastoral Mode in Jean Toomer's Cane

Darwin Turner once wrote of Jean Toomer's literary masterpiece, Cane, that inspires critical rhapsodies rather than (In Minor Chord 207). Turner's observation is suggestive of the critical challenges that Cane poses. While there is no consensus regarding Cane's formal structure, critics have often described it in thematic terms as pastoral work. Bernard Bell's reading of Cane as a pastoral work, contrasting the values of uninhibited, unlettered Black rustics with those of the educated, class consciousness Black bourgeoisie, privileges the lyrical elements of the novel and its indebtedness to Afro American tradition of music as major structural device (Portrait of an Artist 13). Yet his analysis here only extends to the poetic pieces that intersperse Cane without comparing them to the prose narratives that provide thematic and structural counter-point to them. Lucinda MacKethan also offers reading of the novel as pastoral narrative, arguing that Toomer mold[ed] [Cane] into version of Southern pastoral perceived with the black man's double of deep belonging and forced alienation (A Pastoral Problem 425). MacKethan's description of Toomer's ironic pastoral vision in Cane does not adequately attend to the rural and urban conflict that frames the novel's portrayal of culturally displaced blacks in the North. In this essay, I will argue that Cane is best understood as what Michael Denning has described as ghetto variant of the complex pastoral form that emphasizes the unique racial and ethnic conflicts associated with stories of deracinated (im)migrant peoples. Thus, my reading of the novel as ghetto pastoral examines the racial and cultural tensions that necessarily shape Toomer's aesthetic in the novel. In The Cultural Front, Denning calls the ghetto pastoral as yoking of naturalism and the pastoral, stories that dialectically represent urban experience as an allegorical cityscape composed in pidgin of American slang and ghetto dialect, with traces of old country tongues (231). According to Denning, these stories sought to provide more accurate portrayal of ethnic class experience. In contrast to traditional pastoral narratives, which privileged transcendent pastoral ideal in response to the alienating aspects of modern society, the ghetto pastoral narrative revealed the ways in which ethnic and racial categories the experience of class immigrants in the city. These are stories about how displaced immigrants in the city attempt to reimagine themselves in relation to pastoral landscape back home, but they are also stories about how race and ethnicity complicate that transformative ideal. As Denning writes, Ethnicity and race had become the modality through which class peoples experienced their lives and mapped their communities (239). Denning offers as examples of the ghetto pastoral mode the work of authors such as Mike Gold, Claude McKay and Anzia Yezierska, novelists whose works arose out of the proletarian moment of the 1920s and 1930s. As Denning points out, ghetto pastoral novels such as McKay's Home to Harlem and Mike Gold's Jews Without Money revealed the ways in which race and ethnicity challenged the transcendent ideal of green landscape that was at the core of conventional pastoral narratives. Instead, these ghetto pastoral narratives portrayed contested urban landscape composed of the old and the new, past and present--at once bringing together the symbolic elements of ethnic folk culture and the harsh material realities of urban life. Rather than the boundless potential expressed in traditional pastoral narratives, ghetto pastorals were stories that revealed how racial and ethnic boundaries delimited the lives of displaced (im)migrants. At the same time, these stories expressed the ways in which migrants pushed on these boundaries to create liminal spaces of existence, spaces formed at the interstices between the pastoral dream of transcendence and the urban realities of working class tenements, sweatshop and factory labor, and cheap mass entertainments (239). …

“What the College Has Done for Me”: Anzia Yezierska and the Problem of Progressive Education

The literary work of Anzia Yezierska is relevant to the fields of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Partly in dialogue with the philosophy of John Dewey, it reveals the tensions and conflicts inherent in progressive education, emphasizing how these were viewed through the lens of the immigrant student. Yezierska shows that pedagogical progressivism has had tremendous potential to tap into students’ lived experiences and transform them into more fully realized, engaged citizens, even as she also shows that such power has been constrained by institutional structures.

Secret histories: reading twentieth-century American literature

Secret Histories claims that the of the nation is hidden-in plain sight-within the pages of twentieth-century American literature. David Wyatt argues that the nation's fiction and nonfiction expose a secret history that cuts beneath the straight histories of our official accounts. And it does so by revealing personal stories of love, work, family, war, and interracial romance as they were lived out across the decades of the twentieth century. Wyatt reads authors both familiar and neglected, examining double consciousness in the post-Civil War era through works by Charles W. Chesnutt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Booker T. Washington. He reveals aspects of the Depression in the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Anzia Yezierska, and John Steinbeck. Period by period, Wyatt's nuanced readings recover the felt sense of life as it was lived, opening surprising dimensions of the critical issues of a given time. The rise of the women's movement, for example, is revivified in new appraisals of works by Eudora Welty, Ann Petry, and Mary McCarthy. Running through the examination of individual works and times is Wyatt's argument about reading itself. Reading is not a passive activity but an empathetic act of cocreation, what Faulkner calls overpassing to love. Empathetic reading recognizes and relives the emotional, cultural, and political dimensions of an individual and collective past. And discovering a usable American past, as Wyatt shows, enables us to confront the urgencies of our present moment.

"Slipping back into the vernacular": Anzia Yezierska's Vernacular Modernism

During her 1923 trip to Europe, Anzia Yezierska made the appointed rounds of any serious American author of the early 1920s. According to her daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen, Yezierska sought out George Bernard Shaw, Israel Zangwill, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Joseph Conrad to discover the secrets of their writing. The most interesting visit was with Gertrude Stein in Paris, where Stein gave her some typically Steinian advice: Why worry? Nobody knows how writing is written, the writers least of all! (Henriksen 195). The encounter between Yezierska and Stein has essentially gone unexamined in scholarship on these two writers, in part because they inhabit profoundly different spheres of the American literary canon. Despite the fact that they are both Jewish American women of roughly the same generation (Stein was born in 1874, Yezierska around 1880), they have come to represent very different things to scholars of American literature. Stein, firmly embedded in the modernist canon, has only recently been examined under the rubric of ethnic writing by critics such as Maria Damon, Barbara Will, and Priscilla Wald, while Yezierska's rise in American literary studies has been fueled by the interest in the subcanon of ethnic women's writing. (1) Yezierska's 1923 meeting with Stein certainly does not figure as the same kind of watershed moment in American modernism as Ernest Hemingway's arrival at 27 me de Fleums in the previous year. After all, Hemingway approached Stein as an apprentice and Yezierska's meeting occurred after she had already become a successful writer. However, the insistence that Stein remain an unqualified modernist writer, and that Yezierska, at best, be labeled an ethnic modernist suggests an inability of existing literary subcanons to adequately deal with the variety of modernist writing produced in this era. Yezierska was all but invisible to scholars of American literature until the 1970s. Outside a brief mention in Allen Guttmann's 1971 study The Jewish Writer in America, Yezierska was even largely absent from the Jewish American literary canon, which was more kind to conventional realist and modernist figures such as Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, and Henry Roth. (2) Yezierska's rediscovery by literary critics in the 1970s and 1980s (with the republication of Bread Givers [1925] in 1975, and the publication of the Yezierska collection The Open Cage [1979] and the 1985 edition of Hungry Hearts [1920]) came on the heels of an increasing interest in narratives of working women by feminist scholars. (3) As Mary V. Dearborn notes, Yezierska's fiction is welcomed, in short, because it provides valuable documentary evidence that ethnic women existed (Anzia 108). To both feminist and labor historians, such documentation was crucial to the expansion of labor histories to include more diverse voices in the understanding of twentieth-century labor. Since Yezierska's rediscovery, the scholarship on her work has consistently emphasized ethnicity, gender, and class, placing her in subcanons that write out meetings like the one between Stein and Yezierska. Critics have recently gone so far as to include her in studies of Yiddish literature, even though she never published in Yiddish. (4) Ethnic American writers such as Yezierska have been both blessed and cursed by the last thirty years of American literary scholarship. With the emergence of ethnic studies, many American writers long forgotten by literary historians have reemerged in new editions and made their way into classrooms and scholarly journals. This new attention has certainly been a boon for Zora Neale Hurston, whose work has become an indisputable part of the American and African American literary canons. While less canonical ethnic writers continue to inspire a significant amount of scholarship, the relationship of these writers to the rest of American literary history remains murky. In certain cases, such as Michael North's The Dialect of Modernism (1994), writers such as Hurston and Claude McKay form a background for understanding the racial and linguistic appropriations of already canonized high modernists such as Stein, T. …

The New Woman of the Tenements: Anzia Yezierska’s Salome

This essay focuses on twentieth-century Jewish immigrant author Anzia Yezierska’s proto-feminism and how she employed the genre of the romance novel in order to promote new ideas about ethnic identity and female independence. A focal point is her relationship to the trope of the New Woman, especially through her 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements , a work that simultaneously incorporates fresh perspectives concerning popular genres, feminism, and sexuality.

From Sympathy to Empathy: Anzia Yezierska and the Transformation of the American Subject

The work of Anzia Yezierska presents a challenge to early-twentieth-century models of personhood, citizenship, and reading based on common assumptions regarding the nature of sympathy. Yezierska's deployment of what Mikkelsen terms “aesthetic empathy” draws on an emergent discourse about empathy that defined this concept quite differently from current usages. Rather than designating an interpersonal dynamic, this discourse considered empathy as a relation among bodies, objects, and desire within capitalism. Yezierska's fashion-conscious characters reveal a United States constituted by economically, socially, and culturally mobile, not to mention aesthetically pleasing, bodies. Both Jewish and American, these bodies serve as touchpoints for their own desiring gazes, positing a model of assimilative empathy for “native” and immigrant alike in which “looks” refer to both an act and its object, the agent blurred with the process of her continual self-invention as a hybrid of multiple cultures. Meditating on relations between subject and object, viewer and vision, consumer and commodity, Yezierska makes plain the role of citizen as consumer. Her work crystallizes the dominance of technologies that infused the public sphere with art and beautiful images of human forms, leading the modern spectator to see others as potential reflections of herself. Mikkelsen's examination begins with a reading of the short story “Wings”; continues with a discussion of Jewish American involvement with the garment industry and high fashion as imagined in Salome of the Tenements (1922); and concludes with early theorizations of aesthetic empathy's role in motion pictures such as Hungry Hearts (1922), the film made of Yezierska's short stories.