5. Into the mainstream

“Into the mainstream” looks at immigrant Jewish writers in America, such as Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers), and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories), all of whom transitioned from Yiddish into English, and analyzes Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep as a transitional novel. We notice here the transition from “ethnic” to “national” writer in the careers of Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Cynthia Ozick. Much was gained and lost in Jewish literature as a result of Jews becoming a “successful minority” in America. Jewish readers have always been a voracious audience of international literature.

Whitening Domestic Spaces: Enacting Female Roles in Anzia Yezierska's The Lost Beautifulness

The aim of this research is to give an accurate account of how female stereotypes around the concept of hygiene and domesticity in early 20thC North American context influenced newly arrived Eastern European immigrants. Located in New York’s Lower East Side ghetto and determined by their Jewish background, these immigrants’ arrival caused them a cultural shock to the point that they started shaping their identities according to the new standard of beauty and cleanliness related to the Americanness they were eager to perform. For this purpose, Anzia Yezierska’s short story The Lost Beautifulness serves as a referent because it demonstrates the failure of Americanization as the prospective means through which the American Dream could be experienced, a credo which, according to the author, would only reinforce classist policies instead of cancelling them. To this effect, Yezierska depicts the actual consequences for these Jewish female immigrants after attempting to Americanize their private household spaces and maintain, thus, the standard of cleanliness necessary to validate their accurate adaptation to the American culture from their ghettoized and marginalized context. Keywords: Americanization, Anzia Yezierska, female stereotypes, whitening, domesticity, American Dream

Spaces of Identity: Gender, Ethnicity, and Race in Salome of the Tenements (1923) and Quicksand (1928)

The 1920s marked a fervent time for artistic and literary expression in the United States. Besides the famous authors of the decade, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, Anzia Yezierska and Nella Larsen, among other female writers, also managed to carve “a literary space” for their stories. Yezierska and Larsen depicted the struggles and tribulations of minority women during the fermenting 1920s, with a view to illustrating the impact of ethnicity and race on the individual female identity. Yezierska, a Jewish-American immigrant, and Larsen, a biracial American woman, share an interest in capturing the nuances of belonging to a particular community as an in-between subject. Therefore, this essay sets out to examine the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and choice in shaping individual identities in public and private in-between spaces in Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1923) and Larsen’s Quicksand (1928).

Charity institutions as networks of power: how Anzia Yezierska's characters resist philanthropic surveillance

At the end of the nineteenth-century, American private institutions took the charge of spreading national values due to the massive wave of eastern European immigration. These institutions, especially charitable organizations, supported the integration of immigrants, however, from a classist perspective. According to the Polish-American author Anzia Yezierska (1885-1970), their apparently inclusive programs actually hindered the fulfilment of the discourse of the American Dream, which is based on the premise of preserving individual differences. By comparing those charitable institutions to Michel Foucault’s panoptical prison, this research attempts to demonstrate how the similarities between both structures help understand up to what extent the benefactresses in charge accurately managed to influence the newly arrived immigrants. The hierarchy of power established between them would determine the latter’s difficulties to achieve the recognition of their individualities from their intersectional experiences. The alternative to the monitoring network, thus, appears in the act of solidarity, a kind of resistance that allows ghettoized characters to perform their cultural distinctiveness away from Americanization.

THE SPEECH ACT ANALYSIS OF DIRECT UTTERANCES ON SHORT STORY "THE LOST BEAUTIFULNESS� BY ANZIA YEZIERSKA

This research aimed to investigate (1) the form of direct sentences on short story entitled The Lost �Beautifulness�, (2) analyze the purpose of the direct utterances in the short story, (3) show the kind of direct utterances in short story The Lost �Beautifulness�. The object used in this research are direct utterances of short story The Lost �Beautifulness�. The data were collected by observation method. The writer selecting the direct utterances which can be found in the short story. The result of the research showed that: (1) three forms of the direct utterances are declarative, interrogative and imperative sentence; (2) purposes of the utterances depend on the four factors; locution, illocution, perlocution and social context; (3) seven kinds of speech acts are assertive, performative, verdictive, expressive, directive, commisive and phatic utterances.Keywords: Speech act, Direct Utterance, Short Story