“My one story is hunger.” So declared the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s novel Children of Loneliness (1923). Having immigrated with her family from Eastern Europe, Yezierska chronicled the hunger of her generation of newly arrived Jewish Americans around the turn of the century. Her novels, short stories, and autobiographical writing vividly depict both the literal hunger of poverty and the metaphoric hunger for security, education, companionship, home, and meaning—in short, for the American dream.

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Critical assessment of Yezierska’s work has fluctuated since her earliest publications. Initially lauded as an authentic voice of the tenements as “Cinderella of the sweatshops,” by the 1940s, Yezierska had fallen into obscurity. Seen by the American mainstream as “too Jewish,” within the Jewish community her writing was offensive to both immigrant and Americanized Jews who felt mocked and exposed. Because of the growing interest in both ethnic and women’s writing, the 1980s saw a resurgence of appreciation for her writing. Bread Givers was reissued in 1975, followed by editions of many of her other works. Most contemporary critics approach her work sociologically rather than aesthetically, drawn by her compelling depictions of cultural and geographic displacement, the American dream and the harsh reality of immigrant life, and the struggle to acculturate.

In the main, Yezierska has been seen as aesthetically inferior to other writers of the Jewish immigrant and assimilation experience. Many critics praise the raw power of her writing but see in it no real artistry. They cite the proliferation of stock characters—the overworked mother, the ineffectual father, the intellectual gentile or assimilated male savior, the cold WASP, the rootless Americanized Jew, the condescending social worker, the passionate and intelligent young Jewish immigrant woman. Often, readers read the work as veiled autobiography, taking the voice of her protagonists as her own.

But there has been a renewed appreciation for her oeuvre as a crafted literary work. In a biography of Yezierska, her daughter discusses her mother’s imaginative inventiveness and also contrasts the stylized “Yinglish” dialect of the fiction with her mother’s more proper, standardized English. Some contemporary readers note Yezierska’s artful use of metaphor, her ability to present multiple points of view, and the broad humor of her exaggerated types.

Anzia Yezierska died of a stroke on November 21, 1970, in Ontario, California.

All I Could Never Be (1932).

Arrogant Beggar (1927).

Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New (1925. Reprinted 1975 and 1984).

Children of Loneliness (1923).

How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska (1991).

Hungry Hearts (1920).

Hungry Hearts and Other Stories (1985).

The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (1979).

Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950. Reprint, 1981).

Salome of the Tenements (1992).