How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska

by Anzia Yezierska, Vivian Gornick (Introduction)

Overview

An indispensable volume of immigrant literature.

Individually, each of these 27 stories is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next; taken together, they comprise a vivid, enduring portrait of the struggles of immigrant Jews—particularly women—on New York's Lower East Side.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780892552986
Publisher:	Persea Books
Publication date:	08/17/2003
Series:	Uran Gift Fund
Edition description:	Second Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland and emigrated with her family to the Jewish Lower East Side of New York City in 1890 when she was nine years old.  By the 1920s she had risen out of poverty and become a successful writer of stories, novels—all autobiographical—and a semi-fictional autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (Persea). Her novel Bread Givers (Persea) is considered a classic of Jewish American fiction and has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies since its reissue in 1975.  Persea also publishes How I Found America: Collected Stories and The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (a selection of stories, excerpts from Red Ribbon on a White Horse, and uncollected stories on old age).   Yezierska died in 1970.

Editorial Reviews

"All the stories are rich with a primitive energy that rises with volcanic force."

|Los Angeles Times

Groping, impassioned, incandescent, Yezierska's nakedly honest stories of Jewish immigrants on New York City's Lower East Side have universal appeal. Their insistent theme is the possibility for regeneration of self in America. Herself an emigrant from the Russian-held Poland around 1890, Yezierska (1880?-1970) created sympathetic characters nearly crushed by hunger, poverty, the drudgery of sweatshops, cruel bosses, evictions, loneliness, disillusionment. Yet her people, full of fierce longings, resolve to remake their lives. Her women are torn between a desire for ``home, husband, babies . . . a breadgiver for life'' and the urge to carve out an independent identity. This volume includes the two story collections published in Yezierska's lifetime, plus seven additional pieces. Of special interest are the autobiographical sketches in which Yezierska frankly discusses her climb from poverty to sudden wealth, her brief success in Hollywood, followed by neglect, silence, a slide back into poverty, and old age. (July)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

The Jewish immigrant experience in all its joy and pain has been captured beautifully in Yezierska's work. Her stories and novels, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the immigrant Jews of the Lower East Side of New York, particularly the women. This collection of 27 stories--virtually all her short fiction--includes the two collections published during her lifetime, Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness. In ``Wings,'' a recent Russian immigrant who works as a janitor of a building on the Lower East Side fruitlessly pins her hopes on a gentleman tenant. In ``My Own People.'' Yezierska, speaking in the third person, writes, ``Would she ever become articulate enough to express beautifully what she saw and felt?'' After all, her experiences were the stifling sweatshop, a meager night-school education, and a blinding desire to express herself. These are stories of old age as well, written in the 1960s when Yezierska's reputation had waned and she was living in poverty again. Her stories capture the passionate struggle of the human spirit.-- Molly Abramowitz, Silver Springs, Md.

Library Journal