Anzia Yezierska

A young Jewish girl from New York's Lower East Side rebels against the tyranny and chauvinism of her immigrant father, determined to assert her freedom and independence.

A Novel

Bread Givers

The target of intense critical comment when it was first published in 1927, Arrogant Beggar’s scathing attack on charity-run boardinghouses remains one of Anzia Yezierska’s most devastating works of social criticism. The novel follows the fortunes of its young Jewish narrator, Adele Lindner, as she leaves the impoverished conditions of New York’s Lower East Side and tries to rise in the world. Portraying Adele’s experiences at the Hellman Home for Working Girls, the first half of the novel exposes the “sickening farce” of institutionalized charity while portraying the class tensions that divided affluent German American Jews from more recently arrived Russian American Jews. The second half of the novel takes Adele back to her ghetto origins as she explores an alternative model of philanthropy by opening a restaurant that combines the communitarian ideals of Old World shtetl tradition with the contingencies of New World capitalism. Within the context of this radical message, Yezierska revisits the themes that have made her work famous, confronting complex questions of ethnic identity, assimilation, and female self-realization. Katherine Stubbs’s introduction provides a comprehensive and compelling historical, social, and literary context for this extraordinary novel and discusses the critical reaction to its publication in light of Yezierska’s biography and the once much-publicized and mythologized version of her life story. Unavailable for over sixty years, Arrogant Beggar will be enjoyed by general readers of fiction and be of crucial importance for feminist critics, students of ethnic literature. It will also prove an exciting and richly rewarding text for students and scholars of Jewish studies, immigrant literature, women’s writing, American history, and working-class fiction.

Arrogant Beggar

Illus. with Scenes from the Photoplay, a Goldwyn Picture

Hungry Hearts

Salome of the Tenements shocked many critics and writers when first published in 1923, but its author was immediately hailed as a major new talent. A love story of a working-class Salome and her "highborn" John the Baptist, the novel is based on the real-life story of Jewish immigrant Rose Pastor's fairytale romance with the millionaire socialist Graham Stokes. It also reflects Yezierska's own aborted romance with the famous educator John Dewey. Yezierska's passionate but cynical novel poses oppositions such as cultural type/stereotype, passion/reason, and ethnic identity/assimilation, and it resonates powerfully to the contemporary reader.

Salome of the Tenements

First published in 1925, Anzia Yezierska's "Bread Givers" is the tale of a young Jewish-American immigrant woman and her struggle to control her own destiny in Manhattan's Lower East Side at the turn of the century. The novel is based in large part on Yezierska's own life experiences immigrating from Poland as a child and growing up in New York City in an Orthodox Jewish family. "Bread Givers" centers on the story of its main character, Sara Smolinsky, who lives with her older sisters and parents in a poor tenement in the Lower East Side. The Smolinsky family is destitute and struggles to make ends meet as the father, Reb, refuses to work and spends all his time studying the Torah and clinging to the traditions of the country he left behind. He arranges unhappy marriages for his older daughters in the hope of becoming rich himself. Sara vows to avoid her sisters' fates and takes her life into her own hands, pursuing an education and refusing to marry just because it is expected of her. "Bread Givers" is both an engaging portrait of New York at the beginning of the twentieth-century and a timeless tale of a young woman's journey of self-discovery and determination. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

Collected Stories

How I Found America

In stories that draw heavily on her own life, Anzia Yezierska portrays the immigrant's struggle to become a "real" American, in such stories as "Yekl," "Hunger," "The Fat of the Land," and "How I Found America." Set mostly in New York's Lower East Side, the stories brilliantly evoke the oppressive atmosphere of crowded streets and shabby tenements and lay bare the despair of families trapped in unspeakable poverty, working at demeaning jobs, and coping with the barely hidden prejudices of their new land. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Autobiography with an Introd. by W. H. Auden

Red Ribbon on a White Horse

A student is denied her diploma because of her unsightly appearance due to her grueling life going to school and supporting herself in grinding poverty, making her rebel against the divisions of class. Anzia Yezierska wrote about the struggles of female Jewish immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. She confronted the cost of acculturation and assimilation among immigrants. Her stories provide insight into the meaning of liberation for immigrants—particularly Jewish immigrant women.

Soap and Water

Bread Givers: a Novel

Anzia Yezierska wrote about the struggles of female Jewish immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. She confronted the cost of acculturation and assimilation among immigrants. Her stories provide insight into the meaning of liberation for immigrants—particularly Jewish immigrant women.

The classic novel of Jewish immigrants, with period photographs.

Bread Givers is a coming of age story set in the 1920s. As the novel begins Sara Smolinsky is a 10-year-old girl whose family has immigrated to New York City from Poland. Her father is an Orthodox rabbi who feels that it is up to his four daughters and his wife to support him as he studies the Torah. Sara watches as her father manipulates and orders her sisters into bad marriages and sees his many business mistakes. Determined not to let her father ruin her life as he did her sisters', Sara sets off on her own path that leads to family conflict, but with a promise of a better life. Masterfully written, a Jewish American Fiction Classic.

Anzia Yezierska tells of her odyssey from the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side to success in Hollywood and then a return to poverty in New York

Hungry Hearts is a collection of short stories by Jewish/American writer Anzia Yezierska first published in 1920. The short stories deal with the European Jewish immigrant experience from the perspective of fictional female Jews, each story depicting a different aspect of their trials and tribulations in poverty in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The stories were adapted into a film of the same name.

In stories that draw heavily on her own life, Anzia Yezierska (1880-1970) portrays the immigrant's struggle to become a "real" American. Set mostly on New York's Lower East Side, the stories brilliantly evoke crowded streets, shabby tenements, poverty, and ethnic prejudice. These stories are still relevant today, except the ethnic backgrounds are Latino and Asian.

A collection of ten short stories portraying immigrant life in 1920s New York City by the acclaimed Jewish American author of Bread Givers. Anzia Yezierska, known as the “Cinderella of the Tenements,” calls upon her own background as a child of immigrants who worked in sweatshops on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to bring to life stories of women struggling to survive in similar circumstances. From a hardworking woman who becomes the target of her children’s scorn and indifference when they find success to the young mother and her family who are subjected to humiliating rules and circumstances when offered a vacation in the country, these are tales of women who strive, dream, and fight to hold on to their dignity and identity in a harsh reality. “Coping with scholarly dependents and chiseling landlords, chafed by the class system, ravenous for learning and desperate for beauty, Anzia Yezierska’s protagonists have emotions they express in great, big, attention-getting gestures. . . . Louis B. Mayer was so taken by Yezierska’s stories he brought her to Hollywood: The film adapted from Hungry Hearts is about as loud as silent cinema gets.” —Tablet, “101 Great Jewish Books” “Poverty makes no one eloquent, and lack of opportunity to learn leaves its scars. Yezierska, despite her literary faults, is a remarkable writer, a recorder of a history that still is attached to us, that still follows us like a shadow.” —The Los Angeles Times “These stories . . . are, in fact, slices of life as much as fiction, in that tradition of American social realism which harks back to Dreiser.” —The Irish Times

And Other Stories

Lost masterpiece of ten tales by Jewish-American author of the early 20th century, set in New York City's Lower East Side, provides rich psychological portraits of immigrant mothers and daughters.

Stories of the Jewish-American Immigrant Experience

Anzia Yezierska (c.1880-1970) was born in Poland, emigrating to the United States in 1890. All I Could Ever Be is a semi-autobiographical account of a young Polish woman emigrating to the United States and becoming a successful writer.

Anzia Yezierska

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