Anzia Yezierska

Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880 – 1970) was a novelist born in Pinsk, Congress Poland, Russian Empire who migrated to New York City.

Quotes

This is a story with an unhappy ending. And I too have become Americanized enough to be terrified of unhappy endings. Yet I have to drop all my work to write it.
- beginning of "Wild Winter Love", included in Hungry Hearts and Other Stories

Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950)

Give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune. Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom.
- Part 1, ch. 9

This ancient past that I had despised and rejected with the ruthlessness of youth now had me by the throat. I had never really broken away. I had only denied that which I was in my blood and bones. “Poverty ... an ornament . . . like a red ribbon on a white horse. . . .” Those were my father’s words.
- Of Poland, Part 1, ch. 9

...It was a gesture of simple kindness, but it stirred currents in me that had never before been touched. The mountain of hurts I carried on my back from czarist Russia, and the hurts piled up looking for a job in America, dissolved. I had been accepted, recognized as a person....I tasted the bread and wine of equality. (Part Two, Chapter I)

"...But every step of my writing career was a brutal fight, like the stealing of that oatmeal from hungry children.” Even the waiters stopped removing plates and stood with the trays in their hands, listening openmouthed. One confession led to another. “When I banked the money the movies paid me for Hungry Hearts, the elation of suddenly possessing a fortune was overshadowed by the voice of conscience: What is the difference between a potbellied boss who exploits the labor of helpless workers and an author who grows rich writing of the poor?" When the applause came I felt as if I had walked out of darkness into light. (Part Two, Chapter IV)

Part Three, CHAPTER XII: "Red ribbon on a white horse"

Years ago, in Hollywood, Samuel Goldwyn said to me that to tell a good story, you must know the end before you begin it. And if you know the end, you can sum up the whole plot in a sentence. But I had always plunged into writing before I knew where it would take me. If a story was alive, it worked itself out as I wrote it.

I had sought security in the mud and in the stars, sought it in the quick riches and glory of Hollywood and in the security wage of W.P.A. I sought it everywhere but in myself. Suddenly I felt like that ship-wrecked sailor who had been picked up, dying of thirst, unaware that the current into which he had drifted was fresh water.

on the train as I faced my disgrace, I saw that Hollywood was not my success, nor my present poverty and anonymity, failure. I saw that "success," "failure," "poverty," "riches," were price tags, money values of the market place which had mesmerized and sidetracked me for years.

For a long time I sat still, staring at the passing scenery through which the train was speeding, pondering the loneliness in each individual soul. The struggle of man, alone with the feeble resources of courage at his command, against a universe that cares nothing for his hopes and fears.

A warm wave of happiness welled up in me. Often before I had tried to be happy, but this happiness now came unbidden, unwilled, as though all the hells I had been through had opened a secret door. Why had I no premonition in the wandering years when I was hungering and thirsting for recognition, that this quiet joy, this sanctuary, was waiting for me after I had sunk back to anonymity? I did not have to go to far places, sweat for glory, strain for the smile from important people. All that I could ever be, the glimpses of truth I reached for everywhere, was in myself. The power that makes grass grow, fruit ripen, and guides the bird in its flight is in us all. At any moment when man becomes aware of that inner power, he can rise above the accidents of fortune that rule his outward life, creating and recreating himself out of his defeats. Yesterday I was a bungler, an idiot, a blind destroyer of myself, reaching for I knew not what and only pushing it from me in my ignorance. Today the knowledge of a thousand failures cannot keep me from this light born of my darkness, here, now.

Bread Givers: : a struggle between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New (1925)

I had just begun to peel the potatoes for dinner | when my oldest sister Bessie came in, her eyes far away and very tired. She dropped on the bench by the sink and turned her head to the wall.
One look at her, and I knew she had not yet found work. I went on peeling the potatoes, but I no more knew what my hands were doing. I felt only the dark hurt of her weary eyes.
I was about ten years old then. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother. I knew that the landlord came that morning hollering for the rent. And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world. (first lines)

The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me. (p220)

Children of Loneliness (1923)

collection of short stories

Art should be free, like sunlight and beauty. The only compensation for the artist is the chance to feed hungry hearts. ("Brothers")

As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of

understanding. (beginning of "America and I")

The Americans of tomorrow, the America that is every day nearer coming to be, will be too wise, too open-hearted, too friendly-handed, to let the least last-comer at their gates knock in vain with his gifts unwanted. ("America and I")

Ever since I began to read the American magazines one burning question has consumed me: Why is it that only the thoughts of educated people are written up? Why shouldn't sometimes a servant girl or a janitress or a coal-heaver give his thoughts to the world? We who are forced to do the drudgery of the world, and who are considered ignorant because we have no time for school, could say a lot of new and different things, if only we had a chance to get a hearing.
Very rarely I'd come across a story about a shop-girl or a washerwoman. But they weren't real stories. They were twisted pictures of the way the higher-ups see us people. They weren't as we are. They were as unreal as the knowledge of the rich about the poor. Often I'd read those smooth-flowing stories about nothing at all, and I'd ask myself, Why is it that so many of the educated, with nothing to say, know how to say that nothing with such an easy flow of words, while I, with something so aching to be said, can say nothing?
I was like a prison world full of choked-in voices, all beating in my brain to be heard. The minute I'd listen to one voice a million other voices would rush in crying for a hearing, till I'd get too excited and mixed up to know what or where.
- beginning of "An Immigrant Among the Editors"

Spring was in the air. But such radiant, joyous spring as one coming out of the dark shadows of the Ghetto never could dream. Earth and sky seemed to sing with the joy of an unceasing holiday. Rebecca Yudelson felt as if she had suddenly stepped into fairyland where the shadow of sorrow or sickness, where the black blight of poverty had never been. (beginning of "Dreams and Dollars")

One glance at his wife's tight-drawn mouth warned Reb Ravinsky of the torrent of wrath about to burst over his head.
"Nu, my bread-giver? Did you bring me the rent?" she hurled at him between clenched teeth. (beginning of "The Lord Giveth")

I feel like a starved man who is so bewildered by the first sight of food that he wants to grab and devour the ice-cream, the roast, and the entrée all in one gulp. For ages and ages, my people in Russia had no more voice than the broomstick in the corner. The poor had no more chance to say what they thought or felt than the dirt under their feet.
And here, in America, a miracle has happened to them. They can lift up their heads like real people. After centries of suppression, they are allowed to speak. Is it a wonder that I am too excited to know where to begin?
All the starved, unlived years crowd into my throat and choke me. I don't know whether it is joy or sorrow that hurts me so. I only feel that my release is wrung with the pain of all those back of me who lived and died, their dumbness pressing down on them like stones on the heart. (beginning of "Mostly About Myself")

Hungry Hearts (1920)

Short story collection

My heart chokes in me like in a prison! I'm dying for a little love and I got nobody-nobody!" wailed Shenah Pessah, as she looked out of the dismal basement window. (beginning of "Wings")

"...When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts." ("Wings")

Like all people who have nothing, I lived on dreams. (beginning of "The Miracle")

With the suitcase containing all her worldly possessions under her arm, Sophie Sapinsky elbowed her way through the noisy ghetto crowds. Pushcart peddlers and pullers-in shouted and gesticulated. Women with market-baskets pushed and shoved one another, eyes straining with the one thought-how to get the food a penny cheaper. With the same strained intentness, Sophie scanned each tenement, searching for a room cheap enough for her dwindling means. (beginning of "My Own People")

Every breath I drew was a breath of fear, every shadow a stifling shock, every footfall struck on my heart like the heavy boot of the Cossack. (beginning of "How I Found America")

Without comprehension, the immigrant would forever remain shut - a stranger in America. Until America can release the heart as well as train the hand of the immigrant, he would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul. ("How I found America")

Shenah Pessah paused in the midst of scrubbing the stairs of the tenement. "Ach!" she sighed. "How can his face still burn so in me when he is so long gone? How the deadness in me flames up with life at the thought of him!" (beginning of "Hunger")

"The Fat of the Land"

In an air-shaft so narrow that you could touch the next wall with your bare hands, Hanneh Breineh leaned out and knocked on her neighbor's window. (first lines)

"The world is a wheel always turning."

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.

The trouble with us is that the ghetto of the Middle Ages and the children of the twentieth century have to live under one roof.

Quotes about Anzia Yezierska

Reading Miss Yezierska's book sets me thinking again about that famous and curious statement in the Preamble to the Constitution about the self-evident right of all men to "the pursuit of happiness," for I have read few accounts of such a pursuit as truthful and moving as hers.
- W. H. Auden Introduction to Red Ribbon on a White Horse

For Mary Antin and another immigrant Jewish author, Anzia Yezierska, the sacrifices were costly but appeared warranted, the passports to professional success and American identities. Part of a generation bridging Yiddish culture and Yankee experience, Antin and Yezierska passionately described the struggles and changes within the immigrant Jewish family. More than half a century ago, the autobiographical Promised Land and the novel, Bread Givers, anticipated the concerns of such later authors as Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Norma Rosen and Joanne Greenberg.
- Evelyn Avery, "Oh My 'Mishpocha'! Some Jewish Women Writers from Antin to Kaplan View the Family," Studies in American Jewish Literature 5 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 44-48

She was a misfit all her life. Throughout the years she saw herself standing on the street with her nose pressed against the bakery window: hungry and shut out. No matter what happened, she felt marginal. Not belonging became her identity, and then her subject. After she began to write, it was her necessity. In Red Ribbon on a White Horse the relief she feels at finding herself poor again in the Thirties is palpable. She had this in common with other talented neurotics-Jack Kerouac, George Gissing, Jean Rhys-who also managed to keep themselves poverty-stricken and socially outcast, for very much the same reason...She is one of the great refuse-niks of the world. She refuses to accept life's meanness and littleness. She refuses to accommodate herself to loneliness of the spirit. She refuses to curb emotional ambition. She's an immigrant? She's a woman? Her hunger is voracious? intrusive? exhausting? Still she refuses. And on a big scale. We cannot turn away from her. Obsessing as grandly as the Ancient Mariner, her words continue, even now seventy years after they were written, to grab us by the collar. They shake and demand, compel, and remind. Attention must be paid. "I want to make from myself a person!"
The performance is astonishing.
- Vivian Gornick Introduction to How I found America (1991)

“My one story is hunger.” So declared the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s Children of Loneliness (1923). Having immigrated with her family from Eastern Europe, Yezierska chronicled the hunger of her generation of newly arrived Jewish Americans around the turn of the century. Her novels, short stories, and autobiographical writing vividly depict both the literal hunger of poverty and the metaphoric hunger for security, education, companionship, home, and meaning—in short, for the American dream.
- Sara R. Horowitz article

Anzia Yezierska, who told, in Yiddish-like english, stories of Jewish immigrants, especially women's struggles for love, freedom, and education. Of her work, she wrote: "It's not me-it's their cries-my own people-crying in me! Hannah Breineh, Shmendrek, they will not be stilled in me, till all America stops to listen."
- Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz "Some Notes on Jewish Lesbian Identity" (Summer 1980-Winter 1981) in Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology

The multitude of Jewish options that existed before World War II are ones which most nonobservant U.S. Ashkenazi Jews are hardly familiar with, much less recognize...Before World War II many Yiddish-speaking European Jews were already rejecting observance and secularism. Eager to assimilate, they deliberately abandoned their Jewish language and culture. The well-known letters (Bintl Brif) of Der forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), the thirties English stories of Anzia Yezierska, and the more modern forties and fifties Yiddish stories of Kadia Malodowsky describe this assimilation minutely.
- Irena Klepfisz "Khaloymes/Dreams in Progress: Culture, Politics, and Jewish Identity" in Dreams of an Insomniac: Jewish Feminist Essays, Speeches and Diatribes (1990)

Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey. In the Jewish novels of Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Anzia Yezierska, the picture is frequently a grim one.
- Ilan Stavans Introduction to Yiddish South of the Border: An Anthology of Latin American Yiddish Writing edited by Alan Astro (2003)

Immigrant writers of the early twentieth century were still addressing the artistic problem of how to bring Jewish experience to the American reader. Anzia Yezierska, a much more combative writer than Mary Antin, could never get beyond the story of how she left her immigrant home. Whereas Antin "made herself over" into a genteel writer and Cahan accommodated the English reader by treating Yiddish as a foreign language, Yezierska brought the immigrant streets to life by imitating their cacophony and fractured English. "My voice was like dynamite," boasts the ten-year-old herring salesman of Bread Givers. "Louder than all the pushcart peddlers, louder than all the hollering noises of bargaining and selling." Yezierska's resistance to genteel authority and to the humiliations of poverty bursts through the prose and hauls readers down to her level of cultural subsistence. But once her autobiographical heroines move out of their neighborhoods and into their new tailored suits, the author loses the Yiddish pungency that was her trademark.
- Ruth Wisse The Modern Jewish Canon (2000)

Sydney Weinberg, The World of Our Mothers: : The Lives of Jewish Immigrant Women (1988)

This tension between the desire to Americanize and the psychological hold of parents and their traditions has been best described in the novels of Anzia Yezierska. In six books published between 1920 and 1932, Yezierska wrote of the squalor of ghetto life and the constant struggle against dirt, poverty, and old-world family restrictions. Her works portray the longing of a young woman for freedom and beauty, personified by the non-Jewish world, and each one ends with the realization that the source of life lies in the world that was rejected. "All these years," she wrote in All I Could Never Be, "I have gone about a little bit ashamed of my manners, my background. I was so eager to acquire from the Gentiles their low voices, their calm, their poise, that I lost what I had-what I was.' The young woman in Children of Loneliness observes, "I can't live with the old world, and I'm yet too green for the new. Yezierska was not so much writing novels as she was autobiography, so her plots appear and reappear in scarcely changed form. She could tell no other story than her own, but she recorded that with a searing passion. The plot of Bread Givers, her most popular novel, she explained to producer Sam Goldwyn, "is the expiation of guilt. . . . I had to break away from my mother's cursing and my father's preaching to live my life: but without them I had no life. When you deny your parents, you deny the ground under your feet, the sky over your head. You become an outlaw, a pariah...And now, here I am-lost in chaos, wandering between worlds."

Daughters like Anzia Yezierska, who left home at seventeen seeking above all to become a "person," had longings alien to their parents, whose main concern was basic survival.

One young woman in Anzia Yezierska's short story, "Hunger," recalled, as her eyes grew misty, "How I suffered in Savel. I never had enough to eat. I never had shoes on my feet. I had to go barefoot even in the freezing winter. But still I love it. I was born there. I love the houses and the straw roofs, the mud streets, the cows, the chickens and the goats. My heart always hurts me for what is no more.'

In "The Fat of the Land," Anzia Yezierska describes an unfortunate woman whose children had prospered and insisted that she move away from Delancey Street to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But her Americanized children are strange to her, and she feels isolated amidst her new luxury and misses, above all, her old neighbors. "Uptown here," she tells a friend who comes to visit, "nobody cares if the person next door is dying or going crazy from loneliness. It ain't anything like we used to have in Delancey Street, when we could walk into one another's rooms without knocking, and borrow a pinch of salt or a pot to cook in."17 In friendship, there was comfort, and without it, women felt bereft.

External links

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