The Jewish American Female Bildungsroman

At about ten years old, Anzia Yezierska and her impoverished Jewish family immigrated to America from a Russian-Polish village with what must have been grandiose dreams of a better future for them all. She arrived in about 1890 with six siblings, three sisters and three brothers, and her parents, who were all “instantly Americanized” with new American names, according to her daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen. As Jewish Anzia Yezierska changed into American Hattie Mayer, the newly-Americanized family moved into a decrepit tenement, their first American home. All family members except Anzia, who was too young, and her father, a Hebrew scholar (who, due to tradition, did not work), were immediately forced into the labor market for survival.

Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925), Yezierska's depiction of the tension between genders and generations, is admired by feminist scholars and social historians. It depicts a young woman's struggle against Old World patriarchy, one of many strong, self-reliant women heroes who must negotiate the boundaries between immigrant culture and poverty and the life of the recently enfranchised New American Woman.

Anzia Yezierska did not know her exact birth date, but many literary historians agree on 1885 as the year she was born on the Russian-Polish border, to Rabbi Bernard Yezierska and Pearl Yezierska. The family immigrated to New York's Lower East Side in the early 1890s. As usual, in immigrant families, the boys were educated, while tradition dictated that Yezierska and her sister worked in low-paying menial jobs until marriages were arranged for them.

Yezierska, however, educated herself at Columbia University by working in a laundry and gaining the financial assistance of wealthy patrons; she graduated from Teachers College in 1904. In 1910 she married Jacob Gordon, an attorney, but the marriage was annulled six months afterward, and she married Arnold Levitas, a teacher and textbook writer, in 1911. By 1915, however, she had permanently separated from him and published her first story. In 1917 she approached the philosopher and educator John Dewey in his office at Columbia University.

He encouraged her and apparently initiated a romantic relationship with her that ended with his departure for China the following year. Thereafter the theme of the passionate immigrant woman and the repressed Protestant man recurs frequently in her fiction.

Salome of the Tenements is based on the life of her friend Rose Pastor, who married philanthropist Graham Stokes; unlike Rose, however, Sonya Vrunsky, Yezierska's protagonist, finds only failure in her marriage to the Anglo-Saxon John Manning. Her next and most autobiographical work, Bread Givers, earned Yezierska critical acclaim. Rabbi Smolinsky tyrannizes his daughters, sends them to work in sweatshops, and then sells them into marriage; only the youngest, Sara, escapes, educating herself, rejecting her Protestant suitor, and marrying Hugo Seelig, an Americanized Jew who bridges the two cultures.

The 1920s was a hard and painstaking era in American history. Many family's throughout New York lived in absolute poverty and saved ...