by Hannah Walker

Hester Street, which runs parallel to Canal and Grand Streets in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan, serves as a backdrop for much of Anzia Yezierska’s book, Bread Givers (1925). The book is a fictionalized account of Yezierska’s life as a girl and later young woman coming of age in New York City at the turn of the century. Sara Smolinsky, the protagonist and character through which Yezierska’s story is told, is the youngest daughter in a desperately poor Polish immigrant family trying to eke out a living on Hester Street. To complicate matters, Sara’s father, Reb Smolinsky, a devoutly religious man, favors Talmudic study over work and allows the financial burden of familial support to fall on his wife and daughters. Sara’s older sisters are of age and their parents are concerned about finding stable, lucrative matches for each of them, never mind respectful, caring husbands. However, due to inconsistent employment opportunities for Sara’s sister, and a refusal to work on the part of her father, the family is on the verge of eviction from their modest tenement when the story opens.

Humble Beginnings:

In the early 1890s, 1890, according to one source,[1] Yezierska herself immigrated to the Lower East Side with her family,[2] when she was about ten years old. Her exact date of birth remains unknown, due to poor record keeping, but historians think that it was sometime between 1880 and 1885.[3] Her family came from Plinsk in Russian Poland[4] and sought a more stable existence in New York City. Throughout her life, Yezierska intentionally obscured many details of her personal life,[5] making a complete and accurate rendering of her history impossible. What is known, however, comes from a combination of her novels and other stories, many of which were based on people and events she experienced, her inaccurate though nevertheless important autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), and interviews she gave throughout her lifetime.

As a child, Yezierska spent more time working to earn money for her family than she did in school, though she was able to attend Teacher’s College at Columbia University from 1901 to 1905, earning a degree that allowed her to accept an elementary school teaching position.[6] In the following decades she had a few relationships, a marriage that resulted in a daughter, Louise, and returned to Columbia to continue her education but in between that she began writing. Hungry Hearts (1920), her first short story collection, caught the eye of Samuel Goldwyn who bought the motion picture rights from her for $10,000[7] and flew her out to Hollywood to help with the screen play and continue writing for him. Yezierska wrote about her unhappy and ultimately unsuccessful stint in Hollywood and subsequent return to New York City in Red Ribbon on a White Horse. Hungry Hearts was released as a movie in 1922 but Yezierska, who could not abide the abundant wealth, glamour, and vapidity of Hollywood, turned down a promising screenwriting contract,[8] saying she couldn’t be “an author who grows rich writing of the poor.”[9]

Peddling on Hester Street:

The Lower East Side, and specifically Hester Street, where Yezierska could never help returning, whether in her stories or in her escape back to New York, figures prominently in the life of Sara Smolinsky as well. Sara’s first meaningful encounter with Hester Street comes in the first chapter of Bread Givers when she convinces her mother to allow her to peddle herring on the street to earn a bit of extra money for the family.

“On the corner of the most crowded part of Hester Street I stood myself with my pail of herring. ‘Herring! Herring! A bargain in the world! Pick them out yourself. Two cents apiece.’ My voice was like dynamite. Louder than all the pushcart peddler, louder than all the hollering noises of bargaining and selling, I cried out my herring with all the burning fire of my ten old years….And before the day was over my last herring was sold. I counted my greasy fifty pennies….I only wanted to show them what I could do and give it away to them. It began singing in my heart, the music of the whole Hester Street. The pushcart peddlers yelling their goods, the noisy playing of children in the gutter, the women pushing and shoving each other with their market baskets—all that was only hollering noise before melted over me like a new beautiful song.”[10]

Sara, overjoyed at her success and ingenuity, and proud of the small contribution with which she will be able to help her family, suddenly has a change of heart about her surroundings. Whereas before Hester Street was a place of unbearable squalor, now she has come to appreciate the beauty in the surrounding community, despite, or perhaps because of, their shared hardship. Selling wares and goods from pushcarts on the street was common practice among newly arrived immigrants in the Lower East Side, or those looking to sustain an income between more permanent jobs.[11] In an article published in The New York Daily Tribune in 1898, the reporter draws a similar picture of Hester Street. Writing from the perspective of an upper-middle class non-native of the Lower East Side the reporter does not portray the merchants and peddlers in an entirely flattering light, however, his descriptions of “the strange medley of sounds” floating above the street in a mix of English and Yiddish and the diversity of goods available, as well as the large number of fish carts[12], seem to mirror Sara’s descriptions.

A Return:

As Sara grows up, she begins to rebel against her father as she sees her sisters married off to abusive husbands. At a major turning point in her story, she runs away from her parents, who have relocated to Elizabeth, NJ, and escapes back to the Lower East Side and her now-married sisters.[13] She resolves to become a teacher and starts by renting a room of her own and finding a job to pay for her expenses while she attends night school. After years of hard work and study, Sara graduates from college and returns to Hester Street, remarking, “Home! Back to New York! Sara Smolinsky, form Hester Street, changed into a person.”[14] Even after Sara had escaped the clutches of her father and attended college away from New York City, she still felt joy at returning to her home. In this scene, Hester Street is a symbol of Sara’s humble beginnings, self-determination, and willingness to push herself out of the poverty in which she grew up. Her return there as a successful graduate only after years of hardship is a triumph for Sara; she did not come back to Hester Street out of necessity but out of a desire to revisit and reclaim her past. In many ways, Yezierska’s motivation for constantly returning to Hester Street in her writing is probably similar to Sara’s: even though she has moved away from her place of humble beginnings, she can never really move past it. The experiences that the two women had, both real and fictional, shaped their characters and led them to later successes, however, Hester Street always remains home in a way.

A Note on the Photographs:

In 1916, a woman named Rebecca Lepkoff was born in one of the many tenements on Hester Street.[15] Though her childhood in the Lower East Side came approximately two decades after those of Sara and Yezierska, she, too, felt a need to return there through work and art, in her case photography, later in her life. In the 1930s she worked with the National Youth Administration, a New Deal organization,[16] not unlike the WPA Writer’s Project for which Yezierska worked at the same time,[17] and in the 1940s she returned to Hester Street and the Lower East Side to document the neighborhood of her youth. I used her photography for its snapshot-like portrayal of a bygone era: her photographs root the viewer in a Hester Street long past, but well-lived.[18] Each photograph portrays innate daily action of her subject(s) that are no less important for their contribution to a historical look at Hester Street.

Footnotes:

[1] “Revolt, Repression, and Cultural Formations: 1900-1929,” in American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology, ed. Janet Zandy and Nicholas Coles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 328.

[2] Sara R. Horowitz, “Anzia Yezierska,” Jewish Women’s Archive: Sharing Stories Inspiring Change, March 20, 2009, accessed April 28, 2017, https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Yezierska-Anzia.

[3] Ibid. 

[4] Orville Prescott, “Book of the Times,” The New York Times, September 11, 1950, accessed April 28, 2017, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/09/11/89737247.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article&pageNumber=21.

[5] Patricia Brett Erens, “Anzia Yezierska,” Women Film Pioneers Project, accessed April 28, 2017, https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-anzia-yezierska/.

[6] Sara R. Horowitz, “Anzia Yezierska,” Jewish Women’s Archive https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Yezierska-Anzia.

[7] Patricia Brett Erens, “Anzia Yezierska,” Women Film Pioneers Project https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-anzia-yezierska/.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Lyman Bryson, “Haunted Journey,” The New York Times, September 24, 1950, accessed April 21, 2017, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/09/24/306346842.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article&pageNumber=129.

[10] Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers: A Novel (New York: Persea Books, 2003), 21-22.

[11] “Thursday in Hester Street,” The New-York Daily Tribune, September 15, 1898, accessed April 28, 2017, http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/les-hester-street.htm.

[12] Ibid. 

[13] Yezierska, Bread Givers, 139.

[14] Ibid, 237.

[15] Sue, “Celebrating Women’s History: Rebecca Lepkoff,” New York Historical Society Museum & Library: From the Stacks (web log), March 25, 2015, accessed April 28 , 2017, http://blog.nyhistory.org/photographs-rebecca-lepkoff/.

[16] Ibid. 

[17] Sara R. Horowitz, “Anzia Yezierska,” Jewish Women’s Archive https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Yezierska-Anzia.

[18] Sue, “Celebrating Women’s History: Rebecca Lepkoff,” New York Historical Society Museum & Library, http://blog.nyhistory.org/photographs-rebecca-lepkoff/.

Bibliography:

Bryson, Lyman. “Haunted Journey.” The New York Times, September 24, 1950. Accessed April 28, 2017. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/09/24/306346842.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article&pageNumber=129.

Erens, Patricia Brett. “Anzia Yezierska.” In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2013. September 27, 2013. Accessed April 28, 2017. https://wfpp.cdrs.columbia.edu/pioneer/ccp-anzia-yezierska/.

Horowitz, Sara R.. “Anzia Yezierska.” Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 20 March 2009. Jewish Women’s Archive. Accessed April 28, 2017. https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/Yezierska-Anzia.

Prescott, Orville. “Book of the Times.” The New York Times, September 11, 1950. Accessed April 28, 2017. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1950/09/11/89737247.html?action=click&contentCollection=Archives&module=ArticleEndCTA®ion=ArchiveBody&pgtype=article&pageNumber=21.

“Revolt, Repression, and Cultural Formations: 1900-1929.” In American Working-Class Literature: An Anthology, edited by Janet Zandy and Nicholas Coles, 201-365. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Sue. “Celebrating Women’s History: Rebecca Lepkoff.” New York Historical Society Museum & Library: From the Stacks (web log), March 25, 2015. Accessed April 28 , 2017. http://blog.nyhistory.org/photographs-rebecca-lepkoff/.

“Thursday in Hester Street.” The New-York Daily Tribune, September 15, 1898. Accessed April 28, 2017. http://www.museumoffamilyhistory.com/les-hester-street.htm.

Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers: A Novel. New York: Persea Books, 2003.