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 literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Hungry Hearts (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Literature & Fiction

YEZIERSKA, Anzia

United States

Penguin Publishing Group

A timeless American novel about an immigrant girl growing up on the Lower East Side who dares to challenge her Orthodox Jewish family's narrow conceptions of a woman's place in the world, featuring a new foreword by the author of the New York Times bestseller Unorthodox_x2015_the basis for the hit Netflix series_x2015_and cover art by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck A Penguin Classic The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves, under their rabbi father's iron fist, to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are "bread givers," working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah_x2015_according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is "less than nothing." But Sara hungers for more. In defiance of her father, she breaks free, escaping home to see what the American dream holds for her in this poignant coming-of-age tale and striking portrait of feminist rebellion.

Bread Givers (Penguin Classics)

Literary

Penguin Classics

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 resonates powerfully to the contemporary reader.

Salome of the Tenements (Radical Novel Reconsidered)

University of Illinois Press

Hungry Hearts (The Modern Jewish Experience)

Contemporary

Ayer Co. Pub

First published in 1920 to great acclaim, a collection of ten original stories by a Jewish-American writer captures the experience of a young immigrant woman's experience in the slums of New York in the twenties. Original.

Hungry Hearts (Signet Classics)

Short Stories & Anthologies

Signet Classics

"An intimate glimpse into the lives of Jewish immigrants in the early 1900's." — Jefferson State Community College Ten tales by a Jewish-American author of the early twentieth century offer timeless depictions of immigrants' struggles and dreams. Set in New York City's teeming Lower East Side, this lost masterpiece provides rich psychological portraits of mothers, daughters, and sisters as they attempt to find places in the New World. During her early childhood, Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880–1970) emigrated from Poland to New York City, where she worked in sweatshops by day and studied English at night. She drew upon her own experiences to write these stories as well as novels and screenplays focusing on issues of acculturation and assimilation. Hungry Hearts, which originally appeared in 1920, inspired a popular film and holds the historic distinction of being the first publication by a Jewish-American woman writer.

Hungry Hearts: Stories of the Jewish-American Immigrant Experience (Dover Books on Literature and Drama)

Dover Publications

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Hungry Hearts

Kessinger Publishing

Persea's 25th anniversary edition of this classic of twentieth-century American literature. More than 250,000 copies sold. Set on New York's Lower East Side during the 1920s, this is the moving story of a young woman's struggle to free herself from the traditional female role in an Orthodox Jewish family and society. Sara Smolinksy, the youngest daughter of a rabbi, watches as her father marries off her sisters into dire circumstances, and she vows to escape this fate. She leaves home, takes a job as an ironer, and rents a room with a door: "This door was life. It was air. The bottom starting-point of becoming a person." Sara's rebellion and her struggle for self-fulfillment-for education, work, and a marriage based on love-resonates with a passionate intensity all can share. In this new edition, the original text is retained; the introduction is updated; and a new foreword is added describing the discovery of this important work and the relationship with Yezierska's daughter that followed.

Bread Givers: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New

Persea Books

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 divided affluent German American Jews from more recently arrived Russian American Jews. The second half of the novel takes Adele back to her ghetto origins as she explores an alternative model of philanthropy by opening a restaurant that combines the communitarian ideals of Old World shtetl tradition with the contingencies of New World capitalism. Within the context of this radical message, Yezierska revisits the themes that have made her work famous, confronting complex questions of ethnic identity, assimilation, and female self-realization. Katherine Stubbs’s introduction provides a comprehensive and compelling historical, social, and literary context for this extraordinary novel and discusses the critical reaction to its publication in light of Yezierska’s biography and the once much-publicized and mythologized version of her life story. Unavailable for over sixty years, Arrogant Beggar will be enjoyed by general readers of fiction and be of crucial importance for feminist critics, students of ethnic literature. It will also prove an exciting and richly rewarding text for students and scholars of Jewish studies, immigrant literature, women’s writing, American history, and working-class fiction.

Arrogant Beggar

Duke University Press Books

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Books by YEZIERSKA, Anzia

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Hungry Hearts (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Bread Givers (Penguin Classics)

Salome of the Tenements (Radical Novel Reconsidered)

Hungry Hearts (The Modern Jewish Experience)

Hungry Hearts (Signet Classics)

Hungry Hearts: Stories of the Jewish-American Immigrant Experience (Dover Books on Literature and Drama)

Hungry Hearts

Bread Givers: A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New

Arrogant Beggar

Arrogant Beggar