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.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "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." in the context of "Ruth Wisse The Modern Jewish Canon (2000)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.