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...
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,...
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...
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 ...
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...
The target of intense critical comment when it was first published in 1927, "Arrogant Beggar'"s scathing attack on charity-run boardinghouses remains ...
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...
The target of intense critical comment when it was first published in 1927, "Arrogant Beggar'"s scathing attack on charity-run boardinghouses remains ...
In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories and novels, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the Jews of New York's Lower East Side and their struggle to escape poverty and to partake of America's promise. How I Found America gathers together all of Yezierska's short fiction: the two collections published during her lifetime--Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness--and seven additional tales. Each story is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next. taken together,...
In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories and novels, written from the 1920s to the 196...
In this heartfelt novel, written in 1932, Fanya Ivanowna, a Polish Jew from New York's Lower East Side, meets Henry Scott, a well-bred professor who first helps her fulfill her ambition to become a writer, then falls in love with her--but only to change his mind and rebuff her socially. Fanya is hurt, but instead of returning to the ghetto to live among -her own people, - as so many have done before her, she decides to continue to better herself, to become more American. She moves to a small New England town, where she meets her soulmate, a non-Jewish Polish immigrant, and prepares to make...
In this heartfelt novel, written in 1932, Fanya Ivanowna, a Polish Jew from New York's Lower East Side, meets Henry Scott, a well-bred professor wh...
