Anzia Yezierska Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Anzia Yezierska

Over a career of more than fifty years Anzia Yezierska was a prominent part of the vanguard in the literary treatment of the immigrant experience. As she stated in stories, essays, and interviews, Yezierska felt her mission as a writer was to "build a bridge of understanding between the American-born and myself," essentially to translate the experience of the Jewish ghetto for all America. Her work demonstrates not only her conviction that she could build this bridge, but also her belief in America as the promised land. Finding a common language through which to describe herself and her people was no easy task, however. While her tales express a belief in this land of opportunity, her female protagonists just as often articulate Yezierska's feeling of being "in" America but "not of them." The bridge between the Old World and New often seems like an illusion, with Yezierska and her characters caught between "worlds of difference that no words could bridge over."

When Yezierska emerged on the literary scene in the 1920s, the American public was generally interested in the immigrant experience.

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