Anzia Yezierska is probably a name unknown to most people,
but there was a time when her novels and stories were extremely popular, and
Anzia was all the rage not only in her home city of New York but Hollywood as
well.
Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland in 1885, to a Jewish
family that moved to New York when she was about ten years old. She grew up in
one of the poorest districts of the city, Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and
earned a living in one of the many sweatshops that swallowed up the huge
population of Jewish and other immigrants and spat them out more dead than
alive.
Anzia wanted to follow the example of her brothers, who were
being supported by her parents to get an education. She therefore studied at
night and discovered that she had a talent as a writer.
However, before she could put those talents to good use she
went through a tangled series of relationships that left her with a daughter
after two failed marriages, and then with no daughter after she surrendered her
parental rights. Left on her own, she turned to writing as a way of supporting
herself, and she spent the rest of her life (she died in 1970) writing stories
and novels.
The theme of her work was the struggle of immigrant women to
find a voice for themselves and be able to make decisions independently of
others. Her writings, based on her own experiences and those of the many women
she knew and remembered from her sweatshop days, could be said to be about
realising the “American Dream”, but this was expressed not just in terms of
making oneself rich, but of using freedom from poverty as a stepping stone to a
more fulfilled life in which real choices could be made, such as a woman being
able to choose where she lived and who she should live with.
Anzia Yezierska made her name with her first collection of
stories, “Hungry Hearts” (1920), although there was plenty more to come. The
stories are about actual hunger and also the hunger for self-expression. This
could take the form of the struggle of immigrant girls to get an education, or
to escape the attentions of matchmakers who sought to control the futures of
women who were without the means to resist.
The movie mogul Sam Goldwyn came across “Hungry Hearts” and paid
Anzia $10,000 for the film rights. The movie was duly made (in 1922), being filmed
on location in the Lower East Side, and Anzia became what appeared to be an
overnight success. She was hailed as the “Queen of the Ghetto” and Goldwyn saw
an opportunity to exploit this “rags to riches” American Dream story by
offering her a hugely generous contract to become a Hollywood scriptwriter.
However, what Sam Goldwyn was doing was precisely what Anzia
Yezierska had warned about in her stories. She realised that to accept
Goldwyn’s offer would be to place herself back under the control of a wealthy
man and limit her field of choice. She also appreciated the irony of growing
rich by writing about women who would always be poor. She therefore left
Hollywood behind and went back to her roots in New York.
One of her “Hungry Hearts” stories (entitled “The Fat of the
Land”) seemed to sum up her own situation rather well, despite being written
before Sam Goldwyn entered her life. In the story, a poor woman from the tenements
finds wealth and is then dripping with diamonds in a big house, but is also
desperately lonely and unable to communicate with her children. Her greatest
joy is to leave the silks and diamonds at home and go down into the busy Lower
East Side streets where she can haggle with traders over the price of
vegetables, just as she used to in the old days.
© John Welford
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