America and I (Criticism)

Criticism

Rena Korb

Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers. In the following essay, Korb explores the development of Yezierska’s concept of America and her fulfillment of her creative goals.

In a Literary Digest issue from 1923, Yezierska shared her view of America as “a new world in the making, that anyone who has something real in him can find a way to contribute himself in this new world.” At the same time, she noted, “But I saw I had to wait for my chance to give what I had to give, with the same life and death earnestness with which a man fights for his bread.” That same year, her third published work, Children of Loneliness (a novella with ten short stories and three autobiographical pieces), came out. “America and I,” one of those autobiographical pieces, describes the experiences that Yezierska went through that led to the development of this philosophy. This piece aptly fits Alice Kessler-Harris’s description of Yezierska’s mission, “to interpret her people to America,” which she writes about in the introduction to The Open Cage, a 1979 reissue of some of Yezierska’s work.

Yezierska relates her immigrant plight, from her first arrival in this “golden land of flowing opportunity” to her current success as a writer with the gift of introducing her people to their adopted culture. As an eager newcomer, Yezierska has grand dreams of what she will find in America; to Yezierska and the millions of immigrants like her, America stands in marked contrast to Russia. The Old World chokes its people with “airless oppression,” but America brings sunlight to this darkness. In the Old World, Yezierska and her people have no opportunity for economic betterment, but in America they can escape “from the dead drudgery for bread.” Yezierska’s soul and spirit were “stifled” in the Old World, but in America, Yezierska can revel in her ability to give voice to her own forms of self-expression.

“For the first time in America, I’d cease to be a slave of the belly,” Yezierska recalls how she felt at the time. “I’d be a creator, a giver, a human being.”

Yezierska sees her inability to communicate as the major obstacle standing in the way of her dreams. Although she is in America, she is pushed to the outskirts of American society because she has “No speech, no common language, no way to win a smile of understanding from them.” Once she is able to speak the language, Yezierska is confident that the Americans would want to hear about “the richness” in her. When an “Americanized” immigrant family offers to hire her as a maid, she moves in with them, hoping this will allow her to “begin my life in the sunshine, after my long darkness.” To Yezierska, this couple, “so well-dressed, so well-fed,” seem symbolic of the transformative success that America can bring.

As the narrative style underscores, Yezierska glorifies everything American: the “music of the American language,” American words, “new American things,” “an American dress and hat.” She is “so grateful to mingle with the American people” at the house where she works as a maid that she “never knew tiredness.” While living there,

Yezierska comes to perceive herself as an American on the inside, for example “developing American eyes” with which to look at the world. All she needs — or so she thinks — is American clothing to cover up her immigrant heritage. With new clothes, “I’d show them I could look like an American in a day.” She is still filled with optimism; she does not comprehend that merely possessing the outward trappings of an American will not make her one.

Through her experience with the family, however, Yezierska comes to learn a bitter lesson: being “American” does not make something good. The family cheats her out of her wages, leaving Yezierska with nothing to show for a month’s hard work other than a new distrust of so-called “Americans.” However, Yezierska’s narrative also shows her understanding that it is the man and woman who label themselves as such. They are not American-born, actually coming from Yezierska’s own village in Russia. They only want to be American because of the economic opportunities it provides, such as the comfortable home and the nourishing food — as well as the chance to feel superior to other newer immigrants.

This family so embraces their adopted country that they are even “ashamed to remember their mother tongue.” Yezierska’s reiteration of the word “American” implies that this family does not really represent America. Their self-portrayal of themselves as such is as fleeting as the “false friendship” they offered Yezierska. In turning her back on them, Yezierska is not turning her back on America at all.

Holding on to her belief in the concept of America and determining to search anew, Yezierska returns to the slums of New York, where her people have settled. She finds a job that she might have held in Russia — sewing buttons in a sweatshop — a job that affords her only the bare minimum of sustenance. The outward circumstances that face Yezierska make her wonder, ‘“Where is America? Is there an America?’” Yezierska begins to question what before had been her profound faith.

As time goes by, Yezierska moves her way up in the industrial world, going to work for a factory and maintaining a regular schedule with Sundays off. Still, she continues to hold fast to the belief that her America will be the place where can “work for love and not for a living.” When she tries to take steps in this direction, however, the native Americans she meets seem intent on making her aware of the folly of this philosophy. In her efforts to better herself and to fulfill her creative dreams, Yezierska seeks out assistance, but the first person to whom she turns has no comprehension of the depth of her feelings. When she confides to her English teacher, “I want to do something with my head, my feelings,” the woman advises her that she first worry about learning the language and then “patted me as if I was not yet grown up.”

The teacher does tell her about the Women’s Association, which Yezierska visits. This organization has the ostensible purpose of “trying to help the working-girl find herself,” but instead it coordinates activities that promote the needs and success of employers. Yezierska attends a lecture “The Happy Worker and His Work,” which is sponsored by the association. The lecturer extols efficiency in the factory worker at the same time he asserts, “It’s economy for the boss to make the worker happy.” Equating what makes the worker happy with her own vision of what would make her happy — expressing her thoughts and feelings through her writing — Yezierska believes these words apply to her. However, this lecture, filled with “educated language that was over my head,” offers Yezierska nothing except for false hope.

Yezierska’s next step toward achieving her goal is to go to the Vocational-Guidance Center, where she explains to the counselor that her job sewing shirtwaists makes her heart “waste away.” She describes her major problem as “I think and think, and my thoughts can’t come out.” To this plaint, the counselor replies with an answer focused on economic achievement, not personal fulfillment: “Why don’t you think out your thoughts in shirtwaists? You could learn to be a designer. Earn more money.” The counselor cannot understand Yezierska’s yearning to do more with herself than merely earn a living. More strikingly, as illustrated by her words “You have to show that you have something special for America before America has need of you,” the counselor does not even believe that Yezierska yet has a right to aspire to more than being a menial worker. Her admonishment seems to tell Yezierska — and all immigrants — not to hold goals surrounding intellectual, philosophical, artistic, or creative pursuits, but instead to focus only on pragmatic ones. The counselor would feed the body while stifling the soul.

Frustrated, Yezierska comes to feel that “the America of my dreams never was and never could be.” However, in letting go of her vision of America as a Utopia, Yezierska opens herself up to finding out what America really can be for her. By reading American history, she takes the important first step of rethinking her concept of America, and subsequently revamping it. America, she realizes, does not owe her the opportunities she seeks, but she must fight for them herself. Yezierska must emulate the Pilgrims who “made no demands on anybody, but on their own indomitable spirit of persistence.” Yezierska also realizes that not only is she erring in “forever begging a crumb of sympathy,” she is also doing so from the Americans — “strangers who could not understand.”

Yezierska experiences her life-altering epiphany when she comes to realize that America is “a world still in the making.” She can contribute to the ongoing creation of the country through the expression of her inner thoughts and feelings. In writing about the life of the immigrants, her achievement is two-fold: she finds the America of her dreams, but she also widens the perception of the country for the native born by “open[ing] up my life and the lives of my people to them.” The “bridge of understanding” that Yezierska works to build with words can only expand and improve American-born and immigrant readers’ ideas about the country they call home.

At the same time, particularly because she understands the role of all Americans in inventing the country, she feels sadness that so many immigrants “with my longing, my burning eagerness, to do and to be, [are] wasting their days in drudgery they hate.” These people are losing out on the opportunity to fulfill their own dreams, and “America is losing all that richness of the soul.” In these sentiments, Yezierska asserts her belief that people — even those who the American mainstream would ignore — have their unique gifts to offer and can thus shape the world in which they live.

“America and I” ends on the positive vision that Yezierska holds for the future of the country. She writes, “the America that is every day nearer coming to be, will be too wise, too open-hearted, too friendly-handed, to let the least lastcomer at their gates knock in vain with his gifts unwanted.” Whether Yezierska’s prophecy has come true is not for her to determine: it is for the individual, who may even decide to embrace self-expression as a further means of shaping the ever-unfolding world.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on “America and I,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

Kate Covintree

Covintree is a graduate of Randolph-Macon Women’s College with a degree in English. In this essay, Covintree discusses the immigrant experience as expressed through Yezierska’s short story.

First published in 1922, Anzia Yezierska’s short story “America and I” touches on many of the issues and themes common in all her work, including the struggle of the immigrant to be a part of the promise of America. This is the story of a young female narrator who comes to America with a dream and a desire to make something of herself. She has many expectations of what she will be able to become when she arrives, but instead she is immediately introduced to the base reality of America and its treatment of the immigrant community. This is a story of the struggle of assimilation, of the challenges faced by an outsider trying to become part of the mainstream culture. In an ideal situation, aspects of both cultures begin to blend, and a variant of the main culture becomes primary. In this case, the narrator is in the minority group, — “one of the millions of immigrants” — of Jews from Eastern Europe, who are fighting to be heard in their new country and culture. Neither culture knows quite how to respond to the other.

Yezierska’s narrator comes to America
[with a] soul pregnant with the unlived lives of generations clamoring for expression. What [her] mother and father and their mother and father never had a chance to give out in Russia, [she] would give out in America.

She believes that America is a place that will welcome her as an individual with ideas and passions that can make her and America flourish. She expects America to feed her soul, “I’d cease to be a slave of the belly. I’d be a creator, a giver, a human being!” What she finds, though, is that her expectations of the American dream fall short because she is an immigrant girl who enters a country without adequate money, clothing, training, or language skills. In addition, she longs to discover a way to make her dreams come true, a way to reinvent herself as a real American.

The narrator left Russia because she believed there was nothing for her there: she came to America with the desire to give of herself, without any knowledge of how to translate her passionate desire into something that would provide food and shelter and money. Her passions are not enough to sustain her, and she, like so many other immigrants, accepts a menial position as a maid for a family from the Old World who appear to have assimilated to this New World.

She takes this position with comfort, believing herself to be “in the hands of American friends, invited to share with them their home, their plenty, their happiness.” With this job, she expects to learn the language and have money for clothes. She believes her vision of America is in sight. She works tirelessly for them, absorbing what she can about her new country, only to discover they will not pay her for her work. Though providing room and board, these Old World connections do not help the narrator in fulfilling her American dream. In fact, they demean her and shame her for even believing that she is entitled to her own time and her own wages. For the narrator, this is a betrayal. “It went black for my eyes,” she says. Her one American connection is soured, as are her feelings toward immigrants who become Americanized: “It was blotted out in my all trust in friendship from ‘Americans.’”

This Americanized family becomes an example of one way immigrants choose to blend with their new culture, by almost dismissing their very origin. “[T]hey were so well fed, so successful in America, that they were ashamed to remember their mother tongue.” As the husband and wife rise in wealth and stature, they have no qualms about taking advantage of a former neighbor by denying her wages and thereby a means to create a respectable place for herself in America. Perhaps this couple rose to their current status through such basic labor, or perhaps they had been a part of this new culture long enough that they felt entitled to make those who came after them struggle to survive. Whatever the reasons, Yezierska chooses not to explain them. She merely demonstrates, through this couple’s callous nature towards the narrator, one reality of this New World.

This was a culture that did not and would not accept all the ways of the Old World, especially one immediately visible — dress. As Yezierska’s narrator states from the beginning, she longs for new clothes so that she can appear American. The narrator believes, like many other immigrant Jews of the time, that American clothing held with it what Christopher Okonkwo described in his article “Of Repression, Assertion, and the Speakerly Dress” as “transfigurative potential.” With American clothes, the narrator could suddenly transform herself from an immigrant into an American. “Jews were compelled to discard that sartorial part of their ethnic identity in order to be accepted in America,” according to Okonkwo. But of course, before Yezierska’s narrator can buy these alternative clothes, she must work in the very shops that make them.

When she takes factory jobs, she begins to see the reality of the garment industry. Initially, the narrator believes these jobs allow her opportunity to pursue her own dreams and that even her defiance of their bribes is a sign of her assimilation to America. However, like the Americanized family before, she discovers her bosses have other motives. They bribe her with “tea [and] herring over black bread” and English classes only to keep her working in their factory. They are motivated by greed and will use whatever means to gain their profit. Yezierska’s narrator cannot reconcile this motive for herself. Gaining the means to buy her American clothes does not quiet her longing to be American. Looking the part does not satisfy “the hunger in the heart that never gets food.” She can sense her own soul seeping away. As Ron Ebest cites in his article “Anzia Yezierska and the Popular Debate Over the Jews”: “The dead work with my hands was killing me. My work left only hard stones on my heart.” It is as though she must trade her penniless dreaming for the financial reality of factory work which “stifles ... expression.” Yezierska’s narrator has dreams that she does not want to trade, and she struggles to maintain them, to live in the new country based on her expectations, not the harsh reality she encounters.

The reality is Yezierska’s America keeps the immigrant at a distance. This American culture is unwilling to accept or incorporate foreign ways. As Ebest goes on to say in his article: “Yezierska suggests] a casual relationship between American indifference [to the Jewish immigrants] and sweatshop labor.” America abdicated any real responsibility for the narrator. The industry takes no interest in her passions nor her skills unless they can improve productivity. In the factory, with a regular American work schedule of eight-hour work days and five-day work weeks, the young woman at the Vocational-Guidance Center tells her: “You have to show that you have something special for America before America has need of you.” What skills she has gained in the factories do not show she is something special. They show she is a typical immigrant who will get no special privileges. The guidance counselor explains the American dream as “earn[ing] your living at what you know and ris[ing] slowly from job to job.” This is the reality she discovers, a lifetime of factory labor. It turns her dream into “a shadow ... a chimera of lunatics and crazy immigrants.”

When faced with this reality, Yezierska’s narrator discovers a greater reality: no matter what clothes she wears or how well she speaks, she will always be an immigrant because America “could not understand what the Russian soul in me wanted.” The narrator has followed all the channels she knows, and still she is forced to remain “one of the dumb ... beating out their hearts at [America’s] gates for a breath of understanding.” This is the true struggle of assimilation for the immigrant, to find a way to make the dominant culture discover the true value and talents of the non-native so that he or she can be seen as an equal in the community, not just a slave laborer. The narrator wants to be heard, to “be a creator, a giver, a human being.” Without language, the voice of the immigrant cannot speak and the New World appears deaf.

However, when the narrator learns English, commonality still cannot be achieved. Throughout the story, the narrator tries to share her dream of “living joy of fullest self expression.” Each time she shares her dreams with America, she is rebuked, dismissed, and shamed into feeling grateful for her place in America. “You should be glad we keep you here.” Even with common language, the narrator is silenced and must find her voice in some other way.

Yezierska emphasizes the New World’s oppressive silence of die immigrant by never naming the narrator. In this way, this nameless character represents America’s insensitivity to the immigrant. Americans can perhaps listen to the story of struggle but cannot relate it to a real person living in their own America. They can step back from the nameless stranger and remove themselves from the struggle. In the same respect, though, the narrator becomes the Everyman for all foreigners who bring their dreams to American shores. This story of longing and silence becomes their story. Persons who feel unable to find their place in American culture can hear their own voice in the cries of the narrator. As the narrator speaks, she tells of the “burning eagerness” waiting inside so many other voiceless immigrants.

It is in telling the story that Yezierska’s narrator finally finds her voice and also fulfills her dream to be a part of America. This appears to take place for Yezierska’s narrator after she researches American history and comes to the conclusion that Americans survived because of their own “indomitable spirit of persistence.” She also concludes that all of her dreaming about being a part of America was really just her “begging for a crumb of sympathy.” Suddenly she is enlightened and sees that she has a place in “the making of America like those Pilgrims who came in the Mayflower.” The narrator finds her voice in sharing her immigrant story and finds that by doing so she is able to “build a bridge of understanding between the American-born and [herjself.” Through writing, she discovers a means of joining her new American culture while still maintaining her immigrant heritage.

Her writing is her voice and her fulfillment of her American dream. “In only writing about the Ghetto I found America.” She can use her own experience as an outsider clamoring to get in as a guide for other immigrants, and for America. With her story comes the exposure of the reality that “America is losing the richness of the soul.” It is the narrator’s hope that such exposure becomes an agent of change. This is her future vision of successful assimilation. Her hope for the immigrants is that they persevere long enough to share their gifts. For the Americans, she hopes they open their arms, ready to fully take in these immigrant treasures. In this new America, dreams of the future are not dashed and dismissed by the realities of the present.

Source: Kate Covintree, Critical Essay on “America and I,” in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2002.

What Do I Read Next?

• Yezierska’s Bread Givers: A Struggle between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New World (1925) is the author’s most fully realized fictional work. Based on events from her childhood, the novel explores the struggles that Sara goes through as she breaks free from her traditional Old World family to become an independent woman.
• Red Ribbon on a White Horse is Yezierska’s fictionalized autobiography. Yezierska published this work, to great acclaim, in 1950, when she was nearly seventy years old.
• Call It Sleep (1934) is Henry Roth’s highly praised novel about the experiences of Jewish immigrants in New York City. It focuses on a young boy, his difficult relationship with his father, and the squalid urban environment in which they live. Today, this novel is considered a classic of Jewish-American literature.
• Chaim Potok, the son of Polish immigrants, was raised in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. His first novel, The Chosen (1967) tells the story of the son of a Hasidic rabbi who is encouraged to study secular subjects. His next novel, The Promise (1969), follows the same characters into young adulthood.
• Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) chronicles the story of young Francie Nolan, growing up in a poor family in New York City in the early 1900s.
• Sholem Asch’s Salvation (1934) is the story of a Polish Jewish community in the 1800s. This book vividly recreates the persecution of the Jews.
• “A Scrap of Time” and Other Stories (1987) collects Polish author Ida Fink’s short fiction. These stories relate the experiences of Jews in Poland before and during the Holocaust.
• Cecyle S. Neidle’s America’s Immigrant Women (1976) discusses the contributions of women, including Yezierska’s, to the development of the United States and its culture from the 1600s onward.
• Jacob A. Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890), documenting slum life in the late 1800s, exposed the foul conditions under which New York’s urban poor were forced to exist. His perennially popular work contributed to the social reform movements that improved city life.
• Abraham Cahan was a Jewish writer who came to the United States in 1882. His novel The Rise of David Levinsky (1917), one of the first books about the Jewish immigrant’s experience, remains relevant for its vivid re-creation of life on New York’s Lower East Side.