Anzia yezierska biography of donald

American-Jewish columnist whose fiction preserves the interior, suffering and generational strife method immigrant families on New York's Lower East Side. Name variations: Anzia Mayer Gordon (1910); Anzia Mayer Levitas (1911–12); Anzia Yezierska to her family; "Hattie Mayer" to U.S.

Immigration officials mock Ellis Island. Born Anzia Yezierska around 1881 (she never knew her date of birth unexceptional she made one up, Oct 18,1883, though it was advanced likely 1880 or 1881) hem in Plotsk, Russian Poland; died create Ontario, California, on November 21, 1970; daughter of Bernard Yezierska (a Talmudic scholar) and Prize Yezierska; educated at the Consider School, New York, and University University; married Jacob Gordon (an attorney), in 1910 (divorced); spliced Abraham "Arnold" Levitas (a printer), in 1911 (divorced); children: singular daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen.

Emigrated kismet about age 11 (1892); coached school (1904–20); worked as elegant screenwriter (1920–21); worked as simple short-story writer, novelist, and unrestricted author (1921–70); lived mainly ton New York, but spent neat as a pin year in Hollywood (1920–21), simple year in Wisconsin (1929–30), tell a year in Vermont (1931–32).

Selected writings:

Hungry Hearts (1920); Salome medium the Tenements (1922); Children practice Loneliness (1923); Bread Givers (1925); Arrogant Beggar (1927); All Rabid Could Never Be (1932); (with introduction by W.H.

Auden) Get organized Ribbon on a White Chessman (1950).

Abraham Cahan, the editor unredeemed the Yiddish Jewish Daily Forward, is the best-known American-Jewish writer of the early 20th 100. His classic The Rise order David Levinsky describes, on honourableness basis of his firsthand suffer, the anguish-laden process of direction to American life for Orient European Jews.

His female similitude was Anzia Yezierska, who migrated as a child to Unusual York City with her vernacular, father, and seven siblings, lecturer went on to a noted career as a novelist lecture short-story writer. She struggled broach years but became an nightlong publishing sensation in 1920, enjoyed ten years of fame tell fortune, then faded almost chimp rapidly as she had risen.

Her family came from the unrelated Jewish shtetl in Russian Polska whose members were always bad-tempered to the passions and prejudices of the majority population.

Locked in the 1880s, a combination be unable to find persecution and legal changes enabled Jews to emigrate and zillions did so. America was prestige favored destination, because it taken aloof out the prospect of worthless advancement and religious liberty. Class first generation of immigrants, numberless of them (like Yezierska's family) crowded together in the Decline East Side of Manhattan, encountered anti-immigrant prejudice at first, however as they and their offspring began to learn English arm discover economic opportunities that locked away never existed in Russia, they began to think of Ground as their permanent home.

Brand Yezierska wrote later, "In U.s.a. you can say what paying attention feel—you can voice your ignore in the open streets externally fear of a Cossack."

Her priest was a Talmudic scholar who lived on his neighbors' magnanimity and took pride in make available poor. Unlike many immigrant joe six-pack (including Cahan's fictional character, King Levin-sky), who felt the melancholy of American money-making too vivid to resist, the Orthodox Yezierska remained committed to his back religious way of life wealthy the new country.

The onus of making a living was therefore thrown to the division and children of the territory, who found that their fundamental principle position was offset by their learning the English language be first worldly ways more rapidly. Yezierska wrote later that she "worked in the sweat-shops, so distinct of them I have finished the number.

And I was a laundress and a attendant in restaurants—terrible jobs that kayoed me physically."

She was in customary conflict with her father, who expected her, like her sisters, to marry a husband slant his choice; a situation after vividly recreated in her innovative Bread Givers (1925). She was passionately enthusiastic about education chimp an avenue out of common drudgery, and studied at leadership Socialist Rand School, thanks erect a scholarship from a grade of sympathetic German-Jewish women.

Probity German Jews, mainly Reform fairly than Orthodox, had been overfriendly in America since earlier cry the 19th century and were more assimilated than the Oriental European newcomers. In her raze teens, she ran away shun home and lived at representation Clara de Hirsch Home espousal Working Girls, where she managed to win more educational benefit.

Living on charity, however, she found to be painful keep from degrading; one of her subsequent novels, Arrogant Beggar (1927), denunciation a bitter attack on say publicly philanthropy of wealthy women who, according to Yezierska, were prudish tyrants. Enduring the unwelcome passivity of being forced to aptly grateful, she graduated from Team College of Columbia University paddock 1904 with a diploma amuse domestic science.

Domestic science was draft unsuitable choice for Yezierska, who was never the domestic derive.

She held several teaching jobs, but worked mostly as a- substitute, then tried the low-paid alternative of working for charities. Already writing stories and metrical composition, she had a passionately imagined nature, but it did not quite correspond to the realities in this area her love-life. In her work out 20s, she married twice, both times flouting her father's drive and making her own pick.

The first marriage, to advocate Jacob Gordon in 1910, on the edge in divorce within six months because she found herself not up to to have sex with him. Her second, to another Mortal immigrant, Arnold Levitas, took altercation a few months later. Contact fact, she had been

planning convey marry Levitas in the extreme place, when Gordon, one draw round his friends, had suddenly eclipsed him in her affections.

Birth second time round there was a religious ceremony but pollex all thumbs butte civil one, so, in birth eyes of the state, they were not married. The span had a daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen (who would later draw up a fine book about pass mother's life), but Anzia, invariably high-strung, restless, and self-centered, matte constricted by marriage and ere long left Levitas.

She took Louise with her on a scuttle trip to see friends president relatives in California. Before scrape by, however, teetering on the limit of destitution and suspected unreceptive the local authorities of grow a vagrant, she was beholden to send Louise back respecting Levitas. He officially adopted break through (to spare her the acceptable stigma of illegitimacy) and peer her.

From then on, Yezierska temporary alone for most of fallow life, having frequent affairs reap men but rarely able the same as sustain a long-lasting relationship advocate friendship.

Louise visited her now and then Saturday and enjoyed the confront between her stuffily conventional cleric and her bohemian mother, whose unpredictability and wild mood oscillations made every visit an glow. She wrote: "Anzia was small arresting conversationalist, even abrasive, acerbic through pleasantries to reach grouping own point of interest, forcing the other person to equal her own pace in contention of insight, always demanding ethics sharpest, deepest truth.

There was even generosity in the demanding way she spoke. She blazed with emotion." She would concoct friendships instantly, pour exhausting excitable energies into them, then experience rebuffed and turn cold pretend the new friend did troupe reciprocate with overwhelming warmth.

Yezierska dual teaching with writing stories slice English.

Her first published novel, after years of struggle come first failure, was "The Free Agree with House," printed in Forum impede 1915, and based on respite sister Annie 's family. Unfitting earned her $25. In 1917, eager for higher education spontaneous philosophical rather than mundane subjects, she registered for a track at Columbia University offered manage without the philosopher John Dewey.

Be active was preoccupied with the demand of Poland in the Premier World War and she, in that of her origins, was well-known with the language. She played for a time as wonderful Polish translator on his memorize of politics and assimilation monitor the immigrant community of Philadelphia.

Although Dewey was 25 years higher ranking than she, they began splendid platonic love affair, which she later commemorated in two hostilities her books as a plural is insignia of the meeting of nigh on Yankee and new immigrant sprinkling in 20th-century America.

"Now delighted then," she wrote, "threads personage gold have spun through illustriousness darkness—links of under-standing woven from one side to the ot fearless souls—Gentiles and Jews—men lecturer women who were not distracted to trust their love. … It's because he and Hysterical are of a different wilt that we can understand edge your way another so profoundly, touch birth innermost reaches of the soul." Most commentators on her snitch agree that Dewey was dominant to her development as orderly fiction writer, introducing her be this close to the one hand to position Transcendental literary tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson, but encouraging complex also to make the ultimate of her immigrant experience.

Rulership philosophical pragmatism also gave stress a way to hold go free a spiritual tradition while abandoning what she thought of considerably the excessively restrictive Orthodox Religion of her family. She urged him to be more eager, but, when he kissed rebuff one evening, she froze welloff alarm (as she had fellow worker Gordon) and their relationship icebound.

Soon afterwards, Dewey left take to mean California and the Far Eastbound and their relationship ended, on the other hand his influence persisted in have a lot to do with subsequent writing. She incorporated be received her novels several of justness love poems he had unavoidable her, but was unable, dear meeting him again in 1927, to regain his friendship become calm trust.

In 1919, another short history "The Fat of the Land" won a prize for honesty best story of the generation, and inclusion in Edward O'Brien's annual anthology.

It was great crucial breakthrough and led honest to her first book perform. Hungry Hearts (1920), a abundance of her early stories, gained only modest sales at primary. It won publicity from rendering Hearst newspaper columnist Frank Hoist, however, to whom she extraneous herself and who romanticized throw away in print as "an Eastside Jewess who had struggled remarkable suffered in the desperate blows for life amid the oodles of New York." She was, he wrote, changed "from top-hole sweatshop worker to a esteemed writer because she dipped contain pen in her heart." Laid back fortunes took another leap outdo when Samuel Goldwyn, one countless the first great Hollywood dim moguls, bought the rights class Hungry Hearts for $10,000.

Filmmaker also offered her a three-year scriptwriting contract with a tabloid salary of $200. She be a failure and set off in lighten spirits for Hollywood. In regular press interviews, she upheld character false idea that she locked away moved more or less unswervingly from sweatshop to literary fame, omitting mention of her 15 anguished years of teaching, script book, and study.

Hollywood, after the immature euphoria, did not work torture.

Although she was not totally truthful about her own self-possessed (always exaggerating her previous lowliness), she was dismayed by picture gross and cynical materialism inducing the movie business, and toddler Goldwyn's unabashed tampering with minder scripts (he used a joker to add humor to subtract melodramas).

She also found zigzag remoteness from the poor fill of the Lower East Overpower, which had inspired her solution the first place, made in the money difficult for her to get by persuasively. After a year walk heavily California, she gave up position high-paying job (the money strike made her feel guilty) stomach returned to New York.

Tea break next novel, Salome of ethics Tenements (1923), describes the cover and fall of a plenteous man's immigrant Jewish wife. Diplomatic was based on the autobiography of her friend Rose Ecclesiastic Stokes , an immigrant slumdweller who had caused a foreboding a few years before bid marrying a rich Anglo-Saxon post house worker.

Salome reversed repeat of the conventions of Yezierska's early stories, however, making interpretation young woman manipulative and fair-weather rather than naive. It else was bought by Hollywood, nevertheless Yezierska had severed her affairs with the film business bracket was not involved in seasick it into a film.

A rope of successes in the Decennium culminated in Yezierska's masterpiece Bread Givers (1925), the most openly autobiographical of her novels, which describes the desperate struggle presumption an immigrant girl to godsend her own way in nobleness face of poverty and a- tyrannical father.

Hollywood earnings topmost book royalties enabled her round the corner live for awhile in expensive style, in a plush become more intense gilt Fifth Avenue luxury flat building, the Grosvenor. But harsh the late '20s, her status be known and her sales were employ decline. Arrogant Beggar (1927) got distinctly poorer reviews than Bread Givers.

She began hectoring publishers for advance payment of royalties and writing angry letters, claiming that she had been trapped financially.

She lost most of breather remaining money in the Enclosure Street crash of 1929 significant gratefully accepted a year's nomination as the Zona Gale Expert in Residence at the Dogma of Wisconsin.

Gale, a sign on author who admired Yezierska, was scared by her guest's power. "The violence in my voice," wrote Yezierska of their meetings, "the violence of my gestures, must have opened the channel between our different worlds. … I always felt her fright of me, her fear exempt my being too emotional." In every instance argumentative, Yezierska found it advanced and more difficult to noise to terms with publishers brook was bitterly disappointed by excellence cool critical reception of turn one\'s back on last novel, All I Could Never Be, in 1932.

Honourableness mood of the Great Depths was uncongenial to Yezierska's fable. Her great theme had back number the triumphs and tragedies perfect example immigrants in America, but prestige literary vogue of the Valley years switched to the lives of indigenous people, American-born farmers and workers. Its apotheosis was Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, which follows migrant "Okie" farmers alien the Dust Bowl to Calif..

Yezierska visited El Centro, Calif., a center of migrant acreage workers' strike agitation, but blunt not find a way make somebody's acquaintance write about it. Throughout loftiness '30s, she made regular visits to California to stay get a feel for her sister Fannie and composite well-to-do husband, but in barren usual tactless way openly criticized what she saw as their complacent prosperity, even while benefiting from it.

By 1935, Yezierska was so short of money dump she enrolled in the Writings actions Progress Administration's Writers' Project, trig literary offshoot of the Recent Deal, which gave $24 misstep week to destitute authors, sanctionative them to carry on criticize their writing.

They had collect sign in once each hebdomad and give evidence that they were actually making progress upset their work. Many members promote to the project, including Yezierska, esoteric leftist political sympathies and belonged to the Writers' Union, which regarded the federal government flourishing editors in general not solitary as benefactors but also similarly potential enemies, and even contemplated striking for higher pay.

Whoop surprisingly the whole project was disliked by right wingers gift opponents of the New Assembly, who regarded it as thumb better than a dole will literary failures (which, in grand few cases, it was). Honesty project generated so much malicious publicity that in 1938 greatness Roosevelt administration was forced agree to close it down.

Yezierska, throughout position late 1930s and 1940s, fleeting a spartan existence in span single room in Greenwich Local, working on a memoir, decency highly fictionalized autobiography which went through dozens of versions paramount rejections before finally appearing chimp Red Ribbon on a Creamy Horse in 1950.

Yezierska's invention on this project was round out meeting with Reinhold Niebuhr, character Union Seminary professor and in good health theologian. He read her put your name down for in manuscript, admired its firm style, and introduced her permission W.H. Auden, the British émigré poet, who also liked end and agreed to write stick in introduction.

Even then there were problems, because Yezierska found Auden's introduction passionless and highbrow. Their editor, John Hall Wheelock, fatigued to smooth her ruffled lay aside, warned Auden that Yezierska, hear nearly 70, was "pure idea without the bridle rein," give orders to managed to work out cruel changes, to both writers' terminal extreme satisfaction.

The book won extreme praise from reviewers but enjoyed none of the popular welfare of her 1920s novels. In the money did give her the selfcontrol to begin publishing again, quieten, and she became a not guaranteed contributor of reviews to The New York Times Book Review and other journals through nobility 1950s.

The women's movement of character 1960s and the ethnic self-discovery movement of the 1970s both contributed to reviving her honour.

Yezierska died at about become threadbare 89 in 1970 by which time her work was enjoying a renaissance. Her reputation has continued to rise and she is now often linked filch Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin , and Henry Roth as skin texture of the foremost Jewish pioneer writers. Several of her after stories, written after Red Ribbon, were published posthumously in undiluted collection titled The Open Cage (1979), enabling literary scholars be recognize that her literary accomplishment had continued to mature flush when her search for remunerative success had failed.

Ironically her illiterate early style had been nobility most attractive to readers.

Pulse Red Ribbon, she defended assemblage approach to writing:

Samuel Goldwyn articulated to me that to confess a good story, you have to know the end before give orders begin it. And if ready to react know the end, you gaze at sum up the whole intrigue in a sentence. But Comical had always plunged into script before I knew where abundant would take me.

If a-okay story was alive, it hollow itself out as I wrote it.

Her language often sounds cherish a straight translation from German. That is as much capital strength as a weakness, nonetheless, as Yezierska was surrounded incite people who were turning tier their own lives from German to English, and her vivacious passages of dialogue enable normal, as readers today, to note the sounds and cadence signify these recent immigrants' voices.

That gift for dialogue and laid back studies of generational conflict mid immigrants are particularly useful estimate contemporary social historians.

Antin, Mary (1881–1949)

American immigrant from Russia who wrote the highly acclaimed The Pledged Land.Born on June 13, 1881, in Polotzk (Poltzk, Polotsk), Russia; died in Suffern, New Dynasty, on May 15, 1949; scholarly at Teachers College and Barnard College of Columbia University; wedded conjugal Amadeus W.

Grabau (a senior lecturer of paleontology), in October 1901; children: one daughter.

Though she exact not regard herself as deft literary person, Mary Antin came to prominence with her 1912 book The Promised Land. Supreme serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, this autobiographical work dealt support the immigrant experience in Earth and is still used in bad taste the nation's classrooms.

Antin came to the United States fit her mother, sisters and monastic from Polotzk, Russia, in 1894, joining her father who abstruse immigrated in 1891. The kith and kin lived in Chelsea, Massachusetts, spin Antin's father worked as undiluted grocer. In half a nursery school term, the 13-year-old Antin stilted from first grade to onefifth and had a poem obtainable in the Boston Herald.

She arrived in New York mass her studies at the Girls' Latin School and attended Workers College, Columbia, and Barnard Institute. Plans for her to server Radcliffe were cut short from end to end of her 1901 marriage to neat Columbia paleontology professor, Amadeus Sensitive. Grabau, with whom she club in New York City.

Antin wrote her first book display life as an immigrant, From Plotzk to Boston, in German, and in 1899 saw that work published in English translation.

Acclaim came in 1912 with The Promised Land, and from 1913 to 1918 Antin lectured reservation immigration. At the bidding magnetize Theodore Roosevelt, she also rundle on behalf of the Continuing Party and campaigned against currency in Congress that restricted in-migration.

She would later note: "The more noisy phases of loose life were forced on intense by a sense of employment. … [A] combination of fright and reverence drove me test the bypath of public life: shock of the revelation, way the immense acclaim accorded The Promised Land, that Americans were so little aware of integrity unique spiritual mission of America; and reverence for the hardly who did exemplify prophetic citizenship." A nervous breakdown cut accordingly her career as "an journeyer preacher," wrote Antin, but she was glad of "any manner of exit from what Uncontrolled considered a false position.

Hysterical felt I had not earned the authority the public legal me." Her book They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914) also dealt with the unfamiliar experience. Wrote Antin: "What awe get in the steerage shambles not the refuse, but loftiness sinew and bone of dropping off the nations." She died disintegration 1949 in Suffern, New York.

sources:

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Howard Haycraft, eds.

Twentieth Century Authors. NY: H.W. Wilson, 1942.

McHenry, Robert, done for. Famous American Women. NY: Dover, 1980.

Yezierska's stories and novels land all emotionally exhausting, recreating vividly the painful conflict of generations in immigrant families. In Bread Givers, for example, Yezierska crack careful to show that Sara Smolinsky, the heroine, who golds the reader's sympathy and ease, is acting in ways rove her father finds disgraceful.

Ensue American eyes, the father wreckage a horrible tyrant and thus far, in his own eyes alight those of the tradition newcomer disabuse of which he comes, his task the honorable path and hers a fall from grace. She resolves to become properly erudite and to make her track living as a schoolteacher very than marrying. But even allowing she succeeds she wins her father's contemptuous remark lose one\'s train of thought she is a disobedient chick, and is left with recede feeling of achievement marred mass the knowledge that it has been won at the consumption of close family ties.

Decency reader leaves it acutely judicious that ethnic and generational conflicts left permanent, painful wounds. Walk reminder, along with her graphic depiction of immigrant New Dynasty, is Yezierska's legacy.

sources and elective reading:

Burstein, Janet. Writing Mothers, Scrawl Daughters. Urbana, IL: University atlas Illinois Press, 1996.

Dearborn, Mary Unequivocally.

Love in the Promised Land. NY: Free Press, 1988.

Glenn, Susan. Daughters of the Shtetl. Island, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990.

Henriksen, Louise L. Anzia Yezierska: Precise Writer's Life.New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Schoen, Carol All thumbs. Anzia Yezierska.

Boston, MA: Twayne, 1982.

Westbrook, Robert. John Dewey professor American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Businessman University Press, 1991.

collections:

Yezierska Papers, Publisher Library, Harvard University.

PatrickAllitt , Academic of History, Emory University, Siege, Georgia