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Anzia Yezierska, novelist and short story writer, known widely as the "sweatshop cinderella," took as her subject New York's early-20th-century immigrant Jewish community. A volatile, forthright, passionate tone characterizes her writing and remains the source of much of her fiction's appeal. She became a celebrity when her well-received first collection of stories, Hungry Hearts (1920), was optioned for the movies by Samuel Goldwyn, as was her first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923). Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925), Yezierska's depiction of the tension between genders and generations, is admired by feminist scholars and social historians. It depicts a young woman's struggle against Old World patriarchy, one of many strong, self-reliant women heroes who must negotiate the boundaries between immigrant culture and poverty and the life of the recently enfranchised New American Woman.

Anzia Yezierska did not know her exact birth date, but many literary historians agree on 1885 as the year she was born on the Russian-Polish border, to Rabbi Bernard Yezierska and Pearl Yezierska. The family immigrated to New York's Lower East Side in the early 1890s. As usual, in immigrant families, the boys were educated, while tradition dictated that Yezierska and her sister worked in low-paying menial jobs until marriages were arranged for them. Yezierska, however, educated herself at Columbia University by working in a laundry and gaining the financial assistance of wealthy patrons; she graduated from Teachers College in 1904. In 1910 she married Jacob Gordon, an attorney, but the marriage was annulled six months afterward, and she married Arnold Levitas, a teacher and textbook writer, in 1911. By 1915, however, she had permanently separated from him and published her first story. In 1917 she approached the philosopher and educator John Dewey in his office at Columbia University. He encouraged her and apparently initiated a romantic relationship with her that ended with his departure for China the following year. Thereafter the theme of the passionate immigrant woman and the repressed Protestant man recurs frequently in her fiction. Salome of the Tenements is based on the life of her friend Rose Pastor, who married philanthropist Graham Stokes; unlike Rose, however, Sonya Vrunsky, Yezierska's protagonist, finds only failure in her marriage to the Anglo-Saxon John Manning. Her next and most autobiographical work, Bread Givers, earned Yezierska critical acclaim. Rabbi Smolinsky tyrannizes his daughters, sends them to work in sweatshops, and then sells them into marriage; only the youngest, Sara, escapes, educating herself, rejecting her Protestant suitor, and marrying Hugo Seelig, an Americanized Jew who bridges the two cultures.

Her next novels, Arrogant Beggar (1927) and All I Could Never Be (1932), were neither critical nor commercial successes. Arrogant Beggar again explores the theme of the immigrant woman, here named Adele Lindner, who moves from a tenement to a Home for Working Girls and then reacts with disillusion to the shallow hypocrisy she finds. All I Could Never Be is, according to Yezierska's daughter, Louise Levitas Henrikson, a fictionalized version of her relationship with Dewey: The novel presents the relationship through the immigrant character Fanya Ivanova and the famous professor Henry Scott, who ends up losing interest in her because she lets emotion rather than reason rule her reactions. Yezierska's final autobiographical novel, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), was a critical success and, according to scholar Aleta Cane, enabled her to work for the New York Times as a book reviewer (Cane, 380). Yezierska continued to write essays, stories, and reviews until her death in California on November 21, 1970. Boston University houses a collection of Yezierska's manuscripts and letters.

Bibliography:

Boydston, Jo Ann, ed. The Poems of John Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977.

Cane, Aleta. "Anzia Yezierska." In American Women Writers, 1900-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Laurie Champion, 378-382. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Dearborn, Mary V. Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York: Free Press, 1988.

Henriksen, Louise Levitas. "Anzia Yezierska." In The Oxford Companion to American Women Writers, edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin, 948. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer's Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.

Konzett, Delia Caparoso. Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation. New York: Palgrave, 2002.

Rosen, Norma. John and Anzia: An American Romance. New York: Dutton, 1989.

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