Anzia Yezierska: New Light on the "Sweatshop Cinderella"

MELUS ◽  
1980 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 3
Author(s):  
Carol Schoen
Keyword(s):  
Anzia Yezierska

5. Into the mainstream

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-60
Author(s):  
Ilan Stavans
Keyword(s):  
International Literature ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
Philip Roth ◽  
Saul Bellow ◽  
Abraham Cahan ◽  
Cynthia Ozick ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
Grace Paley ◽  
Jewish Writers

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

The Possessive Self in Mary Antin and Anzia Yezierska: Gender, Jewishness, and the Assumptions of Americanization

Prospects ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 357-377
Author(s):  
Blanche H. Gelfant
Keyword(s):  
Evolutionary History ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Mary Antin ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
American Citizenship ◽  
Original Emphasis ◽  
The Creation

Mary Antin was not modest in her use of the possessive case in The Promised Land — in her iterations of Mine, Mine, Mine. While still a schoolgirl, Antin asserted that everything she saw in the Boston Public Library, a “treasure house” of wisdom and art, was “Mine.” As the child of a newly naturalized American, she felt entitled to claim possession; the library and its treasured holdings were “Mine,” she said, “because I was a citizen; mine, though I was born an alien; mine … My palace — mine! … This is mine” (266, original emphasis). By the time Antin came to the soaring conclusion of The Promised Land, she had exchanged her natural (and naturalized) father for the country's Founding Father, and as the child of George Washington, she claimed as her “heritage” everything in human evolutionary history that had led to the creation of America and everything yet to be evolved. “I am the youngest of America's children,” she wrote, “and into my hands is given all her priceless heritage … Mine is the whole majestic past, and mine is the shining future” (286). In swooping hyperbole, Antin equated American citizenship with possession, and possession with inheritance, property, and rights: with a treasure house in which she “had a right to be … at home” (266).

Whitening Domestic Spaces: Enacting Female Roles in Anzia Yezierska's The Lost Beautifulness

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Rebeca Campos Ferreras
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Anzia Yezierska ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Cultural Shock ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
Female Stereotypes ◽  
Female Immigrants ◽  
Eastern European Immigrants

The aim of this research is to give an accurate account of how female stereotypes around the concept of hygiene and domesticity in early 20thC North American context influenced newly arrived Eastern European immigrants. Located in New York’s Lower East Side ghetto and determined by their Jewish background, these immigrants’ arrival caused them a cultural shock to the point that they started shaping their identities according to the new standard of beauty and cleanliness related to the Americanness they were eager to perform. For this purpose, Anzia Yezierska’s short story The Lost Beautifulness serves as a referent because it demonstrates the failure of Americanization as the prospective means through which the American Dream could be experienced, a credo which, according to the author, would only reinforce classist policies instead of cancelling them. To this effect, Yezierska depicts the actual consequences for these Jewish female immigrants after attempting to Americanize their private household spaces and maintain, thus, the standard of cleanliness necessary to validate their accurate adaptation to the American culture from their ghettoized and marginalized context. Keywords: Americanization, Anzia Yezierska, female stereotypes, whitening, domesticity, American Dream  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document