|
COPYRIGHT 1993 American Jewish Congress
IN THE EARLY 1920S, WRITER ANZIA YEzierska was something of a household name. Countless newspapers and magazines told and retold her rags-to-riches story of literary success. Hers was a spectacular and particularly American ascent into the limelight. Some twenty years earlier, she had come with her family from the Russian-Polish village of Plotzk to New York's Jewish immigrant ghetto in the Lower East Side. As a young adult she toiled as a house servant, and then later in the sweatshops and the laundries, attending nightschool and preparatory school, and finally, Columbia University Teacher's College, all in order to "work herself up for a person." Burning all along with the need to express her immigrant aspirations, she labored at the craft of writing, creating stories which eventually propelled her to stardom -- crude compositions by conventional standards, written in the raw unpolished Yiddishized diction and syntax of an immigrant, but redolent with emotion, energy and striving. By 1919, she had short stories accepted for publication by such major magazines as The Metropolitan, The New Republic, Harper's, The Century, The Nation, Cosmopolitan, and Good Housekeeping. In 1920, Edward J. O'Brien, editor of The Best Short Stories series, chose her story, "The Fat of the Land," as the best story of 1919. Before long, Yezierska had a contract with Houghton Mifflin & Company for the publication of her first collection of short stories, Hungry Hearts (1920), which received wide critical praise. That same year, Sam Goldwyn offered her $10,000 for the film rights of Hungry Hearts, in addition to a three-year, $10,400 contract if she would agree to supervise the MGM screen adaptation of her book. During the years 1922-1932 she published five more books, including Salome of the Tenements (1922), the film rights of which were bought by Twentieth Century Fox for the even more fantastic sum of $15,000. From Hester Street to Hollywood, from "Scrubwoman to Novelist," as the New York Herald wrote in 1923, Anzia Yezierska had become, for a time, the apotheosis of the American dream.
Within ten years, however, Anzia Yerzierska, the Sweatshop Cinderella, was almost completely forgotten, bereft of publisher, readership, and income. It is only since her death, in 1970, that Yezierska's work has been rediscovered by feminist literary critics and historians, as well as by scholars and readers interested in ethnicity and culture in America. In the late 80s, biographies of Yezierska began to surface, including a biographical memoir by Yezierska's daughter, Louise Levitas Henrikson.(1) Persea Books began reprinting Hungry Hearts, Bread Givers, and Yezierska's autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse. Most recently, Persea has published How I Found America, a collection of all of the pieces from Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness, with an additional group of uncollected stories. Posthumously, Yezierska now enjoys the largest audience since her eclipse in the late '20s. To what do we attribute this reinvigorated interest in Yezierska? What was her selling power in the 1920s, and what are we rediscovering in her today?
Yezierska's stunning success in the early '20s can be attributed in no small measure to the public appeal and selling power of the story behind her stories. It was an irresistible tale, one which she herself and the publicity engines of Hollywood marketed with zeal: "A struggling young immigrant woman writer breaks away from the filth and grime of the ghetto, turns her back on the backward ways of her domineering old world father who refuses to recognize her personal aspirations, dips her pen into her heart, and writes stories about Lower East Side tenement life that lift her from sweatshop to stardom...."
Though untrained in the then fledgling art of public relations, Anzia Yezierska had an indomitable will and an unmistakable talent for embellishing her personal story in order to elicit sympathy and assistance from people who could help her achieve American success. As a young cooking student at the Clara de Hirsh Home for Working Girls,...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
