Anzia Yezierska

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Anzia Yezierska (picture in The Lima News of July 3, 1922)
Article about Anzia Yezierska in The Cedar Rapids Gazette (March 5, 1921)

Anzia Yezierska (* 29. October 1880 in [?] Płońsk , Poland ; † 21st November 1970 in Ontario , California ) was a Polish-born American author of short stories and novels .

Life

Yezierska, who comes from a poor Polish- Jewish family, worked as a seamstress in a textile factory and as a cook in the Waldorf-Astoria after she immigrated to the USA at the age of 15 . She also worked in laundries and studied English at night school. Following further training, she taught home economics from 1905. After divorcing her two husbands and having a daughter in 1912, she began writing. Between 1917 and 1918 she was friends with the philosopher and educator John Dewey . She later studied on a scholarship at Columbia University and at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts , a private drama school founded in New York City in 1884 .

She made her literary debut in 1920 with Hungry Hearts , a collection of short stories that were filmed in 1922 by Goldwyn Picture Corporation and directed by E. Mason Hopper . The successful film adaptation of these episodes made Yzierka famous in one fell swoop and became a symbol of the " from-rags-to-riches" myth.

After another collection of short stories, some of which were autobiographical about life in New York's Lower East Side , entitled Children of Loneliness: Stories of Immigrant Life in America (1923), she published the novels Salome of the Tenements (1923), Bread Givers ( 1925), which was influenced by Theodore Dreiser's novel Jennie Gerhardt (1911), and Arrogant Beggar (1927). In 1950 her memoir was published under the title Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950).

Also Salome of the Tenements in 1925 by Sidney Olcott with Jetta Goudal filmed.

After the lack of other successful books, she took part in the Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s , a job creation initiative by the US government during the New Deal to bring unemployed intellectuals back into wages for the common good.

Yezierska was the aunt of the journalist Cecelia Ager and the great-aunt of her daughter, the journalist and columnist Shana Alexander .

Works in German translation

  • My father, my enemy . ( Bread Givers ) Translated from the English by Maria Castro. Dvorah-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1993. ISBN 3-927926-07-8 .

literature

  • Irene Billeter Sauter: New York City: "is cage" or "promised land" valid? Representations of urban space in Edith Wharton and Anzia Yezierska . Lang, Berlin 2011. ISBN 978-3-03-430581-5 .
  • Mary V. Dearborn: Love in the Promised Land: The Story of Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey , 1988
  • Marianne Schüz: Between appeal and accusation. The short stories Abraham Cahans and Anzia Yezierskas, 1890-1920 . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1991. ISBN 3-631-43943-1 .

Web links and sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The exact date of Anzia Yezierska's birth can no longer be determined with certainty; different information can be found in different sources. For example, encyclopedia com presumably names 1885 as the date of birth [1] ; the Jewish Women's Archive gives the period between 1880 and 1885 [2] ; Likewise, the Penguin-Classics issue of Hungry Hearts from 1997 says only vaguely: "Anzia Yezierska was born in a small town in Russian Poland sometime in the 1880s."
  2. ↑ Cf. Gerhard Bach : Yezierska, Anzia. In: Bernd Engler, Kurt Müller (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors. 768 p., Stuttgart and Weimar 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 753.
  3. ↑ See Gerhard Bach: Yeziesrka, Anzia. In: Bernd Engler, Kurt Müller (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon of American Authors. 768 p., Stuttgart and Weimar 2000, ISBN 3-476-01654-4 , p. 753.
personal data
SURNAME Yezierska, Anzia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish-American writer
DATE OF BIRTH uncertain: October 29, 1880
PLACE OF BIRTH Płońsk , Poland
DATE OF DEATH November 21, 1970
Place of death Ontario , California