Anzia Yezierska Quotes (1880-1970)

“Reading Miss Yezierska's book sets me thinking again about that famous and curious statement in the Preamble to the Constitution about the self-evident right of all men to "the pursuit of happiness," for I have read few accounts of such a pursuit as truthful and moving as hers.”

“For Mary Antin and another immigrant Jewish author, Anzia Yezierska, the sacrifices were costly but appeared warranted, the passports to professional success and American identities. Part of a generation bridging Yiddish culture and Yankee experience, Antin and Yezierska passionately described the struggles and changes within the immigrant Jewish family. More than half a century ago, the autobiographical Promised Land and the novel, Bread Givers, anticipated the concerns of such later authors as Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, Norma Rosen and Joanne Greenberg.”

“She was a misfit all her life. Throughout the years she saw herself standing on the street with her nose pressed against the bakery window: hungry and shut out. No matter what happened, she felt marginal. Not belonging became her identity, and then her subject. After she began to write, it was her necessity. In Red Ribbon on a White Horse the relief she feels at finding herself poor again in the Thirties is palpable. She had this in common with other talented neurotics-Jack Kerouac, George Gissing, Jean Rhys-who also managed to keep themselves poverty-stricken and socially outcast, for very much the same reason...She is one of the great refuse-niks of the world. She refuses to accept life's meanness and littleness. She refuses to accommodate herself to loneliness of the spirit. She refuses to curb emotional ambition. She's an immigrant? She's a woman? Her hunger is voracious? intrusive? exhausting? Still she refuses. And on a big scale. We cannot turn away from her. Obsessing as grandly as the Ancient Mariner, her words continue, even now seventy years after they were written, to grab us by the collar. They shake and demand, compel, and remind. Attention must be paid. "I want to make from myself a person!" The performance is astonishing.”

““My one story is hunger.” So declared the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s Children of Loneliness (1923). Having immigrated with her family from Eastern Europe, Yezierska chronicled the hunger of her generation of newly arrived Jewish Americans around the turn of the century. Her novels, short stories, and autobiographical writing vividly depict both the literal hunger of poverty and the metaphoric hunger for security, education, companionship, home, and meaning—in short, for the American dream.”

“Anzia Yezierska, who told, in Yiddish-like english, stories of Jewish immigrants, especially women's struggles for love, freedom, and education. Of her work, she wrote: "It's not me-it's their cries-my own people-crying in me! Hannah Breineh, Shmendrek, they will not be stilled in me, till all America stops to listen."”

“The multitude of Jewish options that existed before World War II are ones which most nonobservant U.S. Ashkenazi Jews are hardly familiar with, much less recognize...Before World War II many Yiddish-speaking European Jews were already rejecting observance and secularism. Eager to assimilate, they deliberately abandoned their Jewish language and culture. The well-known letters (Bintl Brif) of Der forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), the thirties English stories of Anzia Yezierska, and the more modern forties and fifties Yiddish stories of Kadia Malodowsky describe this assimilation minutely.”

“Immigrant life in general is miserable, as one sees in the literature produced by those who experienced the journey. In the Jewish novels of Abraham Cahan, Henry Roth, and Anzia Yezierska, the picture is frequently a grim one.”

“Immigrant writers of the early twentieth century were still addressing the artistic problem of how to bring Jewish experience to the American reader. Anzia Yezierska, a much more combative writer than Mary Antin, could never get beyond the story of how she left her immigrant home. Whereas Antin "made herself over" into a genteel writer and Cahan accommodated the English reader by treating Yiddish as a foreign language, Yezierska brought the immigrant streets to life by imitating their cacophony and fractured English. "My voice was like dynamite," boasts the ten-year-old herring salesman of Bread Givers. "Louder than all the pushcart peddlers, louder than all the hollering noises of bargaining and selling." Yezierska's resistance to genteel authority and to the humiliations of poverty bursts through the prose and hauls readers down to her level of cultural subsistence. But once her autobiographical heroines move out of their neighborhoods and into their new tailored suits, the author loses the Yiddish pungency that was her trademark.”

“This tension between the desire to Americanize and the psychological hold of parents and their traditions has been best described in the novels of Anzia Yezierska. In six books published between 1920 and 1932, Yezierska wrote of the squalor of ghetto life and the constant struggle against dirt, poverty, and old-world family restrictions. Her works portray the longing of a young woman for freedom and beauty, personified by the non-Jewish world, and each one ends with the realization that the source of life lies in the world that was rejected. "All these years," she wrote in All I Could Never Be, "I have gone about a little bit ashamed of my manners, my background. I was so eager to acquire from the Gentiles their low voices, their calm, their poise, that I lost what I had-what I was.' The young woman in Children of Loneliness observes, "I can't live with the old world, and I'm yet too green for the new. Yezierska was not so much writing novels as she was autobiography, so her plots appear and reappear in scarcely changed form. She could tell no other story than her own, but she recorded that with a searing passion. The plot of Bread Givers, her most popular novel, she explained to producer Sam Goldwyn, "is the expiation of guilt. . . . I had to break away from my mother's cursing and my father's preaching to live my life: but without them I had no life. When you deny your parents, you deny the ground under your feet, the sky over your head. You become an outlaw, a pariah...And now, here I am-lost in chaos, wandering between worlds."”