The impact of the immigrants

In New York in 1920 the writer Hattie Mayer, under her pen name Anzia Yezierska, published her first collection of short stories, entitled Hungry Hearts. Poignant sketches of Jewish family life among the tenements and sweatshops of the Lower East Side, they gain additional impact from the reader’s continuing awareness that English is not the author’s first language. She grew up in a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement speaking Yiddish and Polish, and made the transatlantic voyage with her parents in the wake of Tsar Nicholas’s pogroms. Given such experience, the final story, ‘How I Found America’, seems, for all its sentimentality, the most moving. Yezierska’s fictional avatar, ‘pressing on through the barriers of materialism’, realises that taking possession of her new world is actually less important than the process of looking for it. ‘In the quality of our search shall be the nature of the America we create.