Salome of the Tenaments.
The First Novel
By The “Queen Of The Ghetto”
Yezierska, Anzia. Salome of the Tenements. New York: Boni and Liveright, (1923).
8vo.; green cloth, pictorially stamped in yellow and black with lower east side tenement vista design; edges lightly rubbed; vivid pictorial dust-jacket showing the heroine clutching her arms to her chest, an open-air urban food bazaar behind her; jacket lightly used, occasionally chipped.
First edition of Anzia Yezierska’s second book and her first novel, preceded by Hungry Hearts, a short story collection that appeared in 1921. In Salome of the Tenements Yezierska tells the story of Sonya Vrunsky, a poor Jewish girl from the Lower East Side who becomes the wife of John Manning, a prominent Anglo-Saxon millionaire and philanthropist. (The Manning character was based on John Dewey, Yezierska’s benefactor with whom she had a long and ambivalent relationship). The novel revolves around Mrs. Manning’s discovery that her aspirations and values are in conflict with those of her husband. At the book’s conclusion Sonya has left her husband and begun an independent life as a dress designer.
Anzia Yezierska was born in 1885 in a mud hut in Plinskk on the Russian-Polish border. In 1901 she emigrated to the United States. With no formal education, she took work as a sweatshop worker, a laundress, a waitress, and a live-in housekeeper. In 1903, Yezeirska received a scholarship to attend Columbia University. That same year, she boldly left her husband and daughter to pursue a career as a writer. Notwithstanding her language difficulties with English (in which she had never been officially trained), Yezierska began to write stories depicting the harsh life lived by Jewish emigrants in New York’s Lower East Side. In 1918 Metropolitan magazine published Yezierska’s short story, “Where Lovers Die.” A year later, Yezierska’s “The Fat of the Land” was acclaimed by Edward O’Brien as “the finest imaginative contribution to the short story” of that year and was consequently published in The Century Magazine. “The Fat of the Land” dealt with the sorts of themes that would concern Yezierska throughout her lifetime: in it, she illustrated the plight of a hard working Jewish immigrant single mother who is rejected by her Americanized, better educated, children.
Yezierska went on to publish several other books, including Children of Loneliness (1923), Bread Givers (1925), Arrogant Beggars (1927), All I Could Never Be (1932), and Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). None of these later works, however, earned her the notoriety of her first two books. Yezierska’s work is notable for her strong female characters and for her multi-dimensional portrayal of Jewish immigrant experience from a female point of view. Her fictions often contain muted (or not so muted) criticisms of orthodox and patriarchal Jewish attitudes towards women. According to Rosenbach, Yezierska was commonly referred to as “Queen of the Ghetto” in recognition of her realistic documentation of female Jewish emigrant life (UJE, Vol. 10, 597).
(#4407)
Print Inquire
