26 pages • 52 minutes read
Anzia YezierskaAmerica and I
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1922A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Immigration and Assimilation
In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, many people arrived in the US from eastern and southern Europe during a third wave of Jewish immigration, many trying to escape religious or political persecution under Russian czars. Harsh treatment of Eastern European Jews was a long-standing paradigm, but in 1881, a czar was assassinated and the crime was blamed on a Jewish conspiracy. After that, a series of pogroms, or state-sponsored massacres, took place. This led to a mass exodus to America under dangerous conditions, consisting of perhaps three million Jews. These Jewish families came through the Port of New York and settled within ghettos in New York City among their Jewish-American neighbors, suffering hardships such as poverty and overcrowding.
Ultimately, these immigrants changed the landscape of the US in profound ways, but in the meantime the sheer numbers of immigrants—historians estimate that one-third of Russian Jews had left Russia by 1920 and half the US population of Jews settled in New York—led to poor conditions and limited resources. In “America and I,” author Yezierska gives a voice to her personal experience as one of this wave of Jewish refugees, arriving in America with hope and a faith in a utopia that doesn’t exist and which is stretched to the limit to provide enough for all the new people coming through its borders.
The author’s experience, while unique to her own passionate personality, also includes many privations and struggles that immigrants from all parts of the world have experienced upon coming to America: settling into a new world where one’s neighbors, even if kin, seem strange; where language is a barrier and rules have changed; where identities are subsumed; where hope for a better life can be key to survival because so many immigrants start with little or nothing. Many immigrants face more unexpected hardships on their way to stability and solvency—such as the ambivalence of Jewish-Americans who have already made a place in the US—adding to their troubles.
Assimilation, too, is part of this experience; becoming part of the culture, with all the positive and negative effects that come with that, is a big part of the experience, and of Yezierska’s work. Yezierska embodies immigrant values, dreams, and challenges in this essay as she seeks for something more than the menial work she is forced to take on as an immigrant in America. While she is trying to find her voice, her relationship to America changes and transforms her way of thinking.
Poverty
One hardship that many immigrants faced during the wave described above was poverty. With so many Jewish immigrants in the ghettos on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, work was scarce—and work that involved the mind even more so. Living in cramped and squalid conditions, women often worked in the garment industry, as Yezierska did. She experiences long work hours, sleeping in a room with many others in her same position, hunger, little free time and little power over her own environment—although she uses what power she has by removing herself quickly from bad situations when they occur. The indignities that she faces as a poor immigrant involve exploitation, humiliation, overwork, loneliness, and being patronized by people who are meant to help her. Yezierska sheds a particular light upon the plight of women finding their own identities in this situation; the privations that she experienced as a young woman trying to assimilate, shed the submissions required of her Jewish background, and make her own independent living without sacrificing her inner life are highlighted in this essay. Her writing helps her create a space for women like her.
Creative Fulfillment and Self-Expression
Despite the overcrowded conditions in the ghettos where many Jewish immigrants lived, Yiddish culture thrived in the form of drama, journalism, liberal ideologies, and the type of prose to which Yezierska belongs. Immigration was a common focus of these immigrants’ art. However, in this story, Yezierska struggles to add her voice to the conversation. She is forced to use her physical skills to work, but it is her mind that yearns to be set free so that she may express her emotions and her thoughts about the New World. In this story, she does not encounter anyone who is of a like mind, who understands her need to break away from the factory work that seems to bind her. Instead, the people she encounters want to keep her working, reminding her that she must have money before she can have the luxury of self-expression. In that way, her poverty goes beyond that of the normal economic privations and becomes a more profound poverty of thought. She is alone and must depend upon herself to provide what she is lacking, and she is constantly being told that that self-expression to which she aspires is beyond her limited means—she shouldn’t even aspire to it. This part of her story provides a more universal experience as she outlines some of the challenges that all aspiring artists and writers face in finding and expressing their voices.
Self-Directed Transformation
Throughout “America and I,” Yezierska is searching for answers. She wants to learn English not just to get along in the culture, but as a sign that she will be transformed into a richer being, full of American success and knowledge. Assimilation, she believes, will lead to success without compromise. The people she consults along the way, though, don’t understand her needs and cannot help her to become the holistic American she hopes to embody. She is only able to make headway and close the distance between herself and the American she longs to become when she herself investigates American history, and realizes on her own that American is no ready-made utopia. Instead, she begins to understand that she has to help herself. Sharing her story through writing helps her bridge the gap while yet maintaining her personal identity. In that way, she has persevered and found what she was seeking—empowerment, a way of expressing herself while becoming part of the New World.
