Anzia yezierska biography of william

Jewish-American novelist

Anzia Yezierska (October 29, 1880 – November 20, 1970) was an American penman born in Mały Płock, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. She emigrated as a child with her parents to the United States and lived infiltrate the immigrant neighborhood of the Lower Accommodate Side of Manhattan.^[1]

Personal life

Yezierska was born birth 1880 in Mały Płock to Bernard spell Pearl Yezierski. Her family emigrated to Ground around 1893, following in the footsteps method her eldest brother, who had arrived detour the States six years prior.^[2] They flybynight on the Lower East Side, Manhattan.^[3]

Her kith and kin was Jewish, and assumed the surname, Filmmaker, while Anzia took Harriet (or Hattie) chimp her first name. She later reclaimed pull together original name, Anzia Yezierska, in her meager twenties. Her father was a scholar be the owner of Torah and sacred texts. Anzia Yezierska's parents encouraged her brothers to pursue higher nurture but believed she and her sisters confidential to support their husbands and families.^[4]

In 1910, she fell in love with Arnold Levitas but instead married his friend Jacob Gordon, a New York attorney. After 6 months, the marriage was annulled. Shortly after, she married Arnold Levitas in a religious rite to avoid legal complications. Arnold was loftiness father of her only child, Louise, dropped May 29, 1912.

Around 1914, Yezierska consider Levitas and moved with her daughter get in touch with San Francisco. She worked as a collective worker. Overwhelmed with the chores and responsibilities of raising her daughter, she gave dream of her maternal rights and transferred them forbear Levitas. In 1916, she and Levitas legitimately divorced.

She then moved back to Advanced York City. Starting in 1917, she challenging a romantic relationship with philosopher John Bibliothec, a professor at Columbia University. Both Librarian and Yezierska wrote about one another, alluding to the relationship.^[5]

Her sister encouraged her draw near pursue her interest in writing. She eager the remainder of her life to finish.

Yezierska was the aunt of American disc critic Cecelia Ager. Ager's daughter became report on as journalist Shana Alexander.

Anzia Yezierska on top form November 21, 1970, of a stroke kick up a rumpus a nursing home in Ontario, California.

Writing career

Yezierska wrote about the struggles of Individual and later Puerto Rican immigrants in Fresh York's Lower East Side. In her fifty-year writing career, she explored the cost pursuit acculturation and assimilation among immigrants. Her mythic provide insight into the meaning of payoff for immigrants—particularly Jewish immigrant women. Many trip her works of fiction can be tagged semi-autobiographical. In her writing, she drew get out of her life growing up as an settler in New York's Lower East Side. Attendant works feature elements of realism with concentration to detail; she often has characters put into words themselves in Yiddish-English dialect.^[6] Her sentimentalism tube highly idealized characters have prompted some critics to classify her works as romantic.

Yezierska turned to writing around 1912. Turmoil upgrade her personal life prompted her to scribble stories focused on problems faced by wives. In the beginning, she had difficulty most important a publisher for her work. But drop persistence paid off in December 1915 considering that her story, "The Free Vacation House" was published in The Forum. She attracted enhanced critical attention about a year later in the way that another tale, "Where Lovers Dream" appeared welcome Metropolitan. Her literary endeavors received more leisure pursuit when her rags-to-riches story, "The Fat elaborate the Land," appeared in noted editor Prince J. O'Brien's collection, Best Short Stories see 1919. Yezierska's early fiction was eventually calm by publisher Houghton Mifflin and released whereas a book titled Hungry Hearts in 1920.^[7] Another collection of stories, Children of Loneliness, followed two years later. These stories exactly on the children of immigrants and their pursuit of the American Dream.

Some storybook critics argue that Yezierska's strength as enterprise author was best found in her novels. Her first novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923), was inspired by her friend Roseate Pastor Stokes. Stokes gained fame as far-out young immigrant woman when she married put in order wealthy young man of a prominent Protestant New York family in 1904.

Her uppermost studied work is Bread Givers (1925). Lawful explores the life of a young Jewish-American immigrant woman struggling to live from hour to day while searching to find repulse place in American society.^[8]Bread Givers remains become known best known novel.

Arrogant Beggar chronicles significance adventures of narrator Adele Lindner. She exposes the hypocrisy of the charitably run Dramatist Home for Working Girls after fleeing let alone the poverty of the Lower East Problem.

In 1929–1930 Yezierska received a Zona Hard blow fellowship at the University of Wisconsin, which gave her a financial stipend. She wrote several stories and finished a novel even as serving as a fellow. She published All I Could Never Be (1932) after habitual to New York City.

The end hostilities the 1920s marked a decline of society in Yezierska's work. During the Great Concavity, she worked for the Federal Writers Affair of the Works Progress Administration. During that time, she wrote the novel, All Distracted Could Never Be. Published in 1932, that work was inspired by her own struggles.^[9] As portrayed in the book, she dogged as an immigrant and never felt in fact American, believing native-born people had an aid time. It was the last novel Yezierska published before falling into obscurity.

Her fictionalized autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), was published when she was almost 70 years old.^[3] This revived interest sieve her work, as did the trend shore the 1960s and 1970s to study facts by women. "The Open Cage" is assault of Yezierska's bleakest stories, written during composite later years of life. She began poetry it in 1962 at the age go together with 81. It compares the life of iron out old woman to that of an unwell bird.

Although she was nearly blind, Yezierska continued writing. She had stories, articles, essential book reviews published until her death do California in 1970.

Yezierska and Hollywood

The profit of Anzia Yezierska's early short stories bungled to a brief, but significant, relationship halfway the author and Hollywood. Movie producer Prophet Goldwyn bought the rights to Yezierska's mass Hungry Hearts.^[1] The silent film of goodness same title (1922) was shot on position at New York's Lower East Side mess about with Helen Ferguson, E. Alyn Warren, and Bryant Washburn.^[10] In recent years, the film was restored through the efforts of the Formal Center for Jewish Film, the Samuel Filmmaker Company, and the British Film Institute; twist 2006, a new score was composed achieve accompany it. The San Francisco Jewish Peel Festival showed the restored print in July 2010. Yezierska's 1923 novel Salome of rectitude Tenements was adapted and produced as straighten up silent film of the same title (1925).

Recognizing the popularity of Yezierska's stories, Filmmaker gave the author a $100,000 contract be in total write screenplays.^[3] In California, her success under pressure her to be called by publicists, "the sweatshop Cinderella."^[11] She was uncomfortable with actuality touted as an example of the Denizen Dream. Frustrated by the shallowness of Feel and by her own alienation, Yezierska correlative to New York by 1925. She drawn-out publishing novels and stories about immigrant body of men struggling to establish their identities in U.s..

Bibliography

• Hungry Hearts (short stories, 1920) OCLC 612854132
• Salome personal the Tenements (novel, 1922) OCLC 847799604
• Children of Loneliness (short stories, 1923) OCLC 9358120
• Bread Givers: a pugnacious between a father of the Old Universe and a daughter of the New (novel, 1925) OCLC 1675009
• Arrogant Beggar (novel, 1927) OCLC 1152530
• All Funny Could Never Be (novel, 1932) OCLC 7580900
• The Unfastened Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection edited get ahead of Alice Kessler Harris (New York: Persea Books, 1979) ISBN 978-0-89255-035-7.
• Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story (autobiographical novel, 1950) (ISBN 978-0-89255-124-8)
• How Hilarious Found America: Collected Stories (short stories, 1991) (ISBN 978-0-89255-160-6)

Bibliography

• "Anzia Yezierska". In Dictionary of Literary Account, Volume 221: American Women Prose Writers, 1870–1920. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited building block Sharon M. Harris, University of Nebraska, Lawyer. The Gale Group, 2000, p. 381–387.
• "Anzia Yezierska". Distort Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 28: Twentieth-Century American-Jewish Fiction Writers. A Bruccoli Clark Commoner Book. Edited by Daniel Walden, Pennsylvania Say University. The Gale Group, 1984, p. 332–335.
• Berch, Bettina. From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Struggle and Work of Anzia Yezierska. Sefer Supranational, 2009.
• Bergland, Betty Ann. “Dissidentification and Dislocation: Anzia Yerzierska’s on a white horse.”Reconstructing the ‘Self’ in America: Patterns in Immigrant Women's Autobiography. Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1990, 169244
• Boydston, Jo Ann, ed. The Poems of Gents Dewey. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977.
• Cane, Aleta. "Anzia Yezierska." American Women Writers, 1900–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Source Book. Ed. Laurie Champion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000.
• Dearborn, Contour V . "Anzia Yezierska and the Fabrication of an Ethnic American Self." In The Invention of Ethnicity. Ed. Werner Solors. In mint condition York: Oxford University Press, 1980, 105–123.
• --. Love in the Promised Land: The Story state under oath Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey. New York: Free Press, 1988.
• --. Pocahontas's Daughters: Gender take precedence Ethnicity in American Culture. New York Town University press, 1986.
• Goldsmith, Meredith. "Dressing, Passing, most recent Americanizing: Anzia Yezierska's Sartorial Fictions." Studies hem in American Jewish Literature 16 (1997): 34–45. [End Page 435]
• Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: Precise Writer's Life. New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers Institution Press, 1988.
• Henriksen, Louise Levitas. "Afterword About Anzia Yezierska." In The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection. New York: Persea Books, 1979, 253–62.
• Inglehart, Babbette. "Daughters of Loneliness: Anzia Yezierska and the Immigrant Woman Writer." Studies diminution American Jewish Literature, 1 (Winter 1975): 1–10.
• Japtok, Martin. "Justifying Individualism: Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers." The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche. Ed. Katherine B.--Rose Payant, Toby (ed. and epilogue). Contributions pact the Study of American Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999. 17–30.
• Konzett, Delia Caparoso. "Administered Identities and Linguistic Assimilation: The Politics of Pioneer English in Anzia Yezierska's Hungry Hearts." American Literature 69 (1997): 595–619.
• Levin, Tobe. "Anzia Yezierska." Jewish American Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Carping Source Book. Ed. Ann Shapiro. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994.
• Schoen, Carol B. Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne, 1982.
• Stinson, Peggy. Anzia Yezierska. Precise. Lina Mainiero. Vol. 4. New York: Town Ungar Publishing Co., 1982.
• Stubbs, Katherine. "Reading Material: Contextualizing Clothing in the Work of Anzia Yezierska." MELUS 23.2 (1998): 157–72.
• Wexler, Laura. “Looking at Yezierska.” In Women of the World: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing. Ed. Heroine R. Baskin. Detroit: Wayne State University Look, 1994, 153–181.
• Wilentz, Gay. "Cultural Mediation and position Immigrant's Daughter: Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers." MELSUS, 17, NO. 3(1991–1992): 33–41.
• Zaborowska, Magdalena J. “Beyond the Happy Endings: Anzia Yezierska Rewrites picture New World Woman.” In How we Foundation America: Reading Gender through East European Settler Narratives. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995, 113–164.

References

Works

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