In the course of the 1920s, the writer Anzia Yezierska published three striking and original novels about Jewish immigrant women who rose out of poverty.
When critics praised Yezierska’s work in her lifetime, it was most often for its authenticity. “One does not seem to read,” the Yale professor William Lyon Phelps wrote, of “Bread Givers,” in. “One is too completely inside.” But her novels were less realistic depictions of the Lower East Side than parables set in that place, informed by the twenty years she’d spent outside it.
The villagers of Chelm believe that they are wise men. Yezierska’s characters don’t realize that Old World wisdom looks like foolishness in the New World. Reb Smolinsky, the patriarch of “Bread Givers,” finds that the single-minded devotion to religious learning that conferred his high status in the Old World makes him a dupe and a schnorrer—a lazy beggar—in the eyes of Americans. He’s outraged when the landlady interrupts his worship to collect the rent; she sees only another deadbeat.
Yezierska’s prose, with its breathless fragments, repetitions, and mixed metaphors, creates its own frenetic motion. First, it’s the herring dancing, and then happiness, and then Sara herself. Early critics often mistook Yezierska’s writing as the product of uncontrolled emotion, but her exclamations—always revised in countless drafts—propel her stories forward. For Sara, the exhilaration of the herring sale soon gives way to the routine of work and need.
Yezierska received her real education while working as a teacher and living at the residential Rand School of Social Science. The Socialists who ran it didn’t think that workers needed training, or saving: rather, they hoped to supplement their “toil-won knowledge” so that they could change the world.
Feminists such as Key celebrated the egalitarian, “companionate” marriage, the scholar Mary V. Dearborn writes, as an alternative to patriarchal tradition. Yezierska’s partnership with Levitas seemed to come closest to that ideal when the two were apart. Shortly after she became pregnant with their daughter, Louise, Yezierska travelled to Long Beach, California, to visit her sister Fannie.
“I have decided to tear my heart out of my body,” Yezierska wrote to Pastor Stokes in the fall. She had given Levitas primary custody of Louise. Back in New York, Yezierska would see her daughter once a week. Levitas could give their child a comfortable life in a stable home, but he would not do most of the work of raising her, LouiseWhen Sara Smolinsky gets older, she works in a laundry while taking night classes, as Yezierska did as an adolescent. Sara, too, decides to leave her father’s home.
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