Anzia Yezierska goes to hollywood
March is Women’s History Month. Our site always centers women’s history; this month we’ll do so a bit more emphatically.
One hundred years ago today … the Brooklyn Citizen was celebrating the success of writer Anzia Yezierska, whose 1920 book Hungry Hearts was being made into a movie by the Goldwyn Corporation, with Yezierska writing the screenplay.
Brooklyn Citizen, 3 March 1921, p. 3. Library of Congress.
The article recounts Yezierska’s story: how an immigrant from Poland, working as a servant, made herself into a writer. In her own words, she remembers saying, “If I can’t write in American English, I’ll write in immigrant English, but write I must.”
The article does not mention Yezierska’s Jewish upbringing. Was the description of her as a “Stranger in a strange land” code for Jewish?
Yezierska had left NYC for California on January 27th.
New York Tribune, 30 January, 1921, p. 38. Library of Congress.
– Jonathan Goldman, March 3, 2021
TAGS: Women Writers, immigration, Jewish, movies, film, poverty