Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970)

Anzia Yezierska was born in the Russian-Polish village of Plinsk (or Plotsk) to Pearl and Bernard Yezierska, an impoverished Jewish Talmudic scholar. She was one of the couple's 10 children. From an early age, she was determined to obtain an education. The family emigrated to the USA in about 1900. Anzia moved out of the family's tenement home to become independent of her father and took various jobs, including in sweatshops. She went to night school in order to learn English. She won a scholarship that enabled her to attend Columbia University Teacher's College. She taught elementary school from 1908 to 1913, with a brief leave of absence to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she studied acting and became involved in radical socialist circles. She began to write fiction that often focused on the problems experienced by immigrant Jewish women and their families in America. In 1910, she married Jacob Gordon, a lawyer, but left him the next day. The following year, she married Arnold Levitas, a typography teacher and printer, and the couple had a daughter; they divorced in 1916. Anzia published her first story, "The Fat of the Land," in 1919, which led to a contract for her first book, Hungry Hearts (1920), a collection of her short stories. It was a bestseller, and Goldwyn Pictures paid her $10,000 for the rights to make a 1922 silent film based on it, and brought her to Hollywood to work on the screenplay. Over the next decade, she published three novels, Salome of the Tenements (1923), Bread Givers (1925), and Arrogant Beggar (1927). She was involved in a romantic liasion with educator John Dewey, who was more than 20 years her senior. She addressed the relationship fictionally in All I Could Never Be (1932) and in her autobiography Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). It also was fictionalized in Norma Rosen's book John and Anzia: An American Romance (1989).