Anzia Yezierska - Writing Career

Writing Career

Yezierska wrote about the struggles of Jewish and later Puerto Rican immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. In her fifty year writing career, the main theme running throughout her works is the cost of acculturation and assimilation among immigrants. Her stories provide insight into the meaning of liberation for immigrants—particularly Jewish immigrant women. Many of her works of fiction can be labeled semi-autobiographical. In her writing, she draws heavily on her personal life as an immigrant in New York's Lower East Side. Her works, therefore, feature elements of realism with heavy attention to detail and skillful use of Yiddish-English dialect. At the same time, sentimentalism and highly idealized characters have prompted some critics to label her works as romantic.

Yezierska turned to writing around 1912. Turmoil in her personal life prompted her to write stories focused on problems faced by wives. In the beginning, she had difficulty finding a publisher for her work. But her persistence paid off in December 1915 when her story, "The Free Vacation House" was published in The Forum. She attracted more critical attention about a year later when another tale, "Where Lovers Dream" appeared in Metropolitan. Her literary endeavors received more recognition when her rags-to-riches story, "The Fat of the Land," appeared in noted editor Edward J. O'Brien's collection, Best Short Stories of 1919. Yezierska's early fiction was eventually collected by publisher Houghton Mifflin and released as a book titled Hungry Hearts in 1920. Another collection of stories, Children of Loneliness, followed two years later. These stories focus on the children of immigrants and their pursuit of the American Dream.

Some literary critics argue that Yezierska's true strength as an author rests in the longer fictional form, the novel. Her first novel, Salome of the Tenements, was published in 1923 and was based on the experiences of her friend, Rose Pastor Stokes. Stokes gained fame as a young immigrant woman who married into a prominent New York family in 1904.

Her most studied work, Bread Givers (1925), follows the story of a young woman struggling to live from day to day while searching to find her place in American society. Bread Givers earned Yezierska critical acclaim and respect as a mature artist. Bread Givers remains her best known novel.

Arrogant Beggar chronicles the adventures of narrator Adele Lindner, who exposes the hypocrisy of the charitably run Hellman Home for Working Girls after fleeing from the poverty of the Lower East Side.

In 1929-1930 the Zona Gale fellowship at the University of Wisconsin offered financial relief and made few demands on Yezierska, who was able to write several stories and finish a novel. All I Could Never Be was published in 1932, after Yezierska had returned to New York City.

The end of the 1920s marked a decline of interest in Yezierska's work. During the Great Depression, she worked for the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration. During this time, she wrote the novel, All I Could Never Be. Published in 1932, this work is derived from her striving to become an American but never achieving that status because she sees herself as an immigrant and feels the road to success is harder because things typically come easier to Americans than immigrants. It was the last novel Yezierska published before falling into obscurity.

Her fictionalized autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, came out in 1950 when she was nearly 70 years old. The publication of her memoirs led to greater interest in her works. The Open Cage is one of Yezierska's bleakest stories written during her later years of life. She began writing it in 1962 at the age of 81. It compares the life of an old woman to that of an ailing bird.

Although she was nearly blind, Yezierska continued writing and having stories, articles, and book reviews published until her death in California in 1970.