English
Birgit Wieking
The Jewish Immigrant Experience in Anzia
Yezierska's Bread Givers and Mary Antin's
The Promised Land
Thesis (M.A.)
Universität Hannover
American Studies
Magisterarbeit
im Rahmen der Magisterprüfung
zur Erlangung des
wissenschaftlichen Grades Magistra Artium (M.A.)
The Jewish Immigrant Experience in Anzia
Yezierska’s Bread Givers and Mary Antin’s
The Promised Land
vorgelegt von
Birgit Wieking
Bearbeitungszeitraum: 27.03.2006 – 26.09.2006
Fig. 2. Anonymous. Mary Antin (c. 1914).
Fig. 1. Anonymous. Anzia Yezierska after the
birth of her child (c. 1912) courtesy of Melvin
Henriksen.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction……………………...……………………………………… 4
2. Definitions and Theoretical Considerations…………………………... 9
2.1. The Concept of Ethnicity…………………………………………………... 9
2.1.1. Ethnicity and Ethnic Identity…......................................................... 9
2.1.2. Ethnicity in American Society……………………………………... 14
2.2. Ethnic Writing……………………………………………………………… 19
2.2.1. The Role of Ethnicity in American Literature – What is Ethnic
Writing?............................................................................................. 19
2.2.2. Jewish-American Literature………………………………………... 25
2.3. To Write Your Life Story – Autobiographical Writing………………….. 27
2.3.1. What is Autobiography?.................................................................... 27
2.3.2. The Construction of Authenticity………………………………….. 37
2.4. Autobiography in Ethnic Contexts – An Attempt to define Immigrant
Autobiography……………………………………………………………… 42
3. Reading Mary Antin’s The Promised Land as Immigrant
Autobiography…………………………………………………………... 48
3.1. One-Way Assimilation – From the Old World shtetl Girl to the New
England Woman………………………………………………………......... 48
3.2. The Story Behind the Immigrant Classic…………………………………. 52
4. Anzia Yezierksa’s Bread Givers………………………………………... 59
4.1. Difficulties and Struggles in the Process of Assimilation…………………59
4.2. The Father-Daughter-Relationship as a Reflection of the
Immigrant Dilemma……………………………………………………....... 66
5. Conclusion……………………………………………………………….. 72
6. Works Cited……………………………………………………………... 75
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1. Introduction
I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over. Is it not time to write my life’s
story? […] It is because I understand my history, in its larger outlines, to be typical of
many, that I consider it worth recording. My life is a concrete illustration of a multitude
of statistical facts. […] I am only one of many whose fate it has been to live a page of
modern history. We are the strands of the cable that binds the Old World to the New
(Antin, PL1 3-5)2.
I suddenly realized that I had come back to where I had started twenty years ago when I
began my fight for freedom. […] And now I realized that the shadow of the burden was
always following me, and here I stood face to face with it again. […] But I felt the
shadow still there, over me. It wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my
father whose weight was still upon me (Yezierska, BG 295-7)3.
These are two quotations by two immigrant women – both experiencing an incisive and
complete change in their young lives through the immigration from Eastern Europe to the
United States of America at the end of the nineteenth century. This thesis investigates their
individual immigrant experience that they claim to be representative of the lives of many.
Immigration has always exerted a great influence on American life. Towards the turn
to the 20th century, the United States was confronted with the largest stage of immigration ithe
nation’s history. From 1890 on, a total of twenty million people entered the country until the
1920s (cf. Di Pietro, Ifkovic 6). Immigrants at the time were mainly from Southern and
Eastern Europe; the largest groups were formed by Italians, Hebrews, Polish, Germans and
English (cf. Gabbacia 140). On the one hand, the rapidly developing “economic expansion”
(139) in the US required human labor; on the other hand, life in Europe was determined by
famine and epidemics as well as political and religious persecution, to outline briefly the most
important reasons for this big wave of migration.
The conflict between the immigrants’ expectations of a better life in the New World
and the actual living conditions as well as the political climate the immigrants had to face in
the United States has been treated in literature in many ways. The examination of cultural or
ethnic identity and the process of assimilation, in this case Americanization, and its effects are
very important issues in immigration literature as well. In this thesis, I am going to
1
To simplify matters, the books’ titles – when quoted – will be abbreviated PL for The Promised Land and BG
for Bread Givers in the following.
2
The thesis is based on the following edition: Mary Antin, The Promised Land, 1912 (New York: The Modern
Library, 2001).
3
All page references preceded by BG are to the following edition: Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York:
Persea, 2003).
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concentrate on the literary treatment of the Jewish immigrant experience. This is a matter of
particular interest because, as Judith Baskin states in the introduction to the study Women of
the Word: Jewish Women and Jewish Writing (1994), the wave of immigration in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries established “an unprecedented number of Jewish
women [who] began to write creatively from the raw material of their own experiences and
feelings” (17). More specifically, Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe “gave rise to a
new genre of Jewish literature: Jewish women’s autobiography” (Zierler 1). In a general way,
it can be said that “most of these autobiographies tend to be concerned in some way with the
relationship between life in the European Old World and the North American New” (Tuerk,
“Columbus” 114). To narrow the topic of my thesis down, I will focus on the two authors in
the field of Eastern European Jewish women writing whom I already quoted above: Anzia
Yezierska and Mary Antin. In the course of my studies on American literature, I have already
written a paper on Antin and Yezierska which motivates my current interest.
Mary Antin published short stories, essays, and her books The Promised Land (1912)
and They Who Knock at Our Gates (1914). Anzia Yezierska’s literary production resulted in
collections of short stories entitled Hungry Hearts (1920) and Children of Loneliness (1923)
as well as the partly autobiographical novels Salome of the Tenements (1922), Bread Givers
(1925), Arrogant Beggar (1927), All I Could Never Be (1932), and Red Ribbon on a White
Horse (1950). Due to restricted time and place, I will turn my attention to Yezierska’s semiautobiographical novel Bread Givers and Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised Land.
The choice of just these books is rooted in the fact that The Promised Land illustratively
demonstrates the immigrant’s complete assimilation in opposition to Bread Givers, a text that
also reflects the dilemmas and struggles immigrants at the time had to face.
The purpose of this thesis is to show that both authors act as literary agents of
ethnicity. As Mary Dearborn points out, the immigrant writer embarks on a “strategy of
mediation, the attempt to build a bridge between her world and that of the native-born
American” (Dearborn, “Yezierska” 113). This strategy of engaging in the East-to-West
dialogue is implemented in immigrant autobiography. One of the most striking aspects is that
both authors’ aim to act as mediators between the old world and the new is most effectively
achieved by using the autobiographical genre. The authors claim their texts and personal
immigrant experience to be representative and insist on being representative of others. Thus,
they see the value or usefulness of their texts in the representativeness of their personal
experience. The relevance of authenticity that is constructed in immigrant autobiography has
to be evaluated as high with regard to its reception.
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The author’s personal involvement is applied as a means to communicate between the
two worlds, to improve the relationship between immigrant and host country, to draw the
attention to problems and insufficient conditions the immigrants had to deal with, and, not
least, to enhance the reader’s empathy. In order to show the different perspectives both
women had on their personal immigrant experience, I will draw a comparison between both
writers’ styles of embarking on this strategy of mediation. Above all, the thesis will only to a
lesser extent concentrate on similarities and resemblances. To a greater extent, it will focus on
the striking discrepancies between the two authors’ texts. Whereas Antin’s text reflects the
seemingly optimistic assimilation with the American culture, Yezierska’s immigrant
experience is more complex resulting in a text which is prone to negativity in order to
demonstrate the struggles and problems immigrants in the United States were confronted
with.
In the following, I’m going to give a detailed overview of the thesis’ structure. The
text is mainly composed of two parts. Since the expression Jewish ethnic or immigrant
autobiography raises several questions, in the first part of the thesis, I will focus on theoretical
considerations about the terms ethnicity and autobiography in order to provide an overview of
the elementary terminology. I will try to define the major terms and aspects the thesis deals
with to establish a basis for the subsequent literary analyses. What should be established at the
very outset is that we are dealing here with a presentation of current debates rather than clearcut definitions.
The following questions will be discussed in the theoretical part: Firstly, what is meant
by ethnicity or ethnic identity at all? What role does the concept of ethnicity play in American
culture? What is American identity? I’m going to present the debates about ethnicity in the
last decades between the so-called essentialist and constructivist attitudes the latter of which is
more convincing to me, as the discussion will show. Thus, I will show that ethnicity or ethnic
identity cannot be regarded as stable and eternal units but are always subject to change and
constant development.
Secondly, what actually is immigrant or ethnic literature? Is it possible to determine
the essential characteristics of a piece of ethnic or immigrant writing? Is immigration
literature American? How can Jewish-American literature be defined? Again, we are going to
see how constructivist views prove to be more persuasive.
Thirdly, I want to point out the most important features of autobiographical writing.
The aim is to become acquainted with the current debate on autobiography and to show its
functions and effects. Another crucial aspect to look at in the definition part is the term
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