Luckily for this blog I'm not the only Katie in What Katy Read. Katie Arscott joined us a few months ago, and is going to keep us posted with what she's reading outside of bookclub. One of the lovely things about being in a book club is the way you discover books that otherwise you might not have come across. I've never heard of Anzia Yezierska, or this collection of stories, first published in the 1920s, but Katie's review makes this author sound intriguing.
I first came across Anzia Yezierska when my mother was asked to review Virago’s publication of her fictionalised autobiography Red Ribbon on a White Horse about twenty-five years ago. Yezierska's strong evocation of early-twentieth-century New York poverty has stayed with me ever since, and recently I treated myself to a second-hand copy of Hungry Hearts and Other Stories.
Born around 1880, Yezierska emigrated from Russian-occupied Poland to America with her family in the 1890s. Like many similar Jewish immigrant families, they settled in Manhattan and worked among the sweatshops of the clothing industry. What a contrast the crowded tenements and factories of New York must have seemed to a rural existence in central Europe. Of course the key difference was escape from the religious persecution and pogroms of the Czarist regime, but how must the ‘land of milk and honey’ have looked in reality to so many of these poor people who never made it far from their arrival at Ellis Island?
This collection of stories follows the hopes and despair of a variety of Jewish women, through their dreams of America to the reality of a hard life in a different unwelcoming society. The yearning for love of these young women may strike a universal chord, but the cruel fate that awaited them as they fought for work and enough money to keep the wolf from the door for themselves and their families is something most of us can only imagine. Yezierska’s powerful prose brings that cruel reality much closer.
What really struck me in reading these stories was a strong sense of the dark, sunlessness of their lives in the dilapidated, crowded tenements. I wondered why so many of them ended up staying in New York, when America is such a huge place. Why didn’t they go further into the country and pursue a lifestyle more akin to the rural areas many of them arrived from?
Hungry Hearts catapulted Anzia Yezierska to instant fame, with a contract from Sam Goldwyn for a silent film, for which she received $10,000. My edition of the book also included an additional three stories, the first of which recounts her experience of the changes brought about by her sudden wealth. She soon finds that, like the heroine in one of the stories in the original collection, she doesn’t fit into her new-found surroundings, but cannot return to her origins either. The final story in the book is a protest against the older generation being dismissed as useless. It is good to see that Anzia did not lose her edge in later life.
Somehow, despite the overpowering odds and hardship that pervade these stories, they also have an energy and strong sense of humanity that lift the book from being depressing and remind us that we are all hoping for something better around the corner. – KA