Anzia Yezierska and the Popular Periodical Debate Over the Jews.

Ever since the rediscovery and celebration of Anzia Yezierska's masterpiece Bread Givers in the early 1970s, scholars have struggled with the question of how to read her work. The struggle has assumed the form of a debate about the quality of Yezierska's prose. Antagonistic readers like Irving Howe, for example, have flatly called her stories "not very good," while even sympathetic readers like Grace Paley have acknowledged Yezierska's clumsiness (269; Wexler 158).(1) Yezierska's partisans have responded by seeing her stories as fictionalized memoirs and by extolling her ability to document the immigrant woman's experience. This makes her stories "valuable as social history and somewhat less important for [their] place in literature" (Kessler-Harris v).(2) On the other hand, the reliability of Yezierska's "social histories" is sometimes suspect. Admittedly they are, as Thomas J. Ferraro has suggested, rich in "autobiographical resonances" (57). Yet Yezierska's autobiography, at least as it was presented piecemeal in reviews and interviews through the 1920s, was largely a public-relations fiction: her life, as Mary V. Dearborn has said, "provides a case study of the invention of ethnicity in American culture" (109). Further, Yezierska's own daughter has warned against taking her mother's work as "literally true": "although most of her writing was autobiographical, she was incapable of telling the plain truth" (Henriksen, A Writer's Life 255). Thus the question remains: if we cannot take her compelling and critically-acclaimed(3) stories as either accomplished fiction or memoir, how should we take them?

My purpose is not to offer an answer to that question. Instead, I want to suggest an alternative way of reading Yezierska's stories, a way that puts aside, temporarily, the issue of her "awkwardness," that sheds light on her methods, and that permits a fruitful understanding of her work. This reading requires an examination of Yezierska's short stories in the context of their first publications. The context was this: during and after the First World War, American popular periodicals engaged in a heated public discussion over what they collectively called "The Jewish Question." Among those periodicals most interested in the subject were Cosmopolitan, Harper's, The Atlantic, The American Magazine, The Century (which once counted Woodrow Wilson among its contributors), and The Outlook (in whose pages Teddy Roosevelt, later a contributing editor, published a version of "The Man with the MuckRake"). The impetus for this discussion, which consumed scores of articles through the early 1920s, was the mass immigration of Jews, like Yezierska, from Eastern Europe.

As a writer, Yezierska believed "her mission was to mediate between her culture and the dominant culture of America" (Dearborn 112). The forum she chose for this mediation was the popular periodical press. Beginning in 1915, she published depictions of ghetto life in The Century, Harper's, The Forum, and other important periodicals. These were the same publications upon whose pages the debate over the Jews was raging. In other words, Yezierska's stories engaged this debate in the space it was already occupying, and, as we shall see, in the terms it was already employing. Thus the stories may be understood as arguments, offered by one of the Jews under discussion, and interjected into an ongoing, often ugly, frequently nativist, many-voiced debate. Contemporary and later scholars have criticized Yezierska's occasional employment of stereotypes. To be sure, Yezierska's "arguments" were sometimes as awkward as her prose. But a reading of those stereotypes in the context of the periodical debate reveals Yezierska to be a more skillful disputant than one might expect.

Since my intention is to describe Yezierska's role in this debate, I will begin by examining her justification of fiction as a legitimate vehicle for her perspective. Next I will explore four important issues raised in the debate--the problems of Russian Jewish personality, business practices, political ideology, and crude numbers--and Yezierska's responses to them. Finally, I will try to offer an assessment of her forensic enterprise.

The Justification

The protagonist of one of Yezierska's most amusing stories for the periodicals, "An Immigrant Among the Editors,"(4) is animated by a compulsion for self-expression. She presents herself to the editors of three journals for which she wants to write essays, journals perhaps modeled on The Nation, The New Republic, or the short-lived anarchist publication The Freeman. The first journal she visits, Free Mankind, is edited by a Mr. Alfred Nott. (The Freeman was edited by Albert Knock.) Nott, terrorized by her zealotry, flees the interview "like a frightened rabbit" (157). The editor of the second journal turns her out after explaining that a "chaotic mind" such as hers "would be useless to an intellectual journal" (158). The third editor cuts the interview short by offering her a book he believes will help her to think: Genung's Psychology of Madness (158).

Incensed, she abandons her ambition to write essays and turns instead to fiction, producing "a story of myself--myself lost in America" (159). This she presents to the editor of the "most literary magazine of all those I looked over" (159). (This is possibly a stand-in for The Century, one of the most widely respected literary journals of the day, which carried much of Yezierska's fiction; or The Forum, the venerable monthly whose contributors included Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and which also published Yezierska's work.) The editor of this journal accepts the protagonist's short story and pays her $200. Afterward, Yezierska's heroine muses that the editors of the intellectual journals "were only little children putting on a long wooden face, playing teacher to the world" (160). On the other hand, the editor of the literary magazine "didn't wear a wooden face of dignity. He was no reformer--no holy social worker--only a human being who loved people" (160).

The story is significant because with it Yezierska establishes the importance of the immigrant perspective to the debate over the Jews, and justifies mass-market periodical fiction as a legitimate vehicle for that perspective. The story begins by questioning the veracity of ghetto depictions contained in the periodicals, dismissing them as "twisted pictures of the way higher-ups see us people" (154). In contrast, Yezierska's heroine presents herself to the "literary" editor as "an immigrant" who has "worked in kitchens, factories, and sweatshops" (159). In other words, she establishes the rhetorical validity of her writing by establishing the authenticity of her immigrant credentials, something Yezierska herself did with this and other stories.

Even more important is Yezierska's depiction of the intellectual journals as "so dull, so dead," whose erudite and antiseptic prose reads to her heroine "like a head without a body" (158). The "dead logic" upon which these journals subsist makes their readers "deaf, dumb, and blind to the cry of hunger and want knocking at their doors" (160). Indeed Yezierska's heroine offers literal and metaphorical hunger, rather than the intellect, as the supreme agent of human creativity: "Hunger and desire is life.... With this hunger they paint pictures and write books and sing songs" (158). In part this valorization of emotion at the expense of intellect reflects the liberal humanist perspective from which Yezierska's thinking proceeds. But additionally the story embodies a more ambitious purpose. Yezierska's heroine assures the editors of the intellectual journals that, unlike the products of their other writers, her stories of hunger "can wake up your readers like lightning.... I'd get the readers so mad, they'd rush out and do something" (157). Although the moment is satirized, the heroine is suggesting that stories about concrete aspects of private lives, unlike the abstract commentary of the intellectual journal articles, are potential agents of change. This proposition, that private life is a legitimate and meaningful source of material for public discourse, serves as a justification for the place of Yezierska's fiction in the periodical debate, much as it would be used, in other contexts, to justify the work of later, more self-acknowledged feminists.(5)

The Jewish Personality

It would be reductive to suggest that the major periodicals always formulated propositions in terms simplified for mass consumption. Nevertheless, mainstream periodicals often distilled ambiguities out of the Jewish Question, reducing its various aspects to the sort of bald propositions for which decisive responses could be easily crafted. Among the masters of the technique was Burton J. Hendrick, who discussed the Jews in a two-part series of articles which appeared in The World's Work in 1922. His series is of particular interest because World's Work's contemporary reputation as a "quality magazine" presumably legitimized his propositions (Mott 4:788). Hendrick asserted that the Eastern Jews were "a type of Jew very different" from the Spanish and Germans who had constituted previous Jewish immigration waves. Degraded culturally, racially, and intellectually by squalid conditions of Russian peasant life and by intermingling with Slavic types, Eastern Jews had developed "a deep lying racial trait" which promoted clannishness and prevented them from evincing patriotic feelings toward any nation in which they lived ("Radicalism" 593). This clannishness manifested itself partly in socialistic agitation whose purpose was to disrupt the American economic and political system which the Eastern Jews were incapable of fully comprehending. Thus the assimilation of Eastern Jews into the civilized American mainstream was a daunting task, one that could be realized only by "putting up the bars against these immigrants until the day comes when those already here are absorbed" ("Radicalism" 601).

This image of the Jews as an undigestible, ghettoized mass was a popular one: among many other periodicals which exploited it were The Atlantic, The Quarterly Review, and The Outlook.(6) Hendrick embellished it further, describing the Russian Jews as "a compact mass of wretchedness in large cities" ("Jews in America" 155). In this way he used the image of ghetto as a metaphor for Jewish social and moral conditions. His method was akin to that used by Ralph Phillip Boas, who attacked the exploitive practices of Jewish sweatshop owners in a 1921 article for The Atlantic. Boas' purpose was not to defend the employees, whom he regarded as exhibiting "fanaticism and doctrinaire social theories" (663). Rather he implied that the interaction of cut-throat owners and fanatical workers constituted a morally degraded industry, and that this industry was in some respects emblematic of the lives and habits of immigrant Jews.

In reading the lower East Side as a metaphor for Jewish personality, Boas, like Hendrick, was not alone. Repeatedly in the early 1920s, periodical writers epitomized abstract "Jewish" qualities in descriptions of the ghetto or sweatshop. The former rabbi and scholar Lewis Brown, for example, depicted what he believed were the "two major traits" of the Jews, "sensitiveness and aggressiveness," in a narrative for The American Magazine:

   The pavements of Seventh Avenue were crowded, impenetrable, and only by
   walking along the gutters could we possibly make any headway. For it was
   the lunch-hour, and all the thousands of workers in New York's
   "cloak-and-suit belt" were out on the street for an airing. They were
   ill-clad and noisy; ... They stood there on the pavement in large coagulate
   masses, shouting to each other in strident argument and gesticulating with
   vehemence. (7)

Margaret Munger Stokes, a substitute worker in a lower East Side library branch, questioned Jewish morality in a Scribner's Magazine article through a close observation of tenement sanitation:

   The dirt, the noise, and the unfamiliar odors nauseated me. This was not
   the slums as I imagined them. There were no pale, hungry children whose
   evident poverty tugged at one's heart-strings. These youngsters were
   bright-eyed, evidently well-nourished, and their parents had the same
   well-fed air. Yet they seemed quite content to live under the worst housing
   conditions in the city.... Not poverty-stricken people unable to live more
   decently, but prosperous folks who evidently enjoyed the noise and crowds
   and confusion. And, if they did not particularly relish the filth, they
   were at least quite oblivious to it. (609)

Not all depictions were so unsympathetic. The Independent, a 60,000-circulation New York journal which had influenced Woodrow Wilson's conception of an early League of Nations, employed the ghetto image to dramatize the Jews' victimization:

   [T]he bulk of [Jews] (witness the throngs that block your way on the
   clothing district sidewalks at the noon hour) have with incredible
   suffering barely attained the sweatshop level of existence and shudder lest
   they drop from that. Formidable? About as formidable financially as they
   are politically! (659)

Another librarian, Mary Frank, employed similar images in a 1919 Century essay to demonstrate hidden nobility:

   Gray-bearded patriarchs, mothers with babies in their arms, bargained for
   fruits and vegetables, hardware, handkerchiefs, hats, underwear, furbelows
   of a thousand kinds. Aged grandmothers, bent, stood aside from the crowd
   and gazed with tired and wrinkled faces on the rushing life.... The
   shabbily dressed old man, most unlikely and unconsidered, might turn out to
   be a great scholar. (375-77)

Mary Frank's purpose was to communicate her "sympathy" for the Jews; she concluded with the assertion that America was "fast coming to new days of brotherhood" (390).

This same liberal humanist ideology informed many prominent periodicals of the day. Edwin Slosson, an associate editor of The Independent, wrote from this perspective when he ridiculed anti-Semitism as a symptom of "crowd-madness": "I have not yet heard that Pope Benedict is a Hebrew and a thirty-third degree Mason, but I expect to any day.... The conspiracy phobia is ... easy to start, hard to eradicate and leading [sic] to persecution and pogroms, riot and revolution. Let us not encourage it" (427-28). The same ideology animated The Literary Digest, the nation's preeminent news journal prior to the founding of Time Magazine, when it published seven articles between 1920 and 1923 which bore such titles as "For Jewish-Christian Friendship," "For a Jewish-Christian Entente," and "To Create Good-Will Between Jew and Gentile." These articles, like those of Slosson and Frank, reflected an assumption that an "understanding" of the Jews was enough to eradicate what the writers often admitted was a growing anti-Semitic mood in the United States. The articles professed a faith that information alone could be transformed by the alchemy of goodwill into club memberships, college educations, and, for that matter, food, warm clothing, and decent housing. Journals like the Digest occasionally expressed an almost evangelical belief that this transmutation was inevitable, though a practical formula for achieving it was rarely explored.(7)

This liberal humanist perspective is also the one from which Yezierska composed her short stories. Like Frank, her purpose was to instill sympathy: to make Gentile America "want me" ("America and I" 151). Like Frank, she professed a faith that the future inevitably held better days: "The Americans of to-morrow, the America that is every day coming to be, will be too wise, too openhearted, too friendly-handed, to let the least late-comer to their gates knock in vain with gifts unwanted" (153). And like Frank and others, Yezierska's depictions of Jews usually revolved around tenement life.

But Yezierska's depictions of the lower East Side were much different from those of other periodical writers. That is because, unlike the others, Yezierska never used the ghetto as a metaphor for Jewish personality. Instead her representations of the tenements revealed a subtler purpose. In many of her short stories, Yezierska suggested a causal relationship between American indifference and sweatshop labor. In "Wings" (1920), a young girl tells her Gentile mentor that she is "burning to learn," to which he responds: "What can you do best with your hands?" (13). In "How I Found America" (1920), a sweatshop laborer complains, "I didn't come to America to turn into a machine. Does America only want my hands--only the strength of my body--not my heart--not my feelings--my thoughts"? (115). Such passages not only blame the survival of sweatshops on American indifference, but they also hint at the dehumanization characteristic of sweatshop conditions.

Indeed, Yezierska expended her most embittered prose depicting the exploitive practices of sweatshop owners. A character in "Hunger" (1920), describes the methods of a "cockroach boss":

   A black year on him! He was a landsman, that's how he fooled me in. He used
   to come to the ship with a smiling face of welcome to all the greenhorns
   what had nobody to go to. And then he'd put them to work in his sweatshop
   and sweat them into their graves. (27)

In "How I Found America" (1920), a sweatshop boss, addressing his employees as "Hands," explains, while he fingers "the gold watch-chain that spread across his fat belly," that he is going to reduce wages by one-third:

   The stillness of death filled the sweatshop. Each one felt the heart of the
   other bleed with her own helplessness. A sudden sound broke the silence.

   A woman sobbed chokingly. It was Balah Rifkin, a widow with three children.

   "Oi weh!" She tore at her scrawny neck. "The blood-sucker--the thief! How
   will I give them to eat--my babies--my hungry little lambs!"

   "Why do we let him choke us?"

   ... "Can we help ourselves? Our life lies in his hands." (116)

Complains the heroine of another story: "Ten hours a day I pushed a machine in a shirtwaist factory, when I was yet lucky to get work. And always my head was drying up with saving and pinching and worrying to send home a little from the little I earned" ("The Miracle" 55). The remark is important because it suggests another causal relationship, this one between sweatshop labor and psychological or spiritual desiccation, "always my head was drying up." For many of Yezierska's heroines, spiritual fulfillment depends on self-expression, sometimes through publication in the periodicals. This is because they see expression as a way of constructing a sturdy public personality or, in the words of one, "to make from myself a person that can't be crushed by nothing nor nobody" ("Hunger" 29). But the environment of the sweatshop stifles that expression. As the protagonist of "America and I" (1922) describes it, "I burned to give, to give something, to do something, to be something. The dead work with my hands was killing me" (149).

Yezierska indicted sweatshop conditions as a major cause of the spiritual poverty which characterized the "living grave" of ghetto life.(8) The stories which call the "living grave" a product of the sweatshop are significant since they occur in light of Yezierska's fictional assertions that the sweatshop was itself a product of American indifference. In effect, these stories argue that the spiritual poverty of the ghetto was neither a product of nor emblematic of Jewish personality. Instead it was an American product to which Jews were subjected. These stories served to critique assumptions made by writers like Margaret Munger Stokes, subverting not their representations of the ghetto, but the meaning ascribed to those representations. Read in light of a Yezierska story like "America and I," the implications of immorality in Stokes's ghetto depiction appear self-accusatory. And presumably some people did read Stokes in light of Yezierska since "America and I" appeared in the same periodical, Scribner's Magazine, as Stokes's article the previous year (1922).

Jewish Politics and Business Practices

The method by which complexities of Russian Jewish personality were depicted as a series of simple, if morally questionable, behaviors, was similarly employed when the periodicals discussed political ideology. In this case, the Russian Jews' long and contradictory ideological history was frequently framed as a question of whether or not the Jews were all Bolsheviks. Among the most insistent on the point was Burton J. Hendrick. "Anyone who attends a socialist meeting in New York is immediately impressed by the fact that the audience is almost exclusively composed of East Side Jews," he observed in 1922. "Practically all the orators of discontent who occupy soap boxes in the New York streets are unmistakably Eastern Jews" ("Radicalism" 595). This proposition was sustained in, among others, the influential interdenominational journal Missionary Review of the World (Conning 946); Dr. George A. Simons, a New York minister whose senate subcommittee testimony that "the present chaotic conditions in Russia are due in large part to the activities of Yiddish agitators from the East Side of New York City," was reprinted in The Literary Digest ("Jews from America in Bolshevik Oligarchy" 181); and by The Outlook, which asserted in two articles that Polish pogroms were actually efforts to root out Bolsheviki agitators ("Pogroms, War Antagonism, or Race Hatred?" 181; Moravsky 144-45). Refutations were voiced in the early 1920s by, among others, The Freeman ("Another Jewish Menace" 436) and The Independent (Hartt 659). The Literary Digest published four articles in 1919 alone disputing the allegation. In 1920 it suggested that false allegations of Bolshevism "preached from many pulpits" posed a threat to the lives of Jews in Poland.(9)

Russian Jewish economic history and business practice were similarly simplified. In this case the periodicals often merely debated whether the Jews were greedy. The Atlantic's Boas, for example, charged that "many Jews" had grown rich profiteering from the War. He further claimed that the conduct of the theatrical and clothing trades demonstrated the Jews' two controlling passions, "a passion for wealth and a passion for power" (659, 663). In 1923 The Missionary Review of the Worm asserted that "[t]wo hundred and fifty millionaires are Jews and two thirds of New York City's wealth belongs to them" (Ford 1007).

G. K. Chesterton, writing in Vanity Fair, lamented the accumulation of property in the hands of a few landlords, explaining his objection with an analogy:

   We have only to imagine the majority of men running about bareheaded, and
   overshadowed by a toppling pagoda of hats worn by one Jewish old-clothesman
   governing the whole country; as, indeed, is very nearly the case now,
   except that the Jew has been successful enough as an old-clothesman to
   dress himself in new clothes. (54)

The observation is significant not only because of Chesterton's status as a popular writer and theologian, but because of Vanity Fair's status as the East Coast's most cosmopolitan publication. This was not, after all, a radical writing in a fringe publication; doubtless the credentials of these sources added weight to their assertions of Jewish greed. Further, Chesterton's analogy is significant for its image of the old-clothesman "governing the country" because it suggests, among other things, that Chesterton and Vanity Fair feared American Jews were in the process of conspiring to parlay wealth into governmental control.

Nor was Chesterton the only significant figure to espouse a relationship between Jewish greed and secret Jewish power. Indeed the most vitriolic of these allegations were leveled by the automobile manufacturer Henry Ford, who asserted that "most of big business, the trusts and banks, the natural resources and the chief agricultural products, are in the control of Jewish financiers." The charge was part of a notorious seven-year anti-Semitic campaign Ford conducted in the pages of his weekly Dearborn Independent. Ford founded his campaign on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This was a secret document, allegedly composed by an "Inner Jewish Council," containing a blueprint for the election of a King of Israel with world-wide dictatorial powers. But however much credibility Ford's articles commanded among his own readers, the Protocols was such an obvious forgery, and the tales of international intrigue which Ford drew from it so ludicrous, that even periodicals prone to occasional anti-Semitic writing, such as The Outlook, repudiated them.(10)

Other journals did not take Ford seriously enough to repudiate him. They lampooned him instead. The Independent, for example, weighed Ford's reasoning and concluded that "as a philosopher he makes the most numerous little automobile on the market" ("Mr. Ford and the Jews" 724). Vanity Fair celebrated the manufacture of the five millionth Model T by publishing a comic playlet entitled "The Pageant of the Ford." The playlet was composed by Donald Ogden Stewart, the humorist who would later serve as the model for the character of Bill Gorton in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. "The Pageant" featured a weary Everyman trodding the Highway of Life, nearly being run down by. a horse-drawn Victoria laden with Jews and Michigan politicians (34). And Lewis Weitzenkom, writing in The Nation, begged Ford to cease the campaign because he was weary of having to listen to his Gentile friends' embarrassed apologies (652-53).(11)

Yezierska's fiction engaged the question of Jewish business practices more substantially than it did the matter of Jewish political ideologies. In part this may reflect a distaste for the terms of the latter debate as established by the periodicals for which she wrote. Indeed the word "Bolshevik" appears only rarely in her short stories, and then in contexts which lampoon its use. In the story "Brothers" (1921), for example, the epithet "Bolshevik" is hurled from a street corner at a character who develops into the most ardent, even cold-blooded, of capitalists. The protagonist of "To the Stars" (1921) is accused of Bolshevism after she observes that in America, "everybody is a person" (165).

But Yezierska's treatment of class struggle on the lower East Side additionally reflected psychological conflict which plagued her mature years. The early 1920s saw Yezierska's greatest popular and financial success: one of her works, "The Fat of the Land," was named in Edward J. O'Brien's prestigious Best Short Stories series as the best story published in 1919; the Goldwyn studios paid her $10,000 for movie rights to her short story collection, Hungry Hearts. This success liberated her from the tenements whose ugliness so disturbed her. Unfortunately, it also liberated her from her immigrant identity, the identity which "validated" her stories, and which depended on material poverty for its authenticity. Occasionally she represented this change as an ideological conversion. In the optimistic essay, "Mostly About Myself," she described rebellion in the United States as "healthy" before admitting that she,

   who used to be the most violent rebel of an immigrant, now find myself the
   most ardent defender of America.... I know how often the artists, the
   makers of beauty in America, are driven to the wall by the merciless
   extortion of those who sell the means of existence. But I know, too, that
   those of the artists who survive are vitalized by the killing things which
   had failed to kill them. America has no place for the dawdling,
   soft-spined, make-believe artists that swarm the Paris cafes. (143)

In effect, Yezierska justified her evolution from rebelliousness to "ardent" patriotism by applauding the cruelty of a capitalistic enterprise that "extorted" the best work from its artists. The strange quasi-Nietzschean apparatus she employed to extol the work of brutalized American artists at the expense of "soft-spined, make-believe artists" swarming in the socialistic hotbeds of Paris cafes, was so unwieldy as to be incoherent. It is difficult to accept the idea that she believed this herself.

But she offered a more sophisticated assessment of the change in an essay for the October 1925 issue of Cosmopolitan. "I was very poor," she recalled. "And when I was poor I hated the rich." Walking among wealthy shoppers along Fifth Avenue just before Christmas 1920, she fantasized about throwing a bomb. Then came the movie contract. Afterward,

   I didn't have time now to hate the rich.... Here I came in contact with
   other capitalists, other conspirators of wealth. I discovered they were not
   ogres, heartless oppressors of the poor. They were as human as other folks.

   Now as I sit alone in my room, watching the wonder of the sunset, I look
   back and see how happy I ought to have been when I was starving poor, but
   one of my own people. Now I am cut off by my own for acquiring the few
   things I have. And those new people with whom I dine and to whom I talk, I
   do not belong to them. I am alone because I left my own world. (9)

Unlike the first passage, in which Yezierska rationalized her upward mobility by seeing it as a kind of necessary, if brutal, artistic education, here she saw it as a futile experience. The experience is made especially poignant by her resentful portrait of herself as a woman "cut off" from her people by material success, a success she trivializes as the acquisition of a "few things." The earlier essay is a textbook example of 1920s-era assimilationist dogma. The latter is a more thoughtful, if self-pitying, contemplation of the cost of assimilation.

In their own ways, both of these passages reflect Yezierska's need to defend simultaneously the rebelliousness of the lower class, which she had been, and the complacency of the middle class, which she had become. Seeing herself with feet in both camps, she frequently tried to reconcile the classes. In her fiction this reconciliation usually involves some sort of awakening on the part of a poor female protagonist. The spiritual value of this awakening minimizes the protagonist's material want, thus making class inequality less significant. In the story "A Bed for the Night," the narrator, a poverty-stricken woman evicted from her tenement, seeks help from various middle-class sources, including her sister, who has married a wealthy merchant. Repeated rejection convinces her she is living "in a jungle of savages who gorged themselves with food, gorged themselves with rooms, while I implored only a bed for the night. And I implored in vain" (216). At last she is taken in by a prostitute, whose kindness convinces the narrator that she "could love the people that I hated yesterday" (218). The sympathy of the prostitute, herself poor, has taught Yezierska's narrator how to pity the wealthy despite their foibles. Meanwhile, she is still homeless.

In "Soap and Water and the Immigrant" (1919), Yezierska's narrator, a school teacher, spends ten years in poverty because of the callousness of the American educational system. She happens to meet a former teacher named Miss Van Ness, who consents to listen to her life story. For the narrator, the experience is galvanizing: "My past was the forgotten night. Sunrise was all around me. I went out from Miss Van Ness' office, singing a song of new life: `America! I found America!'" (77). What she hasn't found, unfortunately, is a job; whatever psychological benefits Miss Van Ness's friendship has afforded the narrator, it has not altered her material circumstances at all.

The conflicts which mar Yezierska's treatment of class issues, however, are absent from her representations of Jewish business practices. That is because she could engage the business debate, in the terms codified by the periodicals, without addressing the class tensions which confounded her. Writers like The World's Work's Hendrick or Ralph Phillip Boas of The Atlantic framed the question simply as a matter of Jewish greed. Yezierska, occasionally as reductive and decisive as either of them, found this allegation a fruitful subject for exploration.

Yezierska's method in this instance was similar to her treatment of immigrant personality. That is, her stories defined greed, not as a trait which Jews imported from Europe (as Hendrick and others asserted), but as an American business strategy in which Jews became complicit after immigration. In "The Lost `Beautifulness,'" for example, a landlord explains to the tenant he is evicting: "If you can't pay, somebody else will. I got to look out for myself. In America, everybody looks out for himself' (37). In "The Fat of the Land," a poverty-stricken tenement dweller observes: "But what's the use of talking? In America money is everything. Who cares who my father or grandfather was in Poland? Without money I'm a living dead one" (79). In "Dreams and Dollars," Yezierska's most thorough treatment of the subject, Jews who escape the poverty of Delancy Street for residential Los Angeles are dehumanized by their assimilative success. The story's protagonist observes them in a card game:

   She could hardly distinguish their faces, so thick was the air with smoke
   and whisky-fumes. The look of wild animals distorted their features.... And
   these people whom she called friends ... what where they?
   All-rightniks--the curse of their people, the shame of their race, Jews
   dehumanized, destroyed by their riches. Glutted stomachs--starved souls,
   escaped from the prison of poverty only to smother themselves in the
   fleshpots of plenty. (228-29)

As this passage illustrates, Yezierska's fiction often did not seek to refute the idea, prevalent in the periodicals, that successful Jews were greedy. Instead, her fiction sought to alter the meaning of the image of the greedy Jew. Yezierska's stories described greed as an American pollution. They critiqued those articles and essays which "exposed" Jewish avarice by seeing the Jews as spiritual victims of greed, rather than as its promulgators. Of course, Yezierska was not the only periodical writer to attempt this line of reasoning. In 1923, The Missionary Review of the World, for example, partly blamed the "appalling" irreligion of young Jews on "[b]usiness relations and the adoption of Gentile customs" (Ford 1008). But Yezierska's treatment presumably was unusual for its popular reception by the larger culture. "The Fat of the Land" was the story named as the year's best by Edward J. O'Brien, the story which brought Yezierska her first fame.

Numbers

In 1922, Burton J. Hendrick observed that, prior to the arrival of the Eastern Jews, "America had nothing that remotely resembled a Jewish `problem'" ("Jews in America" 152). Indeed the 40-year immigration wave from Eastern Europe that swelled the American Jewish population to more than three million by 1920 was itself the impetus for the debate in the periodicals. At its most fundamental, the periodical debate was a collective meditation on great numbers. In 1922, for example, The Literary Digest published a map of the continental United States which listed, by name, every American city possessing a Jewish population of greater than 1,000.(12) The Missionary Review of the Worm declared in 1919 that five years of unrestricted immigration might mean a Jewish population here of "five or even six millions" (Chalmers 946). The Independent observed in 1928 that the Jewish population of New York, "our largest and so-called most American city," was precisely 1,643,012. "America," the periodical remarked, "is in truth becoming the New Jerusalem" (Todd 384-85). The Forum declared that same year that those numbers constituted evidence of a "Jewish invasion" (Levinger 736-37). In 1923, World's Work assessed the growth of European Jewry over the previous century and a half and concluded:

   If New York City's Jewish elements should grow at the same rate, by the
   year 2100 they will have swelled to 26,000,000, and in the same bases of
   computation, the Jewish population of the United States will be something
   more than 60,000,000. ("One Million Six Hundred and Forty-Three Thousand
   Jews in New York City" 22)

These numbers assumed an aura of menace, a suggestion of "swarming." Yezierska responded to them in the same manner she used when addressing other issues in the debate. That is, her stories did not attempt to refute the numbers themselves. Instead they questioned the periodical writers' interpretation of those numbers.

Indeed Yezierska embraced the suggestion of "swarming," but substituted a sense of significance for a sense of threat. For Yezierska, huge numbers established the importance of the immigrant Jews' stories. Repeatedly Yezierska's narrators imagine themselves as speaking for teeming multitudes. The protagonist of "My Own People" sees "[b]ehind her life ... the massed ghosts of thousands upon thousands, beating out their hearts against rock barriers" (102). The narrator of "How I Found America" feels behind her "masses pressing--thousands of immigrants--thousands upon thousands crushed by injustice" (116). The narrator of "America and I" asserts: "As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding" (144). The autobiographical essay, "Mostly About Myself," begins:

   For ages and ages my people in Russia had no more voice than the broomstick
   in the comer. The poor had no more chance to say what they thought or felt
   than the dirt under their feet. And here, in America, a miracle has
   happened to them. They can lift up their heads like real people. After
   centuries of suppression, they are allowed to speak. Is it a wonder that I
   am too excited to know where to begin? (131)

The awkwardness of this statement masks a sophisticated rhetorical project. By associating Russian peasants with "broomsticks" and "dirt," Yezierska de-emphasized the "threatening" aspects of Jewish immigration by instead emphasizing poverty, humility, and repression. By suggesting that the "miracle" of immigration had transformed these inanimate objects into speaking people, she masterfully (if shamelessly) flattered her middle-American audience by mythologizing the experience of assimilation. At the same time she subtly promised that the resulting Jewish immigrant speech, as translated by herself, would be mitigated by an appropriate senso of gratitude. Finally, she excused her own oft-maligned writing style by attributing her clumsiness to breathless excitement over her new liberty. The passage exploits and transforms stereotypes; it panders to its audience even as it justifies itself by evoking the brutal experience of the three million people it promises to explain. It is, in other words, the quintessential Yezierskan performance.

Conclusion

Yezierska, to answer her own question, "began" in poverty, having been born about 1880 in the Russian-Polish village of Ploch. She arrived in New York roughly a decade later. Three decades after that she presented herself in the office of Hearst newspaper columnist Frank Crane as an immigrant autodidact, a "Sweatshop Cinderella" schooled in hard knocks, whose compelling short stories reflected neither formal education nor literary sensibilities, but only a ferocious honesty, an ability to dip "her pen into her heart" (Henriksen 148-49). Crane, enthralled, wrote an account of the interview. It appeared in the Hearst newspapers across the country. The article drew the attention of the Goldwyn studios; Yezierska's fortune was made.

What Yezierska appears to have withheld from Crane, as she would subsequently downplay in various interviews and essays published in Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, The Bookman, and others, was that she actually held a degree, albeit in domestic science, from the Teacher's College of Columbia University; that she had attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts on a scholarship in 1907; that she was a close associate of education reformer John Dewey, who had championed her writing, and whose seminar in social and political philosophy she attended; and that she had even worked with a team of graduate students studying Polish immigrants in Philadelphia (Schoen 7-11).

To the extent that Yezierska's rhetorical strategy was conscious, it presumably reflected, at least in part, her formal education and her sponsorship by Dewey and others. If it is impossible to establish the extent to which that strategy was conscious, it is at least fair to say that the strategy was consistent. Repeatedly in her stories, Yezierska confronted elements or stereotypes which had already been codified by the periodicals as touchstones in the debate over the Jews. Rarely did she refute these touchstones. Instead she embraced them, annexed them into her work, and then re-interpreted them in ways that acquitted the Russian Jews of responsibility for them.

How this strategy evolved is difficult to assess. In part the tactic may reflect Yezierska's problem with class tensions mentioned earlier: after all, by embracing the dominant culture's stereotypes Yezierska was embracing the dominant culture, whatever use she made of those stereotypes afterward. And undoubtedly Yezierska realized that to get published in mainstream periodicals, and to continue to be published in them, certain accommodations had to be made. This point is eloquently dramatized in "An Immigrant Among the Editors," the story which justified Yezierska's fictional perspective in the debate. In that story, Yezierska's narrator, having condemned the unreality of the periodicals' ghetto depictions, establishes her credentials as a reliable ghetto historian by marketing herself as "an immigrant" who has "worked in kitchens, factories, and sweatshops" (159). But these terms, profoundly limiting as they are, are actually touchstones that disputants in the periodical debate would recognize. In other words, Yezierska's narrator has established her "credentials" by demonstrating her conformity to popular images of immigrant life, images perpetuated in journals she has already condemned for their unreality. Perhaps she, like Yezierska herself, plans to do something subversive with those images, once her literary reputation has been made. But it is clear that, if she is going to make a contribution to this debate, Yezierska's heroine will have to make it using terms not entirely of her own devising.

Those "terms," and other commercial pressures on Yezierska to produce formulaic, mass-market fiction, coupled with her education and relationship with Dewey, weigh against our seeing her work as a naif's authentic memoirs despite her own insistence that her stories should be taken just that way.(13) However, to recognize this is not to diminish Yezierska's achievement. She was, after all, a poor immigrant who worked in sweatshops, just as she said. Despite their rhetorical and commercial agendas, as well as their formal limitations, her stories do at times richly evoke that experience. Instead, seeing her stories as forays in an on-going debate allows us to understand her methods and better evaluate her successes.

A description of her methods has been the subject of this paper. An evaluation of her successes is harder to accomplish. Her own implication (in essays like "Mostly About Myself") that she was the only or even the primary spokesperson for the Jews in the United States, is certainly specious. Indeed, American Jews after the turn of the century arguably had more spokespeople than any other ethnic group, among them Abraham Cahan, Michael Gold, and Mary Antin, to name but three of the most familiar. Further, it is clear that not all American Jews were comfortable with Yezierska as their spokesperson. Her tendency to employ stereotypes was understandably criticized. In 1925, a number of Jewish American reviewers dismissed Bread Givers as a conventional up-from-the-ghetto-tract, "anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent" (Ferraro 53). On the other hand, her visibility in the mass market periodicals gave her an authority in the larger culture few contemporary American Jews enjoyed. By 1924 she was "the recognized mouthpiece of New York's Jewish East Side"; The Literary Digest was calling her the "Balzac of the Ghetto"; the proletarian novelist and Vanity Fair columnist Jim Tully was calling her "the biggest person developed among the young generation of American Jews"; and the novelist Gertrude Atherton was describing her as "the most remarkable case of sheer genius fighting its way through an impenetrable thicket and imposing itself upon an unsympathetic world that I have any knowledge of" (Henriksen 180). It is apparent that, at the very least, she established herself in the minds of a sizeable segment of the larger culture as a legitimate "mediator" between them and the Jewish immigrant sub-group; to that extent, if to no other, her efforts were indeed successful. At least, they were successful for a time.

But only for a time. The pressures on the magazine industry exerted by economic depression conspired with changes in literary taste to send Yezierska's popularly into decline. After 1932, though she continued to write, she published only rarely. Many of the most prominent periodicals of the 1920s, to whose debate over the Jews she had contributed, fared no better. In 1932, the venerable Literary Digest was merged into the fast-rising Time Magazine. The Outlook and The Independent merged in 1927 in a failed attempt to stave off bankruptcy for both. Publication of the joint venture ceased in 1935. Five years earlier, The Century, once a significant force in the shaping of American literary opinion, its circulation having fallen to 20,000, was merged into The Forum. After 1940 The Forum was sold and resold a number of times before ceasing publication in January 1950. And after its absorption into The Review of Reviews, The World's Work ceased publication in 1932 (Mott 4:569, 3:435,479, 4:511,773).

Yezierska managed briefly to resurrect her career in 1950 with the publication of another fictional memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse. After this she wrote criticism for The New York Times Book Review, as well as the occasional work of short fiction. Her final story was published in 1969. She was paid $25 for it (Henriksen 3). Like so many of the most important periodicals of her era, her name disappeared from popular memory. She died in 1970.

Notes

(1.) "The chief problem in coming to terms with Yezierska's genius as a writer is that she struggled so with form, and often lost," Wexler observes. "There has been no friendly critic yet--no patron, no rescuer, no appreciator--from the time of Yezierska's career to the present who has not felt compelled to point this out" (157).

(2.) Although Kessler-Harris offers a cogent analysis of the "social historian" argument, she does not herself endorse it.

(3.) "She was awarded a national literary prize, front-page reviews, audiences in Europe with Joseph Conrad and Gertrude Stein, and a year as writer-inresidence at the University of Wisconsin. Her more energetic promoters included short-story czar Edmund J. O'Brien, syndicated columnist Frank Crane, Yale professor William Lyon Phelps, and fellow novelists Zona Gale and Dorothy Canfield Fisher; her publishers included the nation's most distinguished house, Houghton-Mifflin, and one of its most innovative, Boni and Liveright" (Ferraro 53).

(4.) Citations for Yezierska's short stories refer to How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska.

(5.) It should be noted that, unlike her protagonist, Yezierska herself did publish a small amount of fiction and poetry in such "intellectual" journals as The New Republic and The Nation.

(6.) Among many periodical writers who employed the image were Mowrer, Soissons, and Seitz. The Quarterly Review was one of a number of periodicals which reprinted for domestic consumption essays and articles published in Europe.

(7.) The Literary Digest articles appeared on 8 May 1920; 22 April 1922; 20 May 1922; 4 November 1922; 13 January 1923; 20 January 1923; and 29 September 1923. On the Digest's prominence as a news journal, see Mott 4:569-79. The text of a typical edition of the Digest consisted primarily in quoted or extracted material from other published sources, reflecting the cavalier attitude its president, Issac Kauffman Funk, held toward copyright laws. In 1923, the Digest's parent company, Funk & Wagnalls, published Yezierska's second collection of short stories, Children of Loneliness.

(8.) Yezierska's fiction acknowledged other causes as well. In her story "Children of Loneliness" (1923), for example, the young protagonist is spiritually choked by a stifling sense of obligation to her parents; in "The Lord Giveth" (1923), the protagonist is impoverished by the family patriarch's unwillingness to work. Similar familial and generational conflicts inform her masterpiece, Bread Givers (1925).

(9.) The Literary Digest published articles challenging allegations of Jewish Bolshevism in Europe on 17 May 1919; 7 June 1919; 12 July 1919; and 13 September 1919. The quotation is from "Jewish-Christian Accord" 65 (1920): 52.

(10.) Ford was quoted in The Review of Reviews 76 (1927): 197. The Outlook condemned the Ford campaign in its 26 January and 2 February 1921 issues.

(11.) Ford retracted his anti-Semitic statements in 1927, prompting The Review of Reviews to remark: "Off July 8 came an announcement from Mr. Ford in which it appears that he read his magazine for the first time only recently. He was `greatly shocked' by the experience.... Having found these things in his magazine, Mr. Ford explains, he wishes to apologize" (76 [1927]: 197-8).

(12.) The map was published in The Literary Digest 73 (1922): 35.

(13.) "You have read my story, `My Own People?' Well--I'm Sophie Sapnisky--that is my whole life." (Yezierska, qtd. in Browne.)

Works Cited

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Ron Ebest is a lecturer in English at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Among his other publications are a study of James T. Farrell in Eire-Ireland and a chapter on Irish novelist Donn-Byrne in the forthcoming New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, edited by Charles Fanning.