Has anyone read Anzia Yezierska

Gold Member Joined: Nov 07 2005 Posts: 1103

I only learned about the novelist, Anzia Yezierska quite recently. she wrote 1920'-30's about the plight of immigrant women. I believe she rejected her frum upbringing, gave up her daughter in order to be a writer.

she apparently has been "rediscovered" by feminist literary critics. I'm interested in hearing from anyone out there (post-feminist/anti-feminist) to offer a frum take about her literature .

Executive Member Joined: Jan 28 2009 Posts: 327

Hi--actually she was "rediscovered" some time ago. My friend has been teaching her novel Bread Givers for about 20 years in a college course. I asked her for comments from a frum perspective and she told me this:

It's very much a novel whose goal is to justify leaving the traditional community (but staying Jewish) but it's complicated by the fact that the narrator loves her very traditional mother and hates and loves her tyrannical Orthodox father.
A lot of the book is about how horrible and borderline abusive the father is, and he's set up as the figure of European Orthodoxy in many ways. If you read carefully though (and this is part of my teaching technique), you'll see that there are other characters who are Orthodox and NOT like the father. Also, the father doesn't do a lot of the required "correct" religious acts. For example, you never see the father (or anyone) saying benching at the table and there are many scenes devoted to food as a central metaphor. Ultimately, he may be the figure of Orthodoxy in the book but he's NOT presented "correctly" as an Orthodox man--even as a cruel Orthodox man. I try to get my students to see that he's a horrible character who has distorted what it means to be a religious Jew, just as he has distorted what it means to be a good husband and father. In other words, he not horrible because he's religious but he's horrible and part of the proof is in the way that he presents being religious.
Interestingly, even though he represents everything she hates, Sara (the central character) and her new husband (a Jewish man who is a secular scholar) want to take him in at the end of the book since she feels so connected to her father. It's not clear at all how this will work but she needs to try since he is part of her. It's an interesting book but you need to step back and read it carefully, something that students don't do at first and so I get to point out issues of reading, fictionalization, memoir-writing, etc.

That's what she said--hope it helps.