America and I

The primary figure in the essay is the author, a Russian Jewish immigrant; all other characters are devoid of names that might identify them.

Yezierska, born in 1885, is from a town on the Russian-Polish border. Her family immigrated to the US in 1892, settling among other Eastern European Jews in New York’s Lower East Side. She was the youngest child in her family, having taking the Americanized name Hattie Mayer when she entered the country. She presents herself here as a “voiceless” immigrant (Paragraph 1) with a strong body and a hopeful heart, ready to blossom in the America of her dreams—one of full self-expression—only to discover that version of America is a myth.

Yezierska’s work, first as a nanny and housekeeper, then sewing buttons and doing other factory work, is not enough for her. Repetitive tasks that do not utilize her mind are the only work available to her but do not offer the outlets she seeks for self-actualization. She tries to find the America she is longing for and fails, until she realizes that has been searching for a “ready made” (Paragraph 103) America; this is instead an unfinished country with unrealized promise, and she must help turn it into what she wants it to be. She presents herself as someone with a keen mind—able to easily leave the employers who have taken advantage of her and to move up in the world of industry.

Yezierska studied English at night while working in a sweatshop, eventually winning a scholarship to Columbia University and receiving a teaching certificate in 1904. She was married twice; the second marriage resulted in a daughter, born in 1912. In 1915, she moved to California and sent her daughter back East when she couldn’t make a living for them both. That same year, she published her first story, “Free Vacation House,” in the December 1915 issue of Forum.

Her writing career began to take off after that. Her stories, many published in high-profile magazines of the time, are of young immigrant women making their way through poverty in the US—a topic that sparked the interest of the American public. She gained a famous mentor and romantic interest, John Dewey, and had “The Fat of the Land” published in 1920’s The Best Short Stories of 1919. The editor of that tome, Edward J. O’Brien, even dedicated the entire book to her. She also published a short story collection, Hungry Hearts, in 1920. This book got the interest of movie producer Samuel Goldwyn, who bought the film rights and asked her to write the screenplay, which turned Yezierska into a celebrity. Two silent movies were made from her stories: “Hungry Hearts” and “Salome of the Tenements.”

However, the self-doubting author’s experience in Hollywood was not completely positive; among other things, as she expressed in Red Ribbon on a White Horse, she was now so far removed from the places she knew and wrote about. She felt cut off from her people and the history that had gotten her to where she was. Henriksen claimed in Yezierska's biography that her mother had a fear of writing to the deadlines given to her by producers and publishers, which did not help. During the 1920s Yezierska also published Bread Givers and several other works. However, by the time she held a writing fellowship at the University of Wisconsin in 1929-1930, her work had gone out of fashion and she was unable to sell any of her writing. The Depression was not kind to her, although she worked with the Federal Writers Project in the mid-1930s. In 1950, she finally published the autobiographical novel Red Ribbon on a White Horse. While she remained mostly obscure after that, she continued to publish other writings, such as book reviews, until her death in 1970. She is sometimes known as “The Immigrant Cinderella,” or, as a New York Times book review of Henriksen’s biography styled her in 1988, “Cinderella of the Tenements.”

Within this essay, Yezierska seeks out an America that will value her for her ideas, not the menial work she is forced to undertake to make a living. She consults others who don’t understand her struggle, then self-analyzes and endures on her own to create a voice for herself through her writing, finally finding her form of self-expression.