Anzia Yezierska

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Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880 - 1970) was born in Plock, Poland, and immigrated to New York City when she was a teenager. She wrote about the struggles of Jewish and later Puerto Rican immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. Her most studied work, Bread Givers (1925) (ISBN 0-89255-290-7), follows the story of a young woman struggling to live from day to day while searching to find her place in Jewish and American culture.

Many of her stories and novels feature an attraction between a fiery Jewish woman and a WASP-type man. After her death, it was revealed that she had had a passionate relationship with educator and philosopher John Dewey, who was apparently the model for some of these fictional romances. Dewey met her at Columbia University and he recruited her to work on his project studying the Americanization of Polish-Americans in Philadelphia. The only love poems of his life were about her.

Yezierska's own life is described in many of her works, including the semi-autobiographical Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story (ISBN 0-89255-124-0). Another motif common in her work is that of the over-bearing, highly observant Jewish patriarch. Yezierska was one of ten children of Bernard Mayer, a Jewish rebbe who devoted his life to study. People think he sent his wife and ten children to work the sweat shops of New York, although this is far from true. His sons were all professional men who supported their father, although it's unclear if the daughters also did. Yezierska's work reflects the pull of her father's strong faith, and respect for scholarship, as well as her keen interest in modern American life, of which her father was highly critical.