Academiejaar 2006-2007
LOST BETWEEN THE SHTETL AND THE LAND
OF OPPORTUNITY:
Living between two cultures in the work of Anzia
Yezierska
Promotor: Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens
Verhandeling voorgelegd aan de Faculteit
Letteren en Wijsbegeerte voor het
verkrijgen van de graad licentiaat in de
Taal- en letterkunde: Germaanse Talen
door Katrien Impens
“Am I really alone in my seeking? I am one of the millions
of immigrant children – children of loneliness, wandering
between worlds that are at once too old and too new to live in”
Anzia Yezierska, Children of Loneliness (123)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Prof. Dr. Gert Buelens for introducing me to the work of Anzia
Yezierska. I am grateful for his valuable suggestions, encouragement and constructive
criticism during the research and the writing of this dissertation. I also want to express my
gratitude to Lieve Meeremans, who read my work during its final stages. My greatest
appreciation goes to my family and friends. I am deeply indebted to them for their patience,
unwavering support and love.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1
1. Life and Work
1.1. Biography
1.2. Fluctuating Popularity
3
6
2. Americanization
2.1. The Force of Clothing in the Assimilation Process
2.1.1. “Greening out”
2.1.2. The transgressive power of clothes
2.2. Interethnic Relationships
2.3. Upward Mobility to a Middle-class Life
11
11
14
19
29
3. The Jewish Heritage and Problems of Adaptation
3.1. Generational Conflicts
3.2. The Place of Jewish Women in America
3.3. The Ambiguity of Success
40
45
53
4. The Other Side of the “American Dream”
4.1. The Immigrant Dream of America
4.1.1. The Golden Country
4.1.2. The Cruel Reality
4.2. Immigrant Aid
4.2.1. Organized Charity
4.2.2. The Settlement House Movement
4.2.3. A Home for Working Girls
4.3. Ethnographic Research
4.4. Exclusion and Discrimination
59
59
65
74
74
83
87
94
98
5. Idiom and Style
5.1. Her Style of Writing
5.2. Her Idiom
5.3. Stereotypes
102
105
107
Conclusion
108
Bibliography
110
1
Introduction
The past was only my cradle, and now it cannot hold me, because I am grown too big; just as
the little house in Polotzk, once my home, has now become a toy of memory, as I move about
at will in the wide spaces of this splendid palace, whose shadow covers acres. No! it is not that
I belong to the past, but the past that belongs to me. America is the youngest of nations, and
inherits all that went before in history. And I am the youngest of America‟s children, and into
my hands is given all her priceless heritage, to the last white star espied through the telescope,
to the last great thought of the philosopher. Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the
shining future. – Mary Antin, The Promised Land
With these optimistic words Mary Antin ends her famous novel The Promised Land. This
novel is generally read as a hopeful story of acculturation and transformation (Rubin 1988:
288). On the surface it is the optimistic account of those “who arrived in America eager to
shed their outdated customs and who willingly accepted the values and manners of the New
World” (Rubin 1988: 288). While Antin described her transition from the Old World to the
New in positive terms, other immigrant writers portrayed the perils of assimilation. One of
these writers was Anzia Yezierska, who became the most successful Jewish-American woman
novelist of her generation. In the early 1920s, Yezierska gained national recognition for her
stories about immigrant life on the Lower East Side. But her success did not last long, after a
short time in the spotlights she disappeared from the literary scene and fell into oblivion.
In the early 1970s, however, scholars rediscovered her work. The first scholar who drew
attention to Anzia Yezierska was Alice Kessler-Harris. She was gathering information on
New York Jews in the 1890s, when she came across Yezierska‟s work. She was so fascinated
by the stories of immigrant life, that she decided to republish Anzia‟s novels (Kessler-Harris
2003: vii). At the same time, Jo Ann Boydston discovered a collection of Dewey‟s poems,
written for Yezierska. This discovery inspired Mary V. Dearnborn to write her book Love in
the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey (1988). Later that year,
Louise Levitas Hendriksen published a personal account of her mother‟s life (Gelfant 1997:
xxi). In the 1990s, the study of Yezierska‟s work only intensified. Scholars like Zaborowska,
Wilentz, Ferraro, Stubbs … approached Yezierska‟s fiction from many different angles and
produced interesting readings of her stories. Most of them praise her work for its emphasis on
the woman‟s immigrant experience. Yezierska‟s protagonists are strong-willed, independent
women who long to “become a person” in America. But they discover that “the road to
becoming a person [lies] through the dangerous territory of Americanization” (Kessler-Harris
2003: xxxi).
2
Like Alice Kessler-Harris I read one of Yezierska‟s novels and wanted to learn more about
her life and work. Although Yezierska wrote most of her novels during the first decades of the
twentieth century, her themes are still extremely relevant to our times. Every day, new
immigrants ask themselves the same questions as Yezierska‟s protagonists. I belief that
contemporary readers can gain a better understanding of the immigrant experience by reading
her novels and short-stories.
In this dissertation I explore how Yezierska dramatizes the process of constructing a new
identity out of conflicting traditions. I examine how she tries to reconcile the Jewish heritage
with the American lifestyle. In the first chapter I give a short biography and a discussion of
her fluctuating popularity. The second chapter focuses upon the process of cultural adaptation.
We can discern different strategies for entering the dominant culture. For new immigrants
clothing played the leading role in their cultural transformation. However, a new outfit did not
guarantee successful assimilation. Therefore immigrants sought other means to gain access to
American life. Some of them saw an interethnic relationship as their “admission ticket into
Christian America” (Fine 1988: 18), others tried to advance in American society on their own
merits.
Chapter 3 shows that Americanization was a painful process, that often entailed a severe sense
of loss. According to Horace Keller, an important social critic, “the project of
Americanization concealed latent dangers, especially for the immigrant psyche”:
In the new community [the immigrant‟s] old habits and attitudes do not obtain the old results,
and the old results are no longer successful adjustments to the situation. The immigrant‟s
personality suffers attrition and dislocation. He doesn‟t belong, and so, cannot find himself.
Disjoined from the old ways and values and not yet at home in the new, he becomes
demoralized (Weber 2005: 3).
Yezierska‟s fiction gives many examples of Jewish immigrants who float between two world.
Her heroines tear themselves away from the Old World, but come to realize that they are still
too “green” to live in the New.
In chapter 4, I demonstrate that America failed to live up to the immigrants‟ expectations.
Immigrants envisioned the United States as a country where “the streets were paved with
gold” (Schreier 1994: 43). But once they set foot on American soil, they had to re-adjust these
expectations. I end this dissertation with a small chapter on Yezierska‟s idiom and writing
style.
3
1. Life and Work
1.1. Biography
Anzia Yezierska was born into a poor Jewish family in the Russian-Polish village of Plotsk,
around the year 1880. When Yezierska was about ten, she and her family left their native
village for fear of the czar‟s pogroms and embarked upon the journey to the promised land,
America (Stubbs 2004: viii). She arrived with her parents, three brothers, and three sisters at
Castle Garden, “New York‟s gateway for immigrants before Ellis Island” (Hendriksen 1988:
14). In Yezierska‟s biography we can read that the whole family was immediately
Americanized once they set foot on American soil. The oldest brother, Meyer Yezierska, who
had crossed the ocean a few years earlier, had been given the name Max Meyer and they all
received his invented surname and new, American first names (Hendriksen 1988: 14). Anzia
Yezierska turned into Hattie Mayer. But life in the promised land was very hard. While her
older siblings went to work in sweatshops, Anzia, still too young, learned the English
language and the American ways in public school. Soon she too had to enter the workforce
because her father strictly followed the Old World tradition and expected that his children
would support him so he could devote himself to study of the sacred books (Stubbs 2004:
viii).
Anzia Yezierska understood that education was the tool to advance in American society,
therefore she attended night school after her long work day and saved money for a year at
college. In order to attain her dream of the educated life, she had to leave her orthodox father
behind and find a place of her own. She moved to a room in the Clara de Hirsch Home for
working girls, which she will later attack in her novel Arrogant Beggar. With the help of her
wealthy patrons she could enrol in Teachers College of Columbia University. In 1904 she had
earned her diploma that allowed her to teach domestic science. Although being a teacher gave
her financial security, she did not like the profession (Schoen 1982: 7). She was not very
interested in cooking and cleaning and above all disliked teaching. She aspired after
something more than the acceptable role for women. American culture however expected
women to manage the household, rather than pursue careers (Schoen 1982: 8). This attitude
coincided with Jewish traditions, which Yezierska resented for their repressive attitude toward
women. In the Jewish tradition there was no room for “the career woman” she wanted to be
(Schoen 1982: 8). Nonetheless she did not “reject[] all aspects of a woman‟s life” (Schoen
1982: 9). In 1910 she married an attorney, but the marriage was quickly annulled. Shortly
4
thereafter, she married again, to Arnold Levitas, with whom she had a daughter. For a few
years she tried to be a good wife and a good mother for her daughter but according to her
biographer, she was not shaped for this role. She moved with her daughter to sunny California
but was unable to give her the necessary care. Therefore she decided to send Louise back to
her father in New York. In the biography of her mother, Levitas Hendriksen makes clear how
lonely Anzia felt during this period. “By her decision to get an education she had cut herself
off from her parents; by her effort to have a career she had separated herself from the mass of
immigrants and by her refusal to live the usual life of wife and mother, she was cut off from
ordinary women” (Schoen 1982: 10). She missed a sense of community and at the same time
did not feel accepted by the educated, native-born Americans.
It was her meeting with John Dewey, the philosopher, and their relationship that gave a
different direction to her life. Dewey was not only a mentor who gave her the confidence to
develop her talent for writing, he was also a friend and lover who sympathized with her
dilemmas and supported her emotionally (Schoen 1982: 10). He had an enormous impact on
her life and fiction for many years. In most of her novels there appears a character that
strongly resembles Dewey. Especially her novel All I Could Never Never Be revolves around
their relationship. It is the fictionalized account of her experiences as a member of an
ethnographic team studying Philadelphia‟s Polish immigrants. Dewey had gathered a group of
graduate students to study the living conditions of the Polish immigrants and he wanted
Yezierska as a translator for the project. After the study all significant contact between them
ended.
We can only guess at the cause of the break-up, but it may have been due to the distorted
image each had formed of the other: he believed she was a passionate woman, she saw him as
a hero and a god (Schoen 1982: 13). It is a subject that we encounter over and over again in
her novels. In any case, Dewey gave her the courage and support she needed to follow her
dream of becoming an author. In 1920 she received national attention when one of her stories,
“The Fat of the Land,” won the prestigious Edward O‟Brien Best Short Story award. A year
later, Houghton Mifflin published a collection of her short stories under the title Hungry
Hearts. These stories portray the hardship immigrant women have to endure to find a place in
America. They show the longings, broken dreams and, as Schoen formulates it, “the loss of
the past without a gain of the present” (Schoen 1982: 14). She will keep reworking the themes
of this early work in her following prose. Above all, these sketches of immigrant life are
5
appealing for the figure of the young, strong-willed immigrant woman, a personality who will
play the leading part in all her fiction (Schoen 1982: 16). Despite the interest in her work, she
still remained on the edge of poverty until Goldwyn Studios bought the movie rights of
Hungry Hearts for ten thousand dollars. From that moment on her career had been
successfully launched. She moved to Hollywood where she was soon living a life of glamour
and glitter.
Goldwyn organized a huge publicity campaign which depicted Yezierska as the “Sweatshop
Cinderella” who had managed to move “From Hester Street to Hollywood” (Konzett 1997:
595). Tabloids and national newspapers were enchanted by the rags-to-riches story and wrote
numerous articles about this glamorous fairy tale, “describing how a poor immigrant who had
at various times been a scrubwoman, servant, and factory worker had been instantly
transformed into a great novelist and Hollywood success” (Konzett 1997: 595). The publicity
campaign was built around the myth of her as an ignorant sweatshop worker, which was an
image that Yezierska herself had encouraged. Yet this myth is only partially true, it leaves out
the fact that she had earned a degree in domestic science and that she briefly went to the
American Academy of Dramatic Arts (Stubbs 2004: ix). The myth leaves out these facts of
Yezierska‟s life to strengthen the rags-to-riches story that so many people adored. Yezierska
created her own persona by mystifying or altering elements from her life (Stubbs 2004: ix).
She loved spinning fairytales about her life and applied the same strategy to her fiction. It
seems that her novels contain many biographical facts, but we must be aware that she juggled
with the events of her life to suit the needs of her books.
The Hollywood adventure did not last long. The violent commercialism of the film industry
suffocated her and she was offended by the way Goldwyn Pictures altered harsh elements in
Hungry Hearts to secure a box-office success (Stubbs 2004: x).The superficiality of
Hollywood choked her inspiration so she returned to New York City. There she wrote
respectively Salome of the Tenements (1923), the short story collection Children of Loneliness
(1923), Bread Givers (1925) and Arrogant Beggar (1927). When her novel All I Could Never
Be (1932) was published, her literary success had drastically declined. Almost twenty years
later she tried to recover some of her success with the „autobiographical‟ novel Red Ribbon on
a White Horse (1950). She kept writing until her death in 1970, treating an entirely new
subject: the problem of the aged.
6
1.2. Fluctuating popularity
As I shortly mentioned above Yezierska‟s popularity was one with ups and downs. At the
beginning of the twentieth century her collection of short stories Hungry Hearts made her an
instant star, a celebrity from the Lower East Side ghetto. But after a short time in the
spotlights she disappeared from the literary scene and fell into oblivion. She ended up obscure
and forgotten in a nursing home. After her death in 1970 various scholars revived the interest
in her work and lauded her writing as documents of historical interest. In my discussion of her
fluctuating popularity I will try to retrace this path from success to oblivion while giving the
reasons for the fading or rising attention for her work. For this discussion I rely on the
introduction Katherine Stubbs wrote for Arrogant Beggar and which was extremely helpful
for this purpose.
When Hungry Hearts was published, Yezierska in general received favourable reviews. The
New York Evening Post printed the first review, praising her for her accomplishment: “When
one considers her own struggles to become an American her detachment strikes one as little
short of miraculous” (Hendriksen 1988: 144). Two weeks later, William Lyon Phelps, a
professor of literature at Yale, wrote in the New York Times: “Many realistic tales of New
York‟s ghetto have been written, but in point of literary workmanship and in laying bare the
very souls of her characters, the superior of Miss Yezierska has not yet appeared”
(Hendriksen 1988: 145). These reviews were only the forerunners of the praise that was still
to come. While before her writing was considered too high-strung and crude, now most
reviewers approved of her style and wrote that “No more powerful indictment of certain
phases of the immigrant problem could have been penned. Miss Yezierska‟s idiom is
excellent. It would be a pity if she turned to a more polished formula” (Schoen 1982: 33).
Consequently the expectations for her first novel Salome of the Tenements were very high but
unfortunately the book could not really live up to the expectations. The reviews of the novel
were only partially favourable. Some readers were dismayed by the explicit sexuality of the
protagonist Sonya, who uses her brute passions to escape from the ghetto. The critical
reception of her next collection of short stories Children of Loneliness was also less
enthusiastic than the reception of Hungry Hearts. Although many of the themes and situations
were similar to those she had used in her first collection, her language now became a matter
of dispute among many Jewish critics. They felt that Yezierska was poking fun at Jewish
people by letting her characters speak broken English (Schoen 1982: 59). By the time Bread
7
Givers reached the audience her literary success was already fading. Few reviewers discussed
the novel although “they were aware of the higher achievement of this work” (Schoen 1982:
74). The next years we see a reversal of fortune for Yezierska. Although she published two
more books, they were not received well either by the public or by the critics. Especially
Arrogant Beggar was fiercely attacked. The New York Tribune accused Anzia Yezierska of
showing “a complete and amusing ignorance of gentile minds, and somehow a faint lack of
good taste” (Stubbs 2004: vii). The reviewer for the New York World revealed that he felt
“cold” toward Yezierska‟s “unpleasant” style, her “high-handed impatience at the existing
order of things” (Stubbs 2004: vii).
Stubbs points out that there were numerous factors for her literary decline. Yezierska herself
contributed to the fading attention. By the late 1920s, she suffered from a writer‟s block
(Stubbs 2004: xi). She believed she had lost touch with reality by leaving the ghetto. She
blamed herself for having turned her back on the Jewish community but at the same time she
knew that she could not be an immigrant twice ( as she states it in Children of Loneliness).
She had made herself a spokeswoman for the poor immigrants but she realized that her
poverty-stricken youth had given her an ambivalent attitude toward the downtrodden: “Once
you knew what poor people suffered it kept gnawing at you. You‟d been there yourself. You
wanted to reach out and help. But if you did, you were afraid you might be dragged back into
the abyss”; “all I could feel was disgust – revulsion – escape. Anywhere – only away” (Stubbs
2004: xi).
Her writing method had always been time-consuming (Stubbs 2004: xi). She was very
insecure about her work so sometimes she would rewrite a story from beginning to end before
she considered it finished. Even then, she was never completely satisfied, as the story “Mostly
About Myself” in Children of Loneliness clear.
What shall I keep, and what shall I throw away? Which is madness, and which is inspiration? I
never know. I pick and choose things like a person feeling his way in the dark. I never know
whether the thoughts I‟ve discarded are not perhaps better than the thoughts I‟ve kept. With all
the physical anguish I put into my work, I am never sure of myself. (…) I am learning to
accept the torture of chaos and confusion and doubt through which my thoughts must pass, as
a man learns to accept a hump on his back, or the loss of an arm, or any affliction which the
fates thrust upon him. (11)
Of course there were more decisive factors at play than her writer‟s block. A number of
external elements help to explain her literary downfall. There were historical developments
during the period that changed the attitude toward her writing.
8
The early 1920s were known as “the roaring twenties” or “the jazz age”. The booming
economy gave rise to a new lifestyle, especially in the cities. Many women began to question
the traditional womanly behaviour and were attracted by the independence and sexual
freedom of the “flapper” who wore short skirts and “bobbed hair” (Norton 2007: 445).
Feminists fought for economic and sexual independence. They did not want to restrict
themselves to domestic chores and argued that voting rights were indispensable in their search
for equal opportunities. In 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment at last granted women the right to
vote. So Yezierska‟s female-centered fiction fitted the climate perfectly. Moreover,
“Yezierska‟s brand of ethnic fiction, her focus on the lives of immigrants came after two
decades of Progressivism‟s social reformist rhetoric, which encouraged the general public‟s
interest in the problems of the burgeoning population of Eastern and Southern European
immigrants” (Stubbs 2004: xiii). Consequently we can see her early popularity as a result of
the attention given to women and immigrants.
But the “roaring twenties” were also years of growing conservatism. Conservatives opposed
the modernization and defended the puritan values. As a result there was xenophobia and
hostility toward immigrants who did not fit the image of the WASP. People were taken over
by the Red Scare. In 1919 Michell Palmer founded the Bureau of Investigation and began his
“Palmer raids.” Thousands of people, especially immigrants of Russian origin, were accused
of having communist sympathies and were arrested or deported. In 1921 and 1924 more and
more people supported the proposition to restrict immigration (Norton 2007: 446). Congress
introduced immigration quotas for each nationality that restricted the immigration of Eastern
and Southern immigrants. Fear of “immigrant radicalism” was evident in 1921 when two
anarchist immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were convicted of murder while
there was not enough evidence to prove their guilt. (Norton 2007: 446).It was clear that they
were convicted on the basis of their Southern-European background. During the same period
the Ku Klux Klan revived, attacking not only Afro-Americans, but everyone who was nonAnglo-Saxon (Jews, Italians, …).
In this atmosphere of racism and intolerance, Yezierska‟s concern for the fate of the
immigrants was not very popular. In addition, organized systems of welfare and charity
gathered support. So the fierce attack on settlement houses and scientific charity, mainly in
Arrogant Beggar, did not meet with the approval of the readers. The largest part of her
audience were members of the German Jewish community and they were disgruntled at their
9
representation in the novel (Schoen 1982: 87). Yezierska‟s heavy condemnation of the
German Jews no doubt put off many possible readers who were not willing to accept the
critique. Although she had voiced her dissatisfaction with American philanthropies before,
this novel remains her most perishing and hardest critique, and the only text in which she
attacks charity-run boarding homes. She also exposes Progressivism as an attempt to curb
“the threat of the foreign” to the American culture (Stubbs 2004: xv). Stubbs writes that
“Progressivism was an essentially conservative response to Establishment anxieties about the
threat of labour radicalism and the rise of socialism” (Stubbs 2004: xiv). To ward off the
threat, Progressivism introduced several adjustments but those adjustments did not really deal
with the basis of economic inequality. Yezierska questions the methods of the Progressive
movement (e.g. food and health instruction) and demands attention for the difficult situation
of the working-class during a time when striking workers were seen as criminals.
While her choice of subject matter contributed to the literary decline, this decline was also a
result of her writing style. What is more, the role of the Yezierska legend accelerated the
downward spiral (Stubbs 2004: xv). At the beginning of her career the legend contributed to
her success. But as a result of her growing popularity, some critics rejected Yezierska on the
basis of her popularity (Stubbs 2004: xvi). They accused her of telling the same story over and
over again, a story they equated with her own life without considering her skills as a writer.
Many critics weighed her work against the real immigrant experience. Thus when they
praised her work, they always referred to its realistic qualities. When her work was criticized,
the target was “the work‟s failure to be realistic – in short, its sentimentality” (Stubbs 2004:
xvi). The opinions about her sentimental style of writing had always been a matter of dispute.
By the late 1920s critics no longer assessed her style as refreshing and alive but pleaded for
more restraint. Historically, the writings of women or immigrants were most often labelled as
sentimental. The sentimental was a genre traditionally practised by female writers and read by
female readers, so for many women aspiring to a writing career, the sentimental was the most
familiar literary mode (Stubbs 2004: xvii).
But for critics of early twentieth century literature, sentimentalism has traditionally been
considered conventional – manipulative, simplistic, excessive – in contrast to modernism‟s
formalist innovations and its interest in discontinuity and self-conscious experimentation.
Against modernism‟s elitist position as high culture, sentimental discourse had traditionally
been relegated to the popular. Implicit in these oppositions is an insidious gendering of the two
traditions, as modernist discourses are coded as masculine, and the sentimental is feminized.
(Stubbs xvii)
10
Critics approved of Modernism because it was a radical break with all the familiar
conventions while sentimentalism became a degraded genre for a less educated public.
But the sentimental can also be considered as a narrative strategy that female writers could
use to make their point (Stubbs 2004: xviii). She adopted the sentimental language instead of
the realistic to heighten the injustice of certain social or economic situations. With this
strategy she hoped to persuade her readers of the inequality in society. Throughout literary
history sentimental fiction has been used to communicate ethical messages (Stubbs 2004:
xviii). Although “sophisticated readers” did not like sentimental texts for their simplicity,
these texts had the capacity to mobilize large numbers of readers because they were accessible
(Stubbs 2004: xviii). Another aspect of sentimental prose is the use of stereotypes. Like other
writers who used this mode, Yezierska relied heavily on ethnic stereotyping which made her
unpopular by Jewish critics. Of all the negative reactions to her work, the accusation of racism
has remained the severest critique (Stubbs 2004: xix).
As a result of her declining popularity she could not find publishers who were willing to
invest in her work. From 1932, when All I Could Never Be appeared, until 1950, Anzia
published nothing. Then her seventh book Red Ribbon on a White horse was published.
The critics generally praised it and were surprised by her achievement after her long silence
Yet, in spite of the good reviews, the book did not sell well. Again the historical context
played a role in the disappointing book sales. Similar to the early 1920s a new “red scare”
swept the nation, creating a paranoid attitude toward foreigners. Many saw the Soviet Union
virtually taking control in Europe and infiltrating in America. Senator McCarthy poured oil on
the fire and started an anticommunist “witch hunt.” Everyone was a potential suspect so a
novel by a Russian immigrant with socialist leanings was not well received. Again she ended
up in anonymity. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that her work was rediscovered.
Scholars directed their attention to writings that were not included in the canon, namely the
literature of women, people of colour. Alice Kessler-Harris brought back into print many of
Yezierska‟s texts thus initiating an intense study of her work that goes on until today.
11
2. Americanization
2.1. The force of clothing in the assimilation process
2.1.1. “Greening out”
For newly arrived immigrants clothing functioned as the first step toward Americanization.
A new set of clothes was the easiest and clearest way they could identify themselves as
“American Jews” (Schreier 1994: 50). Greenhorns quickly learned to be ashamed of Old
World clothing because those clothes labelled them as outsiders. Especially Jewish
immigrants were heavily burdened with the label of greenhorn since they, unlike some other
ethnic groups, intended to stay in the United States (Schreier 1994: 92). So they did
everything in their power to “green themselves out,” which contributed to their rapid adoption
of American styles. Schreier shows that this took on a special significance for Jews.
Historically, clothes played an important role in their identity; Jewish appearance had
“functioned as a visual manifestation of ethnic identity and a self-conscious assertion of
solidarity, a kind of cultural boundary marker. Clothing customs reflected deeply embedded
values” (Schreier 1994: 33). In order to be accepted in America, they had to change that
aspect of their identity. For example, many immigrant women exchanged the Jewish kerchief
for the stylish and fashionable American hats. Stylish clothing became especially important
for young, immigrant women who made new clothes their first priority (Schreier 1994: 66).
Only later came the realization that adaptation goes further than material possessions.
Yezierska‟s novels reveal her awareness of the role of clothing in early twentieth-century
America. The importance of dress in the immigrant experience is a theme that keeps
appearing in her oeuvre. In the early story “America and I” the narrator, a young Jewish
woman, has just arrived from Russia and she eagerly wants to adapt to her new country.
Impatiently she awaits her first wages so she can purchase the clothes necessary for the
transformation.
The outside of me still branded me for a steerage immigrant. I had to have clothes to forget
myself that I‟m a stranger yet. And so I had to have money to buy these clothes. … Money to
buy a new shirt on my back- shoes on my feet. Maybe yet an American dress and hat! (38).
In her mind she already walked in her new American clothes. “How beautiful I looked in my
new American clothes. How beautiful I looked as I saw myself like a picture before my eyes!
I saw how I would throw away my immigrant rags tied up in my immigrant shawl. With
money to buy – free money in my hands – I‟d show them that I could look like an American
12
in a day” (38). Later in the story she discovers that a new set of clothing does not make her an
American overnight. “Now, I even looked dressed up like the American-born. But inside of
me I knew that I was not yet an American. I choked with the longing when I met an
American-born, and I could say nothing” (43). Shenah Pessah in “Wings” is also anxious to
shed the label of greenhorn. Her desire to conform to American aesthetics arises when she
meets John Barnes, a young instructor of sociology who is writing a thesis on the
“Educational Problems of the Russian Jews” (7).
For the first time she realized how shabby and impossible her clothes were. “Oh weh!” she
wrung her hands. “I‟d give away everything in the world only to have something pretty to
wear for him. My whole life hangs on how I‟ll look in his eyes. I got to have a hat and a new
dress. I can‟t no more wear my „greenhorn‟ shawl going out with an American (14).
Since she does not have enough money to buy the clothes, she needs to pawn the feather bed
her mother left her. With this act she symbolically replaces the Old World with the new one.
As this passage makes clear many young female immigrants interpreted new clothing “as a
practical and worthwile investment in their future”(Schreier 1994: 144). They saw stylish
clothing as the means to attain romantic adventure. Unlike many of their mothers who did not
leave the familiar surroundings, young women were eager to broaden their cultural horizons
(Schreier 1994: 66). Consequently they became aware of the important role dress played in
the everyday life of urban America.
Mashah in Bread Givers is a paragon of fashion. She strolls the pushcarts and neighbourhood
shops in search for the latest style. “When Mashah walked the streets in her everyday work
dress that was cut from the same goods and bought from the same pushcart like the rest of us,
it looked different on her. Her clothes were always so fresh, without the least wrinkle, like the
dressed- up doll lady from the show window of the grandest department store” (4).
Everywhere she goes she receives admiring looks. The attention of men and the whole range
of urban activities further strengthen the girl‟s interest in dress. “I‟m going to hear the free
music in the park tonight, and these pink roses on my hat to match out my pink calico will
make me look just like the picture on the magazine cover” (3). But Mashah‟s passion for
beautiful clothes causes growing tensions in her family. While the rest of the family struggles
to survive, she spends her last penny on fashionable clothes. Unlike Bessie, who contributes
all her wages to the family income, Mashah does not want to put over her pay envelope
unopened. This causes parental conflicts since “in the patriarchal order of Jewish tradition,”
the spending of family money was a “cornerstone of parental authority” (Schreier 1994: 134).
Many parents expect their children to hand over their wages. But Mashah questions this
13
system, she feels entitled to an allowance that she can spend in any way she pleases. As a
result quarrels arise over her spending autonomy. “Mother tore her hair when she found that
Mashah made a leak of thirty cents in wages where every cent had been counted out. …
“Empty head!” cried Mother. “You don‟t own the dirt under their doorstep and you want to
play the lady” (6). Nevertheless the pressure to be stylish outweighs the family pressure and
her precarious economic situation. A few years later Mashah‟s sister Sara faces the same
problem when she goes to college. She finds herself in an environment that is completely
alien to her familiar surroundings and that treats her as an outsider. She believes she needs to
“change herself inside and out to be one of them” (24). From that moment on she scrimps and
saves to acquire the necessary clothes to be accepted.
Every week, I saved a bit more for a little something in my appearance – a brush for the hair, a
pair of gloves, a pair of shoes with stockings to match. And now I began to work still longer
hours to save up for a plain felt hat like those college girls wore. And the result of my wanting
to dress up was that I was too tired to master my hardest subject (221).
She is attracted by the fashion of her fellow students for it‟s “plain beautifulness”(212) which
forms a strong contrast to the cheap, fancy style of Hester Street.
I seen such plain beautifulness. The simple skirts and sweaters, the stockings and shoes to
match. The neat finished quietness of their tailored suits. There was no show-off in their
clothes, and yet how much more pulling to the eyes and all the senses than the Grand Street
richness I knew (212).
Although Sara aspires to the simple taste of her college peers, many working-class women did
not follow the American conception of elegance. They used their creativity to customize the
Fifth Avenue looks and intentionally overdressed to “put on style” (Schreier 1994: 132). They
exchanged the simple fashion of the rich for bright colours and flashy fabrics to construct
their own identity. Schreier contends that “the outfits they assembled, more often a parody
than an imitation of the elite fashions, asserted their own sense of style” (Schreier 1994: 70).
Many social workers who accused female immigrants of lacking modesty, did not see how
important dress was in the girls‟ self-definition. The domestic science writer Bertha June
Richardson voiced her aversion to “the spectacle” of immigrant girls wearing flamboyant
clothes:
They looked better dressed than you did! Plumes on their hats, a rustle of silk petticoats,
everything about them in the latest style. You went home thoughtful about those girls who
wasted their hard-earned money on cheap imitation, who dressed beyond their station, and you
failed to see what enjoyment they got out of it (Stubbs 1998: 162).
We come across a similar passage in Yezierska‟s Arrogant Beggar when the ladies of the
Home for Working Girls ventilate their disapproval over the way the girls dress.
14
“The way they dress these days! Ridiculous! Shop girls wearing silk stockings, fur coats.
Where‟s it all leading to?” Mrs. Gordon smoothed her broad-tail bag that matched her madeto-order broad-tail shoes. “If we could only make them see how much better simple things are
than all their finery (63).
They obviously miss the point that immigrant girls not only used clothing to advance in
society and bridge “the differences between themselves and those with larger opportunities”
as Richardson calls it, but also to make themselves visible as independent, exuberant Jewish
women. In this respect these girls differ from Sara in Bread Givers. She wants to suppress her
ethnicity in order to achieve upward mobility.
2.1.2. The transgressive power of clothes
The novel in which clothing plays the most prominent role is Salome of the Tenements.
Stubbs states that in the novel “clothing is used as a vehicle to engage in a fascinating attempt
to transgress and transcend forms of economic and social hierarchy” (Stubbs 1998: 157). In
order to fully understand the implication of this statement it is necessary to look at the role
Jewish immigrants played in the production of ready-made clothing. Then we can see why
ready-made clothes held such an important position in the lives of Jewish garment workers
and consequently in the work of Anzia Yezierska.
Already in Eastern Europe, Jewish people shared a long history with clothing production. The
May Laws prohibited Jews, living in the Pale of Settlement, to own or rent land (Ewen 1985:
37). Since they were not allowed to work in the agricultural sector, they looked for jobs in the
trading business and in small artisans‟ shops. “In Eastern Europe, at the end of the nineteenth
century, the garment trade employed more Jewish men and women than did any other
occupation outside of commerce and trade” (Stubbs 1998: 160). In the meantime across the
Atlantic the American garment industry was booming. By the time Russian Jews migrated in
large numbers to the United States, there was a run on skilled workers. From the early 1890s
through 1910, the United States saw the heaviest influx of Jewish immigrants, during the
same years the ready-made garment industry grew substantially (Stubbs 1998: 160). So Jews
who already had some experience in the needle trade were valuable assets. When they arrived
at Ellis Island they found themselves in the centre of the American ready-made garment
industry.
New York was the printing center of the country, but it‟s leading industry was ready-made
clothing, which produced three-quarters of all women‟s clothing in the country and most of the
men‟s clothing as well. The new immigration coincided with the development of New York
15
City as the capital of the ready-made clothing industry, and the immigrants provided a source
of labor. It was in the garment trade that most immigrant women worked (Ewen 1985: 25).
At the outset of the twentieth century, almost forty percent of the people working in New
York City‟s garment factories were Jews from Russia and this number even increased
between 1910 and 1920 when most Russian Jewish immigrants were employed in the
American garment industry (Stubbs 1998: 161). Stubbs maintains that ready-made clothes
seemed to have a radical impact, both materially and ideologically. “Materially, the mass
production of clothing in standardized styles meant that many members of even the lowest
classes in society could afford to purchase clothing. Ideologically, the ready-made garment
seemed to make possible a form of egalitarianism, an equal access to attractive commodities”
(Stubbs 1998: 161).
But just when the mass-production of clothing took a high flight, the haute couture designer
made his entrance in urban society (Stubbs 1998: 162). We can see haute couture as an
attempt of the elite to preserve the boundaries between themselves and the less fortunate in an
era when ready-made clothes could almost magically change a person‟s status. For the elite
clothing had to keep its function as a classifying device. There were anxieties that workingclass women would be able to transgress their class by counterfeiting the appearance of high
society women. Those anxieties were matched by the fear that marriage could serve as a tool
for class transgression (Stubbs 2004: xxvi). Young working-class women, “stereotyped as
morally loose „gold diggers,‟ might, it was feared, snare a man of a higher social class. To
effect this infiltration of the middle and upper classes through marriage, young working
women might attempt to represent themselves as belonging to a higher class” (Stubbs 1998:
163).
Sonya Vrunsky in Salome of the Tenements can be viewed as a woman who wants to
transgress the boundaries by using clothes as a means to catch the man of her dreams, the
millionaire John Manning. As the plot unfolds Sonya finds that she has to repress herself in
order to fit into mainstream American culture and attain her goals; nonetheless she will
discover that she cannot repress or conceal her ethnic self (Okonkwo 2000: 130). The story
starts with the encounter between Manning and Sonya within the framework of an interview
for the Ghetto News. Stubbs remarks that the text immediately shows its obsession with
clothing. When Yezierska describes Manning‟s appearance in the first chapter, she focuses on
his clothes instead of on his body (Stubbs 1998: 165).
16
Not a detail of his well-dressed figure escaped her. His finished grooming stood out all the
more vividly in his background of horrid poverty. A master of tailor had cut his loose Scotch
tweeds. His pale brown pongee shirt was lighter and finer than a woman‟s waist. The rich
hidden quietness of his silk tie; even his shoes had a hand-made quality to them! She thought
(2).
Similarly, Manning also concentrates purely on her clothing:
Less definitely, but with equal interest, the man‟s glance took in the girl. Of severe blue serge,
shiny from wear, there was about her dress the nun-like austerity of the intellectual East Side.
But personality, femininity, flamed through this unrevealing uniform (2-3).
It seems that the two characters divide each other in a different class on the basis of their
clothing. Manning‟s “Scotch” tweeds and hand-made shoes classify him as a rich AngloSaxon, while Sonya‟s dress of “severe blue serge” identifies her as an East Side Jewess
(Stubbs 1998: 165). After this first encounter with John Manning she makes it her goal in life
to win him over. In order to do so she needs to manipulate her own appearance with the right
clothes. Initially she scours the pushcarts and one-price stores of Essex Street but does not
find the beautiful clothes she is looking for. „“Gottuniu! What hardness – what ugliness!”
Sonya turned up a scornful, young nose. “Something simple, I want – yes, but soft and formed
on the lines of the head (…). I hate cheap feathers. I hate cheap stuff. I ask only, how can a
person like me stand the cheapness of these ready-mades?”‟ (14-15). The saleswoman scorns
“Maybe a plain store on Fifth Avenue wouldn‟t have anything „simple‟ enough for the likes of
you. Why not better go to Jacques Hollins direct? He got those „simple‟ nothings in hats and
dresses that costs fortunes” (15). Sonya immediately puts this „advice‟ into action and visits
Hollins, née Jaky Solomon, in his Fifth Avenue mansion.
Jaky Saloman has on his own merits climbed the social scale. He started out as a designer in a
sweatshop but after training in Paris he became one of the most prestigious designers of New
York. High class women come to him in their urge to conform to the American norm of
physical beauty, especially Eastern European women who feel the need to conceal the things
that emphasize their ethnic difference. If they wanted to embrace the American ideal, they had
to accept a new body type namely “big busts, big behinds and small waistlines” (Schreier
1994: 64). But most women were not blessed with the right measurements, certainly not many
Eastern European women who had a “solid frame”: “without the contrast of a small waist, a
woman with full breasts and solid hips appeared large rather than curvaceous, and she could
be ridiculed for her „Jewish figure‟” (Schreier 1994: 64). Mrs. Isenblatt turns to Solomon in
the hope that he can hide her hips, so she can meet the American body type. “Nobody can
hide away my hips the way you can, Solomon. And honest I look like a perfect thirty-six
17
instead of a forty-eight around the bust” (19). The same goes for Mrs. Van Orden who hopes
that his gown will veil “the problem of her irrepressible fat, beefy shoulders and bulging bust”
(24). But what the narrative calls “a problem” is actually, as Okonkwo phrases it, “the fictive
definition of Mrs. Van Orden‟s physical „difference‟ which Americanization sees as
inauthentic, and hence must be repressed with a dress” (Okonkwo 2000: 133). Jacky
understands the need of these women to conceal their ethnic background because he has done
the same thing. When he came back from Paris he renamed himself Jacques Hollins because
he believed that his Jewish name would jeopardize a successful participation in America‟s
capitalist economy (Okonkwo 2000: 133). So Hollins is the perfect man for Sonya‟s aims.
With her youthful enthusiasm she convinces him to make her a dress free of charge.
“Jacky Solomon!” The cry burst from the depths of her. “There are people who will
sympathize with a girl starving for bread, but only an artist like you can sympathize with a girl
starving for beautiful clothes. And only you can know that the hunger for bread is not half as
maddening as the hunger for beautiful clothes. Why, day after day, for years and years, I used
to go from store to store, looking for a hat, a dress that will express me - myself. But
something that is me – myself, is not to be found in the whole East Side. Sometimes I‟m so
infuriated by the ugliness that I have to wear that I want to walk the streets naked – let my hair
fly in the air – out of sheer protest. My soul is in rebellion. I refuse to put clothes over my
body that strangle me by their ready-madeness” (23).
Sonya despises the ready-made clothes because she feels that they do not express her
individuality. Those standard shapes and sizes blur the differences between individuals.
Designer clothes on the other hand are handmade and measured on the body of the client and
as a result are the very pictures of individuality.
Dressed in her Fifth Avenue outfit she makes her landlord Mr. Rosenblat believe that she is “a
little queen,” “a lady” (49). He does not recognize her as one of his tenement residents and
while he is enchanted by her beautiful appearance, Sonya tricks him into repainting her
apartment. Yezierska insinuates that the new outfit plays an important part in her
Americanization because it also enables her to come in closer contact with the wealthy
settlement worker Manning (Okonkwo 2000: 135). But as their wedding reception later in the
story shows, Americanized clothes do not succeed in repressing her ethnic heritage. Manning
wants a reception where Sonya‟s ghetto friends will mingle with his high society
acquaintances so he can prove his belief “in the brotherhood of man, the elimination of all
artificial class barriers” (120). Sonya on the other hand has her doubts about this initiative.
“Democratic understanding?” Sonya‟s brow puckered doubtfully. “Don‟t talk over my head in
your educated language. Tell me in plain words how can there be democratic understanding
between those who are free to walk into steerage and the steerage people who are not allowed
to give one step up to the upper deck?” (120).
18
Her objections turn out to be valid. Instead of blurring class and cultural differences, the
reception painfully highlights the socio-economic differences between the guests and her own
ethnic difference. One of the guests, Alice Vandewater, observes “Astonishingly well-dressed
but her gesticulating hands show her origin” (121). Her Jewish fervour exposes her as “one of
the “steerage people” like Gittel Stein and Mrs. Peltz. The latter is unaware that her glittering
dress in which she feels equal to the elite, marks her as a Lower East Side immigrant.
Wholly unabashed by glittering wealth, Mrs. Peltz strutted in, decked in the gaudiest finery of
Essex Street. She wagged her head in proud self-consciousness that society in all its glory was
arrayed as she (123).
“Nu,” she whispered raspingly in Sonya‟s ear. “I can also look with other people alike when I
shine myself out in holiday things.” She thrust out a thick thumb at society. “They don‟t have
to know that what I‟m wearing is the lend from all the neighbors on the block.” Then she
proceeded to enumerate: “This silk waist, Mrs Finkelstein from the fish market lent me. And
the diamond earrings is from the butcher‟s wife. Mrs. Smirsky from the second-hand store let
me wear this hat for to-day. But don‟t it all fit me together like I was a lady born?” (123).
At the end of the novel, after her marriage has ended, Hollins confesses that he had fallen in
love with her at first sight. For him she does not have to assume a middle-class persona.
He tells her “I loved the battered toque on your crazy hair – the broken shoes in which you
rushed to me. I loved every little hole in your worn-out gloves” (176). Together they plan to
open a store where they want to sell designer clothes at democratic prices because Sonya
believes that beauty should be for those who love beauty, not only for those who can buy it.
She views this initiative as a way to bridge class distinctions.
Stubbs states that “in its portrayal of Sonya Vrunsky, Salome of the Tenements presents a
Jewish clothing worker who appears to use her love and expertise with commodities to
transgress class boundaries, in the realm of both clothing consumption (her use of custommade gowns to attract and wed the upper-class John Manning) and clothing production (her
project to design prestige clothing for the impoverished masses)” (Stubbs 1998: 169).
19
2.2. Interethnic Relationships
I already explained above that clothing was the first step in the assimilation process. But even
those immigrants who managed to obtain beautiful clothes, might still find themselves
excluded from mainstream American life. Therefore they sought other means to be accepted
by their new country and fellow citizens. Many immigrants saw interethnic relationships as
the best option to shed their status as an outsider and become an insider. Numerous works of
Jewish-American writers deal with interethnic marriages, especially first generation writers,
who were most concerned with assimilation. Buelens points out that “the cultural-symbolic
character of this resolution needs to be underlined: until the 1950s Jewish intermarriage was a
negligible social phenomenon; as such, the central place that intermarriages occupies in the
denouement of pre-World-War-II American Jewish narratives does not „reflect‟ any important
facet of the acculturation process as it historically occurred” (Buelens 1993: 231). So
Yezierska‟s interest in interfaith love affairs reflects her urge to be part of the dominant
culture. From her early work until Red Ribbon on a White Horse “the recurrent theme is the
love affair between a poor immigrant Jewish woman from the Lower East Side and a
prominent, well-educated Anglo-Saxon man, a relationship based on her own liaison with
John Dewey” (Shapiro 1996: 80). Yezierska‟s “literary world is populated by fictional
counterparts of John Dewey: the men are attracted to the otherness of immigrant women, yet
they find the same exotic otherness excessive and overwhelming” (Coklin 2006: 138). She
always juxtaposes the passionate, emotional nature of the immigrant girl with the rational,
cold inner life of the Anglo-Saxon male.
The first story in Hungry Hearts, “Wings,” immediately sets the tone. It tells the story of the
young immigrant girl, Shenah Pessah, who falls in love with a sociology instructor.
The first lines of the story characterize her as a passionate, emotional girl who desperately
needs love. “My heart chokes in me like in a prison! I‟m dying for a little love and I got
nobody – nobody!” (5). She believes that her lonely days are over when John Barnes enters
her life. He has come to the Jewish ghetto to conduct research into the lives of the new
immigrants and he congratulates himself “at his good fortune in encountering such a splendid
type for his research” (21). He only sees Shenah as an object of study, a way to gain a closer
connection with the immigrant community whereas Shenah makes him the object of her
worship. “It was as though the god of her innermost longings had suddenly taken shape in
human form and lifted her in mid-air” (6). Her worship of Barnes depends primarily on his
ability to teach her “the American way.” “Pessah‟s profound desire for love and her even
20
more fervent desire to become an educated American become conflated in the person of
Barnes” (Pavletich 2000: 88). She desires him because he symbolizes America and everything
that she wants to achieve. Barnes embodies the cool Anglo-Saxon who represses his feelings.
Like Manning in Yezierska‟s later novel Salome of the Tenements he is interested in Shenah
because she represents the ethnic other who will “take form under his touch” (9). He is
convinced that he “could help her by pointing the way out of her nebulous emotionalism and
place her feet firmly on earth” (9). He believes it is his mission to teach her more restrained
behaviour. With this conviction he mirrors Manning who will hold the same belief, as I shall
explain later in this discussion. Shenah interprets his interest in her as an amorous approach.
Consequently, she has high expectations after their kiss on the pier. During that moment, John
abandons his rational reserve but the territory he has entered proves “unfamiliar and
threatening to his sense of self-control” (Pavletich 2000: 92). He is deeply disturbed by the
sudden appearance of his primitive nature and retreats to the safe world of restrained feelings.
After he has apologized – “that night - it was a passing moment of forgetfulness”- he packs
his suitcases and leaves Shenah in dull stupor. We shall see that in other stories Barnes is
replaced by a whole gamut of Anglo-Saxon males, ranging from social workers to teachers
and college professors.
The image of “a male teacher-friend” who introduces the immigrant women to his world of
reason and education can be found in another story of Hungry Hearts (Zaborowska 1995:
134). The heroine of “The Miracle” lives in a small town in Poland; since she has no dowry
her prospects for marriage are bleak. Then she receives a letter from a friend who lives in
America. “America‟s a lover‟s land. In America millionaires fall in love with poorest girls.
Matchmakers are out of style, and a girl can get herself married to a man without the worries
for a dowry” (73). This letter convinces Sara that she needs to go to America if she wants to
find love. But she soon experiences that the marriages available to a dowryless woman in
America are the same as they were in Poland. After a disappointing experience with a
matchmaker she decides to “make a person of herself” (82) and enrols in English classes.
There she meets her ideal man, a teacher, whom she sees as the personification of America:
“Here is a person! Here is America!” (83). He even receives a God-like status. The teacher is
attracted to her because she lacks the emotional restraint that keeps him captive. She is
praised “exactly for her unintellectual „ethnic‟ qualities, for being a stereotypical East
European Jewish female” which is, according to Zaborowska, an ironic compliment, since she
“desperately craves for knowledge and education” (Zaborowska 1995: 130). He confides to
21
her “I am bound by formal education and conventional traditions…You are not repressed as I
am by the fear and shame of feeling. You could teach me more than I can teach you. You
could teach me how to be natural” (85). Sara on the other hand wants to lose the very thing
that attracts him and learn how “to get cold in the heart and clear in the head” (84) like he is.
In the end they engage in a relationship in which he teaches Sara from his books while she
teaches him to be more emotional.
“You can save me. You can free me from the bondages of age-long repressions. You can lift
me out of the dead grooves of sterile intellectuality. Without you I am the dry dust of hopes
unrealized. You are fire and sunshine and desire. You make life changeable and beautiful and
full of daily wonder” (87).
In this respect “The Miracle” is an exception in Yezierska‟s treatment of the theme. In most of
the novels the relationship between the Jewish girl and the American man falls apart as a
result of their unbridgeable differences. This is especially the case in Salome of the
Tenements, her most profound exploration of the problems in interethnic marriages.
In Salome of the Tenements we follow the poor immigrant girl Sonya Vrunsky, who does
everything in her power to win the heart of the millionaire settlement worker John Manning.
The novel is based on the fairytale romance and marriage of Yezierska‟s good friend Rose
Pastor and the philanthropist Graham Phelps Stokes. Their relationship was highly publicized
in the press and made young immigrant women dream of the same good fortune. For the
young women who toiled in Lower East Side factories, daily headlines such as “J.G. Phelps
Stokes to Marry Young Jewess” and “A Ghetto Romance” gave fuel to their imagination
(Wilentz 1995: xv). Yezierska mingled this story with her own experiences with Dewey.
Hendriksen writes: “It was therefore only the externals of Stokes‟s life and mannerisms, but
mostly Anzia‟s traits, that went into the vivid personality Anzia created for Sonya”
(Hendriksen 1988: 171). As I already mentioned earlier, the assessment of the novel varied
widely. Many people rejected the strong emphasis on lust.
Indeed, Sonya uses her sexual attraction to advance in society. Like the biblical Salome she is
able to seduce a puritanical man, “a John the Baptist – a man without blood in his veins” (96).
In the legend Salome dances for the guests at the birthday party of her mother‟s husband
Antipas; one of those invitees is the austere John the Baptist (Coklin 2006: 141). Afterwards
she demands his head as a reward for her voluptuous dancing. Sonya Vrunsky symbolically
“beheads” an American millionaire by seducing him and snaring him into a marriage (Coklin
2006: 150). In order to dance her way out of the ghetto she uses a whole range of men who
22
cannot resist her charm. As Gittel describes it, “Women like Sonya are a race apart. They can
no more help vamping men than roses can help giving out their perfume” (11). She first turns
to the designer Hollins who, enchanted by her appearance, agrees to make her a designer dress
for free. With her dress as a weapon she approaches the landlord. Although she realizes “the
questionable depths to which her guileful flirtation was leading her” (51), she determines to
be remorseless to attain her goal. Soon she “had got him so stirred up that his head was
swimming away from him” (52) and he agrees to repaint her apartment. She can even
convince Honest Abe, czar of the ghetto, to loan her hundred dollars for new furniture. Sonya
is well aware of her sexual appeal: “Men ain‟t such hard stuff as they think they are. They
melt like wax in my fire for beauty” (56). With her behaviour she embodies the negative
perception of Jewish immigrant women as “irrational, promiscuous, and unable to control
their animalistic drives or excessive cravings” (Coklin 2006: 149).
She goes through all this trouble to conquer the man of her dreams, John Manning. She meets
him for the first time when she interviews him for a Jewish newspaper and immediately “his
formal manner rouses in her the fire of worship” (1). Like in her short stories, the American
protestant has the status of a deity; the heroine worships him because he can introduce her
into American culture. He is her bridge to civilization. She want to learn how to remain calm
and cold, in short she wants to be like the Anglo-Saxons. She confides to her editor Lipkin,
“There must be something superior to a people that have themselves under their feet all the
time… The Anglo-Saxons are a superior race to the crazy Russians. The higher life is built
inch by inch on self-control. And they have it. They‟re ages ahead of us. Compared to them
we‟re naked savages” (68). While Manning‟s background and rigid training prevent him from
being warm and spontaneous, Sonya describes herself in the following words:
“I am a Russian Jewess, a flame – a longing. A soul consumed with hunger for heights beyond
reach. I am the ache of unvoiced dreams, the clamor of suppressed desires. I am the unlived
lives of generations stifled in Siberian prisons. I am the urge of ages for the free, the beautiful
that never yet was on land or sea” (37).
Sonya‟s racial otherness precisely attracts Manning. He is fascinated by her oriental charm,
she represents “both a mysterious race and raw material for cultural uplift” (Jirousek 2002:
39). He hopes that he can come in closer contact with the immigrant community through
Sonya. “From the very beginning he had felt she would be tremendously helpful to him… She
could interpret those strangers to him” (101). Manning has chosen to work among the
immigrants because he needed the simplicity his own people failed to give him. “I had to get
23
away from people who waste themselves on unessentials. Our women are the worst in the
energy they waste on clothes, on the care of their bodies that leaves so little time for the
spirit” (74). He sees in Sonya an innocent women who is morally superior to the women of
his class because she is not corrupted by social mores, puritan upbringing and years of
schooling (Coklin 2006: 152). He expresses this belief when he visits Sonya in her renovated
apartment. This highly ironical scene shows that he is out of touch with reality. He praises the
room for its simplicity and natural beauty which he names “the glory of poverty” (73). He
confides to Sonya that “the directness, unscheming naturalness”(73) of the East Side appeals
to him. “Your dress for instance…I‟m sure you have no time to waste on thoughts of clothes,
but how absolutely successful it is! … You represent poverty – toil, and it is beautiful,
because unveiled by any artifice” (74). He does not realize that she obtained the simple beauty
by plotting and scheming. She eagerly wants to adjust herself to Manning‟s image of her as an
unspoilt, natural woman.
After their meeting in her apartment, Manning offers Sonya a job in his Settlement House.
Despite his strong attraction to Sonya, the ancestral fear of women prevents him from giving
in to his emotions. He goes to Washington to escape from his feelings but “through the whole
stay at Washington love had been hammering and boring through all his ancestral inhibitions”
(102). When he returns, he casts his inhibitions aside and they elope together to his estate in
the countryside.
It seemed to him that on the East side he had never perceived her irresistible attraction. In a
theoretical way he had accepted her as a type of the people that drew him. Now, the woman
beside him was a flame of life – a vivid exotic – a miraculous priests of romance who had
brought release for the ice of his New England heart (106).
Sonya has momentarily managed to unburden him from the weight of his tradition, but later in
the story we shall see that the change in Manning is not permanent. Immediately after the
consummation of their love, he declares, “Are we not the mingling of the races? The oriental
mystery and the Anglo-Saxon clarity that will pioneer a new race of men?” (108).
With these words he articulates “the amalgamation theory of Americanization” to justify his
marriage (Jirousek 2002: 40). Manning “views the relationship in an abstract, scientific
manner while Sonya seeks the personal, individual bond between man and wife” (Jirousek
2002: 40). Already in the first days after their romantic escape she realizes that they will never
be on the same level. She questions: “Am I one of them now? Has our love made us alike?
Just because I am his wife, have I become his kind? Will his people accept me – and will I
24
accept them?” (111). Unfortunately all these questions will have a negative answer. Sonya
becomes more and more dependent on his love, Manning on the other hand regains his
aloofness and is even embarrassed at his wife‟s over-demonstrativeness in public.
The wedding reception proves that the “mingling of the races” is an unattainable dream.
By accident Sonya overhears a conversation the aristocratic ladies are having over “John‟s
melodramatic vaudeville of social equality” (127). One of the ladies comments, “The East
Side in full regalia…in the Manning drawing-room…what a picture!” Another agrees,
“Indeed! One could consider it as the latest amusement. You remember the Newport monkey
dinner that was given to a pet monkey? …Giving a dinner for a pet monkey is one thing and
marrying one is quite another thing” (127). With these discriminatory, almost racist, remarks,
the women make clear that they see Sonya as a primitive, lower creature. For them she will
always stay an intruder who does not belong in their society (Jirousek 2002: 41). They
actually feel threatened by her because she is at ease with her sexuality and makes use of it.
“They say,” broke in another voice, “Russian Jewesses are always fascinating to men. The
reason, my dear, is because they have neither breeding, culture, nor tradition…With all to gain
and nothing to lose…They are mere creatures of sex…And much as we may dislike to admit
it, men uptown and downtown are the same…” (128).
Manning also does not treat her as an equal. For him, this reception can prove his ability to
civilize Sonya – if she obeys and behaves the way he wants it (Jirousek 2002: 41).
“Your likes and dislikes are scarcely of importance…you are my wife, and as such the hostess
of this house…She had obeyed him. She was his – doubly his!” (129-130). She attracted him
as an enigmatic, spirited woman but now he tries to restrain those character traits and “„raise‟
her into more „civilized‟ behaviours” (Jirousek 2002: 41). He believes she can learn a great
deal from him.
The whole experience makes Sonya realize that their temperaments are too different to unite:
“Just as fire and water cannot fuse, neither could her Russian Jewish soul fuse with the solid,
the unimaginative, the invulnerable thickness of this New England puritan. With her, passion
marched naked: with him always veiled – shame always when the veil was drawn” (147). The
very reserve that in the beginning aroused her worship, has become a bone of contention. She
feels increasingly stifled by the sterile atmosphere in the Madison Avenue mansion. She
dislikes the frigid dignity of the servants, the sombre dining room and the portraits of his
ancestors that seem to condemn her. Most of all she dislikes the portrait of Manning‟s greataunt Susan who was the exact opposite of Sonya. She was so devout that she refused a gift
25
from a relative in China because she heard that it had been carried on a vessel that had sailed
on a Sunday. At one point Sonya bursts out:
“What have I got? A house like a prison. Servants like jailers. Have I got a lover? No! I got a
husband. I‟m starving. I‟m dying under your very eyes. And you don‟t see it. You don‟t know
it. I want love – love. I cannot live without love!” …You never loved me for me, myself. You
only love dead traditions. Your only religion is your family pride” (149).
The last vestiges of their marriage crumble when she confesses to Manning that she owes a
pawnbroker fifteen hundred dollars. She confesses that she lied to escape poverty but he
shows no mercy to her and even reveals anti-Semitic sentiments when he says, “My name in
the hands of that Jew!” (151). After their fight Sonya decides that their marriage is over and
leaves the house.
Manning can not accept the shame of a divorce and when he tries to win back Sonya‟s love,
he displays the passionate, almost savage side of his nature (Jirousek 2002: 41).
Custom, tradition, every shred of convention, every vestige of civilization had left him. He
was primitive man starved into madness for the woman. Utterly lost in his passion, incoherent
ravings of love poured from him as he smothered her with kisses, unseeing, unheeding her
struggles against him (181).
In this violent scene Yezierska invalidates the antithesis of “heart and head” (Jirousek 2002:
42). Manning is no longer the cold Anglo-Saxon male and Sonya no longer the passionate
Jewess because she rejects his advances. Sonya discovers that “At bottom we‟re all alike,
Anglo-Saxons or Jews, gentlemen or plain immigrants…When we‟re hungry, we‟re hungry –
even a gentleman when starved long enough can become a savage East Sider” (183).
Zaborowska notes that “for the first time in the novel the demigod reveals his sexual nature,”
thus Sonya discovers “the American male as a dichotomy – at once a restrained Puritan and a
violent „savage‟” (Zaborowska 1995: 143-144). This discovery confuses Sonya because she
left him for his inability to be passionate. “After all,” she thought, “the way he loved me at the
last was what I dreamed of him at first sight” (184). In the end, Yezierska‟s novel depicts a
courageous immigrant woman who is strong enough to reject intermarriage as a means to gain
more social prestige (Coklin 2006: 154). In the end she rises in society on her own merits. She
knows success as a designer and has plans to open her own clothing shop together with
Hollins. In this respect she rejects what Mary Dearborn calls “the Pocahontas myth” namely
the conviction that the social rise of an ethnic woman depends on a marriage to a man who is
socially and economically influential (Coklin 2006: 154). Moreover she chooses a man from
her own community who appreciates her for who she is since “you can‟t love a man that
drives you to be different from what you are” (163).
26
I would like to end this discussion with one last example of interethnic relationships in Anzia
Yezierska‟s work. I already mentioned that John Dewey stood as the model for all her
fictional puritan Anglo-Saxon characters. This is especially the case in All I Could Never Be
in which she fictionalizes her relationship with Dewey. The main part of the story begins
when Fanya attends a lecture by the famous professor Henry Scott. Like in Anzia‟s other
stories the heroine looks upon him as a god and the gateway to America.
His noble head and fine grey eyes contrasted strangely with a slipshod appearance – clothes
worn anyhow, pockets bulging with papers, tie crooked, often as not a boot-lace hanging. He
looked like a small-town tradesman, but Fanya‟s fanatic idealism made him the symbol of all
she could never be. He was free of their sordid bondage for bread. He was culture, leisure, the
freedom and glamour of the “Higher Life” (28).
While looking at him, she realizes that he reminds her of her father: “Henry Scott had a
strange resemblance to him [her father]. Her feeling of familiarity shocked and amazed her…
And yet, for all their differences, there was that unworldly look about Henry Scott‟s eyes that
made her feel her father” (35).
The Dewey figure stands for the understanding father, who encourages his daughter in her
search for intellectual growth instead of the Jewish father, who denies his daughter the right to
pursue education (Shapiro 1996: 82). The older educated man attracts Fanya because he
stimulates her to write. To thank him for his encouragement she tries to write him a letter but
she only manages to scribble down one line. The next day she finds in her mail a poem based
on that one line and an invitation from Scott to meet again. The poem hints at his difficulty in
expressing his emotions.
Generations of stifled words, reaching out through you
Aching for utterance, dying on lips
That have died of hunger,
Hunger not to have, but to be (43).
…
During their meeting he tells Fanya that her honest expression of feelings affected him deeply.
She made him realize that he impoverished his life by repressing his feelings: “My life is an
evasion from life. It is not only that I have the habits of generations of repression to
overcome, but I have the paths beaten out in my brain by the many years of intellectualizing”
(45). He hopes that her freshness will unburden him from the weight of his tradition because
she is “fire and sunshine and desire,” while he is “an old-fashioned, Yankee puritan” (63-64).
As the story progresses Scott becomes increasingly affectionate and one night he approaches
her sexually. Although she flirted with him during the research project, she nourished the
27
mental image of him as a god and a father figure (Schoen 1982: 97). So when he becomes a
man of flesh and blood, her reaction is revulsion.
A crashing of sights and sounds and feelings. Blind terror – confusion. The shattering impact
of his lips thrust her from him even in his arms. Dark barriers rose inside her. They welled up
in her heart – the sorrow – the disillusion! … Instead of a god, here was a man – too close, too
earthly. She wanted from him vision – revelation – not this – not this (101).
He, on the other hand, expected a passionate response from her and turns away. When Fanya
realizes that she has made a mistake, she tries to re-establish contact but Scott avoids any
rapprochement. Their separation supports Jaher‟s thesis about interethnic relationships.
Jaher notes:
All of these relationships fail because they derive from severe character flaws and are based on
stereotypes. For the females, the romantic appeal of the Jew as alien cannot be sustained in
extended contact and reveals their inability to love in a way that nurtures their partners or
fulfills themselves (Shapiro 1996: 86).
Both of them defy the expected behaviour: Henry Scott no longer fits the stereotype of the
reserved intellectual and Fanya does not answer to the description of the Jewess as sensual
and uninhibited. She withdraws when the relationship becomes too physical, while Scott
retires into his shell when she rejects his sexual approach (Shapiro 1996: 86). When Fanya
tries to talk to him, he hides himself behind a wall of work and tells her he is tired of emotion;
from now on he will rely on reason again.
The second part of the novel starts when Fanya is ten years older. She has become a
successful author but she still mourns for the loss of Scott‟s friendship and love. She is unable
to forget him and decides to visit him one more time. Their meeting is a complete failure, she
describes it as “two ghosts making dead conversation” (205). The thought of any comradeship
between them turns into a phantom and for the first time Fanya realizes that there has always
been an unbridgeable gulf between them, he has always been a stranger to her. Only in her
imagination did he become “the image of love and understanding” (202). She now
understands that she wanted to use him for her own wishes:
For the assuagement and exaltation of her little ego she had wanted him to flow into the image
of her blind desire – change the pattern of conduct that five generations of New England
farmers had built up in him. He could no more step out of his New England mold than she
could escape the forces that made the timbre of her voice or the color of her eyes. Yes. That
was his chief advantage over her. He knew himself. He knew he was a Yankee puritan. And
therein lay his strength. She sought to escape from what she was. Therein lay her weakness …
Setting him up as her new god. Dreaming of a love that never was (203).
28
In the end she no longer needs his approval or support. Like Sonya and other heroines she
finds peace and understanding with a man who has the same cultural background. “Without
looking at each other, they read each other‟s essences and flowed together in understanding.
Into each face had come that strange look of release – exiles in strange lands, suddenly
granted a vision of home” (253).
29
2.3. Upward Mobility to a Middle-class Life
As I explained above, many immigrant girls were convinced that an interethnic marriage was
the best way to climb the social scale. They often discovered that they had to pay a price for
their upward mobility. To make the marriage work they had to discard major aspects of their
identity. As certain aspects cannot be repressed, many interethnic relationships did not survive
the ethnic differences. Most of Yezierska‟s heroines come to realize that they can advance in
American society on their own merits. They live by the motto “make a person of yourself.”
During the Gilded Age self-made men like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and
Cornelius Vanderbilt personified the myth that wealth was accessible to everyone who was
willing to work for it. If you only pulled yourself up by your bootstraps you could turn from a
newspaper boy into a millionaire. Anzia Yezierska also participated in the myth by creating
the illusion that she, an uneducated sweatshop worker from the Jewish ghetto, suddenly woke
up in the swellest hotels of Hollywood. The reality was far less glamorous. As I mentioned in
her biography she went to night-school and college to secure herself a place in middle-class
life. Like all the heroines of her books, she internalized the American values of self-reliance
and individualism to rise from the ghetto.
From Hungry Hearts to Red Ribbon on a White Horse, the young immigrant women in those
stories crave for knowledge. If we consider clothing the first step in the Americanization
process, then learning the English language certainly comes next. The ability to read and write
English gave the immigrants access to a whole new world. In “Mostly about Myself” in
Children of Loneliness Yezierska thinks back to her mother‟s ecstatic face when her mother
“burst into the house and announced proudly that … she could read the names of the streets
and she could find her way to the free dispensary without having to be led by us” (15). She
cried “I‟m no longer blind. The signs of the streets are like pictures before my eyes”(15).
While the old woman learns English to gain practical benefit from it, most immigrant girls
dream about “finding a new sense of self through education” (Gelfant 1997: xxxiii). Two
stories in Hungry Hearts are explicitly concerned with the need for education. We already
saw that Shenah Pessah in “Wings” worships John Barnes mainly for his intellectual
capacities. She is “burning to learn” (19) and hopes that he will assist her in her intellectual
growth. When Barnes leaves her she comforts herself with the knowledge that “he waked up
the highest” in her, he “waked up the wings of her soul” (24). We meet Shenah again in a
second story, “Hunger.”
30
The short romance with Barnes has given her the strength to break away from her uncle. She
finds work in a shirtwaist factory where she befriends Sam Atkin. At one point he takes her to
a restaurant and tries to win her heart by bragging about his bank account. If she married him,
he would give her a comfortable life:
“Yes – you – everything I only got – you – I‟ll give you dove‟s milk to drink – silk and
diamonds to wear – you‟ll hold all my money… My money can buy you everything. I‟ll buy
you teachers. I‟ll buy you a piano. I‟ll make you for a lady. Right away you can stop from
work”(40).
His offer only briefly tempts her “from her determination to achieve more than material
satisfaction in America, to search rather for the essence of the American way of life” which
John Barnes incarnates (Schoen 1982: 21). She tells him: “You can‟t make me for a person.
It‟s not only that I got to go up higher, but I got to push myself up by myself, by my own
strength” (40). There is a fire in her, “it‟s not just the hunger of a woman for a man – it‟s the
hunger of all my people back of me, from all ages, for light, for the life higher!” (41). In this
passage Yezierska uses her central metaphor: hunger. Ellen Golub notes about this metaphor:
For the promise of America, its language, its natives, and her rapidly Americanizing Lower
East Side of New York, she [Yezierska] has but one metaphor. For beauty, language, love,
achievement – for all the desires she confronts in the immigrants‟ name, issues of the mouth
color and define her prose (Golub 1983: 51-52).
Like Sara in Bread Givers and other heroines, Shenah
Attempts to attach herself to America by filling her hungry mouth with American culture and
language… Those who hunger for beauty in Yezierska‟s world are twice as hungry as those
who hunger for mere food. Theirs is a spiritual yearning of the heart and soul to possess an
American aesthetic, to achieve the clean spareness which they deem patrician (Golub 1983:
58).
She rejects Sam‟s marriage proposal because he does not aspire after higher values, he only
likes the American dollar. For the same reason Sara will end her relationship with Max
Goldstein. We can regard Shenah as the forerunner of Sara since many character traits of this
figure will reappear in the heroine of Bread Givers.
This novel tells the story of Sara Smolinsky‟s quest for a middle-class life. At the beginning
of the novel Yezierska depicts the difficult living conditions of the family Smolinsky. As a ten
year old girl, Sara sells herring to contribute to the family income. Even as a young girl she
already has the “iron will” to improve her situation. She picks out the most crowded part of
Hester Street and with a voice like dynamite she “cries out her herring with all the burning
fire of her ten old years” (21). With the same fire she makes her way from night school to
31
college and finally to a teaching position. But during her struggle for upward mobility she
learns that every medal has two sides: her success also causes alienation from her Jewish
roots. Therefore Renny Christopher classifies Bread Givers among “narratives of unhappy
upward mobility,” a sub-genre of U.S. working class literature, which he describes as follows:
The paradigm of this subgenre is the recounting not only of the struggles of a protagonist who
originates in the working class to follow the myth of the “American Dream” along the line of
upward mobility, but the ultimate homelessness with which the protagonist, who discovers the
lie built into the dream, is left, and the writers‟ refusal to endorse the protagonist‟s arrival in
the middle class as an unquestionably positive outcome … To rest happy with upward
mobility, one must completely stamp out one‟s previous, working-class self, turn one‟s back
on working-class consciousness, and embrace the oppressive values of the middle class
without question (Christopher 2002: 80).
The novel shows that Sara has to make significant sacrifices to reach the American Dream.
The titles of the three books mirror her rise out of the working-class: the first book is titled
“Hester Street,” the second “Between Two Worlds” and the third “The New World.”
Especially book two focuses on the sense of loss Sara feels after leaving her familiar
surroundings. Book one reveals that Sara is not the only one who wants her share of the
American cake, all the members of the Smolinsky family try “to work themselves up.” In
“The Old World,” Sara describes the different events that contribute to the rise of her family.
They bring about the gradual progress from poverty to more secure living conditions (Ferraro
1990: 554).
At the outset the family balances on the edge of poverty. Although everybody chips in, they
live in constant fear of being evicted. To avoid eviction the mother proposes to take in
boarders. But before she can carry out her plan, she needs to convince her husband to give up
his room so she can accommodate the boarders. This is not an easy task since the room is
almost sacred to Reb Smolinsky, it is the place where he devotes himself to prayer and the
study of the Torah. Only when he hears that his books can be thrown on the street, does he
agrees to remove them to the kitchen. According to Ferraro “the demotion of the Reb‟s books
opens the way to economic activity” (Ferraro 1990: 556). But before their situation improves,
they have to take another blow. In the middle of one of his prayers, the collector lady for the
landlord dashes in, asking for the rent: “Schnorrer! … My rent! My rent! My rent I want!”
(17). When it becomes clear that Reb Smolinsky is unable to give her the money, she calls
him “a dirty do-nothing” (18) and in the heat of the moment she “took one step toward him
and shut his book with such anger that it fell at her feet” (18). Enraged by this act of
blasphemy he slaps the landlady on both cheeks. Soon the police arrives at the house to arrest
32
father Smolinsky. With the Reb under arrest and his daughters out of work the situation of the
family appears very bleak but the ruling of the court effects a change of fortune. The
neighbourhood pools money for “the best American –born lawyer” (24) who convinces the
judge of Smolinsky‟s innocence. He portrays his client as an honest man who “couldn‟t hurt
a fly” (25); he only defended his faith against the threat of capitalism, symbolized by the
landlady‟s intrusion upon his prayers (Ferraro 1990: 556): “And if he hit the landlady, it was
only because she burst into the house in the midst of his prayers, and knocked his Bible out of
his hands and stepped on it with her feet” (25). The protest of the collector lady is stifled by
an important piece of evidence: a print of her foot on a white paper. When the lawyer
compares this footprint with the footprint in the Bible, Smolinsky‟s case is made since the two
prints show a close resemblance. The judge discharges the prisoner and an excited crowd
carries him home over their heads.
For weeks after, everybody was talking about Father. By the butcher, by the fish market,
everybody was telling everybody over and over again, as you tell fairy tales, how Father hit
the landlady when she stepped on the Holy Torah…Their only talk was how Father was the
speaking mouth of the block. Not only did he work for the next world, but he was fighting for
the people their fight in this world (26).
This extract shows, as Ferraro phrases it, “the Reb‟s stumbling but increasingly self-conscious
transformation from an eccentric whose piety is outmoded and economically disastrous to a
neighborhood leader whose piety is a vehicle for mobilizing family and community” (Ferraro
1990: 554-55). In the eyes of the neighbours Reb Smolinsky made a stand for all the poor
people of the ghetto who cannot participate in the money culture and fear the sight of the
landlord. For them “Father hitting the landlord‟s collector lady was like David killing Goliath,
the giant” (26). Seeing that they cannot attack capitalism itself, they content themselves with
this small act of rebellion. Whereas Smolinsky uses his religion to help the community, the
collector for the landlord “insults her own religion” (26) by conniving with the landlord.
Therefore she deserves no pity. The whole experience does not harm his family, on the
contrary:
Soon everybody from all around knew us so well, it got easy for us to rent the front room.
First one came, then another, and then a third. And when Mother wanted to squeeze in another
border, they said they‟d better each pay yet another quarter a week more and not have another
boarder in the same room. Things began to get better with us (28).
Their new-found luck enables the Smolinskys to enter the realm of consumption, which is one
of the most essential changes in their life (Ferraro 1990: 556): “Mother began to fix up the
house like other people. The instalment man trusted us now. We got a new table with four feet
that were so solid it didn‟t spill the soup all over the place… Mother even bought regular
33
towels. Every time we wiped our faces on them it seemed so much behind us the time we had
only old rags for towels” (28). But once they participate in the consumer-driven economy,
they start to desire more and more things. Objects that they considered frivolous in their
poverty, now become indispensable items.
But the more people get, the more they want. We no sooner got used to regular towels than we
began to want toothbrushes, each for himself like Mashah. We got the toothbrushes and began
wanting toothpowder to brush our teeth with, instead of ashes. And more and more we wanted
more things, and really needed more things the more we got them (29).
In the first chapter, Mashah‟s craving for beautiful things was “depicted as a form of
antifamilial selfishness,” now all the women in the Smolinsky household give more attention
to their appearance so that the focus on individuality is no longer viewed as conceit (Ferraro
1990: 557).
New tensions arise in the family when there appear potential marriage candidates for Sara‟s
older sisters, despite their lack of a dowry. Instead of rejoicing over his daughters‟ happiness,
the father fears that their marriages will mean a decrease of income (Schoen 1982: 63).
Therefore he rejects the suitors and meddles in the love life of his daughters. His first „victim‟
is Bessie. As the eldest she is the “burden bearer” (35) of the family. While men buzz around
Mashah “like flies around a pot of honey” (37), Bessie receives little attention from the male
sex. When Berel Bernstein shows interest in her, she is very excited. He is the head cutter in
the factory where she works, but he has plans to open his own shop. Bessie possesses the
qualities he is looking for in a girl since she is “a plain home girl that knows how to help save
the dollar, and cook a good meal” (45). It is obvious that his interest in her is based on
practical considerations rather than on love. He hopes to profit from her frugality and her
ability to work hard. But the same goes for Reb Smolinsky. Bessie hands in every penny she
earns which enables him to maintain his lifestyle: “But Bessie spends nothing on herself. She
gives me every cent she earns. And if you marry her, you‟re as good as taking away from me
my living – tearing the bread from my mouth…When a girl like mine leaves the house the
father gets poorer, not richer. It‟s not enough to take my Bessie without a dowry. You must
pay me yet” (46-47).
By asking a dowry for his daughter, the Reb deviates from the traditional Jewish custom. In
Eastern Europe, the father selects a husband for his daughter but at the same time he has the
obligation to provide a substantial dowry (Ferraro 1990: 561). Smolinsky only wants to fulfil
one part of the bargain. He “reinterprets the obligation to provide a dowry as an opportunity to
34
fund the mobility of the family” (Ferraro 1990: 561). Since Bernstein does not want to accept
Smolinsky‟s condition, Bessie sees her chance of marriage crumble before her eyes. Berel still
tries to convince Bessie to defy her father‟s wishes but she does not have “the courage to live
for herself” (50). Six weeks later, he marries the forelady who had always been crazy for him.
When Mashah introduces her lover to Reb Smolinsky, he is immediately pleased with her
choice. As the son of a wealthy department store owner on Grand Street, he easily reaches
Smolinsky‟s economic standards. Therefore “Father didn‟t question out Jacob as he did
Bessie‟s man, because there was about Jacob Novak the sure richness of the higher-up that
shut out all questions of how he spent his money” (56). He only objects to the fact that Jacob
plays the piano on the Sabbath but he would “wait till Jacob was tight married to the family
before he‟d begin to hold up to him the light of the Holy Torah” (57). This time the romance
is not broken off by the Reb but by Mr. Novak, Jacob‟s father.
The minute his father stepped in, we saw it was the richest man that had ever been in our
house. From him hollered money, like a hundred cash registers ringing up the dollars…One
look he gave on all of us. Then for a minute his eyes burned over Mashah…From Mashah, he
gave the house another look over. And all Mashah‟s beauty couldn‟t stop the cash-register
look in his eyes, that we and our whole house weren‟t worth one of his cuff buttons (58).
Like Reb Smolinsky, Mr. Novak he moulds his child‟s life in the shape he desires: both men
interfere in their children‟s lives to obtain or secure upward mobility (Ferraro 1990: 562).
Whereas the marriage would improve the reputation of the Smolinskys, the Novaks would
debase themselves with a daughter-in-law from the ghetto. When Jacob seeks to re-establish
contact with Mashah, the Reb for his part forbids any rapprochement .
“Empty-head!” shouted Father, tearing Mashah away from Jacob. “You yet speak to this liar,
this denier of God! Didn‟t I tell you once a man who plays the piano on the Sabbath, a man
without a religion, can‟t be trusted? As he left you once, he‟ll leave you again” (63).
As her sister Bessie did a few weeks before her, she gives in to her father‟s will and lets go
her chance of happiness because the Reb cannot set his unforgiving pride aside. Fania and the
poet Lipkin fare no better. Reb Smolinsky discovers their relationship when he intercepts one
of Morris Lipkin‟s love letters. He is immediately ill-disposed towards the romance because
the poor poet would undermine the prestige of his family.
“A writer, a poet you want for a husband? Those who sell the papers at least earn something.
But what earns a poet. Do you want starvation and beggary for the rest of your days? Who‟ll
pay your rent? Who will buy your bread? Who‟ll put shoes on the feet of your children, with a
husband who wastes his time writing poems of poverty instead of working for a living?” (68).
35
This reaction demonstrates how much he has already deviated from his original religious
beliefs by the lure of the US dollar. In times of economic insecurity he extenuated their
poverty with the words: “Poverty is an ornament on a good Jew, like a red ribbon on a white
horse” (70). Now he rejects Morris because he wears this “ornament.” Smolinsky is unable to
see the irony in his objections. The reader however remembers the Reb‟s own idleness: he
reproaches Lipkin for his inability to support his daughter while he himself totally depends
on his wife and children. When Lipkin comes to ask Fania‟s hand in marriage, her father acts
as if the poet does not exist and “pushed another man into the room” (73). He has decided to
take the matter into his own hands and has hired Zaretzky, the matchmaker, to arrange
marriages for his daughters. He is pleased with himself because Moe Mirsky radiates
luxuriance. The diamond merchant dazzles them “with the glitter of his shining wealth” (73)
while Lipkin “hasn‟t the money to get himself a decent haircut” (75). Consequently
Smolinsky does not want to welcome the poet into his family for the same reason as the
wealthy Mr. Novak disapproved of Mashah. For them, social prestige outweighs personal
happiness: “The impudence of that long-haired beggar – wanting to push himself into my
family! I‟m a person among people. How would I look before the world if I introduced such a
hunger-squeezed nobody for a son-in-law?” (75). Mirsky on the other hand will open doors
that were previously closed to his family:
“Am I a judge of people. Didn‟t I tell you from the first that I know how to pick out a man?
With a diamond-dealer in the family, all our troubles are over. You‟ll see he‟ll cover Mashah
with diamonds. And through her riches, all of us will get rich quick. Think only of the future
for the other girls with a sister in the diamond business” (77).
But as the story progresses, it turns out that he is not such a good judge of character. He
marries Mashah and Fania off to men who are anything but prosperous. Moe Mirsky turns out
to be a swindler who neglects his wife and Fania‟s husband, Abe Schmukler, loves the poker
game more than he loves his bride. Still the Reb does not want to admit his errors, he even
starts a business as matchmaker. For the outside world he is “the smartest matchmaker of
America” who was able to “marry his two daughters off in one day” (91). People turn to him
in their search for a partner. One of them is Zalmon the fish-peddler whose wife died and left
him with six children. When Smolinsky finds out that the man is well-off, he proposes his
own daughter Bessie as a marriage candidate. The fifty-six year old Zalmon immediately
agrees and the father literally sells his daughter for five hundred dollars to the fish-peddler.
Ferraro notes that in the representation of the marriage negotiations, Yezierska “hits upon an
astonishing image for the capitalization of Jewish fatherhood: in trying to profit from his
36
daughters‟ marriages, Smolinsky has been trying to turn fatherhood itself into a source of
profit” (Ferraro 1990: 563). The unhappy marriages of her sisters strengthen Sara‟s longings
for a different life. “I want to learn something. I want to do something. I want some day to
make myself for a person and come among people. But how can I do it if I live in this hell
house of Father‟s preaching and Mother‟s complaining?” (66). Later in the novel she will
actively pursue her longings and leave her parents behind but before she does, she works as a
saleswoman in their grocery store.
With the money that Zalmon has paid him, Smolinsky wants to go into business. Instead of
earning a living as a Rabbi in the synagogue he decides to try his luck as an entrepreneur.
“What! Sell my religion for money? Become a false prophet to the Americanized Jews! No.
My religion is not for sale. I only want to go into business so as to keep sacred my religion. I
want to get into some quick money-making thing that will not take up too many hours a day,
so I could get most of my time for learning” (111).
At this point in the story he actively pursues the American Dream but he seems to forget that
the “American dream involves a certain work ethic” (Codde 2001: 9). He buys a grocery store
in Elizabeth, New Jersey, without his wife‟s knowledge. At first Sara and her mother
congratulate father on his bargain and act as if they have become millionaires: “Think only!
Seventy-eight dollars and eighty-nine cents in one day! …We will have to hire a bookkeeper
to count up for us all our profits a year” (116). Mother indulges in fantasies about the goods
she will buy, even Sara dreams aloud: “We‟ll soon be able to buy a piano an I‟ll begin to take
piano lessons” (118). The family regards their store as a gold mine and they fall prey to “a
conflation between the goods they must sell and the goods they wish to buy, between the
work that affords middle-class consumption and consumption itself” (Ferraro 1990: 557).
The bubble bursts when Sara accidentally discovers that the oatmeal boxes are empty.
“Business man! What have you? You got air in your hand,” and she tore open the box and held
emptiness before Father‟s eyes. “How could they be empty?” said he, puzzled. “Didn‟t I see
him selling them?” “Fool!” Mother turned upon him. “Couldn‟t he have had full ones on the
top of the pile to sell from?” …The shelves had goods only in the front row. The whole space
was empty. … Half the night we worked to see the extent of the great business deal that Father
snatched with such mad haste (119-120).
The Reb‟s attempt to enter the American business world proves a total fiasco. He tried to
adopt the role of a worldly businessman but the effort only stressed his incompetence
(Schoen 1982: 69). He is unaware that the years of studying the Holy Scriptures have left him
ignorant of the real world. When it turns out that he has been cheated, he finds solace in his
religion while his wife and daughter Sara have to control the damage. Eventually their
37
ingenuity and hard work make the grocery store profitable but Sara got no satisfaction out of
her work as a saleslady. Although the Reb leaves the menial tasks to her, he daily interferes
with the management of the shop. She reaches her limit of tolerance when the Reb blows up
at her for trusting a young girl for two cents. Disgusted with his tyranny, she determines to go
back to New York: “I‟ve got to live my own life. It‟s enough that Mother and the others lived
for you. … I‟m going to live my own life. Nobody can stop me. I‟m not from the old country.
I‟m an American!” (137-138). With these words, Sara gives the impression that “she is now
finding the courage to pursue „an American Dream‟; but in fact she has participated for almost
half the novel in achieving a still potent form of upward mobility,” namely “the ethnic
version for which her father is chief ideologue and chief executive officer” (Ferraro 1990:
554, 559).
Book two, Between Two Worlds, narrates Sara‟s struggle to find her place in the world.
She breaks away from “the collectivity of her family” to achieve her dream of becoming a
teacher (Christopher 2002: 80). When she arrives in New York, she starts her search for a
room of her own. Soon she discovers “ what a luxury it was for a poor girl to want to be alone
in a room” (158). Most landlords are not keen on renting a room to a single girl. Finally she
finds a dwelling which she can afford and she uses all her powers of persuasion to get it.
Like a drowning person clinging to a rope, my tired body edged up to that door and clung to it.
My hands clutched at the knob. This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting-point of
becoming a person. I simply must have this room with the shut door. And I must make this
woman rent it to me. If I failed to get it, I‟d drop dead at her feet (159).
After this initial state of ecstasy, she comes back to earth. During the day she must toil as an
ironer in a laundry so she can follow courses in night school. In spite of all her efforts, she can
barely hold her head above water: she is constantly hungry and the lack of heating in the room
drains her energy. Only the dream of becoming “a teacherin” keeps her going: “Stop all this
sensitiveness, or you‟re beaten already before the fight is begun. … You‟ve got to study. As
you had to shut your eyes to the dirt, so you must shut your ears to the noise” (164). To avoid
all distractions she locks herself up in her room and isolates herself from the neighbourhood.
But gradually the solitude begins to take its toll. She cannot stand the crushing loneliness,
whereas before she believed that “the loneliness was enough” (160) for her. In the midst of
Sara‟s despair, mother comes to visit her. She came all the way from Elizabeth to bring her
daughter a feather bed and a jar of herring. Mother‟s unselfishness makes Sara question her
own motives: “Hours she travelled, only to see me for a few minutes. God! How much bigger
38
was Mother‟s goodness than my burning ambition to rise in the world!” (171). She wants to
return the favour but when her mother begs for a visit, the following conversation arises:
“I‟d do anything for you. I‟d give you away my life. But I can‟t take time to go „way to
Elizabeth. Every minute must go to my studies.”
“I tore myself away from all my work to come to see you.”
“But you‟re not studying for college.”
“Is college more important than to see your old mother?”
“I could see you later. But I can‟t go to college later. … But won‟t you be proud of me when I
work myself up for a school teacher, in America?” (171-172).
Although she evades her mother‟s question, the implicit answer is “yes” since she will not
visit her for another six years. Even Bessie and Fania cannot convince her to re-establish
contact with the family. Not only do they remind her of the family ties, they also try to
persuade her to choose marriage above schooling. “For what does a girl need to be so
educated? You can read and write. You know enough. … Better come with me to Los
Angeles. I‟ve a wonderful young man for you out there” (174,177). This proposition on
Fania‟s part is very astonishing because only a few minutes before she lamented her own
unhappy marriage. Underneath her appearance as “the Queen of Sheba, shining with silks and
sparkling with diamonds” (174) hides a very lonesome woman who detests the superficiality
of her “easy” life.
The stories of Sara‟s married sisters fan her conviction that she must rely on herself to achieve
her goals. She turns down the offer with the words “Then I‟m better off than you married
people! It‟s not a picnic to live alone. But at least I‟ve no boss of a husband to crush the spirit
in me” (177). Bessie and Fania interpret her reaction as an attack on sisterly solidarity and
leave the house. “Come Bessie. Let‟s leave her to her mad education. She‟s worse than Father
with his Holy Torah” (178). Ferraro points out that “Sara‟s ascent into individualism threatens
an older form of women‟s strength – that of mutual support” (Ferraro 1990: 568). In the
Jewish tradition, immersion in education is seen as a male activity. As a result the Jewish
women in Bread Givers regard Sara‟s journey to education and assimilation as a rejection of
the female community (Wilentz 1991: 37). But Fania does not give up so easily. She sends the
charming Max Goldstein to New York, just when Sara feels lonelier than ever. Sara is
immediately attracted to this lighthearted man and believes she has found her soul mate.
Nonetheless she feels torn between her desire for independence and need to be loved: “One
moment I loved him; the next moment I tried to resist him, wanted to be free. … My one need
of needs, stronger than my life, was my love to be loved” (198). As their relationship
39
progresses, she begins to realize that they are not so alike as she thought, especially when he
ventilates his ideas about education:
“What for should you waste your time yet with school any more? You‟re smart enough the
way you are. Only dumbheads fool themselves that education and colleges and all that sort of
nonsense will push them on in the world. It‟s money that makes the wheel go round” (199).
Max Goldstein equates success with wealth while Sara believes that individual fulfilment is
the true sign of success (Girgus 1984: 111). Consequently she breaks off the relationship and
throws herself with renewed vigour into her studies. Her efforts are richly rewarded: she
moves from night school to college; at the end of the road she is even awarded the prize for
the best essay.
Now that she has become a teacher, she decides to return home. “Home! Back to New York!
Sara Smolinsky, from Hester Street, changed in a person!” (237). She actually means, “a
person of middle-class manners, means, and education” (Christopher 2002: 93). With the
prize money she buys an expensive suit, which represents her new middle-class life: “I, Sara
Smolinsky, had done what I had set out to do. I was now a teacher in the public schools. And
this was only at the beginning of things. …Now I‟ll have the leisure and the quiet to go on
and on, higher and higher” (241). But soon she discovers that the years of schooling estranged
her from the rest of the family. She widens the gap even further when she refuses to
participate in a Jewish custom: at the funeral of her mother she refuses to tear her new dress.
Because of this “act of selfishness” she is branded as a cold-hearted “Americanerin,” although
her heart bleeds for her mother. Not only has she lost her mother, she has also lost the
approval of her community. Wilentz points out that “the loss of her mother is symbolic of the
other losses Sara suffers as she makes her uneven journey toward the dominant culture: living
away from her community, she feels disconnected, homeless, apart from life” (Wilentz 199192: 39). She has finally achieved her goal but the success tastes bitter-sweet. When she walks
through the ghetto, she realizes that she is one of the fortunate few who have achieved upward
mobility, most East Side inhabitants still suffer from extreme poverty.
But as a walked along through Hester Street towards the Third Avenue L, my joy hurt like
guilt. Lines upon lines of pushcart peddlers were crouching in the rain. Backs bent, hands in
their sleeves, ears under their collars, grimy faces squeezed into frozen masks. They were like
animals helpless against the cold, pitiless weather (281).
“Sara‟s lament for her people is not only for the cruelty of a system that locks people up in
poverty, but also for what one must leave behind to succeed” (Wilentz 1991-92). In the end
she can not enjoy her success, knowing that the struggle for survival still goes on.
40
3. The Jewish Heritage and Problems of Adaptation
3.1. Generational Conflicts
Come all you foreigners and jump into the magic kettle. You are colored and discoloured with
things that do not fit in well with affairs in America. In fact, to speak frankly, there is a certain
taint about you, a stain brought from the old world. Your clothes are ugly and ill-fitting. Your
language is barbaric. … Immediately you will become like us, your slacks will be exchanged
for the latest Fifth Avenue clothes. The magic process is certain. Your money back if we fail
(Ewen 1985: 186).
These satiric words, written by two New York social workers, give the impression that
acculturation was a smooth and easy process. But many first generation immigrant writers
revealed that “cultural baggage cannot be checked at Ellis Island for long” (Fine 1988: 16)
and they portrayed the emotional strains of Americanization. For new immigrants, integration
into the dominant culture implied a radical break with time-honoured customs and traditions.
This was especially difficult for Eastern European Jews who came from a world governed by
religion. The sacred texts or the Torah and the interpretation of those texts, the Talmud, not
only guided religious activities, they also determined how people should live their daily lives.
As Schoen states, “all phases of life, including dress, food, and social mores were covered by
regulations so that „no realm of life [was] … divorced from the Law embodied in the Holy
Books …[and] there was no line between the religious and the secular‟” (Schoen 1982: 4).
Keeping the Sabbath holy, eating kosher food and establishing a family were just three of the
613 regulations that Jewish men and women had to comply with (Schreier 1994: 19).
In America the values of their native country no longer applied; as a result, Jewish immigrants
lost everything that shaped their identity. In the old world, the family had been the
cornerstone of society but in the new world even family ties came under attack. While
immigrant parents tried to live according to shtetl traditions, their children acquired a different
lifestyle through schooling and contact with native Americans (Ewen 1985: 187). As parents
witnessed the change in their children‟s behaviour, they feared that they were watching the
loss of the Jewish culture (Schreier 1994: 6). According to Julius Drachsler:
The fear of losing the children haunts the older generation. It is not merely the natural desire
of parents to retain influence over the children. … It is a vague uneasiness that a delicate
network of precious traditions is being ruthlessly torn asunder, that a whole world of ideals is
crashing into ruins; and amidst this desolation the fathers and mothers picture themselves
wandering about lonely in vain searching for their lost children (Ewen 1985: 187).
The immigrant children for their part longed to fit in with the native Americans and
denounced the “strange” traditions of their parents, which caused generational tensions.
41
Like other writers from her generation, Yezierska depicts these generational conflicts between
Orthodox parents and their Americanized, worldly children. In her award-winning story “The
Fat of the Land” she describes the fate of an immigrant mother caught between her “oldfashioned” ways and her modern children. At the outset of the story we see a familiar ghetto
scene: Hanneh Breineh, a young mother of six children is hardly able to make ends meet. One
moment she blames her offspring for the family‟s poverty-stricken living conditions, the next
moment she is frantic with worry that something might happen to her “precious lambs.” Her
neighbour, Mrs. Pelz, is convinced that Hanneh‟s situation will improve as soon as her
children are old enough to earn money: “Push only through those few years while they are yet
small; your sun will begin to shine; you will live of the fat of the land, when they begin to
bring you in the wages each week” (HH 115).
In the second half of the story Mrs. Pelz‟ prediction has come true. Hanneh Breineh, now a
middle-aged woman, lives in a fancy house on 84th Street. But she feels out of place in her
brownstone house. The emptiness of her existence becomes clear when her old neighbour,
Mrs. Pelz, pays her a visit. Hanneh confesses to her friend that she misses the hospitable
atmosphere of Delancey Street. “Uptown here, where each lives in his own house, nobody
cares if the person next door is dying or going crazy from loneliness. It ain‟t like we used to
have it … when we could walk into another‟s room without knocking…” (122). She is almost
a prisoner in her own home, guarded by servants who “look on [her] like the dirt under their
feet” (124). What is more, even her children cannot hide their scorn for her Old World habits.
They provide for her materially but disregard her emotional needs (Fishman 1992: 27).
“My children give me everything from the best. When I was sick, they got me a nurse by day
and one by night. They bought me the best wine. If I asked for dove‟s milk, they would buy it
for me; but – but – I can‟t talk myself out in their language. They want me to make me over
for an American lady, and I‟m different. … When I was poor, I was free, and could holler and
do what I like in my own house. Here I got to lie still like a mouse under a broom. Between
living up to my Fifth-Avenue daughter and keeping up with the servants, I am like a sinner in
the next world that is thrown from one hell to another” (124).
The family dinner in honour of her son Benny‟s Broadway success shows the gap between
Hanneh and her American children (Schoen 1982: 30).
While her children revel in their good fortune, Hannah feels shut out from their success. She
realizes that each triumph only widens the chasm of the generation gap. Unable to endure
their bantering remarks any longer she cries out “Do I count for a person in this house? If I‟ll
say something, will you ever listen to me? … What worth is an old woman to American
42
children? The President is coming tonight to the theatre, and none of you asked me to go”
(127). Indeed, Hanneh‟s daughter Fannie does not want to take her mother to the theatre
because she is ashamed of Hannah‟s ghetto accent, her appearance and vivid gesticulations.
She believes her mother will spoil her chances of advancing in society (Fishman 1992 27).
“I‟ve borne the shame of mother while you bought her off with a present and a treat here and
there. God knows how hard I tried to civilize her so as not to have to blush with shame when I
take her anywhere. I dressed her in the most stylish Paris models, but Delancey Street sticks
out from every inch of her. Whenever she opens her mouth, I‟m done for. … I, with all my
style and pep, can‟t get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother” (128).
Hanneh‟s isolation is complete in the last section of the story. Her socially ambitious children
have transplanted her to a new Riverside apartment. Deprived of her kitchen, Hanneh feels
“robbed of the last reason for her existence” (129). Cooking and pottering around the house
had given her a sense of meaning, consequently “the enforced idleness … stunned all her
senses and arrested all her thoughts” (129). But the least endurable part of her life on
Riverside Drive is eating in the public dining room, which only serves American food. The
inability of immigrants to reconcile themselves with American dietary habits is a common
theme in immigrant literature. As Ewen points out, “the loss of culture was identified with
American eating patterns. Eating American food was seen as an indication of
Americanization” (Ewen 1985: 174-175).
Hanneh not only dislikes the food which “looks so fancy on the plate but is nothing but straw
in the mouth” (133), she also detests the presence of the other guests who disapprove of her
table manners. Therefore she decides to cook her own meals in her apartment. Shopping
among the pushcart vendors of the ghetto, she regains some of her old vitality. But her
cheerful mood is short-lived. When she arrives at the apartment building, the doorman refuses
to let her in because she carries a basket with herring and garlic. In the ensuing quarrel
Hanneh voices the frustration and anger that had been suppressed in her for weeks. Her
daughter only aggravates the situation by siding with the doorman. In a fit of rebellion
Hanneh storms out of the building and goes to her old friend Mrs. Pelz, who still lives in the
tenement district. There she pours out her heart:
“What have I from all my fine furs and feathers when my children are strangers to me. …All
the grandest feathers can‟t hide the bitter shame in my face that my children shame themselves
from me. … Why should my children shame themselves from me? From where did they get
the stuff to work themselves up in the world? … It is I, who never had a chance to be a person,
who gave him the fire in his head” (134).
After an uncomfortable night in her friend‟s house, she realizes that she can no longer endure
43
the sordid living conditions of the ghetto. She does not belong to the uptown world of her
children but she is also alienated from “the old world of the ghetto” (Schoen 1982: 31): “She
had outgrown her past by the habits of years of physical comforts, and these material comforts
that she could no longer do without chocked and crushed the life within her” (136). In the end
she has no option but to return to “the marble sepulchre of the Riverside apartment” (136).
Yezierska paints an even crueller picture of family tensions in the title story of the collection
Children of Loneliness. In this story Rachel Ravinsky feels that her Old World parents are
dragging her “by the hair to the darkness of past ages every minute of the day” (103). She has
just returned from college and can no longer cope with the lifestyle of her parents. Especially
their lack of table manners agitates her. In this story Yezierska shows that immigrant parents
and their children often live in two different worlds. Rachel‟s college years have estranged her
from Old World customs. What is more, she has internalized the view that the “European
culture [is] a backward and disposable remnant of the past” (Ewen 1985: 266). As a result,
she tries to foist a new, American lifestyle upon her parents who are set in their ways.
“It drives me wild to hear you crunching bones like savages. If you people won‟t change, I
shall have to move and live by myself.
“You think you can put our necks in a chain and learn us new tricks. You think you can
make us over for Americans? We got through till fifty years of our lives eating in our own
old way – ” (102).
For her father, a scholar who follows the tenets of Judaism, Rachel‟s insistence on using a
knife and fork “spelled apostasy, Anti-Semitism, and the aping of the Gentiles” (103). Rachel,
on the other hand, fears she will lose face if her college friends see their poor table manners.
Like Hanneh‟s daughter Fannie, she believes that her parents will compromise her good
reputation. The thought of having to introduce “her low, ignorant, dirty parents” (106) to her
Anglo-Saxon friend Frank Baker appals her. “I might as well tear the thought of Frank Baker
out of my heart. … If he just once sees the pigsty of a home I come from … he‟ll fly through
the ceiling” (106).
In her unrighteous condemnation of her parents‟ lifestyle, she even refuses to eat the fried
lotkes her mother prepared, which hurts Mrs. Ravinsky‟s feelings deeply. Baskin explains that
“for many mothers, that nurturing activity remained the one link that connected them to their
increasingly sophisticated and scornful Americanized offspring” (Fishman 1992: 27). So Mrs.
Ravinsky equates the rejection of her food with the loss of her child.
44
“Ain‟t ever my cooking good no more either?” Her gnarled, hard-worked hands clutched at
her breast. “God from the world, for what do I need yet any more my life? Nothing I do for my
child is no use no more.” … “I put my hand away from my heart and put a whole fresh egg
into the lotkes, and I stuffed the stove full of coal like a millionaire so as to get the lotkes fried
so nice and brown; and now you give a kick on everything I done – ” (107).
Mr. Ravinsky can only laugh bitterly at his wife‟s self-abasement: “Fool woman, stop laying
yourself on the floor for your daughter to step on you! What more can you expect from a child
raised up in America? … She makes herself so refined … but her heart is that of a brutal
Cossack, and she spills her own father‟s and mother‟s blood like water” (108). Enraged by her
father‟s harsh words, Rachel packs her bags and leaves the house. But living alone is harder
than she thought; soon she realizes that she has found nothing but a “loneliness that‟s death”
(110). Overwhelmed with loneliness, she returns to the parental home. Watching her father
sing an age-old song of woe, she can only feel love for him. However, when she sees the dirt
in the room, her love turns into pity. While before Yezierska presented a one-sided and cruel
picture of the main character, she now skilfully depicts Rachel‟s inner struggle. Rachel is torn
between her aspirations to rise in the world and her love for her parents. One moment she
longs to make peace with them, the other moment she is convinced that she will never
“conquer the new” if she does not break away from them. In the end she leaves her parents
behind, feeling “as if she had torn away from the flesh and blood of her own body” (116).
In the third part of the story Yezierska focuses her attention on the blossoming relationship
between Rachel and Frank Baker. Frank stays in New York for several months to work in an
East Side settlement and has invited Rachel to dinner in a fashionable restaurant. Rachel
immediately envisions a beautiful future together, but the meeting turns out to be extremely
disappointing. He believes the East Side is a “picturesque” place where there is “poetic
devotion between parents and children” (119). As an insider, Rachel knows he is deluded.
“All I know of is the battle to the knife between parents and children. It‟s a black tragedy that
boils there …” (119). Realizing that Frank is only interested in curious “social types,” she
turns down his offer to accompany him to a musical comedy. Alone in her room she
understands that she floats between two worlds. “I can‟t live with the old world, and I‟m yet
too green for the new. I don‟t belong to those who gave me birth and to those with whom I
was educated” (122). In this story, Yezierska clearly shows the emotional cost of
Americanization “and the tragic sense of isolation and loss that were its by-products” (Rubin
1988: 294). Like other immigrant children, Rachel has disengaged herself from her roots, but
has not yet found her place in the dominant culture.
45
3.2. The Place of Jewish Women in America
In Yezierska‟s fiction, most generational conflicts occur between Old World patriarchs and
their Americanized daughters. The quarrels are predominantly the result of a different outlook
on the position of Jewish women in American society. While the Jewish fathers expect that
their daughters take on the traditional woman‟s role, Yezierska‟s heroines want to take
advantage of the new possibilities America offers them. Seeing their daughters cast aside the
Old World image of womanly behaviour, the Jewish patriarchs accuse the young women of
betraying their heritage.
In the small shtetls of Eastern Europe there was a strict division of roles. Only men were
allowed to study the sacred books (Kessler-Harris 2003: xxii). Women were relegated to the
role of mother and housewife. As long as they devoted themselves to the care of their husband
and children they were respected, but if they moved outside that sphere and entered “the
male‟s domain of study and prayer” they risked the condemnation of the entire community
(Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 4). Since immersion in religious education was considered the
most honourable occupation, the exclusion of women only consolidated their second-class
status (Schoen 1982: 8). From birth girls were subordinate to boys. When a male child was
born, the whole neighbourhood congratulated the parents on their good luck, but when the
child was a girl, her birth passed almost unnoticed. Unlike her male counterpart, she could
never learn the meaning of the Torah or gain prestige as a religious scholar. As a Talmudic
saying formulated it: “Woe to the father whose children are girls” (Baum, Hyman, Michel
1975: 10).
A girl received no more than two years of schooling because too much education was seen as
a hindrance to her domestic skills (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 61). Moreover, Jewish men
feared that education might hamper their daughters‟ search for a husband, which was a
nightmare scenario since the Jewish community scorned unmarried women.
To be left an old maid was “the greatest misfortune that could threaten a girl, and to ward off
that calamity the girl and her family, to the most distant relative, would strain every nerve,
whether by contributing to her dowry, or hiding her defects from the marriage broker, or
praying and fasting that God might send her a husband” (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 62).
Marriage and motherhood were a woman‟s reasons for existence. But most women not only
managed the household, they were also responsible for the economic survival of the family.
As a result, women became better acquainted with worldly activities than their learned
husbands. Ironically, “though intended to produce submissive and retreating women in the
46
domestic sphere, exclusion from most religious activity placed major economic burdens on
many women and encouraged them to develop aggressive and articulate roles in the larger
world” (Kessler-Harris 2003: xxiii). Indeed, the difficult living conditions required that
women were aggressive and direct; delicate women could simply not survive in the
marketplace. While many Western societies promoted the ideal of the tender female, Jewish
culture encouraged women to be tough and cunning. Jewish women were unfamiliar with “the
macho mystique” which oppressed females in America and other Western European countries
(Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 14). The masculinity of a Jewish male did not hinge on his
physical power, but on his intellectual abilities. “They expressed their masculinity in the
synagogue and in the house of study, not on the battlefield and not through the physical
oppression of their women” (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 14). But as soon as they arrived in
America, Jewish men began to redefine their definition of a good wife because the American
concept of womanhood was completely different from their own. Middle-class American
culture considered it inappropriate for married women to work outside the home. If they did,
it was believed that their husbands could not provide for them (Ewen 1985: 230). Noticing
that American women stayed at home, Jewish men internalized the view that women did not
belong in business. They abandoned the age-old belief that females were capable of
functioning in the commercial world and accepted “the American scheme of male financial
domination” (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 196). What is more, they began to see women as
the weaker sex.
Jewish women also changed their image of a desirable man. Americanized girls no longer
desired pious scholars, but looked for wealthy husbands with management skills. While their
mothers had called upon the matchmaking services of the shadchen, the women of the second
generation wanted to choose their own partner (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 221). They
argued that in America girls had the freedom to associate with boys of their own choice and
they repudiated the institution of matchmaking. No matter how hard they had fought
traditional ideas, once they married, these girls had to give up their social independence and
devote themselves to the care of their husband and children. It was “the unusual woman” who
ran counter to social expectations (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 233). In this respect, Anzia
Yezierska was an “unusual woman.” She rebelled against the restricted life women led in the
1920s and decided to follow her vocation, burning up “in this all-consuming desire [to write]
[her] family, [her] friends, [her] loves … [her] very life” (Children of Loneliness 14). At the
age of seventeen she left home because she did not accept her father‟s view of a respectable
47
Jewish life. She refused to be the servant of a man and rejected the traditional role of wife and
mother. Her two unsuccessful marriages proved that she was too independent to content
herself with a homebound existence. Not only did she fail to live up the expectations of the
Jewish community, she also violated the American ideal of womanhood (Kessler-Harris 2003:
xxv). Yezierska endowed her fictional heroines with her own character traits. They are all
energetic, demanding, independent and they all want to become somebody in the world. To
achieve this goal they do not need a husband: “I‟m living in America, not in Russia. I‟m not
hanging on anybody‟s neck to support me. In America, if a girl earns her living, she can be
fifty years old and without a man, and nobody pities her” (Hungry Hearts 13). For
Yezierska‟s heroines schooling and the Emersonian idea of self-reliance are the essential
ingredients for success. Like Yezierska, they desperately want to “work themselves up.”
Sara Smolinsky, the heroine of Bread Givers, is the best example of a New Jewish woman
who struggles against poverty and patriarchal oppression to obtain an education. In this novel
Yezierska deals with the double “otherness” of female Jews. As Baskin points out, “Jewish
women not only experience the duality of living as women in a male-dominated culture, but
also feel the equally significant duality of being part of a Jewish minority in often uncongenial
cultural environments” (Baskin 1994: 21). As the ethnic other, Sara faces the hostility of the
dominant culture and she has to cope with male domination both in the Jewish and American
community (Wilentz 1991-92: 34). On the surface she succeeds in reconciling her Jewish
heritage with her New World life, but a closer reading of the text reveals that she has lost her
fixed identity.
The novel revolves around the conflict between the tyrannical father Reb Smolinsky and his
strong-willed daughter Sara. Like Yezierska‟s own father, Smolinsky clings on to Old World
traditions and values. He spends his days studying the Torah and he lives off his wife and
daughters. Although the family suffers financial hardship, he refuses to work; what is more he
gives their hard-earned money away to charity. He does not care that his family members
“suffer bitter hell” while he is “busy working for Heaven” (10). According to the Reb, it is the
duty of his wife and daughters to support him, so he can apply himself to the study of the
sacred books. He believes that the five women he lives with can only obtain a place in
Heaven, if they accept their inferior position.
Heaven and the next world were only for men. Women could get into Heaven because they
were wives and daughters of men. Women had no brains for the study of God‟s Torah, but
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they could be the servants of men who studied the Torah. Only if they cooked for the men, and
washed for the men, and didn‟t nag or curse the men out of their homes; only if they let the
men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into Heaven with the
men, to wait on them there (10).
The mother does not question her second-class status, she stays in her “place”; her
Americanized daughters however have a different vision of womanhood. Reluctant to accept
patriarchal authority unquestioningly, each of them develop a different strategy for dealing
with their obstinate father (Codde 2001: 9). Bessie, the oldest daughter, is the burden bearer
of the family. She buries herself in work, so she is too worn out to reflect upon her life (Codde
2001: 9). Mashah, on the other hand, has created “her own solipsistic realm of beauty,
governed by its own laws, to counter the rigidity of her father‟s world” (Codde 2001: 10). She
does not worry about the unpaid rent and she seems undisturbed by the dirt and troubles
around her:
Worry or care of any kind could never get itself into Mashah‟s empty head. Although she lived
in the same dirt and trouble with us, nothing ever bothered her … Mashah worked when she
had work; but the minute she got home, she was always busy with her beauty, either
retrimming her hat, or pressing her white collar, or washing and brushing her golden hair. She
lived in the pleasure she got from her beautiful face, as father lived in his Holy Torah (3-4).
Unlike Bessie, she spends her money on luxury goods and enjoys the finer things in life.
Fania tries to escape her father‟s “reign of terror” by going to night school and reading books
from the free library. But in the course of the story, the three girls succumb to their father‟s
wishes. Sara is the only one who openly revolts against Smolinsky‟s treatment of his family.
She witnesses how he exerts his authority by marrying off his daughters to equally
authoritarian men.
Adhering to Old World concepts, Reb Smolinsky believes that “only through a man has a
woman an existence” (137). In this way, he “justifies” the fact that he matches his daughters
to men they do not love, while scaring away their lovers (Wilentz 1991-92: 34). He brands
romantic love as an impractical American phenomenon and defends the Old World institution
of matchmaking. According to “shtetl logic,” “First you marry, and then you love” (Schreier
1994: 24). This was the case in his own marriage: a matchmaker conducted the negotiations
with the family of his future wife, and they saw each other for the first time on their wedding
day. “I didn‟t give a look on your father till the day of the engagement, and then I was too
bashful to really look on him. I only stole a glance now and then, but I could see how it shined
from his face the high learning, like from an inside sun” (32). Reb Smolinsky assumes that his
daughters will learn to appreciate their husbands. Without remorse, he matches Bessie to
49
Zalmon, a fifty-six-year-old fish peddler, who has six children. Mashah is given to a diamond
dealer who turns out to be a swindler and the third sister, Fania, is married off to a wealthy
cloaks-and-suits buyer from Los Angeles. All three of them bow down to the Reb‟s
commands because he has broken their spirit. They think that marriage is the only escape
from the oppressive world of their father. In the second part of the novel, Sara assesses the
devastating effects of her father‟s tyrannical behaviour on her sisters. When she visits Bessie
and Mashah, she realizes that their living conditions have not improved, on the contrary, they
are again treated with no respect. Ferraro writes: “As each sister testifies to feeling trapped in
marriage and subordinated to male authority, Yezierska reveals how re-establishing patriarchy
produces in ethnic women the uncanny feeling of never having left their ghetto home”
(Ferraro 1990: 563). Bessie‟s life is even harder than before she left the parental home. Not
only does she work in Zalmon‟s fish store, she also takes care of his six demanding children.
Mashah did not fare better. She lives on the edge of poverty because her husband spends all
his money on himself and neglects the needs of his family.
Despite her poverty, Mashah has managed to turn her dwelling into a beautiful place. She has
channelled all her creative energy into the decoration of her house (Ferraro 1990: 566), but
the “beauty [that] was in that house had come out of Mashah‟s face”: “The sunny colour of
her walls had taken the colour out of her cheeks. The shine of her pots and pans had taken the
lustre out of her hair. And the soda with which she has scrubbed the floor so clean, and
laundered her rags to white, had burned in and eaten the beauty out of her hands” (147). Sara
witnesses how Mashah‟s carefree, big-headed husband humiliates his wife.
He drew a cigarette from his silk vest, lit it, and then, through the smoke, he eyed her coldly.
“You‟re nothing but a worn-out rag.”
“How can I take time to look decent, with all the work and worry on my head.”
“If it would be in you, you‟d find time. With your worn-out face, nice clothes would be wasted
on you” (150).
Realizing that her sister does not dare to speak against her husband, Sara defends her; soon
she sees that it is hopeless to stand up for Mashah, because her sister is unwilling to change
the situation herself. On the surface Fania has the most comfortable life. She moved from the
ghetto to a house in the suburbs, where she lives among the nouveau riche and enjoys an
affluent existence . However, she can not conceal her discontentment: “Good eating, good
sleeping, and the sunshine of plenty breathed from her face. And she held her head high, as if
she didn‟t come from the same family as the rest of us. But for all her shine, I could see in the
shadowy places under her eyes thready lines of restlessness” (175). She is a representative of
50
a new generation of immigrant women, whose “primary role is to adorn men‟s lives” (Baum,
Hyman, Michel 1975: 202). Her husband demands that she is dressed in the latest style, so he
can show her off to his wealthy friends. Hearing her sister‟s complaints, Sara concludes that
male control of income keeps women down (Ferraro 1990: 565). Yezierska shows that, at the
turn of the century, most married women were entirely dependent upon their husband,
whether they lived in the ghetto or in the outer suburbs. Fiercely independent, Sara vows
never to let a man “crush the spirit in [her]” (177). She decides to take her life in her own
hands and breaks away from her father, who tries to force his Old World traditions upon her.
“I‟ve got to live my own life. It‟s enough that Mother and the others lived for you.”
“Chzufeh! You brazen one! The crime of crimes against God – daring your will
against your father‟s will. In olden times the whole city would have stoned you!”
“Thank God, I‟m not living in old times. Thank God, I‟m living in America! You made the
lives of the other children! … “My will is as strong as yours. I‟m going to live my own life.
Nobody can stop me. I‟m not from the old country. I‟m American!” (137-138).
The second part of the novel, “Between Two Worlds,” focuses upon her pursuit of
independence. The title is indicative of Sara‟s position in society. Although she has managed
to tear herself away from the Old World, she is not yet accepted by the New (Schoen 1982:
65). As a result, she feels “adrift in the world.” Kessler-Harris points out: “On the way to
successful Americanization lay another kind of anguish. Becoming an American cut women
off from their culture and their past. It brought the fearful recognition that they were adrift in
the world” (Kessler-Harris 2003: xxxii).
What Sara learn in night school and later at college, is that she has to suppress her cultural
identity in order to become part of the dominant culture. But no matter how hard she tries to
adjust herself to the expectations of native Americans, she always remains the ethnic “Other.”
At work she is excluded by the other girls, and her fellow students make fun of her. She
thinks that she will be accepted if she changes her appearance. “Maybe if I could only live
like others and look like other, they wouldn‟t pick on me so much, I thought to myself. …
Late into the night I spent fixing myself up … I looked in the glass at the new self I had made.
Now I was exactly like the others! But … I felt funny and queer” (182). Throughout the novel
she stays the perpetual outsider, longing for acceptance into the in-group. Even at college she
has difficulty making friends. The other students look straight through her: “I was nothing and
nobody. It was worse than being ignored. Worse than being an outcast. I simply didn‟t belong.
I had no existence in their young eyes” (219). At a dance she is confronted with “the extent of
her outsider status” (Wilentz 1991-92). She can only stand back and look on, while the rest of
51
her classmates enjoy themselves. Since she cannot make friends, she grows lonelier and
lonelier. Her need for friendship is so strong that she almost gives up her dream of becoming
a schoolteacher. But she pushes on, rejecting her family‟s suggestion that she should end her
studies and find a husband. Mrs. Smolinsky hopes that her daughter will finally embrace the
traditional concept of womanhood. “I‟d be happier to see you get married. What‟s a school
teacher? Old maids – all of them. It‟s good enough for Goyim, but not for you” (172). While
we can understand the mother‟s defence of Old World values, we can only guess at the
sisters‟ reasons for defending marriage. Although each of them is trapped in an unhappy
marriage, they still try to marry Sara off (Ferraro 1990: 567). It is Fania, the most assimilated
sister, who takes on the role of matchmaker and who introduces her younger sister to Max
Goldstein. Initially Sara is charmed by his attention, but remembering the living conditions of
her sisters, she turns down his marriage proposal. She sees that she will never achieve
freedom if she is economically dependent upon a man. For Goldstein, “a wife would only be
another piece of property” (199).
After her refusal to marry Max Goldstein, she visits her father because she hopes that he will
understand her decision. But the opposite is true. Once again he condemns her aspirations:
“What‟s a woman without a man? Less than nothing – a blotted-out existence. No life on
earth and no hope of Heaven … A woman‟s highest happiness is to be a man‟s wife, the
mother of a man‟s children. You‟re not a person at all” (205-206). This scene in which the
Old World father disowns his child returns in Red Ribbon on a White Horse. In this novel,
“the narrator‟s emancipated aspirations are perceived in terms of sexual impurity; to her
father, an educated woman is like a prostitute because she trades her body – which should
belong to a man and his children – for intangible ambition and learning” (Zaborowska 1995:
161). He says to the narrator: “You‟re no longer a Jew. You‟re a meshumeides, an apostate, an
enemy of your own people. And even Christians will hate you” (217).
In both novels, the heroine realizes that her father will never understand her longing for
personal fulfilment. She is also well aware that she has to pay a price for the pursuit of her
“American dream”: “So this is what it cost, daring to follow the urge in me. No father. No
lover. No family. No friend. I must go on and on. And I must go on – alone” (208). By
choosing to live her live as an Americanerin, she loses the support of the Jewish community.
After graduation it seems that Sara is successfully integrated into American society, but as
Wilentz points out, “Sara finds the rewards empty because of the loss of her cultural identity”
52
(Wilentz 1991-92: 38). Her job as a teacher does not live up to her expectations and she
yearns for love. At the end of the novel, she finds love with Hugo Seeling, the Jewish
principal of her school. He is an immigrant like herself, who is Americanized but feels proud
of his Jewish heritage. He even plays a major part in Sara‟s reconciliation with her father.
With his help, she sees Reb Smolinsky in a different light. “Then suddenly the pathos of this
lonely old man pierced me. In a world were all is changed, he alone remained unchanged – as
tragically isolate as the rocks. All that he had left of his life was his fanatical adherence to his
traditions” (296). Sara realizes that her father is also caught between two different ways of life
(Schoen 1982: 69). He holds on to Old World values, while these values are not respected in
his new country: in America scholars of the Torah gain little recognition for their study. This
insight leads to a better relationship with her father. The Reb even approves of Sara‟s lover,
who would like to learn Hebrew.
However, Sara‟s marriage with Hugo Seelig has provoked differing opinions among scholars.
Especially Zaborowska has difficulty accepting the fact that Sara gives up her independence
so easily.
The irony of this happy ending is that it emphasizes the price Sara has to pay for a few years
of feminist freedom. Having been her own person, she has to settle at the end for a life
controlled by her husband-father, a man who subtly combines the repressive energies of both
worlds. … Although clearly suggesting her love for Hugo, the ending destroys her
independence by showing that she needs a man to affirm her femininity after the years of
repressing and sacrificing it to free herself from the Old World and to prove her intellectual
abilities in the New. In the end she loses; she is neither a Jew … nor an American – she comes
back to her repressive Judaic roots through her Americanized Jewish husband, who uses her to
explore his “heritage” (Zaborowska 1995: 150-151).
Likewise, Ferraro believes that “Sara capitulates to Seelig‟s grip” (Ferraro 1990: 578). Indeed,
it is remarkable that all of Yezierska‟s heroines marry at the end of the story. Her heroines are
strong women, who take life into their own hands, but who still want to get married. Off
course, this does not necessarily mean that they give up their freedom. For Laura Wexler,
Seelig is “the hero of Bread Givers” because “he does not choose to forget [his cultural
history].” “He gives Sara a chance to reclaim her own, non-American experience and recode
her own previously forbidden pre-American truths” (Wexler 1994: 173-177). But the final
pages of the novel suggest that Sara will not be able to reconcile the Old World with the New.
“But I felt the shadow still there, over me, I wasn‟t just my father, but the generations who
made my father whose weight was still upon me” (297). With these words, Yezierska leaves
the problem of finding a true Jewish-American identity unresolved.
53
3.3. The Ambiguity of Success
Like other Jewish writers of her generation, Yezierska was concerned about “the paradox of
worldly success” (Stubbs 2004: xxi). In many of her short stories and novels she juxtaposes
the temptation of easy profits with the search for higher values. Not only do we encounter this
theme in immigrant literature, American writers such as Herman Melville also explored the
struggle between materialism and spirituality. In his story Bartleby, the Scrivener he argues
that these conflicting desires are rooted in the American Self. While the American dream
promised self-fulfilment and freedom, money distorted these ideals and turned people into
slaves of the dollar bill. Jewish immigrants, who arrived in the financial centre of America,
struggled even more with the antithesis between material and spiritual well-being. They came
from a world where religion held sway over their daily lives. In the small villages of Eastern
Europe, scholars of the Torah and Talmud enjoyed a higher social status than wealthy
businessmen (Schoen 1982: 4). But in America money was “the secular God of the
metropolis” (Ewen 1985: 23). As a result “there was a battle between a religious culture that
demanded that economic activity be subservient to religion, and a secular culture whose
primary values were concerned with money-making and business” (Howe 1976: 181). Many
Jewish immigrants wondered how they could participate in America‟s money-oriented society
without losing their spiritual values.
The most compelling representation of the ambiguity of success is Abraham Cahan‟s famous
novel The Rise of David Levinsky. In this narrative Cahan tells the story of the Talmudic
scholar Levinsky, who leaves his homeland behind and makes the voyage to America. In the
New World he renounces the ideals of his religion and falls prey to the lure of money. He
works his way up from a poor immigrant to a wealthy industrial but in the process he loses his
ethical standards (Marovitz 1988: 318). Despite his riches, the self-made millionaire still feels
restless and unfulfilled. He realizes that money cannot compensate for his deprived childhood,
nor give him love, friendship or inner peace. In the end, he has to accept that “a million
dollars cannot sustain a hungry soul” (Marovitz 1988: 318). Like Cahan, Yezierska also wrote
stories about Jewish immigrants who suffer from an emotional hunger that cannot be satisfied
with material wealth. Yezierska knew from personal experience that money does not buy
happiness. At the pinnacle of her literary career she wrote the article “This is What $ 10,000
Did to Me” for Cosmopolitan magazine. In the article she describes how the glitter and
glamour of Hollywood had made her “a tortured soul” (Gelfant 1997: viii). Her sudden wealth
had isolated her from her people on the Lower East Side and had left her lonely. She was so
54
full of the subject that she could not stop writing about it. To her great disappointment,
however, the editor abridged the story and published only a piece of the original text
(Hendriksen 1987: 225). Years later she discussed the same subject in greater detail in her
novel Red Ribbon on a White Horse.
Red Ribbon on a White Horse is the fictional account of Yezierska‟s rise from the ghetto to
Hollywood. She narrates her journey from poverty to material success and her gradual
disillusionment with Hollywood‟s unashamed love of money (Stubbs 2004: x). The novel is
divided in three sections, each section highlighting different events in her search for material
and spiritual satisfaction. Part I dramatizes her introduction in the world of glittering wealth,
which entails the abandonment of Old World values. The opening pages already carry the
overarching theme of the novel; they hint that her choices will alienate her from her own
community. We see how the narrator has to pawn her mother‟s shawl so she can pay for the
telephone call to her agent. This shawl “represents her last heritage from her European past,
the last remnant of her identification with her family and its traditions” (Schoen 1982: 104). It
had been her mother‟s “Sabbath, her holiday,” and “old and worn – it held memories of my
childhood” (26). When she calls her agent, he tells her that Goldwyn Studios has bought
Hungry Hearts for ten thousand dollars. Goldwyn plans to turn her novel into a box office
success and asks the narrator to move to Hollywood. Before she leaves, she tries to make
peace with her father, who condemns her “lawless, godless, selfish existence” (31). But the
visit only emphasizes the difference between the worldly daughter and the Jewish father, who
devotes his entire life to God. Her father does not take pride in her success, on the contrary, he
scorns her godlessness: “Can your money make up for your duty as a daughter? In America,
money takes the place of God. … You‟ve polluted your inheritance. … You‟ll wander in
darkness and none shall be there to save you” (33). The narrator, on the other hand, wants to
participate in the American Dream.
His old God could not save me in a new world, I told myself. Why did we come to America, if
not to achieve all that had been denied to us for centuries in Europe? Fear and poverty were
behind me. I was going into a new world of plenty. I would learn to live in the now … not in
the next world (33).
From the beginning, her journey to a new life is overshadowed by the loss of her mother‟s
shawl and her father‟s harangue. His words will stay with her and reverberate throughout the
story. The next chapters juxtapose her initial attraction to expensive commodities with her
dislike of “the marketplace‟s empty materialism” (Schoen 2004: xxii).
55
At first she is dazzled by the luxury of her hotel room. She stands in awe of “the delicate
perfection” (37) of the tiled bathroom, which has bath salt in crystal bottles, soap wrapped in
silver foil and canary-coloured toilet paper that matches the towels. She no longer has to
survive on stale bread and leftover herring, instead she can gorge herself on Terrine de Pâté de
Foie Gras and Canapé Royale Princesse (40). Looking at all these luxuries she muses: “For
the first time in my life I had every reason to be happy. I had pushed my way up out of the
darkness into the light. I had earned my place in the sun. … I would shed the very thought of
poverty as I had shed my immigrant‟s shawl” (39). But soon she experiences that the years of
poverty have shaped her personality. At the party of the rich author Rupert Hughes she is torn
between her longing for success and her allegiance to the poor.
But can you be yourself with the money from the movies tucked safely in the bank? You‟re
afraid to spend your money and you‟re afraid to give it up. You‟re afraid to plunge back into
the poverty and dirt from which money has saved you. Yet you fear what money may do to
you. You want to be a person of importance. You want to be a success – and yet you can‟t
give up what you were when you were nobody. You want too much (57).
Her initial reservation melts away when she is introduced into Hollywood‟s inner circle. Her
lifelong hatred for the rich disappears and in her eagerness to be accepted, she repudiates her
former self. At this point she can almost feel her father “turn in his grave” for her apostasy
(59). Throughout the evening his shadow hangs over her, warning her that she sells her soul.
Towards the end of the evening she realizes that she will never be one of them. For the first
time in the story, Yezierska shows that the chase for money destroys ideals and values. In
their fixation on their own material welfare, the writers no longer value artistic integrity; they
sell their “art” to the highest bidder.
I had dreamed of Olympian gods and woke up among hucksters. I remembered seeing
Shakespeare‟s Merchant of Venice in modern dress. Now I saw the fish market in evening
clothes. The fight that went on at the pushcarts in Hester Street went on in this Hollywood
drawing room. … Even if I turned myself inside out, I could not compete with the sharp,
shrewd barter of those business authors. … How could I stand this movie market where the
bargaining for contracts and royalties was multiplied into fabulous thousands of dollars? (62).
More and more she begins to feel that she has betrayed her own people by joining “hands with
those who grew rich at the expense of the poor” (66). The director of Hungry Hearts and his
entourage are not interested in the message of the novel; they only want to rake in as much
money as possible. The narrator sees how they alter and distort aspects of her life to boost the
sale of Hungry Hearts. As Schoen points out, “truth itself is simply another commodity to be
distorted for the service of money” (Schoen 1982: 105). She no longer recognizes her own life
in the front-page articles that narrate her rags to riches life story. Disillusioned by
56
“Hollywood‟s whirling race toward the spotlight, the frantic competition to outdistance the
others, the machinery of success,” Yezierska‟s persona can no longer write (87). She believes
she has lost her own integrity and self-respect by accepting “the gospel of the cash register”
(127). A letter from a poor rabbi troubles her conscience even more. The man asks the
narrator for money to return to Poland. He is disgusted with America‟s disrespect for spiritual
values and longs to go back to his homeland, where he does not have to live among “the
money-making fat bellies – worshippers of the Golden Calf” (91). This letter evokes again the
image of her father and his prediction that wealth will leave her unfulfilled. His prediction
proves correct. As a result she flees from Hollywood in the hope that she will find real values
on the Lower East Side. But those months of financial security have made it impossible to
embrace the poverty of the ghetto again. Her pursuit of success has given her an ambivalent
attitude towards money: “she is unwilling to sacrifice all her values to the worship of money,
yet she has been too spoiled to accept the deprivations that a return to traditional ways would
entail” (Schoen 1982: 106). So the price of success is loneliness and the narrator laments her
alienation from the Jewish community (Zaborowska 1995: 161).
The rest of the story focuses on Yezierska‟s fading popularity. She experiences that the career
of a celebrity is insecure. “As long I was a rising star, I was in their orbit and it was their
business to make a fuss over me. At my first flop their blurbs would go on the next best
seller” (126). Friends who once sang her praise, are now embarrassed to be seen with her.
Ruined by the stock market crash, she has no choice but to join the Writers Project of the
WPA. Although it seems that she is back to square one, she has gained a crucial insight from
the whole experience.
I saw that “success,” “failure,” “poverty,” “riches,” were price tags, money values of the
market place which had mesmerized and sidetracked me for years. … Why had I no
premonition in the wandering years when I was hungering and thirsting for recognition, that
this quiet joy, this sanctuary, was waiting for me after I had sunk back to anonymity? I did not
have to go to far places, sweat for glory, strain for the smile from important people. All that I
could ever be, the glimpses of truth I reached for everywhere, was in myself (220).
Red Ribbon on a White Horse is Yezierska‟s most thorough exploration of the dangers of
materialism, but she already discussed the subject in two stories of Children of Loneliness.
In both narratives the main characters are introduced into a world of plenty but they “turn
away from its seduction” because they fear they will lose their soul (Hendriksen 1987: 222).
Berel Pinsky, the hero of “The Song Triumphant,” is an aspiring poet who puts his “heart‟s
blood” in every letter he writes (236). Despite his hard work, his poems do not bring in much
57
and he lives on the edge of poverty. One day he bumps into his old friend Shapiro who
promises to make him a millionaire if he sells his art. Initially he is reluctant to tailor his
poetry to the needs of the audience but when his friend offers him two hundred dollars, he
throws his objections overboard. Seduced by the prospect of accumulating money, he agrees
to write catchy love songs for the vaudeville star Maizie. In this part of the story, Yezierska
expresses the dilemma many artists face: Should they retain their integrity despite financial
difficulties or should they go for the money and popularize their art? Berel chooses the latter
and he will have to live with the consequences of his choice.
To the outside world he is the prototype of a successful artist but his immediate family
discerns that he cannot enjoy his fame. His decadent lifestyle has “blotted out the ethereal
longing gaze of the hungry Ghetto youth” (240). After another night of carousing he can no
longer ignore his conscience; he realizes that “he had prostituted the divine in him for the
swinish applause of the mob!” (244). During this rude awakening Yezierska skilfully
juxtaposes Berel‟s commercial songs with the ritual chant of the Hebrews on the Day of
Atonement to highlight that the Americans have a completely different set of values. As Berel
repeats the chant, “his heart begins to swell and heave with the old racial hunger for purging,
for cleanness” (244): “My sin! I took my virgin gift of song and dragged it through the mud of
Broadway!” (245). Eventually he gives up his career and returns to his old neighbourhood
because he can no longer sell himself for dollars (Schoen 1982: 53).
“Dreams and Dollars” also addresses the problem of upholding spiritual values (Schoen 1982:
53). The narrator, Rebecca Yudelson, visits her sister Minnie in the residential section of Los
Angeles. Ten years earlier Minnie had left the ghetto to marry a rich cloaks and suits
salesman. Those years of financial security have transformed her from an idealistic young girl
into a blasé woman, who has forgotten her former ideals. Rebecca holds Abe, Minnie‟s
husband, responsible for the change in her sister. “Abe fulfilled the great essentials of life. He
was a good provider, a good husband, a good father, and a genial host. But tho he could feed
her sister with the fat of the land, what nourishment could this stole bread-giver provide for
the heart, the soul, the mind? (184). The reason why her sister and brother-in-law have invited
Rebecca becomes clear when they introduce her to Moe Mirsky, a business associate of Abe.
Minnie has taken on the role of matchmaker and tries to pair Rebecca off with this friend of
the family. Initially the young girl is flattered by his attention but when he starts bragging
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about his riches, she realizes that they have a different outlook on life. While Moe attaches
great importance to material comfort, Rebecca values creativity and artistic achievements.
“Ach! How I love music!” The glow of an inner sun lit up her face. “I can‟t afford a seat in the
opera, but even if I have to stand all evening and save the pennies from my mouth, music I‟ve
got to have.”
“Haw – ha!” He laughed in advance of his own humor. “My sweetest music is the click of
the cash-register. The ring of the dollars I make is grander to me than the best songs on
the phonograph” (188).
As in “The Song Triumphant,” Yezierska romanticizes life in the tenement district. She
depicts the ghetto as a world not yet contaminated by “the dollar music from cash-registers,” a
world were spirituality is still important (190). She inserts a happy memory of Minnie‟s past
to contrast the protagonist‟s poor - but emotionally rich - childhood with the loneliness of her
present-day life.
Despite her riches, Minnie is lonely and isolated and she tries to fill the painful void by going
out on shopping sprees or organizing poker evenings. In a scene reminiscent of The Great
Gatsby, Yezierska exposes the emptiness of the life of the new rich. She shows that “in a
world where there was no music, no books, no spiritual stimulus, where people had nothing
but money” excitement fills “the eternal emptiness” (193). Seeing her drunken sister pick a
fight with the other card players, the narrator is deeply ashamed.
Thank God, her mother, her father couldn‟t see what Cloaks and Suits had made of Minnie!
Her own sister a common card-player! … How was that fine spirit of hers lost in this wild lust
for excitement? And these people whom she called friends, this very Moe whom she had
picked out for her to marry – what were they? Allrightniks – the curse of their people, the
shame of their race, Jews dehumanized, destroyed by their riches. Glutted stomachs – starved
souls, escaped from the prison of poverty only to smother themselves in the fleshpots of plenty
(196).
Rebecca refuses to stay another day in what she calls, “a desert of emptiness painted over with
money” (198) and she immediately returns to the ghetto. Like Berel in “The Song
Triumphant,” she goes back to “the relentless, penny-pinched poverty” in the knowledge that
it is “a poverty rich in romance, in dreams, - rich in its very hunger of unuttered, unsung
beauty” (203).
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4. The Other Side of the “American Dream”
4.1. The Immigrant Dream of America
4.1.1. The Golden Country
From 1880 onward thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe made the journey to America. In
the 1880‟s over 200 000 Jews migrated to the United States, in the 1890‟s another 300 000
followed their example (Rischin 1964: 20). Various factors caused the exodus from Russia,
Poland and other Eastern European countries. Throughout history, the Jewish race suffered
oppression and expulsion. A long history of persecution scattered them around the world.
Since their expulsion from the Land of Israel, many Jews found new homes in Eastern
Europe. In the thirteenth century Boleslav the Pious, King of Poland, welcomed European
Jews in his kingdom because he hoped they would breathe new life in the precarious
economic situation (Rischin 1964: 20). For centuries they coexisted with the native
population, but changes in the Polish political constellation affected their lives drastically in
the eighteenth century. The majority of Poland‟s Jews fell under the authority of Russia and
the tsarist government was not favourably disposed toward them: driven by anxiety and
superstitious beliefs tsar Alexander II confined the Jews to an area known as the Pale of
Settlement (Rischin 1964: 22). Throughout the century the tsar restricted the areas for Jewish
settlement. He not only expelled them from their villages but also forbade them to occupy
certain job positions that had supported many Jewish households (Baum, Hyman, Michel
1975: 56). Their living conditions became even worse in 1881 when a wave of pogroms
terrorised the Jewish population. The Russians falsely blamed the Jews for the assassination
of Alexander II and revenged the death of their leader by plundering Jewish houses and
slaughtering many Jewish citizens.
After the pogroms of 1881-1882 the measures against the Jews tightened. The Russian
establishment held the Jews responsible for the heated climate and introduced the harsh May
Laws, “officially reserving the land and its products for Christians, prohibiting Jews from
owning or renting land, and expelling people [once again] from towns they had inhabited for
generations” (Ewen 1985: 37). As a result a large number of Jews began trickling into already
overcrowded cities where they had to endure economic deprivation (Baum, Hyman, Michel
1975: 57). Poverty, pogroms, the May Laws and blatant anti-Semitism made life in the
Russian empire and other Eastern European nations almost impossible. For millions of Jews
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migration became a necessity, even a life-saving measure. Rischin narrates how the religious
persecution and economic oppression forced Jews to escape their villages:
In a little more than three decades, over one third of the Jews of Eastern Europe left their
homes. Over ninety percent of them came to the United States, the majority settling in New
York City. These immigrants packed their few household belongings, pots and pans, samovar,
pillows, and bedding, much of which would be lost or pilfered on the way, and forsook their
native towns and villages to embark on the greatest journey of their lives (Rischin 1964: 33).
In order to reach America they had to bear an extremely difficult journey. First they had to
travel to the port cities of Western Europe before they could embark on the long, strenuous
voyage to the “Promised Land.” Crammed into steerage, they suffered appalling hygienic
conditions and a poor diet. A popular immigrant guidebook described the crossing of the
ocean as “a kind of hell that cleanses a man of his sins before coming to Columbus‟ land”
(Rischin 1964: 33). But the promise of a better life without fear of religious persecution
helped them sustain the difficult voyage. Once they saw the Statue in the bay, they forgot all
their troubles and were determined to succeed in “di goldene medina” (Schreier 1994: 45).
Emma Lazarus, herself a daughter of Jewish immigrants, wrote the famous poem “The New
Colossus,” depicting the Statue of Liberty as a “Mother of Exiles” who welcomes the
“huddled masses yearning to breathe free” in the New World.
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightening, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbour that twin cities frame.
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
1883
Most immigrants believed that America was a land of milk and honey, a place where “all the
streets were paved with gold and you just picked up the gold and became rich and you sent for
your family” (Schreier 1994:43). This myth was designed by fellow countrymen who had
reached America before them. In letters they sent to those left behind, they presented an
unrealistic picture of their new life. America acquired such mythical proportions that hardly
anybody in Eastern Europe knew what life in the United States really was. In the story “How I
found America” from Hungry Hearts, Anzia Yezierska describes America‟s magical
61
attraction. One day a letter arrives in the small village where the narrator lives. The whole
town gathers round Masheh Mindel to hear the news from her husband in America. He writes
that his sun has begun to shine now that he is a businessman in America: “I have for myself a
stand in the most crowded part of America, where people are as thick as flies and every day is
like market-day by a fair. … I , Gedalyeh Mindel, [count up] four rubles a day, twenty-four
rubles a week!” (155). He continues the account of his new-found happiness, telling his
correspondent that he eats “white bread and meat…every day just like the millionaires” and
that “in America there are no mud huts where cows and chicken and people living all
together” (155). He owns a separate room with a closed door, “like a king in a palace” (155).
But most importantly, there is no Czar in America. This last piece of news is music to the ears
of the oppressed villagers because they live in constant fear of the merciless Cossacks. The
narrator describes how she is constantly on her guard: “Every breath I drew was a breath of
fear, every shadow a stifling shock, every footfall struck on my heart like the heavy boot of
the Cossack” (152). When her father teaches the neighbourhood children the ancient poetry of
the Hebrew race, she has to survey the road and warn her father when the Cossacks appear in
sight to enforce the ukaz of the Czar. According to the new regulation “no Chadir [ Hebrew
school] shall be held in a room used for cooking and sleeping” (153). This law not only
deprived Jewish scholars of their most important source of income, but also tried to weaken
the Jewish culture by hampering the religious education.
The letter inflames the villagers‟ desire to go to America. They have only one thought on their
mind: “How to get to America. What could they pawn? From where could they borrow for a
ship-ticket?” (156). That very evening the narrator‟s family sells all their precious possessions
to raise enough money for the steamship tickets. Ewen indicates that we can see an important
exchange in this story: “the past is sold off in order to purchase the new. To make the dream
come true, the family hocked its old way of life, turning their valued objects into the currency
of the New World – cash” (Ewen 1985: 55). The image of America as a place where
everybody could become a millionaire was meticulously fostered by U.S. enterprises and
steamship companies (Ewen 1985: 55). The latter distributed posters showing prices and
departure dates into the smallest towns and added articles from American newspapers as
evidence that “America was the promised land to the poor, as opposed to the old world where
land was denied the peasant” (Ewen 1985: 55-56). But personal letters were the best
advertising steamship companies could wish for. In “The Miracle,” another story in Hungry
Hearts, Yezierska describes how the companies profited from personal accounts.
62
The ticket agents from the ship companies seeing how Hanneh Hayyeh‟s letter was working
like yeast in the air for America, posted up big signs by all the market fairs: “Go to America,
the New World. Fifty rubles a ticket” (74).
A report by the Immigration Commission of 1909 concluded that personal witness had caused
by far the greatest part of the emigration from Southern and Eastern Europe in the last twentyfive years. The report also stated that “recently arrived immigrants are substantially the
agencies which keep the American labor market supplied with unskilled laborers from
Europe. … It is these personal appeals, which, more than other agencies, promote and
regulate the tide of European emigration to America” (Ewen 1985: 56). These letters pictured
the United States as a country where millionaires fell in love with poor girls, where men
worshipped women, in short, where everybody could find happiness, especially young girls
who were looking for love.
“America is a lover‟s land,” said Hanneh Hayyeh‟s letter. “In America millionaires fall in love
with poorest girls. … “In America there is a law called „ladies first,‟” the letter went on. “In
the cars the men must get up to give their seats to the women. The men hold the babies on
their hands and carry the bundles for the women, and even help with the dishes. There are not
enough women to go around in America. And the men run after the women, and not like in
Poland, the women running after men” (73-74).
The big advertising campaigns, combined with the reports from relatives or friends, had their
effect. Thousands of Eastern European Jews gathered their belongings and boarded the ships
that would bring them to their new home. As I mentioned earlier, the voyage in steerage was a
terrible experience that remained printed on the immigrant‟s memory.
In “How I found America” Yezierska gives a graphic representation of the living conditions
in just a few words: “Steerage – dirty bundles – foul odors – seasick humanity” (158). But she
also renders the almost healing effect which the golden country exerted. “I saw and heard
nothing of the foulness and ugliness around me. I floated in showers of sunshine; visions upon
visions of the new world opened before me. From lips to lips flowed the golden legend of the
golden country” (158). For the immigrants America was “a Garden of Eden, a paradisiacal
haven for the world‟s refugees” (Zaborowska 1995: 123).
“In America you can say what you feel – you can voice your thoughts in the open streets
without fear of a Cossack.” “In America is a home for everybody. The land is your land. Not
like in Russia where you feel yourself a stranger in the village you were born an raised” …
“Everybody is with everybody alike, in America. Christians and Jews are brothers together.”
“An end to the worry for bread. An end to the fear of bosses over you. Everybody can do what
he wants with his life in America.” “Plenty for all” (158).
The conception of America as a safe haven from the evils of the Old World goes back to the
founding of the country in the seventeenth century. In 1620 a small band of Puritans, led by
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William Bradford, settled in New England. They were Separatists who sought to separate
from the Church of England, which they considered “too corrupt to be salvaged” (Norton
2007: 33). After a short stay in Holland, they received permission from the Virginia Company
to settle in the northern part of its territory (Norton 2007: 33). That autumn more than a
hundred people crossed the ocean on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth Colony in
Massachusetts. But the Pilgrim Fathers experienced extreme difficulties. The bleak winter
surprised them and they were ill-accustomed to the wild environment. Only half of the
Mayflower‟s passengers survived the winter (Norton 2007: 33). We can consider these
Puritans the first emigrants who left their country for religious reasons. Before the 1620s
ended another, more moderate group, undertook the same voyage. Led by John Winthrop,
they sailed aboard the Arbella (and other ships) and colonized Salem and Boston areas (Cain
2004: 11). In 1630 they established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Unlike Bradford and his
followers, they were not Separatists. They wanted to reform the Anglican Church from within
and cleanse it “of its Catholic doctrinal traces and elements of ritual” (Cain 2004: 67). During
the journey across the ocean Winthrop delivered the immortal sermon “A Model of Christian
Charity.” In the sermon he described the purpose of the mission and the duties of the settlers.
He believed that America could be a true commonwealth, if each individual put the common
goals ahead of individual interests. At the end of his preach he expressed the well-known
words:
For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us,
so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause
Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through
the world (Cain 2004: 82).
He articulates the idea that America is as an exceptional nation, which still influences the
political rhetoric today. America is the model for the world, even the last hope for the entire
world. It is “the pathfinder, the exemplar, the redeemer, among nations; its role in the world is
to break from older social and political models, undemocratic and corrupt, and to spur reform
and revolution everywhere. …” ( Cain 2004: 17). According to Puritan thinking God had
chosen them for the special mission. New Englanders believed the New Testament prefigured
the New England settlement of Massachusetts Bay. Like Moses led his people out of bondage
into the Promised Land, so Winthrop took them out of a situation of suffering and brought
them to a new land where they could live a spiritual existence. God opened up this new land
to establish a pure church. If they did not succeed in their mission, they would not only shame
themselves but they would also break their covenant with God and give ammunition to His
enemies. They saw New England as the battleground where the forces of good and the forces
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of evil fought for world supremacy. The ultimate battle for the spiritual destiny of the world
was happening in Massachusetts and the Puritans had the special task to defeat evil. If Satan
succeeded in claiming America, the whole world would succumb to the dark side but if they
defeated him, God would bring peace and salvation.1
After those early settlers, other immigrants came to the new continent who were also incited
by the idea of America as a shining beacon of hope and freedom. Schoen points out that “the
expectation of religious freedom had encouraged the early Quaker and Catholic migrants; the
hope of economic security had motivated the mid-century Irish farmers and the belief in
American political freedom had lured the German refugees” (Schoen 1982: 2). They all
believed that America was a mythical New World, free from the evils that corrupted the Old
World. It was a place where man could find equality and create a paradise on earth (Schoen
1982: 2). The first writer who put this myth into words was the eighteenth century French
immigrant J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In his Letters from an American Farmer he gives
an optimistic account of immigration. He recounts the boundless opportunities that America
holds in store for its new citizens. The scholar Annette Kolodny observed that Crèvecoeur had
come to the New World “saturated with the Enlightenment‟s faith that here, in an
uncontaminated environment, Europe might produce the kind of society it had only dreamed
of on the old continent” (Cain 2004: 304).
In Letters from an American Farmer he maintains that they “are the most perfect society now
existing in the world” (Cain 2004: 306). With him originates the idea of America as a
“melting pot” where the differences between nations will be erased and “a new race of men”
will emerge.
He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives
new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the
new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great
Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours
and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world (Cain 2004: 308).
But only Northern Europeans are present in his “melting pot”: “Whence came all these
people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes.
From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen” (Cain 2004: 306).
With this view he creates the myth of the WASP which, as we can read in Yezierska‟s work,
1
For these insights, I rely upon the guest lecture given by Prof. Deborah Madson on “American Exceptionalism”
(7/03/07).
65
poses difficulties for immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Not only did he voice the
melting pot theory, Crèvecoeur also coined the term “American asylum”:
In this great American asylum, the poor of Europe have by some means met together, and in
consequence of various causes; to what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen
they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. …Urged by a variety of motives, here they
came. Every thing has tended to regenerate them; new laws, a new mode of living, a new
social system; here they are become men: in Europe they were as so many useless plants,
wanting vegetative mould, and refreshing showers; they withered, and were mowed down by
want, hunger, and war; but now by the power of transplantation, like all other plants they have
taken root and flourished! (Cain 2004: 307).
4.1.2. The Cruel Reality
In contrast to this vision, Anzia Yezierska‟s stories and novels mostly depict the Promised
Land as a “desert where the American Dream is a thirst that can never be quenched or a dark
night filled with nightmares in which dreary economic and social factors overshadow any
chance for betterment and renewal for lower-class Jewish newcomers” (Zaborowska 1995:
123). Back in Eastern Europe, Jews dreamed of a land of opportunity where the streets were
paved with gold but the reality destroyed their inflated dreams. They found themselves in
crowded neighbourhoods characterized by poverty and the daily struggle for survival. The
narrator of “How I found America” begins to question the utopian dream when she sees her
new home in the tenements of the Lower East Side.
I looked about the narrow streets of squeezed-in stores and houses, ragged clothes, dirty
beddings oozing out of the windows, ash-cans and garbage-cans cluttering the side-walks. A
vague sadness pressed down my heart – the first doubt of America. “Where are the green
fields and open spaces in America?” cried my heart. “Where is the golden country of my
dreams?” … All about me was the hardness of brick and stone, the stinking smells of crowded
poverty (160).
In Eastern Europe people could enjoy the peace and quiet of the spacious woods but in New
York nature and sunshine were replaced by walls of brick and stone. Especially the loss of
sunshine was hard to process. In her stories Yezierska expresses in her stories the feeling
many new immigrants shared: “In America were rooms without sunshine, rooms to sleep in,
to eat in, to cook in, but without sunshine. … Could I be satisfied with just a place to sleep
and eat in, and a door to shut people out - to take the place of sunlight?” (160). For many, the
loss of sunshine was a metaphor for the loss of the shtetl life, an image of mourning for “the
soft, responsive earth” (160) of their villages (Ewen 1985: 62). They expected to live in small
palaces but instead they ended up in one of the most miserable places of America: the New
York Tenement. Like boxes in a warehouse, they were stacked next to each other in living
areas of 12 m² without heat, light, water or ventilation. When they looked out of the window,
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they only saw dark airshafts which accumulated garbage. Some reformers, like the journalist
Jacob Riis, advocated for model tenements, with more room and better facilities. He had
witnessed the miserable living conditions in the tenements while he did research for his work
How the Other Half Lives. Shocked by the extreme poverty, he started a crusade against social
wrongs with his “muckraking” journalism. The work became a milestone in American social
writing and initiated widespread reform campaigns. Especially his photographs of life in the
tenements opened the eyes of many Americans and questioned the melting pot theory.
In reality New York was a divided city with the tenements as the dividing line (Ewen 1985:
21). In the same city, there existed two separate worlds. On the one hand there was Fifth
Avenue which breathed wealth and prosperity, on the other there was the tenement district
characterized by poverty, sweatshops but bubbling with vitality. While the upper class saw the
Lower East Side as foreign and distinct from mainstream America, the newly arrived
immigrants believed it was distinctly American (Ewen 1985: 27). Immediately they became
acquainted with the “secular God of the new metropolis”: money (Ewen 1985: 23).
In the United States everything was assessed in terms of money so the immigrants had no
choice but to participate in the money culture. Many of them worked in factories, small
sweatshops or tried to make a living as peddlers. Yezierska‟s persona in “How I found
America” is one of the many Jewish girls who works in a sweatshop where “dirt and decay
cries out from every crumbling brick” (161). Everyday she finds herself in “the roar and the
clatter, the clatter and the roar, the merciless grind of pounding machines,” while she dreams
of an education (161). At one point she cries out:
“Oi weh! I can‟t stand it! I did n‟t come to America to turn into a machine. I came to America
to make from myself a person. Does America want only my hands – only the strength of my
body – not my heart – not my feelings – my thoughts? … What for did I come to America but
to go to school – to learn – to think – to make something beautiful from my life…” (162).
She feels that her search for the Promised Land is restricted to menial labour, although she
would like to contribute something more to the American society (Zaborowska 1995: 128).
The struggle for economic survival makes her wonder “America – America – where is
America?” (161).
When the boss tries to cheat his employers out of their wages, the girl decides it is time to
take action. In this scene Yezierska exposes the injustice of the economic system and depicts
the vulnerable position of labourers in the early twentieth century. Without any consequences,
the boss can announce a reduction of their income.
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“Hands,” he addressed us, fingering the gold watch-chain that spread across his fat belly, “it‟s
slack in the other trades and I can get plenty girls begging themselves to work for half what
you‟re getting – only I ain‟t a skinner. I always give my hands a show to earn their bread.
From now on, I‟ll give you fifty cents a dozen shirts instead of seventy-five...” (163).
He refers to the economic reality of that time: as a result of the surplus of manual workers,
many of them were prepared to work for the lowest of wages. They did not dare to contest the
injustices because they knew they would be replaced immediately. This is the hard lesson the
narrator has to learn. Stimulated by all the other girls in the sweatshop and by her youthful
idealism, she goes to the boss :
America, as the oppressed of all lands have dreamed America to be, and America as it is,
flashed before me – a banner of fire! Behind me I felt masses pressing – thousands of
immigrants – thousands upon thousands crushed by injustice, lifted me as on wings (164).
But she does not receive much support from the girls when he fires her. “Not a hand was held
out to me, not a face met mine. A moment before, our togetherness had made me believe us so
strong – and now I saw each alone – crushed - broken” (165). At that moment she learns that
in the struggle for survival each one has to look out for himself. She realizes that the fear to
lose one‟s livelihood can “dehumanize the last shred of humanity” (165).
Yezierska describes a similar scene in her novel All I Could Never Be. After years of
mourning her lost friendship with Henry Scott, Fanya decides to exchange her writing career
for manual labour, in the hope that it will take her mind off the time she spent together with
Scott. Her search for a job is more difficult than she had anticipated but eventually she finds
work as a waitress. Soon she witnesses the exploitation of the employees. The girls are given
only a half-day off although they are entitled to a whole day and the dishwasher, a distant
relative of the boss, performs underpaid work.
A boy of nineteen. Because he was dumb and green and helpless, the boss paid him seven
dollars a week. From six in the morning till eleven at night, he stood stooped over the sink –
the sweat pouring from his face, his neck, his bare breast, - his hands steeped in greasy suds,
washing, washing endless stacks of dishes. Every time she passed him his eyes cried to her.
Those dumb, immigrant eyes. The look of a stranger in a strange land (164).
Appalled by “the long hours, the small pay, the degrading beggary of the tipping system”
(178), she makes it her mission in life to fight for better working conditions.
She had come here to gather them together – rouse them out of their slavery – inspire them to
demand their rights! … She saw herself going from restaurant to restaurant, recruiting the girls
as in the great shirt-waist makers strike, years ago. She saw the waitresses of the entire city,
marching on Fifth Avenue – an army with banners (178).
With the passion of a labour leader at a mass meeting she tries to spur her fellow waitresses to
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demand their rights, but at the point where she has almost convinced the girls, one of them
informs the boss who fires her. “Rattlesnake… I‟ll show you who‟s with you! … Get the hell
out of here!” (181). For fear of the same misfortune, the other girls shrink from the bullying
boss and content themselves with the prevailing situation. Their need for money is more
compelling than their need for better working conditions.
For many Lower East Side inhabitants, the factory bosses and pitiless landlords were the new
czars of America. They thought they had escaped the poverty and oppression that constituted
their lives in Eastern Europe, but in America they encountered the same struggle for
existence. Like in the Old World, they worried about how to pay the rent or how to put food
on the table. In the story “Hunger” Sam Arkin tells about the dangers that await naïve, new
immigrants.
“Before my eyes was always the shine of the high wages, and the easy money and I kept
pushing myself from one city to another, and saving and saving till I saved up enough for my
ship-ticket to the new world. And then when I landed here, I fell into the hands of a cockroach
boss. … He was a landsman, that‟s how he fooled me in. He used to come to the ship with a
smiling face of welcome to all the greenhorns what had nobody to go to. And then he‟d put
them to work in his sweatshop and sweat them into their grave” (HH 39).
Most of the money they earned, they had to spend on the rent. Rent was the biggest item in a
working-class family‟s expenses. “The average rent for a three-room apartment on the Lower
East Side was 13.50 dollars…the average yearly income of immigrant families was
approximately 600 dollars” (Ewen 1985: 116). The majority of working-class households
dreaded the end of the month because then they had to face the landlord. Landlords were
regarded as exploiters, and “jumping the rent” was a common strategy among poor
immigrants (Ewen 1985: 116). In Breadgivers we can read some of the sentiments toward the
landlord. “Every month of your life, …you got to squeeze out so much blood to give the leech
for black walls that walk away, alive with bedbugs and roaches and mice.” In short, they hate
the landlord wholeheartedly, especially because they have to pay him a lot of money for
dilapidated dwellings: “It‟s the landlords who don‟t want to fix or paint the house and yet
keep raising the rent” (27).
Hanneh Hayyeh, the heroine in the story “The Lost Beautifulness” decides to improve her
kitchen without the help of the landlord. “Sick of living like a pig with her nose to the earth,”
she takes on extra washing to save enough money for white paint. She wants to have the room
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spick and span by the time her son comes home from the army. Her husband accuses her of
extravagance, but she does not want to hear his objections:
“What do I got from living if I can‟t have a little beautifulness in my life? I don‟t allow myself
the ten cents to go to the moving picture that I‟m crazy to see. I never treated myself to an icecream soda even for a holiday. Shining up the house for Aby is my only pleasure (HH 44).
While Hanneh is over the moon about her beautiful kitchen, her husband keeps his feet on the
ground. “Yah, but it ain‟t your house. It‟s the landlord‟s” (44). Later in the story she will
discover the implication of these words. But at the moment she enjoys her small victory over
poverty and shows her new kitchen to all the neighbours. They all stand in awe of this island
of beauty in a sea of ugliness. “Gold is shining from every corner! Like for a holiday! You
don‟t need to light up the gas, so it shines!” (47). One of the neighbours even asserts: “Such a
tenant the landlord ought to give out a medal or let down the rent free” (48). But the opposite
is true. When the landlord views the room, he realizes that her work has increased the market
value of the apartment. Two weeks later Hanneh Hayyeh and her husband receive a note from
“the money-grabbing” landlord, announcing that he will raise the rent five dollars a month. Of
course they cannot pay the increase. In the following confrontation with the landlord,
Yezierska lays bare the ills of the economic system.
“Oh weh! Mr. Landlord! Where is your heart? How could you raise me my rent when you
know my son is yet in France? And even with the extra washing I take in I don‟t get enough
when the eating is so dear?”
“The flat is worth five dollars more,” answered Mr. Rosenblatt, impatiently. “I can get
another tenant any minute. … If you can‟t pay, somebody else will. I got to look out for
myself. In America everybody looks out for himself.” …
“I beg by your conscience! Think on God!” Hanneh Hayyeh wrung her hands. “Ain‟t your
house worth more to you to have a tenant clean it out and paint it out so beautiful like I done?”
“Certainly,” snarled the landlord. “Because the flat is painted new, I can get more money for
it” (53).
After two months, Mr. Rosenblatt sends another rent increase. But this time Hanneh‟s
fighting spirit is stronger than her fear of the landlord. She will “fight till all America will
have to stop and listen to her” (57). She takes her case to court but the judge rules in favour of
Mr. Rosenblatt. Disillusioned with the verdict, she wonders:
“Is this already America? What for was my Aby fighting? Was it then only a dream – all these
millions people from all lands and from all times, whishing and hoping and praying that
America is? Did I wake myself from my dreaming to see myself back in the black times of
Russia under the czar?” (60).
In a savage fury, she seizes the chopping-axe and begins to scratch down the paint, breaking
the plaster on the walls and tearing up the floorboards until the kitchen is completely
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destroyed. When her son finally comes home, after two years of separation, he finds his
mother on the sidewalk before their house surrounded by a heap of household things.
Ewen points out that eviction was common on the Lower East Side. “Eviction was an old
story in the ghetto, it was not unusual to find a dispossessed woman standing in front of her
old building” (Ewen 1985: 118).
To escape the nightmare of eviction, and enlarge the family budget in general, immigrant
families resorted to alternative ways of making money. Some made their apartment into a
workshop, others took in boarders. Hanneh Breineh in “My Own People” is one of those
women who rents a room to a boarder, the young writer Sophie. As the narrator of the story,
Sophie observes the hardship of the family. Like so many immigrants, Hanneh believed that
“in America everything would be so plenty,” but “not in Poland did her children starve like in
America!” (HH 141). At the moment when she pours out her heart to Sophie, her fourteen
year old daughter dashes in, announcing that she got fired from her job in the factory because
she has not yet reached the legal working age. Without her daughter‟s pay envelope, the
situation does not look rosy for the family. Although minimum employment ages were
designed to protect children from exploitation, many working-class parents saw them as a
nuisance since they needed the extra income.
“The president from America should only come to my bitter heart. Let him go fighting himself
with the pushcarts how to get the eating a penny cheaper. Let him try to feed his children on
the money the charities give me and we‟d see if he would n‟t better send his little ones to the
shop better than to let them starve before his eyes. …What for did I come to America? What‟s
my life – nothing but one terrible, never-stopping fight with the grocer and the butcher and the
landlord…” (143).
If they had enough money, she would happily send her children to school, but they do not.
The situation deteriorates further when a representative of the charities knocks at the door.
She is of the opinion that they play on the generosity of the Social Betterment Society and she
decides to withdraw the funds. When she leaves the house, she has broken Hanneh‟s spirit
completely. Hanneh no longer believes in the myth that America is “a lush garden or an
Edenic landscape” (Zaborowska 1995: 122). She is one of the few heroines in Yezierska‟s
work who has a negative assessment of America, most of the others keep hoping that Uncle
Sam has something better in store for them, despite their negative experiences.
When we return to the story “How I found America”, we find the narrator wandering the
streets after her discharge. She asks herself “Was it then only a dream – a mirage of the
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hungry-hearted people in the desert lands of oppression – this age-old faith in America – the
beloved, the prayed-for “golden country””? (166). In the blackest days in Russia, there was
always the hope that a better life awaited her in the United States: “In Russia, you could hope
to run away from your troubles to America. But from America where can you go?” (167). Her
gloomy thoughts suddenly disappear when she finds out that there is a new school for
immigrant girls. With revived enthusiasm she goes to the school, where Mrs. Olney receives
her. She seems to the girl the living spirit of America, a benefactress who would “save her
from the sordidness that was crushing her” (169). Unfortunately Mrs. Olney envisions the
narrator‟s future differently than the narrator herself. The narrator has many ideas about how
to improve her new country, she only wants to learn how to express them. Mrs. Olney on the
other hand proposes that she would learn a trade.
“It‟s nice of you to want to help America, but I think the best way would be for you to learn a
trade. That‟s what this school is for, to help girls find themselves, and the best way to do is to
learn something useful. “Ain‟t thoughts useful? Does America want only the work from my
body, my hands? Ain‟t thoughts that turn over the world? … But there‟s got to be a change in
America! Us immigrants want to be people – not „hands‟- not slaves of the belly! And it‟s the
chance to think out thoughts that makes people” (170).
Spurred by her ambition to achieve something more in life than the other immigrant girls, she
rejects the possibility of entering the Immigrant School. When she comes home, she is faced
with an unpleasant surprise. On the sidewalk, she finds her mother amidst a pile of housefurnishings, lamenting her situation: “What are we here? Nobodies – nobodies! Cats and dogs
at home ain‟t thrown in the street. Such things could only happen in America – the land
without a heart – the land without a God!” (173). The narrator realizes that the loss of her
wages has caused the eviction, and the next day she goes back to the shop, “to the same hours
– to the same low wages – to the same pig-eyed, fat-bellied boss” (173). But slowly the
working conditions improve. During the Progressive Era a general movement for social
betterment stirs the country. Middle- and working-class reformers unite their powers to enact
factory inspection laws, protect public health and restrict the working hours for women
(Norton 2007: 381). As a result of these changes, the narrator has enough vitality left to join
the night-school after work. She still hopes to find a teacher-friend but “the lifeless teachers
are no more interested in their pupils than in the wooden benches before them” (175).
Her faith in the American schools is restored when she meets Miss Latham. The narrator feels
a strong connection with Miss Latham, although they come from a different background. The
teacher is a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers while the narrator is an immigrant girl from
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Eastern Europe. Miss Latham maintains they are basically alike, despite their different
heritage. She asks the young girl: “Were n‟t the Pilgrim fathers immigrants two hundred years
ago?” (179). Thereupon she reads a passage from Waldo Frank‟s book “Our America”: “We
go forth all to seek America. And in the seeking we create her. In the quality of our search
shall be the nature of the America that we create” (179). This passage articulates clearly what
the narrator was unable to say. She believes that “through her inarticulate groping and
reaching-out” (180) she has finally found the soul, the spirit of America. Notwithstanding the
positive ending, Zaborowska questions whether Yezierska herself believed that immigrants
could find the America of their dreams. The reader remembers the horrors of poverty and the
narrator‟s disillusions rather than the happy ending and “moral victory” (Zaborowska 1995:
128). Consequently, we can interpret the title of the story in two different ways. On the one
hand “How I Found America” could suggests that the young immigrant girl has reached her
goal: she has found understanding and appreciation, on the other the title could also refer “to
the reevaluation of the dream by a disenchanted immigrant who says good-bye to her visions
of finding America as she hoped it would be” (Zaborowska 1995: 130). Anyhow, most of
Yezierska‟s heroines keep searching for “their America.” Two stories in the collection
Children of Loneliness show what newcomers really want from America.
In the story “America and I” we follow a young “greenhorn” who tries to find her place in the
New World. Like so many immigrants before her, she has her share of difficulties and sorrow.
Still she is convinced that “America must be somewhere, somehow – only I couldn‟t find it –
my America, where I would work for love and not for a living” (42). She hopes the woman in
the Vocational Guidance Centre will point her in the right direction but the reverse is true.
The woman only shatters her utopian dream: “America is no Utopia. First you must become
efficient in earning a living before you can indulge in your poetic dreams” (48). The narrator
leaves the Centre stripped of all illusions.
Till now there had always lingered a rosy veil of hope over my emptiness, a hope that a
miracle would happen. I would open my eyes some day and suddenly find the America of my
dreams. … But now I felt that the America of my dreams never was and never could be.
Reality had hit me on the head with a club. I felt that the America that I sought was nothing
but a shadow – an echo – a chimera of lunatics and crazy immigrants (48).
Then she starts reading American history. She realizes that the Pilgrims were not so different
from her: “They had left their native country as I had left mine. They had crossed an unknown
ocean and landed in an unknown country, as I” (50). The Pilgrims‟ story “personalizes
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America for the narrator” and helps her to give meaning to her new life (Girgus 1984: 109).
But the myth of the Pilgrims also makes her feel inferior to the dominant culture.
I saw how the Pilgrim Fathers came to a rocky desert country, surrounded by Indian savages
on all sides. But undaunted, they pressed on – through danger – through famine, pestilence,
and want – they pressed on. They did not ask the Indians for sympathy, for understanding. …
I, when I encountered a few savage Indian scalpers, like the old witch of the sweat-shop … I
lost heart and said: “There is no America!” (51).
At the end of the story, she finds her dream in the belief that “America is a world still in the
making” and that she, “the last comer, had her share to give, small or great, to the making of
America, like those Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower” (50). With these words Yezierska
turns the Jews into the new Pilgrims of America (Girgus 1984: 109). She develops this idea
further in “Mostly about Myself,” in which she writes: “Were not the Pilgrim Fathers
immigrants demanding a new world in which they could be free to live higher lives?” (27).
Now the Jewish immigrants for their part demand that America gives them the chance “to
become a partner in the making of the country” (29). They only want America to want them.
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4.2. Immigrant Aid
4.2.1. Organized Charity
The overwhelming number of poor immigrants drew the attention of progressive liberals such
as Lillian Wald, Jane Addams and John Dewey. They responded to the social problems by
promoting large-scale philanthropic projects that would help the new immigrants adapt to the
urban way of life ( Konzett 1997: 600). In the 1880s, the first settlement houses appeared in
tenement neighbourhoods all across the country; most settlement workers were women “from
old-stock Protestant families, whose fathers were well-off professionals: teachers, lawyers,
civil servants, doctors, or businessmen” (Ewen 1995: 76). But among the settlement workers
were also many assimilated Jews of German origin. The German Jewish women who had
emigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century had already initiated the process
of modernization in Germany. When they came to the United States they brought their
Reform Judaism with them and they played a major part in the success of the Reform
movement in America (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975:24). Those who had not yet embraced
Reform Judaism in their homeland, did so when they landed on American soil because it
increased their chances of success. Since Reform Judaism accepted “the aesthetic standards
and cultural patterns of Protestantism,” the German Jewish population managed to secure a
good position in the American middle classes (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 26). Soon, they
were scarcely different from their Anglo-Saxon compatriots.
By the time the Eastern European immigrants began streaming into America, the German
Jewish community was well-established and affluent. These American Jews of German
descent believed it was their duty to look after their “unfortunate Eastern European
coreligionists” (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 164). Especially women were encouraged to
participate in philanthropic initiatives. One of the speakers at the 1896 convention of The
National Council of Jewish Women voiced the general opinion that charity belonged to a
woman‟s range of duties:
“It seems to me the pressing need there is, that those of the leisure class of our Jewish women
who have no conflicting home duties should be aroused to personal and active interest in
philanthropic and religious educational work” (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975:49).
Charity was considered a legitimate activity for a middle-class woman because it
complemented her domestic obligations (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 30). So like no other
ethnic group, they had an interest in the problems of Eastern European immigrants who found
themselves on unknown territory. Although their main concern was the mental and material
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welfare of their coreligionists, they were also motivated by less altruistic concerns. They had
become respectable US citizens and now they feared “that they would be identified, as Jews,
with the lower-class and (at least in Western terms) uncultured immigrants, and blamed for
the latter‟s social lapses” (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 164).
They hoped to secure their good name by encouraging the new immigrants to adopt their
mores and values. Just as important, however, was their urge to engage in work that would
give them recognition. This work consisted of different activities. First of all they helped the
Eastern European immigrants come through Ellis Island, but their help did not stop at the port
of New York:
Immigrant aid included welcoming the immigrant girl, seeing that she reached a proper home,
guarding her against wrongs, assisting her to find work, providing wholesome amusement, and
placing her in touch with Americanizing agencies (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 169).
The last words of this short paragraph clearly show the ideology behind philanthropic
organizations. As part of a larger American movement, they were mainly concerned with the
assimilation of the newcomers into the dominant culture. Social workers understood they had
to come in close contact with immigrant families if they wanted to achieve their goals. So the
home visit became one of the most popular methods for familiarizing the immigrants with
American life in general (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 168).
Those home visits were not appreciated by most immigrant families. No matter how sincere
her motivations were, the social worker remained an intruder upon the private lives of the
immigrants and she “worked to instill a particular American sense of cultural and national
identity that wrongly demanded the negation of their Old World values” ( Konzett 1997: 604).
And immigrant Jews had reason to shun their German Jewish counterparts. The uptown Jews
viewed the downtown Jews as “culturally inferior and socially backward” (Baum, Hyman,
Michel 1975: 180). These ideas resembled the claims of the eugenics movement; the only
difference is that the eugenics movement believed that immigrants from Eastern Europe (or
Southern Europe) were inferior biologically rather than socially. At bottom the two
movements were not so different : both of them defended the superiority of the WASP culture
( Konzett 1997: 601). As a result the new immigrants adopted a hostile attitude towards social
workers who only felt contempt for the vibrant Jewish culture of their “clients.” Immigrant
writers like Anzia Yezierska subjected the charity lady to heavy criticism. The female social
worker was an easier target than her male counterpart because she was more visible. While
the men established the policy in welfare agencies, the women visited the immigrants in their
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homes to evaluate the families‟ living conditions. They were the ones who investigated
whether the immigrant families followed the American customs, reared their children
correctly and lived a morally acceptable life (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 182).
The women were often better acquainted with the ins and outs of the everyday life in the
tenements than the more academic men. Nonetheless, “as the field of social work was
increasingly professionalized, volunteer women, who had devoted themselves to the day-today matters of home visiting and interviewing of prospective clients, were dismissed
scornfully by male professionals as „ladies bountiful,‟ ignorant of the scientific bases of social
work” (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 176). We should not forget that at the time, social
science underwent fundamental changes. Central to the new Progressive ideology was the
belief that philanthropy alone could not solve the social ills. Most progressives advocated the
use of scientific methods to improve the living conditions of the poor. Ultimately, this
scientific method was but an alternative version of the nineteenth-century approach. In both
varieties, charity work believed in the superiority of one group over another, therefore it
imposed American middle-class values on the immigrants (Ewen 1985: 91). One social
worker articulated the underlying ideology as follows: “Old standards must be changed if we
are sincere in our desire to attain a higher form of civilization. The strangers from across the
water must be taught to discard un-American habits and conventions, to accept new ideals”
(Ewen 1985: 85).
Yezierska‟s work severely criticizes the methods of charity workers, “attacking their
philanthropy as a means of preserving established social and cultural hierarchies” (Konzett
1997: 597). She exposes charity workers as merely agents of Americanization who intrude
upon the lives of the Jewish immigrants. Yezierska experienced the politics of assimilation
herself. As a young girl she lived in the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls and later she
worked for a brief period as an investigator for the Hebrew Charities. In a letter to her friend
Rose Pastor Stokes, she ventilated her aversion for her work: “At present I‟m working as
investigator for the Hebrew Charities – the dirtiest, most dehumanizing work that a human
being can do. I see how the people are crushed and bled and spat upon in the process of
getting charity and I must keep my mouth shut or lose my job…” (Hendriksen 1988: 71).
But she did not keep her mouth shut in her novels and short stories. Already in her first short
story collection Hungry Hearts she railed against organized charity, and her critique would
only intensify over the years. She set the tone with the story “The Free Vacation House.”
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The story depicts the experiences of an immigrant woman who goes with her children to a
vacation house run by a charity group. Yezierska herself never stayed in such a country house,
but one of her sisters did several times. It is most likely that her sister provided her with the
raw material which Yezierska then moulded in the shape she desired. Biographical material
supports this hypothesis: her sister rather enjoyed the holidays in the countryside while the
character in “The Free Vacation House” detests the experience (Schoen 1982: 18). In her own
immigrant English, the mother of six children narrates the humiliations she has to bear during
the application and during her stay in the free vacation house. The story opens with a visit of
her children‟s school teacher who encourages her to apply for a free vacation. A few days
later a woman from the Social Betterment Society knocks at the door. She immediately
exercises her authority over the mother when she sees the baby sucking a pacifier. In the little
scene that follows Yezierska shows the conflict between two different forms of child rearing.
Before I could say something, she goes over to the baby and pulls out the rubber nipple from
her mouth, and to me, she says, “You must not get the child used to sucking this; it is very
unsanitary.” “Gott im Himmel!” I beg the lady. “Please don‟t begin with that child, or she‟ll
holler my head off. She must have the nipple. I‟m too nervous to hear her scream like that”
(63).
Social workers were convinced that pacifiers were “an extremely bad habit” (Ewen 1985:
138) and started a campaign against them. Immigrant mothers however were well accustomed
to pacifiers, and saw the new techniques of scientific mothering as a direct attack on their
parental abilities. In the story, the inferiority of the mother is further emphasized by her
emotional response which, in the eyes of the social worker, is unacceptable adult behaviour.
The charity woman looks upon the narrator as a demanding child “incapable of caring for
herself, much less her six children” ( Konzett 1997: 608). According to Ewen, many charity
workers shared this belief:
At the same time that mothers were perceived as losing control over their children, they were
also criticized for being too intensely involved with them. “The fact is that the immigrant
mother is as much a child as her children and plays with them, quarrels with them, and loves
them just as another child would” (Ewen 1985: 96).
Consequently the “friendly visitor” is not in the mood for a long discussion with the
emotional mother, and turns a blind eye when the mother gives the comforter back to her
baby. After all, she has a more urgent business to attend to: the inquiry of her client. She
directs a barrage of questions at the tired mother, until the latter cries out: “My goodness, for
why is it necessary all this to know? For why must I tell you all my business? What difference
does it make already if I keep boarders, or I don‟t keep bothers? … Or whether I come from
Schnipishock or Kovner Gubernie?” (63). The next day she has to go through the same
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bureaucratic inquiry at the charity office. When she arrives at the office, she finds a crowd of
women and children waiting on long benches. “Each one felt like hiding from all the rest.
Each one felt black with shame in the face” (65). The narrator is especially worried that one
of her friends might have seen her walk into the charity office: “They would n‟t know that it
is only for the country I go there. They might think I go to beg. Have I come down so low as
to be seen by the charities?” (65). Her self-consciousness turns into mortification when the
charity lady starts asking the same questions as the previous day. This time, the narrator finds
the questions even more humiliating because strangers can overhear her answers.
After the inquiry, she and her children are sent to the doctor for a medical examination. The
treatment they receive from the medical personnel destroys the narrator‟s last bit of selfrespect.
I wish I could ease out my heart a little, and tell in words how that doctor looked on us, just
because we were poor and had no money to pay. He only used the end from his finger-tips to
examine us. From the way he was afraid to touch us or come near us, he made us feel like we
had some catching sickness that he was trying not to get on him (66).
The doctor and nurse completely disregard the sensibilities of the immigrant poor. Even
during the short walk to the bus, they (unconsciously) humiliate them.
Then we was told to walk after the nurse, who was leading the way for us through the street to
the car. Everybody what passed us in the street turned around to look on us. I kept down my
eyes and held down my head and I felt like sinking into the sidewalk. … For what did they
make us walk through the street, after the nurse, like stupid cows? Were n‟t all of us smart of
us to find our way without the nurse? Why should the whole world have to see that we are
from the charities? (66).
She begins to feel better when they finally arrive at the country house. The blue sky, green
grass, the trees and flowers seem to rejuvenate her. For the first time in a while, she can
“forget the unpaid butcher‟s bill, forget the rent, forget the wash-tub and the cook-stove and
the pots and pans, forget the charities!” (67). But the ladies of the house soon remind her that
she and the other women are only poor immigrants, dependent on welfare. Not only do they
have to answer the same questions again, they also receive an endless list with house rules.
These regulations reduce their personal freedom to a minimum: they are not allowed to sit in
the comfortable chairs under the shady trees, to lie down on the beds in the daytime or to enter
the beautiful front rooms. Furthermore, the children older than two years are forbidden to stay
with their mothers, they have to stay with the nurse in the playroom. When the charity worker
has finished reading the list, the narrator feels overwhelmed: “I was wondering which side of
the house I was to walk on. At every step was some rule what said don‟t move here, and don‟t
go there, don‟t stand there, and don‟t sit there. If I tried to remember the endless rules, it
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would only make me feel dizzy in the head” (69). A few days later, it becomes clear why
there are so many regulations. The management of the vacation house wants to keep the house
spic and span for the “swell ladies in automobiles” who inspect the institution.
The narrator realizes that the beautiful front sitting room and easy stairs with carpet are only
“window dressing” (Schoen 1982: 19) for the rich ladies and that the immigrant women are
part of the show: “For why do they have to fool in worn-out mothers, to make them think
they‟ll give them a rest? Do they need the worn-out mothers as part of the show? I guess that
is it, already” (71). The narrator has a distinct feeling that the women and children in the
house have to soothe the ladies‟ conscience, so they can return home in the knowledge that
“these poor creatures have a restful place like this” (70). But while the rich ladies depart with
an easy mind, the immigrant mothers stay behind, “feeling cheap like dirt” (70). Nevertheless,
the narrator stays out the whole two weeks because at least she does not have to spend money
on groceries and butcher bills or do the washing and cleaning. When she finally returns to the
tenements, she feels so happy that she could cry from thankfulness.
How good it was feeling for me to be able to move around my own house, like I pleased. I was
always kicking that my rooms was small and narrow, but now my small rooms seemed to
grow so big like the park. I looked out from my window on the fire-escapes, full with bedding
and garbage-cans, and on the wash-lines full with clothes. All these ugly things was grand in
my eyes. Even the high brick wall all around made me feel like a bird what just jumped out
from a cage (71).
Despite the dirt and clatter, she prefers the tenements to the beautiful country house. In her
own house she is a free agent instead of “a dog that has got to be chained on one spot” (71).
In other stories Yezierska shows that even in their own home, immigrant families were not
safe from the paternalistic and patronizing attitudes of charity workers. “My Own People,”
another story in Hungry Hearts, deals with the issue of house visiting. Sophie, the narrator of
the story, has left the parental home to develop her writing career. She hopes to find peace and
quiet in the house of the family Breineh but Hanneh Breineh constantly distracts her. Sophie
loses her concentration completely when Hanneh‟s daughter announces that the factory
manager has fired her. The news comes as a bombshell because her mother desperately needs
the extra wages to feed the children. In the midst of the confusion, another boarder,
Shmendrik, enters the house, who treats the group to cake and wine. Suddenly all the
anxieties and sorrow disappear: “With a yell of triumph the children gobbled the cake in huge
mouthfuls and sucked the golden liquid. All the traditions of wealth and joy that ever sparkled
from the bubbles of champagne smiled at Hanneh Breineh from her glass of California grape-
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juice” (147). But the little party is broken off by the arrival of “the friendly visitors” from the
charities. They charge Shmendrik with intent to deceive the Social Betterment Society and
obtain assistance by dishonest means. One of the superintendents, “made bold by the
confidence that what he was doing was the only scientific method of administering
philanthropy,” starts searching through the old man‟s letters and takes possession of the
content: “ These dollars, so generously given, must go to those most worthy … I find in these
letters references to gifts of fruit and other luxuries you did not report at our office” (150).
Sophie, who has witnessed the whole scene, cannot stand the injustice and blows up at the
intruders:
“Kossacks! Pogromschiks! You call yourselves Americans? You dare call yourselves Jews?
You bosses of the poor! This man Shmendrik, whose house you broke into, whom you made
to shame like a beggar – he is the one Jew from whom the Jews can be proud! He gives all he
is – all he has – as God gives. He is charity. But you – you are the greed – the shame of the
Jews! … What do you give from yourselves? You may eat and bust eating! Nothing you give
till you‟ve stuffed yourselves so full that your hearts are dead!” (151).
She voices the frustration many impoverished immigrants shared. Reform Jews had become
so much secularized that they did not understand the religious traditionalism of Eastern
European Jews. In the traditions of the latter, charity received a totally different interpretation.
While the charity workers preached their social and cultural pre-eminence, the immigrants
dependent upon their services, assessed the behaviour of their coreligionists as morally
inferior (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1975: 182). The Eastern European Jews esteemed the Old
World conception of charity superior to the scientific philanthropy of the assimilated German
Jews. In her book about Anzia Yezierska, Carol B. Schoen gives a clear and detailed
exposition of the concept of charity in Eastern Europe. She explains that “charity had always
been a basic tenet of Jewish law, but there were very strict guidelines intended to protect the
recipient‟s pride and self-respect” (Schoen 1982: 81).
The highest level of giving is when mere material help is combined with “bestowing of loving
kindness.” Although conspicuous charity was a standard practice, it was based on the
assumption that giving to others was simple social justice, the literal meaning of the Hebrew
word for charity and was a requirement for every person. The recipient could feel that was
given was in part his due, and no one was regarded as being so destitute that he or she could
not be a giver as well. It was considered a good deed to protect a person from being ashamed,
and rather than waiting to be asked for help, the truly charitable individual would proffer a
benefactor rather than wait to be solicited (Schoen 1982: 81).
All the guidelines were designed to spare the destitute person the shame of begging himself.
This way, the person could accept the gifts without loss of dignity. In any case, the problems
of the poor were considered the responsibility of the whole community. Everyone was
expected to make a contribution, however small it was (Schoen 1982: 81). Yezierska‟s fiction
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shows many examples of this form of charity, which stands in glaring contrast to the
American way of conducting benefaction. One of these examples is the story “The Lord
Giveth” in Children of Loneliness. The story starts in medias res with a domestic dispute
between Mrs. Ravinsky and her husband. Reb Ravinsky had promised to borrow money that
morning to ward off their impending eviction for unpaid rent, but he returned home from the
synagogue empty-handed. As a result Mrs. Ravinsky is unable to pay the rent when the
landlord comes around to collect it. For weeks she had been living “in momentary dread of
this catastrophe” (211) and now her worst nightmare comes true. She witnesses helplessly
how the moving men take away her Passover dishes, the Sabbath candlesticks and the brass
samovar while her husband seeks refuge in flight. “In his anxiety for the safety of his holy
books, he forgot the existence of his wife and ran with his books to the synagog as one runs
from a house on fire” (212). But the neighbours do not forget Mrs. Ravinsky. She and her
family are invited to stay with the woman next door, although the woman already lives in
cramped conditions. The other neighbours join forces to collect money so that the family
Ravinsky does not fall in the hands of the charity workers.
“The charities? A black year on them!” Came a chorus of angry voices.
“All my enemies should have to go to the charities for help.”
“One poor man with a heart can help more than the charities with all their money” (214).
These reactions reveal the strong aversion for organized charity. Despite their own poverty,
the neighbours honour the Eastern European interpretation of charity. They believe it is their
duty as good Jews to help a destitute member of the community.
“I‟m not yet making Rockefeller‟s millions from the butcher business, but still, here‟s my
beginning for good luck.” And Mr. Sopkin tossed a dollar bill into the basket on the counter.
A woman, a ragged shawl over her head, clutched a quarter in her gaunt hand. “God is my
witness! To tear out this from my pocket is like tearing off my right hand. I need every cent to
keep the breath in the bodies of my Kinder, but how can we let such a holy Jew fall in the
street?” (215).
They achieve what Schoen called the highest level of giving. Their material help is clearly
combined with “bestowing of loving kindness”: “It [the collected money] seemed not money but the flesh and blood of the people – each coin a part of a living heart” (216). When the
pawnbroker‟s wife peels a dollar from the roll of bills in her stocking, the others object to her
donation. They do not want their money and hers to mix since her money is “the profits from
the pawnshop” (216) while their money comes straight from the heart.
With the donation of the neighbours Mrs. Ravinksy prepares a nutritious meal for her family.
While they are enjoying the rare luxury of butter and eggs, the charity lady pays them a
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surprise visit. Before they let her in, Mrs. Ravinsky and her little daughter hide all the
evidence of their “festive meal.” When Miss Naughton, the charity worker, enters she takes in
every little detail of the families‟ appearance at a glance. The poverty-stricken looks of
mother and daughter pull at Miss Naughton‟s heartstrings and she decides to prepare a lunch
for them. Mrs. Ravinsky tries to turn down the offer but the charity worker interprets her
objections as unwarranted pride: “Miss Naughton could understand the woman‟s dislike of
accepting charity. She had coped with this pride of the poor before. But she had no sympathy
with this mother who fostered resentment in her child toward the help that was so urgently
needed” (223). While the charity worker waits for the boy who will deliver the groceries, she
takes a closer look at the apartment. She cannot refrain from criticizing the lifestyle of the
poor family. According to her, “any one can be clean. Soap and water are cheap” (225). She
clearly lacks empathy for the living situation of the immigrants. Even if they tried to put the
American standards of cleanliness into practice, tenement living made it difficult to reach
those standards: “clean and different clothing every day, good shoes, and daily baths were
simply out of reach” (Ewen 1985: 155).
In her search through the apartment Miss Naughton suddenly discovers the butter, eggs,
cheese and bread. Seeing the expensive food, she accuses the family of deceiving the agency
and withdraws her help. The merciless attitude of the charity worker contrasts sharply with
the generosity of the neighbourhood. Thus, the Lower East Side, “while not as caring as the
European community, is painted as being at least more humane than the Americans with their
system of scientific charity” (Schoen 1982: 54). Yezierska will elaborate this antithesis in her
novels Salome of the Tenements and Arrogant Beggar. In both novels she portrays the upperclass German Jews as snobbish, self-centred and shallow. But Yezierska was not the only
writer who painted a negative picture of the rich, reformed Jews. Many immigrant Jewish
writers tried to settle the score with their benefactors on paper (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1976:
181). Their portraits of the German Jews were highly caricatured and sarcastic. Especially the
female social worker became a stock character in the novels of immigrant writers (Baum,
Hyman, Michel 1976: 182). This one-sided picture of American philanthropy threatens to
downplay the achievements of social workers. Most of them were genuinely concerned with
the fate of poor and tried to improve the living conditions in the ghettos. The conflicts with
their clients were primarily the result of a different outlook on life. As reformed Jews, the
charity workers regarded Judaism as a “purely religious phenomenon,” but for the new immigrants, Judaism was an aspect of an entire ethnic culture (Baum, Hyman, Michel 1976: 53).
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4.2.2. The Settlement House Movement
In the discussion above I gave a general picture of organized charity, now I want to direct my
attention to a specific form of immigrant aid, namely the settlement house. In her novel
Salome of the Tenements Yezierska targets the settlement house movement and exposes the
hypocrisy of the liberal reformers who initiated the movement. Settlement houses were
familiar territory for the writer. As a staff member of such an organization she became aware
of the problems of liberal reform, and her intimate friendship with Rose Pastor Stokes only
extended her knowledge of the internal affairs of this philanthropic initiative. Pastor was
married to the philanthropist Graham Stokes who ran the University Settlement. Modelled
after Jane Addams‟ Hull-House in Chicago, the University Settlement was one of the first
settlement houses that cropped up in the ghetto of New York (Wilentz 1995: xv). She met her
future husband while conducting research for an article about settlement houses, which would
be published in the Jewish daily Yiddishes Tageblatt. For Rose and Yezierska, “liberal
reformers like Dewey and Graham Stokes symbolized the America they had dreamed of – a
place where the high-born and the immigrant could work and love together, where they could
make a new America that would not break its promise to the poor and powerless” (Wilentz
1995: xiii). But reality would soon undercut their high expectations.
Rose Pastor‟s life story gave Yezierska the inspiration to write Salome of the Tenements, a
novel that questions the “mingling of the races,” along with the motives of the settlement
house movement. We could best describe settlement houses as educational centres where new
immigrants could learn the necessary skills to succeed in the American society. The liberal
reformers who ran the settlements attempted to “inculcate” the immigrants with American
mores, in order to avert the threat of the foreign to the dominant culture (Wilentz 1995: xiv).
At that time, they believed that immigrants were a threat to the existing social order and they
had to be “Americanized so as to protect the „American way‟” (Wilentz 1995: xiv). According
to Social Darwinism, every person could be moulded into a certain shape through scientific
training (Wilentz 1995: xiv). This training included erasing ethnic differences and preserving
the social hierarchy. Like Rose, Sonya Vrunsky discovers how hypocritical the intensions of
liberal reformers really are. Instead of working for social change, they want to protect their
privileged position in society (Wilentz 1995: xvi). The majority of the reviewers of the novel
mainly focused their attention on the distorted romance, and rarely discussed the critique of
liberal reformers. One reviewer who did see “the progressive themes” was the historian James
Harvey Robinson, who wrote that “every sociologist and „miscellaneous moralizer‟ should
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read Salome of the Tenements so as to expose the „facile, pompous generalizations and
academic abstractions… of the creatures which he pretends to explain‟” (Wilentz 1995: xix).
In the beginning of the novel Sonya thinks anything but highly of the settlement house and its
social workers. Like many other immigrant Jews she had gone through “the free dispensaries,
the working-girls‟ homes, all the institutions erected to help the poor.” She had known the
“bitter, biting, galling shame of them” (43). But when she meets John Manning all her
previous objections melt away. Manning, an upper-class Anglo-Saxon, had come to live
among the ghetto people to escape from “the deadly conventions of this class” (32). He had
hoped to find warm, personal contact but instead discovered that his culture set him apart,
labelled him as a “philanthropist,” an “uplifter”. The encounter with Sonya fills him with
renewed hope: “Through her he would yet touch the pulse of the people. Within her lay the
power to make articulate his life‟s purpose” (32). Sonya, on the other hand, would do
anything to escape the ghetto. She reveals her intentions at the very outset: “It‟s just to get
away from the sordidness of this penny-pinched existence that I got to catch on to a man like
Manning” (6). So both protagonists have a hidden agenda and they use each other to attain
their conflicting goals. While Manning tries to get rid of his riches, Sonya tries to free herself
from poverty. For Sonya and other immigrant girls, a marriage to a wealthy, influential male
is the quickest way out of the ghetto. They attend courses at the settlement not for “education
and assimilation into the dominant culture,” but to catch a prominent man (Wilentz 1995:
xix).
Where else can a poor girl like me meet the millionaire if not in the settlement?” Sonya
rationalized her inconsistency. “How did Rose Pastor catch on to Graham Stokes? How did
Mary Antin get her chance to climb higher up? How did Sonya Levien, a plain stenographer,
rise to be one of the biggest editors?”… “Why, there would be no fake settlements if they were
only openly what they should be; marriage centers – clearing houses for ambitious youth,
where live East Side girls like me can catch on to men higher up” (83).
She realizes that, in order to win his heart, she will have to adjust herself to Manning‟s
romanticized ideas about poverty. Even though he preaches “the gospel of the Simple Life,”
her instinct tells her that “Manning‟s tolerance of poverty and dirt is only very nice in talk”
(41). So by obtaining new clothes and new furniture she tries to meet “his settlement ideology
of domestic economy” (Batker 2000: 88). The scene in Hollins‟ atelier reveals the extent to
which Sonya has repressed her negative experiences with organized charity. Her worship for
Manning has clouded her judgement and she fiercely defends him when Hollins calls him a
fraud.
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“You mean,” scoffed Hollins, “he is one of those philanthropists who come with a gilded cane
to tap ash-cans and garbage heaps? I suppose,” he added cynically, “playing with poverty is
more exciting than knocking golf balls.”
“But he don‟t just play with poverty,” defended Sonya. “He spends his days worrying how
to get rid from his riches.”
“The stupid fraud! The self-deceiver! It‟s his wealth that has made him spiritual enough to
want to get rid of his wealth” (30).
Although she refutes the accusations, Hollins‟ words stay in her memory and reverberate
throughout the novel. Despite his dislike for Manning, the clothing designer makes a gorgeous
dress for Sonya. With her new middle-class outfit the young Jewess is able to seduce the
puritanical John Manning. Her appearance sustains his blind faith in the ultimate goodness of
the settlement. She demonstrates that “beauty costs nothing. All that is necessary is educationto show them how” (76). For Manning, the charity workers are the saviours of the poor:
“Whole families have been regenerated by the work of the friendly visitors and their followup talks on hygiene and nutrition” (76).While Manning revels in the “success” of his
philanthropic organization, the reader knows he is deluding himself. Sonya is anything but a
product of the settlement philosophy. She has achieved her goal through her own cunning and
the manipulation of middle-class ideals. Batker correctly argues that “unlike Manning, Sonya
is fully aware that the distance between the middle and working class is not measured in
moral but in material terms. While settlement workers see cleanliness as a „moral‟ issue,
Sonya recognizes middle class standards of hygiene as elitist” (Batker 2000: 89). Manning‟s
lyrical description of the charity workers, evokes a painful memory of her childhood.
At the words “friendly visitor,” Sonya saw a stiff starched dress with a high collar. She heard
the mechanical greeting “What can I do for you, dear?” She saw again the irritating smile of
professional kindness that guarded the approaches of Manning‟s office. A host of earlier
memories flashed through Sonya‟s mind. She lived again her childhood days when the
entrance of the “friendly visitor” brought fear and hate into their home as he lectured the
family how to do without meat, without milk and without eggs (76).
Hollins‟ cynical words flash through her mind again, only to be repressed by her unreasoning
admiration of Manning. But the seeds of doubt have found fertile soil in Sonya‟s mind.
Nonetheless, in her infatuation with the philanthropist she even accepts Manning‟s offer to
work in the settlement house. With Sonya at his side, he is convinced that his settlement will
become a vital force in the community, “a neighbourhood house that would be a beacon-light
of human brotherhood” (78). During her first days at the settlement house, Sonya deludes
herself that the place is “the most splendid achievement in the world” (82).
The love she feels for Manning prevents her from making a rational evaluation: “Her brain
knew, though her heart denied it, that this philanthropy was no different from the others she
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had known. But her incorrigible gift of illusion had made it the very shrine of romance” (82).
When their relationship starts to disintegrate, she also grows dissatisfied with the management
and ideology of the settlement house. Manning‟s belief in “a brotherhood of man” turns out to
be an illusion. This becomes painfully clear at their wedding reception. As I already stated in
chapter two, the wedding reception demonstrates the failure of the melting pot theory. Instead
of erasing the traditional differences, the reception highlights how much the immigrants differ
from the high society guests. Still Manning does not want to give up his dream and he
reprimands his wife for being sceptical: “The elimination of all artificial barrier is my
religion. And you harp constantly on class differences, as if you wanted me to lose faith in my
work” (120). For the first time in the novel, Sonya sees that Manning is no different than the
philanthropists who she despised in her childhood. He too aims at effacing the ethnic identity
of the immigrants. He tries to display his wife as “a successful specimen of Americanization”
(Jirousek 2002: 41) but Sonya does not want to betray her Jewish heritage.
“I am sure you are glad now, that you came down like a sensible girl,” he said, with
affectionate tolerance. “You will find very soon, my dear, that you can adjust yourself to the
form of the society in which you have to live.” … “I could never choke myself into the form
of your society friends… I am different” (131).
Wilentz points out that this passage “radically critiques the settlement education projects that
aimed at Americanization through the melting pot theory (a sociological premise that all
immigrants could be moulded into Americans along the lines of the dominant culture)”
(Wilentz 1995: vix).
From now on she can no longer shut her eyes to the hypocrisy of the settlement and its social
workers. Now she “was seeing his settlement, as she had refused to let herself see it before her
marriage” (138). Attending one of the home economy classes, she witnesses how the
settlement workers try to keep their students content with poverty. By teaching them to bake
“milkless, butterless, eggless cake” (135) the instructors attempt to keep the immigrants poor
(Wilentz 1995: xx). When she hears one social worker telling another that they “must guard
against imposters for the sake of the worthy poor,” Sonya bursts out: “So these are Manning‟s
social experts! So this is their plane of reason – „reason‟ forced down the throats of the
people!” (135,138). At this point Sonya still hopes that with Manning‟s help she will be able
to change the settlement, but he is so sure of the stimulating good of all the activities that he
remains deaf for his wife‟s propositions. Disillusioned, she rages against Manning:
“Settlement business ain‟t work. It‟s only a make-believe, a fake. Your settlement is a lie…
It‟s fit for jokes in comic papers, the whole show-off of uplift work” (148).
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4.2.3. A Home for Working Girls
In 1927 Yezierska published her fifth book Arrogant Beggar, which attacked another
institution of American philanthropy: the charity-run boarding home. As we have seen so far,
the novel was not her first discussion of philanthropy. Many short stories depicted the
condescension of charity workers, their disrespect for the time-honoured customs of the
immigrants and their humiliation of those in need (Stubbs 2004: xxv). In her first novel
Salome of the Tenements she interlaced her critique of the settlement house movement with a
love story. In Arrogant Beggar she goes one step further and devotes the entire novel to a
discussion of the charity-run boarding home.
The novel was published when the organized boarding home movement held an influential
position in the American society. While settlement houses functioned as community centres,
boarding homes were “primarily dormitories; social work and education focussed on a target
population rather than the community at large” (Stubbs 2004: xxv). The motive behind the
movement was the concern for the vulnerability of young, female immigrants. The founders
of the movement believed that unmarried immigrant girls could easily fall victim to sexual
harassment or pimps; to protect the girls from harm they introduced a rigid system of rules
and regulations in the homes (Stubbs 2004: xxv). They promoted the boarding homes as “a
haven from the evils of the street” and presented themselves as loving mother figures (Stubbs
2004: xxvi). But they failed to mention that there was another important motivational factor.
During the Progressive Era, more and more Anglo-Saxons began to regard working women as
a threat to society. Anxieties about working women‟s sexual vulnerability were replaced by
fear for their sexual attraction. Single working-class women might “potentially tempt middleclass men to adultery, jeopardizing the sanctity of middle-class marriage” or they might
seduce a high class male into marrying them (Stubbs 2004: xxvi). Therefore middle- and
upper-class women feared that their working-class counterparts would invalidate the social
hierarchy. Charity-run boarding homes seemed the perfect place to control young, single
women and to maintain the status quo: rather than encouraging the young women to pursue
upward mobility, the benefactors tried to content the working-class women with workingclass life (Stubbs 2004: xxvii). In Arrogant Beggar, Yezierska exposes this motivational
factor and demonstrates that there are other options for working-class girls.
We meet the heroine of the story, Adele Lindner, when she is about to move to a Home for
Working Girls, founded by the influential Mrs. Hellman. In her initial excitement she can only
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see the difference between her dingy ghetto room and the spacious, uncrowded room in the
boarding home. The contrast between the two places is further highlighted by the difference in
appearance of Miss Simons, the director of the home and her ghetto friend, Mrs. Hershbein
(Schoen 1982: 78). While Miss Simons looks like “a model in a show window” with her
“smoothly pressed” clothes (8), Mrs. Hershbein oozes poverty in her shabby pushcart clothes.
Adele is so blinded by her own chimera of the home that she forgets the friendship and
hospitality of her ghetto friends. She believes she has found new friends in Miss Simons, Mrs.
Hellman and the other benefactors. When her roommates insinuate that the boarding home is
far from perfect, Adele‟s first reaction is disbelief. Even when other girls back up the
complaints she still holds on to her illusion:
What a thankless lot these girls were! Instead of being warmed by the beauty of this place,
they sit back with the coldness of superior ladies, looking for black spots on the sun. God!
Wasn‟t it ever possible to satisfy poor people? What more do they want? Where they showing
off before me? Dissatisfied? Such a grand place! Such a good meal! Imagine being so happy
that you could play at being ill-treated (24).
But gradually she experiences the negative aspects of boarding home life herself. One day,
after work, Adele goes shopping for cheap, black stockings in the tenement district. On her
way back to the boarding home a speck of dust blows in her eye. The ophthalmologist spends
so much time on getting it out that she arrives an hour late at the home. When she rings the
doorbell, the matron “solid and stiff in her white starched uniform” (27) opens the door:
“Why are you ringing that way? Here, put your name down in the late book” (27). Adele finds
out to her cost that the ladies make no exception to the rules; moreover the rigidity of the rules
may not be questioned. For the first time since her arrival, Adele begins to detect cracks in the
management of the philanthropic institution: “Never in my life had I known what it was to
live by rules. I began to look back in wonder, wasn‟t I perhaps a little freer when I lived
alone?” (28). This little episode is only a very small step in her awakening. Slowly her initial
idealization of the Hellman Home for Working Girls changes into disillusionment (Stubbs
2004: xxvii).
She experiences the rigidity of the rules again when she loses her job. Instead of giving her
emotional and economic support, Miss Simons, “her understanding friend,” (35) delivers an
ultimatum: if Adele does not pay her rent in two weeks, she will have to leave her room.
Shocked by the heartless attitude of the director, she asks herself “Was this the friend to lean
on in my need? … What was the beauty of this place – why this polite, kind, low voice when
there was no heart to feel with me when I was down?” (36). Then Miss Simons remembers
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that there is a shortage of girls in the domestic training course and she practically forces Adele
to follow the course. Boarding house workers set up domestic science courses because they
saw “instruction in hygiene and homemaking” as the most efficient way to Americanize the
young immigrant women (Batker 2000: 84). According to Batker, “domestic training could
encourage middle-class mores even as it served the middle class by alleviating the shortage of
domestics” (Batker 2000:84). But many girls were not keen on becoming domestic servants.
From the 1920s onwards different versions of New Womanhood questioned previous
domestic ideas (Batker 2000:84). The New Women did not want to be homebound and opted
for a job in the factory because factory work, however tedious, provided a wider world view
and more independence. This little historical sketch clarifies Adele‟s resistance to becoming a
domestic servant but her resistance can also be attributed to another factor. Adele rightly
observes that the course is a form of “cultural imperialism”: the scientific cooking and
cleaning methods try to eradicate ethnic forms of domesticity (Stubbs 2004: xv). The young
woman impugns the pseudo-scientific approach to household management:
“Sort your dishes,” commanded Miss Perkins;
“What‟s that?” I asked.
“Look in your notebook, rule one.”
“All the dishes together, it‟s so much quicker.”
A steely glint appeared in Miss Perkins‟s eye. But her voice was low and ladylike. “Are you
trying to teach me how they wash dishes on the East Side. You are here to learn how to work
scientifically.”
I thought I‟d die of dullness trying to be “scientific.” A whole morning spent on different ways
to make white sauce (40).
But the urge to please the Home‟s benefactors overrules her objections. When she discovers
that Miss Perkins finds her “absolutely hopeless,” (40) she decides to show the woman what
she is worth and stays up all night to clean the kitchen. With her work she gains the approval
of Miss Perkins and the other members of the board of directors. To show her gratitude Adele
writes a letter of thanks in which she calls the ladies of the home “benefactors of humanity,
saviours of her soul” and the home “a lighthouse of love to all the homeless ones of the
world” (43). Mrs. Hellman is so pleased with the letter that she invites Adele to her house to
discuss the plans she has in mind for the girl and to give her some of her daughter‟s old
clothes. When Adele visits Mrs. Hellman, she is enthralled by the elegant interior of the
house. She believes the beautiful furnishings are direct proof of Mrs. Hellman‟s noble and
tender personality (Schoen 1982: 78). “How much finer, more sensitive the Hellmans must be
than plain people – they with so much beauty around them every day of their lives” (46). But
the further course of events shows the discrepancy between these ideas and reality. Mrs.
Hellman‟s main concern is to reconcile Adele with her low position in the social hierarchy.
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“It is almost a religion with me, this mission of teaching the masses that there is no such thing
as drudgery. There are no menial tasks if you bring to your work the spirit of service and the
love of honest toil. …If only women could bring into their homes this self-sacrificing attitude
toward life! Isn‟t it just as satisfying to the soul to feel you have scrubbed a floor faithfully as
to be mistress of the house. In doing your cheerful, conscientious best, in your humble sphere,
you are doing your part toward the harmony and perfection of the whole universe.” (46) …
Some day you‟ll realize that your greatest blessing in life is the discipline of being poor and
having to count your pennies” (51).
Not until “the benefactor” rejects Adele‟s gratitude for the cast-off clothes does the girl
understand that she is only a second-class citizen in Mrs. Hellman‟s eyes, for she wipes
Adele‟s kiss of her cheek as if she could catch a disease. Stubbs points out that “Mrs.
Hellman‟s deliberate physical rejection of Adele … initiates Adele‟s painful realization of the
power differential upon which charity is predicated, the underlying inequities of the class
system” (Stubbs 2004: xxvii).
A wild thought came to me. I wanted to take the clothes back to Mrs. Hellman and tell her:
“I‟m nothing and nobody in your eyes. I‟m only one of your damn charities. Why fool myself?
…Why should they have the glory of giving and we the shame of taking like beggars the bare
necessities of life? (49).
Adele‟s visit to the Hellmans serves as the first major step in the unmasking of the charity
givers‟ intentions. The following chapters give more examples of their hypocrisy.
Mrs. Hellman has offered Adele a job as waitress in her own house so the girl can learn “how
a household of the first class arranged the details of its service” (61). While serving the
benefactors of the Home on their monthly meeting, she eavesdrops on their conversation. In
this highly ironical scene Yezierska portrays the ladies as shallow, self-centred parvenus who
have no real interest in the lives of the immigrant girls. Mrs. Stone, who weighs 200 pounds,
complains that they are doing the girls “a positive injury with so much pampering”: “I‟ve
been quite worried about the future of our girls. …You all know the besetting vices of the
working class are discontent and love of pleasure. Have we the right to give our girls luxuries
they can‟t afford when they‟re out of our care?” (62). Her complaint meets with the approval
of the other women. They all believe they should not confuse the girls‟ standards of living
with their own, because it would be “utterly disastrous for them to get wrong notions of
superiority” (62). The conversation shows the charity workers‟ deep-routed fear that the
working-class women could unsettle the class hierarchy if they do not adjust themselves “to
the conditions in which they are born” (62) (Stubbs 2004: xxviii). Yezierska brilliantly
counterposes the criticism on the girls‟ behaviour and appearance with the benefactors‟ own
“excesses” in clothing (Stubbs 2004: xxviii). After the immaculately dressed Mrs. Gordon has
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vented her spleen on the fact that shop girls wear silk stockings and fur coats, Mrs.
Gessenheim, “the preacher of efficiency”(63), passes to the order of the day, namely the
deficit in the Home‟s budget. She proposes that chopped meat be served instead of roast beef
to eliminate the deficit, but Mrs. Hellman does not want to economize in the girls‟ diet. The
latter even suggests surprising the girls with a special treat to celebrate her birthday. But the
real motivation behind her generosity becomes clear when she says: “It would have made
such a splendid newspaper story. Two hundred poor girls made happy because of my
birthday. And publicity for the Home is so essential” (66). With these simple words she
betrays why she and the other ladies perform charity work. They help the poor for personal
profit: “For your magnificent donation your name will be written in letters of gold on the
tables of our institution” (67). After the meeting, the benefactors enjoy a copious lunch while
wallowing in self-pity:
“But it‟s so tiresome, not to be able to eat or sleep enough,” complained Mrs. Gordon, helping
herself to more olives. “Always having to worry over one‟s figure.”
Squabs on toast, asparagus, endive salad, disappeared while Mrs. Stone and Mrs. White
discussed the latest scientific methods of eating to grow thin.
“Look at the girls of the Home – straight, lithe …They may indulge in all the desserts they can
get. If they only knew how we have to deny ourselves … they‟d be thankful!” (68).
Although they witness poverty daily, they are so self-centred that they fail to understand how
privileged they are. Adele however is well aware of the power relations in American society,
especially when she discovers that Mrs. Hellman, “the Friend of the Working Girl” (69), has
been paying her less than the girls from the agency. Despite the fact that she made a vow
never to serve again in her benefactress‟ home, she accepts Arthur Hellman‟s offer to work at
a party for the aspiring musician Jean Rachmansky. The prospect of seeing Mrs. Hellman‟s
son after months of secret adoration, makes her forget her anger. In her naïveté she fools
herself that Arthur is not “a stingy philanthropist like his mother” (72). But just like his
mother he rejects her affection. Although Arthur withdraws when she tells him how she feels,
“the party proves a major step in her maturation: for the first time she discovers a world of
values that is not dependent on material possessions” (Schoen 1982: 79) Listening to the
music, she receives a “new sense of life.” “Life was not what you put in your stomach, or
wore on your back, or the house you lived in. It was what you felt in your heart and thought in
your mind” (73).
Stripped of all illusions but fortified by her new insight, she decides to avenge herself on the
charity workers. She sees her chance when she is asked to give a speech of gratitude at the
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annual open meeting of the home. Instead of finishing her set speech, Adele reveals her true
feelings. She publicly denounces the benefactors of the home as hypocritical “Ladies
Bountiful” who engage with charity to boost their own ego.
“Hypocrites! Shaming me before strangers – boasting of your kindness … Feeding your vanity
on my helplessness – my misfortune … You had to advertise to all – „Remember, beggar,
where you would have been if it hadn‟t been for us! Shylocks! … worse than Shylocks!
Shylock only wanted the man‟s flesh. You want his soul. You robbed me of my soul, my
spirit. You robbed me of myself. … Publicity Hounds! Why this holler about the Working Girl
when all you‟re after is you picture in the paper?” (86-87).
She targets “the self-loathing that charity creates in the charity recipient, and the way such
charity enforces class distinctions rather than abolishing them” (Stubbs 2004: xxviii). She
feels that she been forced to betray herself. “Gratitude you want? For what? Because you
forced me to become your flunkey – your servant? Because you crushed the courage out of
me when I was out of a job? Forced me to give up my ambition to be a person and learn to be
your waitress”? (87). After her passionate speech Adele flees from the home and returns to
the Lower East Side.
In the familiar ghetto streets she finds values that she had disregarded before her stay in the
boarding home (Schoen 1982: 79). Especially Muhmenkeh teaches her what is really
important in life. Adele meets the old, poverty-stricken woman in the restaurant where she
works as a dishwasher. Muhmenkeh is the exact opposite of the immaculately dressed charity
women: “Gray skin, gray stringy hair, gray rags. It had seemed to me nothing on earth could
be as terrible as to grow so old and so bent. And yet she could smile and receive me with that
warm, rich friendliness of a person who feels she has much to give” (95). The old woman
shelters Adele and takes care of the girl when she falls ill. With her generous and warmhearted nature she represents the Eastern European form of charity. As I mentioned before,
charity was conducted completely different in Eastern Europe. They attached great value on
the notion of tsdokeh, the Hebrew word for “social justice” (Stubbs 2004: xxix). Tsdokeh
entailed that every member of the community was expected to help the poor, proportioned to
his income. Material or spiritual help that was given with kindness was considered the highest
form of giving. To spare the charity recipient humiliation, secret or anonymous gifts were
preferred. According to the shtetl tradition the assimilated German Jews in Arrogant Beggar
are not “good Jews” because they do not respect the ideology of tsdokeh (Stubbs 2004: xxx).
Instead of helping the immigrant girls discreetly, the benefactors of the boarding home bring
their charity work to public notice. Muhmenkeh and the other friends from the ghetto are
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depicted as truly charitable. Although they live in poverty, they share everything they have.
Mrs. Hershbein saves the best piece of gefülte fish for Adele and her son Shlomoh is so
generous that he spends his last penny on a bouquet of roses for the girl. But Muhmenkeh
surpasses the others in goodness. She freely tends a neighbour‟s baby, comforts her
neighbours with a cup of coffee and takes the homeless Adele to her home. Not only does she
nurse Adele back to health, she also spends all the money she has saved for her
granddaughter‟s ship ticket on medical care (Schoen 1982: 85). The ghetto world shows
Adele that charity can be based on mutual support and affection. In contrast to the patronizing
philanthropy of the charity workers, Muhmenkeh‟s help is based on an equal relationship
between giver and receiver: she accepts gifts from the neighbours as willingly as she provides
them (Stubbs 2004: xxxi). Experiencing the unconditional friendship of the old woman, Adele
muses: “There flowed over me a sense of peace, of homecoming. Here was the real world I
knew. … How I wasted my young years trying to catch on to the false shine of the rich – only
to come back to the beginnings of myself (97).
As a result she turns down Arthur Hellman‟s offer to bring her to a private sanatorium. Ever
since Adele‟s fierce attack on his mother and the other women of the home, Arthur had been
searching for her. When he finally finds her, he is anxious to make up for his past behaviour
and turns into “a typical Lord Bountiful in a Christmas story” (107). He runs errands for
Muhmenkeh, does the housekeeping, treats Adele to expensive food and tries to help
Muhmenkeh financially. But the old woman rejects his monetary help because she does not
want to be an object of charity. She prefers to retain her independence and self-respect. “No,
Mister. Your heart is good. But Gott sei dank, I got yet my hands and feet to earn me my
every cent. …God is yet good. With what bitter sweat I struggle for each cent I earn, but it‟s
all my own – this place –when I pay my rent” (96,110). After the example of Muhmenkeh,
Adele rejects Arthur‟s offer of money. She wants to stand on her own feet, not “fly with
borrowed feathers” (112). Consequently she also turns down his marriage proposal because
she realizes that she will never be treated as his equal.
“You are Sir Galahad. It‟s not me you‟re interested in. You‟re only interested in being Sir
Galahad. … I‟d never feel your equal even though I was, because I‟d be smothered by your
possessions …” (117).
Muhmenkeh‟s sudden death inspires Adele to spread her friend‟s spirit of generosity. She
uses the knowledge she gained from her domestic science training to convert the dingy
basement into a coffee house where the customers can alleviate their physical and spiritual
hunger (Stubbs 2004: xxxii).
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4.3. Ethnographic research
The “immigrant problem” not only attracted the attention of social workers, the massive
influx of immigrants also created new challenges for sociologists and anthropologists. As a
result social science changed its methodology in the early twentieth century. Many
anthropologist tried to replace, what Jirousek calls, spectacle ethnography with the practice of
participant-observation (Jirousek 2002: 27). “The father of American anthropology,” Franz
Boas introduced the practice of “living among, observing and recording a studied culture” to
refute scientific racism (Jirousek 2002: 27). At the beginning of the twentieth century many
Anglo-Saxons supported the theory that the Teutonic or Nordic race was superior to other
white races and to coloured people. This racial theory had some prominent followers:
As president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, anthropologist
Daniel Brinton upheld this theory in 1895: “The black, the brown, and the red races differ
anatomically so much from the white … that even with equal cerebral capacity they never
could rival its results by equal efforts.” Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, co-founder
of the Immigration Restriction League, complained that new immigrants comprised races
“most alien to the body of the American people and from the lowest and most illiterate classes
among those races” (Jirousek 2002: 26).
Spectacle ethnography adopted the above-mentioned outlook and assumed that the new
immigrants were inferior to the Anglo-Saxons and “inherently unsuited for American
citizenship” (Jirousek 2002: 26). Consequently spectacle ethnographers proposed two
different, but equally oppressive, solutions to “the immigrant problem”: exclusion or
Americanization. Boas spoke out against the racial hierarchy and championed cultural
relativism. He hoped that participant-observation would underpin his claim that cultural
differences did not “imply levels of superiority or inferiority” (Jirousek 2002: 27).
Boas and Yezierska‟s mentor, John Dewey, met each other when the latter became a member
of Columbia‟s philosophy department. Some of Boas‟ ideas found resonance in Dewey‟s
philosophy. Like Boas, he maintained that the Anglo-Saxon tradition was not superior to other
traditions.
“I never did care for the melting pot metaphor, but genuine assimilation to one another – not to
Anglo saxondom [sic] – seems to be essential to America. That each cultural section should
maintain its distinctive literary and artistic traditions seems to be most desirable, but in order
that it might have more to contribute to others. … The hyphen in the hyphenated American
must connect, not separate” (Schoen 1982: 12).
So when Dewey commenced his study of the Polish immigrant community in Philadelphia, he
used the anthropological techniques taught by Boas. But Yezierska demonstrates in her novel
All I Could Never Be that many American observers reverted to spectacle ethnography once
they were working in the field. In the novel Yezierska narrates her experiences as a translator
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for a team of graduate students who studied the living conditions of Polish immigrants. The
purpose of the study was to discover why these immigrants defied assimilation and why the
second generation continued to remain separate from the rest of the city (Hendriksen 1988:
94). Dewey‟s students hoped that the study would show them how to solve ethnic isolation.
Like Dewey, the fictional Henry Scott wants to eradicate biased representations of ethnic
minorities. He believes that Fanya‟s immigrant perspective will help the study group to
achieve this goal. With her help he hopes to “build a bridge of understanding between the
different races and people of the world” (70). But even before the start of the study, Fanya
questions Scott‟s scientific methodology: “How will you set about to know the Poles? How
can Americans with their cold hearts and clear heads ever come to know people burning up
with a million volatile ideas? … I hope it won‟t be another study of the poor. Words. Grand
words, but nothing back of them” (37). As a Jewish immigrant she sympathizes more with the
Polish informants than the other members of the team and she worries that an impersonal
investigation will silence the immigrant voice (Jirousek 2002: 43). She does not think that the
study will ameliorate the living conditions of the ethnic minority. Her scepticism increases
when Scott describes Americanization as “typically an agreeable and inevitable process”
(Jirousek 2002: 43): “Our whole history is one of assimilation. We began as Anglo-Saxons.
And look at our country now! Jews, Italians, Poles – all the nations of the world are weaving
themselves into this interracial symphony” (38). But Fanya‟s own experiences have given her
a different outlook.
There rose before her the thwarted, inarticulate, starved lives she knew in the factory.
Crowded blocks of Poles, Jews, Italians who had lost their own national heritage and had not
gained a true American one. Islands of foreign-born who remained shut out of America, shut
out from one another, behind the barrier of their racial differences.
“Symphony of nations!” she reiterated his words in emphatic denial. “If you knew the
rumble of discord, the jarring and clashing of nationalities that really goes on! Who cares for
the culture immigrants bring with them? They may sell the labor of their bodies. But how
many get the chance to give to America the hopes in their hearts, the dreams of their minds?”
(38).
Fanya knows from personal experience that “genuine assimilation to one another” is an
almost unattainable dream. Instead of maintaining their distinctive traditions, immigrants have
to discard many aspects of their ethnic identity. She knows that the assimilation process
involves conflict and struggle. Her different perspective causes more problems once the
research project begins. While Fanya promotes personal contact, her colleagues remain aloof
and support the conventional scientific method which is impersonal and objective.
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When Fanya probes Miss Foster‟s intentions, she discovers that her colleague is not really
interested in gaining deeper insight into the lives of the Polish immigrants. Miss Foster admits
that she participates in the study because “it was one of the first jobs to open up. A chance to
get some experience” (80). She thought she “might get quite a kick out of visiting the foreign
homes” (80). Hearing her motivation, Fanya concludes that the project is only “a slumming
adventure” to Miss Foster. The female sociologist is not the only one who maintains a safe
distance between herself and the informants, the other researchers also prefer observation to
participation. Consequently they privilege “a spectacle ethnography of surface interpretation
over thorough understanding” (Jirousek 2002: 44). In contrast, Fanya encourages the
members of the ethnographic study to “go out and meet the Poles” (81). She wants them to
put their reservations aside and plunge into the daily lives of the immigrants because it seems
to her that “you must feel first what people love and admire – to know them” (81) (Jirousek
2002: 44). Despite Fanya‟s ardent plea for a more personal approach, her colleagues stick to
the traditional method, which entails gathering facts and reading reference books.
Miss Foster read an interview with the social worker who had told her of some of the
interesting “cases” of the neighbourhood. There followed an account of a talk with a priest,
another with a school-teacher. The social worker with her “cases”, the priest with his parish,
the teacher with her class – all glibly forgetting the individual in their abstractions. The Poles
were to them people outside themselves. Specimens, types they could tabulate and pigeonhole
in their daily reports (82).
But Fanya cannot keep her distance from the informants because “the Poles were a living part
of herself” (82). The Polish immigrants however view Fanya as one of the cold-blooded,
American researchers who only love statistics. The editor of one of the Polish newspapers
asks her, “Well, has your Americanization bunch set the world on fire yet? … Whatever got
you in with those hundred percenters – those Saviours of Society?” (89). The critical remarks
of the newspaper editor give her food for thought: “What were all the social studies worth that
would improve things in ten or twenty years to this man who wanted work now?” (92). With
these words Fanya reveals the limitations of the project. Unlike her colleagues, she is aware
that the scientific method with its focus on objectivity has precluded “familiarity” with the
immigrant community (Jirousek 2002: 46). By keeping their distance from the immigrants,
the investigators have unconsciously disabled the research: not only did they limit their access
to information; they also made the project irrelevant to the lives of the Poles (Jirousek 2002:
46). Nearly a century ago, Yezierska already recognized what modern anthropologists such as
Alma Gottlieb, Philip Graham and Garcia call “ethnographic responsibility” or “reciprocity”:
ethnography has not only the task to give a detailed description of the studied community but
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it must also try to benefit the community (Jirousek 2002: 28). But in 1918 this point of view
was not yet established. Just as they alienated the Polish immigrants, the investigators
estrange Fanya from the study. Instead of using her “insider‟s perspective” (Jirousek 2002:
26), they want to get rid of Fanya. The chairman of the group writes a letter to Scott, asking
for her discharge because “her attitude is so destructively critical” (93): “She colors all she
observes with her own overemotionalism so much that we feel we cannot depend on her
observations as scientifically accurate. We fear she would infect the whole study with her
persecution mania, her unfortunate psychosis” (94). Scott, however refuses to dismiss her and
suggests that they find a more vital method of approach so that the ethnographic study will
provide more than “rooms stacked full of tabulated facts that are not worth the paper they‟re
written on” (97). Unfortunately the project turns out to be another dry enumeration of facts
and figures.
Disillusioned by the study, Fanya refuses to write her final report because “the study is as
unreal as social work and helping the poor” (108). Rather than giving the Polish immigrants
the opportunity to explain why they resist assimilation, the ethnographic study engaged in
spectacle ethnography by imposing the American perspective (Jirousek 2002: 45).
“You know less about the Poles than when you started out to study them three months ago.
Reports only cover the chasm. … Well, what have we got? Words – words – words. We have
been awfully busy – with – with nothing – … You know nothing about the heart of the Poles.
Without love, what is there to write about?” (109).
This time Scott is not pleased with her criticism and he defends his methods. Her rejection of
his romantic approach earlier in the story has made him less sympathetic toward her. Now he
is the one who accuses Fanya of being too emotional.
“Haven‟t we had a competent staff of investigators? Haven‟t we interviewed representative
leaders of the community? Haven‟t we gathered data from a large number of families?
Haven‟t we examined basic, social and economic conditions among them? Problems are
solved by reason – not emotion. You are ardent and emotional, and your approach is always a
personal one; but unfortunately it won‟t do in a case like this. Try to leave yourself out of it for
once – if a woman ever could” (108-110).
In reality, Dewey‟s “public version of the actual ethnographic report, published in the New
Republic”, showed a better understanding of the Polish immigrant community than Yezierska
suggests in All I Could Never Be (Jirousek 2002: 27). Problems in their personal relationship
have no doubt influenced her account of the study. As always, we should not confuse reality
with fiction.
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4.4. Exclusion and Discrimination
As I explained at the beginning of this chapter, immigrants came to America with nothing but
high hopes. They believed that America would offer boundless opportunities, but reality
destroyed their dreams. Only the fortunate few found fame and riches, most immigrants
however encountered financial hardship and had no choice but to accept charity from “Ladies
Bountiful.” The greatest disappointment, perhaps, was the frosty welcome native Americans
gave them. Schoen points out that “part of the myth of America had been the idea of
acceptance of all people” (Schoen 1982: 3). Especially Jewish immigrants hoped that they
would finally be treated as equals instead of second-class citizens. Unfortunately antiSemitism was equally present in the Promised Land. In the story “Brothers” Yezierska
describes a familiar situation for many East European immigrants. On their walk through the
city the main character and his family have to swallow anti-Semitic comments from passersby: “ „More Bolsheviki!‟ scoffed a passerby. „Trotzky‟s ambassadors,‟ sneered another. And
the ridicule was taken up by a number of jeering voices” (Children of Loneliness 141).
The attitudes which shaped post-World War I anti-Semitism already began to take shape at
the end of the nineteenth century (Rischin1962: 258). In the popular press Jews were
stereotyped as shrewd, money-grabbing businessmen who were hatching a worldwide
financial conspiracy. In the presidential election of 1896, the Reverend Isaac M. Haldeman of
New York‟s First Baptist Church fanned the paranoia.
The time is coming when the Jews will rule the world. They are already its financial masters.
In a few years they will control every professional and every branch of commerce and
industry. The largest commercial interests of New York are already in their hands. The day is
fast approaching when an anti-Christ will rise among the Jews who will devastate the nations
of Europe and build up in Palestine the most powerful kingdom on earth (Rischin 1962: 259).
American fears of foreigners turned into overt racism after World War I. The American
society became increasingly intolerant of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. Nativists were
convinced that the new immigrants polluted solid American values with their alien religious
and political convictions (Norton 2007: 446). In their eyes the Eastern European immigrants
planned a Bolshevik uprising in imitation of the Russian Revolution. American fears grew
when the Soviet leaders founded the Communist International to “export revolution
throughout the world” (Norton 2007: 428). The American establishment decided to take
action after an unsuccessful bomb attack on Labour Day, 1919. Although the police never
captured the perpetrators, many Americans put the blame on pro-Bolshevik sympathizers or
“the Reds.” J. Edgar Hoover responded to the Red danger with violent raids. Over four
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thousand people were arrested on suspicion of conspiracy, six hundred of them, mainly
immigrants of Russian origin, were deported (Yezierska‟s friend Rose Pastor Stokes was
among those arrested). The Palmer Raids was supported by Nativist groups who claimed that
immigrants were a threat to America. According to Madison Grant, who wrote The Passing of
the Great Race, immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe “threatened to weaken
American society because they were inferior mentally and morally to earlier Nordic
immigrants” (Norton 2007: 385). As a result the employment signs that had once announced
“No Irish Need Apply” were now substituted with signs that said “No Jews Need Apply”
(Schoen 1982: 3).
In Red Ribbon on a White Horse Yezierska narrates her painful search for a job. As a Jewish
girl she encounters nothing but rejections to her applications.
A bank in the Jewish clothing district wanted a beginner. I was among the first to apply. The
room was crowded with girls when the door of the inner office opened and the personnel
manager stuck his head out. “Are there any Jews here?” he asked, briefly scanning the girls‟
faces. “If so there‟s no need to stay. No Jewish girls are wanted for this particular job.”
I stood up and walked out quickly. Others followed me. Out in the street I could see nothing
but that man‟s face, hear nothing but that man‟s voice as he said, “No Jewish girls are wanted”
(105).
But she does not lose heart and keeps answering ads because she is convinced that in “some
office it isn‟t a crime to be born a Jew” (105). With renewed vigour she applies for a job as a
stenographer in the law firm of John Marrow. Not only does Marrow offer her the job, he also
gives her friendship and sympathy. His kindness restores her faith in America: “The
mountains of hurts carried on my back from czarist Russia, and the hurts piled up looking for
a job in America, dissolved. I had been accepted, recognized as a person. … I tasted the bread
and wine of equality” (107). All of Yezierska‟s heroines crave after friendship, love and
recognition from native Americans. But the Anglo-Saxon characters are often insensitive to
“the emotional outpourings” of the uninhibited immigrant women (Zaborowska 1995: 120).
In her autobiographical story “Mostly about Myself” in Children of Loneliness Yezierska
admits that her hunger after personal contact is stronger than her hunger after bread.
When I first started to write, I could only write one thing – different phases of the one thing
only – bread hunger. … And now I can write only the different phases of the one thing –
loneliness, love hunger, the hunger for people.
In the days of poverty I used to think there was no experience that tears through the bottom of
the earth like the hunger for bread. But now I know, more terrible than the hunger for bread is
the hunger for people (18).
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She ascribes “her unsatiable hunger for people” to the persecution and oppression which the
Jewish race suffered throughout history. In America she hopes to mingle with as many races
and classes as possible, but the majority of native Americans prefer to keep the exotic,
emotional Other at a distance. Experiencing the barrier between her and the Anglo-Saxons,
Yezierska‟s persona tries to convince her compatriots that they are alike, despite the physical
differences:
“When I first came to America, the coldness of the Americans used to rouse in me the fury of
a savage. Their impersonal, non-committal air was like a personal insult to me. I longed to
shake them out of their aloofness, their frozen stolidity. But now when I meet an AngloSaxon, I want to cry out: “We‟re friends, we‟re friends, I tell you! We understand the same
things, even tho we seem to be so different on the outside” (19).
In almost every novel Yezierska juxtaposes the emotional immigrant with the rational,
restrained native American. The young immigrant woman has no trouble expressing her
feelings while the Anglo-Saxon male or female dislikes an overt display of sentiments. It is
exactly the unrestrained show of emotions that alienates the native American. Miss
Farnsworth in All I Could Never Be is a good example of an Anglo-Saxon female who fears
the emotional nature of her Jewish “friend.” The prologue of the story narrates how Fanya
meets the cultured Miss Farnsworth in the department store where she works. Touched by
Fanya‟s loneliness Miss Farnworth invites the girl to spend Thanksgiving with her. Fanya
seizes the offer with both hands and enjoys a wonderful evening in the company of her
American friend. To thank her hostess, she writes an effusive poem in which she describes
Mss Farnsworth as “a Madonna,” “a Mother-spirit” (23). For days she waits for a reply but
she never receives an answer. Finally she realizes that “she had humbled herself, exposed the
famine of her soul to strangers. In her loneliness – her social famine – she had mistaken a
little friendliness, a gesture of politeness, for personal response” (24).
The prologue of the story draws the reader‟s attention to one of the central themes of the
story. But the prologue can only be fully understood if we compare it to the epilogue.
The latter begins abruptly with Fanya waking up in her new house in Oakdale, New England.
Initially she is enchanted by the warm welcome she receives from the inhabitants, by the
idyllic surroundings and the “timelessness of nature” (Schoen 1982: 92). Soon however she
discovers that discrimination not only exists in New York. Oakdale turns up its nose at East
Oakdale because “East Oakdale aren‟t real natives, they‟re not in the same class as Oakdale
proper” (223). The citizens of this small New England town turn out to be as intolerant of
others as the New Yorkers. Especially the excommunication of the eccentric Jane shatters
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Fanya‟s idealized image of Oakdale. Fanya feels a strong connection with the solitary woman:
“In Jane‟s ostracism, Fanya saw her aunt thrusting her out of the house because her head was
dirty, the disgust which the gentle Farnsworths must have felt at her letter, the fear that made
Henry Scott flee from her uncivilized emotions” (231). Remembering her own need for
human warmth, she tries to draw Jane out of her isolation but instead of helping the old
woman she only estranges herself from the rest of the community. The residents of the town
grow even more suspicious of Fanya when she befriends the Russian painter Vladimir
Pavlowich. Despite the fact that she is once again an outsider, she does not rebel against her
situation. For the first time in her life she “waits in peace for the unknown future” (Schoen
1982: 93). In this respect Yezierska deviates from her previous novels and the epilogue of All
I Could Never Be. In the prologue Fanya decides to fight for acceptance, for access to the
world of the native Americans. The events in the epilogue show that Fanya has matured
during the novel: she no longer fights for things beyond her reach. On the contrary, she
remains passive (Schoen 1982: 93). However, the prologue and epilogue are closely
connected. In both of them appears a solitary outsider who has been accepted in the dominant
culture, but “has offended the sensibilities of the „in‟ group” (Schoen 1982: 93). This leads to
the exclusion of the main character.
In her story “Bread and Wine in the Wilderness,” published in The Open Cage, Yezierska
treats the same theme of exclusion. The story strongly resembles the epilogue of All I Could
Never Be. Like Fanya, the narrator moves from New York to a small New England town. She
believes she has finally found “the gift of home” (195) but at the Thanksgiving Day she
experiences that she will never belong to this close-knit community. Hearing anti-Semitic
remarks at the town celebration, she becomes aware of her outsider status and the
incompatible differences between Judaism and Christianity (Zaborowska 1995: 162). Finally
she sees “the futility of all her attempts to become a Fair Oaks villager” (205). She realizes
that she can only find inner peace if she embraces her Jewish heritage.
With a sudden sense of clarity I realized that the battle I thought I was waging against the
world had been against myself, against the Jew in me. I remembered my job-hunting,
immigrant days. How often when I had sought work in Christian offices had I been tempting
to hide my Jewishness – for a job! It was like cutting off part of myself. That was why there
was no wholeness, no honesty, in anything I did. That was why I always felt so guilty and so
unjustly condemned – an outsider wherever I went (206).
As in Bread Givers Yezierska depicts the price of cultural accommodation (Girgus 1984:
111).
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5. Idiom and Style
5.1. Her Style of Writing
From the beginning, Yezierska‟s writing style provoked differing opinions among critics.
In several stories Yezierska dramatizes her struggle to find publishers willing to print her
work. Time and time again publishers rejected her stories, saying: “It‟s not a story; it has no
plot”; “feeling without form”; “erotic, over-emotional” (Children of Loneliness 88). Their
negative criticism did not discourage her; on the contrary, she rewrote her stories, infusing
them with even stronger emotions. Her perseverance was rewarded in the spring of 1919
when she sold “The Fat of the Land” to the influential literary magazine Century (Hendriksen
1988: 123). In the following months, editors started to embrace her fiction. “From being a
strange and freakish writer, she had become an acquired taste. Novelty was desirable, once
someone had tested it” (Hendriksen 1988: 123). Suddenly the sentimental style of writing
became her trademark and contributed to her success. Two critics hailed Salome of the
Tenements as an ingenious work. “An orgy of emotions … poetized chaos” but “shot through
with genius. Handed by any other novelist addicted to Hebrew themes, the [story of the novel]
would hardly have risen above the level of high comedy. Anzia Yezierska has passed it
through the sieve of her astonishing temperament and produced a work of art – sentimental,
illogical, hysterical, and naïve, but still a work of art” (Hendriksen 1988: 180). But these
critics were far outnumbered by others who pleaded for more restraint and self-control. By the
late 1920s many readers began to question the quality of her fiction. We can better understand
these dismissive evaluations if we see them in the light of the literary developments of that
period.
The 1920s were the heydays of modernism. Writers such as Proust, Joyce and Döblin defined
the age by rejecting traditional forms and opting for experimentation. Yezierska‟s sentimental
tales about life in the ghetto were no longer fashionable. As I mentioned in the first chapter,
critics considered her sentimentalism “conventional – manipulative, simplistic, excessive – in
contrast to modernism‟s formalist innovations and its interest in discontinuity and selfconscious experimentation” (Stubbs 2004: xvii). Modernism embraced a disruption of the
established conventions and renounced the sentimental, which they regarded as characteristic
of low art. But modernists overlooked that the sentimental could also be “transgressive”
(Stubbs 2004: xviii). Because the sentimental was a genre mainly dominated by female
writers, they could use this genre to convey their message (Stubbs 2004: xviii). This is what
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Yezierska did. She chose the sentimental style of writing to emphasize the material or
emotional deprivation on the Lower East Side and she never gave up that sentimentality. It
was also a discourse Yezierska knew from her childhood days. As a young girl she was
fascinated by the Yiddish theatre, which had the power to unlock intense emotions in its
audience. It was a theatre characterized by melodramatic plots and a bombastic style and
steeped in pathos: Yiddish plays voiced “primary, unevaded emotions, Jewish emotions that
had only yesterday escaped from the prisonhouse of Europe” (Howe 1976: 473). Precisely
because Yiddish playwrights rejected the quiet modernist style, the more cultivated
theatregoers and critics branded the Yiddish theatre as coarse entertainment. But the majority
of Jewish immigrants loved it. They went en masse to the theatre and shared in the grief of the
characters on stage. Gerard Sorin points out that the audience was actively involved in the
performance.
Crying, always part of an evening at the Yiddish theatre, was cathartic for the bone-weary
workers who made up most of the house. Laughter at characters with familiar problems was
just as prevalent as tears and helped immigrants recognize their own strength and motivation
to hold on – even to succeed (Sorin 1992: 100).
Viewers ate and drank, cheered the actors on and even gave them good advice. One Jewish
man was so absorbed in The Jewish King Lear that he almost ran on stage shouting: “To hell
with your stingy daughter, Yankl! She has a stone, not a heart. Spit on her, Yankl, and come
home with me. My yidene [Jewish wife] will feed you. Come Yankl, may she choke, that
rotten daughter of yours” (Sorin 1992: 100). It is not unlikely that Yezierska wanted to evoke
similar emotional responses with her work.
The Yiddish theatre found expressiveness more important than structure or a carefully
thought-out plot (Howe 1976: 494). Unlike the modern and classical productions of the West,
the Yiddish plays were not interested in giving long reflections on existential problems.
Instead, they wanted to “hold up a mirror of recognition to its audience” (Howe 1976: 494).
The plays dealt with problems faced by every immigrant family. How to reconcile their
Jewish heritage with American values and mores? How to deal with generational conflicts
between parents and their Americanized children? How to practice their religion in a mainly
protestant country? In short, how to be a Jew in an American society (Sorin 1992: 100). By
presenting immigrant dilemmas on stage, the Yiddish theatre gave immigrants a better insight
into their own life in America and helped them tackle similar problems. To make sure that
even the most ill-lettered immigrant was able to find his own story in what was shown, the
plays made use of predictable plots and cardboard characters.
104
With these characteristics in mind, we could argue that Yezierska closely followed the
conventions of the Yiddish theatre. Her fiction is also characterized by melodramatic plots,
simplistic story lines, stock characters and an energetic style. One critic wrote that “every
time she sat down to write, it was as tho her heart would set the paper aflame” (Hendriksen
1988). Yezierska was well aware that her novels often lacked a tight structure.
I envy the writers who can sit down at their desks in the clear calm security of their vision and
begin their story at the beginning and work it up logically, step by step, until they got to the
end. … I‟m too much on fire to wait till I understand what I see and feel. My hands rush out to
seize a word from the end, a phrase from the middle, or a sentence from the beginning. … And
I paste them together with my own blood (Children of Loneliness 10).
Because her writing has a loose structure and because she uses melodramatic clichés and
happy endings, she is often considered to be “a marginal author” (Zaborowska 1995: 118).
But Zaborowska argues that the clichéd happy endings are a deliberate strategy:
She gives her readers a seemingly optimistic conclusion, one that can either make a fairy tale
ending or inspire them to search for some hidden subtext. … Pasting a clichéd happy
conclusion onto an otherwise pessimistic story about the drudgery of a working-class woman‟s
manual labor allows the text to pass politically as immigrant propaganda while it discloses the
oppressive structure of the ideological message it is expected to carry” (Zaborowska 1995:
125).
This is again an argument for the transgressive power of the sentimental genre.
105
5.2. Her Idiom
Not only her writing style elicited different reactions, her idiom was also a matter of dispute
among readers and critics. Yezierska‟s language is peppered with Yiddish expressions or
literal translations of Yiddish phrases. The reader often encounters words and expressions as
God from the world, Oi weh, gefülte fish, nu, gazlin, schnorrer, mammeh, pogromschiks,
mouzhiks, lokshen, kugel, rifkeh, yok et cetera. Furthermore, her characters often speak broken
English. They make grammatical errors, which results in peculiar sentences like “For why
must I come there,” “All the time I was trembling for fear somebody what knows me might
yet pass and see,” “I‟m forgetting from everything,” “I know what is with you the matter.”
Joyce Carol Oates wrote the following words about Yezierska‟s language: “Yezierska‟s prose
style reads as if it were translated from Yiddish – hardly as if it were self-consciously written
at all” (Codde 2001: 18). But in fact she worked hard at her ghetto idiom. Although the
sentences come across as very natural, she found it extremely difficult to write in the ghetto‟s
ungrammatical idiom. Years of intensive schooling had refined her language and erased many
idiosyncratic expressions (Konzett 1997: 606).
Therefore she asked her older sister Annie for help. According to Louise Levitas Hendriksen,
Annie was an important source of information; “she had a vivid way of talking about her life,
for instance giving details of her children‟s conversation and gestures that captured the whole
experience” (Hendriksen 1988: 21). Annie‟s imitation of her children and neighbours gave
Yezierska the inspiration to write the short story “The Free Vacation House,” which narrates
the experiences of a tired mother and her children in a Free Vacation House. With the help of
her older sister, Yezierska tried to convey the speech of such a ghetto mother but it was a
difficult process. The direct translation of the immigrant idiom did not sound natural so she
“carried her handwritten manuscript back to Annie repeatedly. They worked on the phrasing
while Annie was ironing, cleaning, or cooking. Hattie would coax Annie to remember how
her neighbors spoke, the Yiddish expressions they used, and then they would rework it into a
strange but picturesque English” (Hendriksen 1988: 22). This “picturesque English” became
characteristic of all her stories.
While Yezierska wanted to add a realistic touch to her stories by writing in the vernacular of
the Jewish immigrants, many critics felt that she was making fun of the immigrants who could
not speak correct English. Until then, only comedians like Montague Glass had used dialect to
caricature Yiddish speakers (Schoen 1982: 59). But it was not Yezierska‟s intention to mock
106
her people. She wanted to draw attention to the different social status of immigrants in the
American society. It would have been unrealistic to pretend that her characters spoke flawless
English. If she had transcribed the spoken language of her ghetto characters into proper
English, she would have lost the flavour and energy of the Yiddish vernacular (Schoen 1982:
59). With her linguistic innovations, she paved the way for other writers like Henry Roth,
who, in Call it Sleep, reaches a skilful compromise between broken English and correct
translations of Yiddish expressions (Schoen 1982: 59). Despite the negative criticism from
contemporaries we should not minimize Yezierska‟s ground-breaking efforts to depict the
linguistic diversity on the Lower East Side. In Arrogant Beggar we encounter one of the best
examples of this diversity:
An Irish girl with blue eyes and black hair roared with laughter. “Faith, you kids! It‟s at the
Waldorf you think you are. When I was with them Sisters, no feller would cross the door-step.
No fellers, no pettin‟ – gawd! That‟s worse „n bad eats.”
“Not for mine,” grumbled Minnie Rosen. “I can‟t live on lovin‟.”
“You kikes are always kicking.”
“And you wops – macaroni suckers” (22).
For the first time, Yezierska also includes the dialect of non-Jewish immigrants. Not only
does she identify them as immigrants, she also classifies the girls as working-class.
Especially her early stories reveal the extent to which language is a marker of class affiliation.
In “The Free Vacation House” Yezierska deliberately juxtaposes the broken English of the
mother with the standard English of the charity workers to show that language is indicative of
a person‟s position in the social hierarchy (Konzett 1997: 607).
“My dear woman,” the teacher said, “you are about to have a nervous breakdown. You need to
get away to the country for a rest and vacation.”
“Gott im Himmel!” says I. “Don‟t I know I need a rest? But how? On what money can I go
to the country?”
“I know of a nice country place for mothers and children that will not cost you anything. It is
free.”
“Free! I never heard from it.”
“Some kind people have made arrangements so no one need pay,” she explains (62).
The teacher‟s sentences are grammatically correct, “establishing her power to explain and
dictate as well as asserting her position as a spokesperson for an elite WASP culture and an
agent of assimilation” (Konzett 1997: 608). The immigrant mother however speaks a
language full of pathetic interjections and incorrect sentence structures. The discrepancy
between the idiom of the mother and that of the teacher highlights the superior position of the
latter. In this extract, language serves as the sign of “an American identity,” separating the
“assimilated immigrants” from the “unassimilable or un-American immigrants” (Konzett
107
1997: 603). Despite reform efforts to teach newcomers standard English in public schools,
many immigrants held on to the ghetto idiom. Yezierska discerned this anti-assimilationist
attitude and wrote stories in which her characters could speak their immigrant vernacular.
5.3. Stereotypes
Whereas Yezierska‟s writing style and language still found favour with certain critics, all of
them were ill-disposed toward her use of stereotypes. This feature of her fiction is a result of
her sentimental writing style because sentimental fiction relies heavily upon stereotyped
characters (Stubbs 2004: xix). As Jane Tompkins has argued, sentimental fiction employs
stereotypes to convey a lot of cultural information in a condensed form (Stubbs 2004: xix).
Jewish critics however found that those stereotypes had a pernicious effect on how Jewish
immigrants were perceived by native Americans. Her depiction of Russian Jewish character
traits seemed to support racist views about immigrants. The Jewish heroines are always
extremely emotional, passionate, boisterous and irrational. Yezierska‟s fiction is even
populated by characters that put the Jewish race in a bad light. In all her novels she stages
“money-crazed, fat-bellied and avaricious sweatshop bosses, landlords, pawnbrokers and
merchants (Stubbs 2004: xix). In Salome of the Tenements she gives one of her most
damaging representations of Jewish pawnbrokers when she describes Honest Abe.
Honest Abe was known in Delancy Street as the shrewdest bargain driver that ever shrugged
his shoulders and rubbed his hands beneath the three gilded balls. He had no family, no
friends. No cat nor dog ever came near him. The grey pallor in his face added an icy coldness
to the granite hardness of his features. But more terrifying than his forbidding features was the
hissing hoarseness of his cracked voice. … Poverty and want, sickness and woe of those about
him were the assets upon which his profits piled (59).
Yezierska often contrasts these money-crazed male characters with pious, otherworldly artists
who try to survive in a money-oriented society. Both stock characters court the heroine but
the Jewish girl prefers an Anglo-Saxon male who is depicted as rational, restrained and
inhibited by his traditional upbringing. Although the contrast between a cold, educated AngloSaxon and a “hot-blooded” immigrant girl served the sentimental narrative, it also sustained
the ideas of the eugenicist movement, which became increasingly popular in the early
twentieth century (Stubbs 2004: xx). While the negative criticism of Yezierska‟s idiom was
not always appropriate, Jewish critics had good reason to criticize the stereotyped
representation of Jews in her work, for these stereotypes could strengthen negative
perceptions of the Jewish community in America.
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Conclusion
Like other immigrant writers of her generation, Yezierska was concerned with the question of
identity. “Am I or do I want to be a secularized American, an assimilated Jew, or a Jewish
alien on the margin of a secular national culture reflective of a chiefly Christian past?”
(Marovitz 1988: 315). In her own life she had difficulty defining her position. She was one of
those thousands of Jewish immigrants who crossed the ocean, hoping for a better life in the
United States. In the first chapter, I showed that she actively pursued the “American Dream,”
and for a while she was a very successful writer; yet, she always felt an outsider. Her fiction
became the outlet for this sense of alienation. Every novel or short story is “suffused with the
unending trauma of adjustment, with the psychic stress of adaptation” (Kessler-Harris 2003:
xxx). Just as Yezierska herself, the protagonists long for a new American identity, but they
find out that they cannot ignore their roots.
In chapter 2, I focussed upon the process of Americanization. We could discern different
strategies for entering the dominant culture. Clothing became the first step toward
Americanization. Immigrants quickly realized that a new set of clothes was able to transform
them from “greenhorn” to “American.” Especially Jewish immigrants were anxious to lose
the label of greenhorn because they intended to stay in the United States (Schreier 1994: 92).
Yezierska‟s novels clearly reflect the newcomers‟ urge to shed their Old World outfits. Her
heroines scrimp and save to purchase stylish clothes because they hope that a new dress or a
fashionable hat will make them an American overnight. Yezierska also demonstrates that
clothes had the ability to transgress class boundaries. Especially her novel Salome of the
Tenements depicts the anxiety that working-class girls could infiltrate into the upper classes
by counterfeiting the appearance of high society women (Stubbs 1998: 163). High-class
women feared that immigrant girls would use their looks to catch a wealthy Anglo-Saxon
man. Indeed, intermarriage with a native American was an alternative strategy for finding
acceptance in the New World. Yezierska‟s fictional world is populated with characters who
hope that their Anglo-Saxon lovers will introduce them to American society. The Jewish
heroines are attracted to successful, educated males because they represent “the ideal of what
the New World can offer” (Fine 1988: 28). But the relationship between the restrained AngloSaxon and the emotional Jewish girl is doomed from the beginning: they are too different to
make the marriage work. Most of Yezierska‟s heroines come to realize that they can become a
person without the help of a man. Through education they try to rise from the ghetto.
109
Chapter 3 discussed the psychological cost of Americanization. This chapter showed that for
most Jewish immigrants, acculturation was not an easy process, because it implied a radical
break with time-honoured customs and traditions. Especially the older generation experienced
a severe sense of loss. Seeing that older immigrants had been raised in a rural, religion-based
society, they found it difficult to adapt themselves to the secular, urban lifestyle of American
people. Their children, however, were “far more the children of the metropolis” (Ewen 1985:
16). As a result, conflicts arose between immigrant parents and their Americanized children.
In Yezierska‟s fiction we encounter many examples of generational conflicts. As immigrant
daughters of America, Yezierska‟s heroines denounce the Old World traditions. The parents
for their part still honour the values from their homeland and look upon their children‟s
worldly behaviour with sorrow. But eventually, even the worldly children begin to realize that
the price of assimilation is high. For the Jewish woman the experience of Americanization
took on another dimension: she had to cope with male domination both in the Jewish and
American community (Wilentz 1991-92: 34). I ended this chapter with a discussion of the
ambiguity of success. Jewish immigrants came from a world that subordinated economic
activity to the study of the Torah and the Talmud. However, they immigrated to a country that
valued worldly success. As a result they wondered how they could enjoy material success
without betraying their heritage.
In chapter 4, I demonstrated that America did not live up to the immigrants‟ expectations.
From 1880 onward thousands of Jews from Eastern Europe came to America to escape
persecution. As we can read in Yezierska‟s fiction, most immigrants believed that the United
States was a land of milk and honey, a heavenly place. But the reality destroyed their inflated
dreams. They found themselves in crowded tenement blocks and they had to struggle for
survival. Instead of living a comfortable life, they were dependent upon charity. In many
stories, Yezierska ventilates her contempt for charity worker. She criticizes philanthropic
initiatives because they try to erase cultural differences by foisting the American lifestyle
upon immigrants. The greatest disillusion, however, was the racist attitude of many native
Americans. Yezierska‟s fiction makes clear that anti-Semitism was equally present in the
Promised Land. In the last and shortest chapter, I examined Yezierska‟s idiom and style of
writing. She conveyed the immigrant experience by using a sentimental writing style, a ghetto
idiom and ethnic stereotypes. She deliberately chose the sentimental discourse and never gave
up that sentimentality, although critics pleaded for more restraint. In every aspect Yezierska
was a remarkable woman, whose fiction has enriched American literature.
110
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