By day she worked in a sweatshop and at other menial jobs, while at night she attended school to learn to read and write English. Three years after her arrival in America, she obtained a scholarship to study domestic science at Columbia University; however, her subsequent career as a teacher of domestic science was short-lived since she found herself to be temperamentally unsuited to the job of teaching. About 1910 she married an attorney, but after only a few months this marriage was annulled. Shortly thereafter she married Arnold Levitas, a teacher and author of textbooks, and gave birth to a daughter, Louise. However, finding domestic chores and maternal responsibilities to be oppressive, Yezierska left Levitas and soon after surrendered her daughter to his care. She devoted the remainder of her life to pursuing a career as a writer.
Yezierska describes again and again in her fiction the attempt of a spirited Jewish female protagonist from the ghetto to bridge the chasm between the chaotic though vital immigrant milieu and the orderly but ultimately repressed world of the uptown Jews and WASPs.
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