Hungry Hearts

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.

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Anzia Yezierska (1882-1970) was born in Poland and came to the Lower East Side of New York with her family in 1890 when she was nine years old. By the 1920s she had risen out of poverty and become a successful writer of stories, novels; all autobiographical; and an autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (Persea). Her novel Bread Givers (Persea) is considered a classic of Jewish American fiction. Her acclaimed books also include How I Found America: Collected Stories and The Open Cage. She died in 1970.

Blanche H. Gelfant is a scholar and critic of 20th century American literature. Gelfant is the recipient of the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for lifetime achievement in American literary scholarship. Her books range from Cross-Cultural Reckonings: A Triptych of Russian, American, and Canadian Texts, to Women Writing in America: Voices in Collage, and the pioneering study The American City Novel. She is the Robert E. Maxwell Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English Emerita at Dartmouth College.