‘The Queen of the Ghetto’ Gave New York’s Immigrant Community a Voice. A Century Later, It’s Re-emerging

Anzia Yezierska wrote from experience then worked hard to make sure her work found an audience. Then a new audience found her

Fred Nadis

April/May 2026

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In the 1890s, the crowded Jewish enclave on New York’s Lower East Side, filled with horses, pushcarts, clotheslines and Hebrew shop signs, drew fascination and derision from the American public. This immigrant community was considered exotic and creative; it was also decried as squalid and foreign. At the same time that uptown audiences were flocking to Yiddish theaters, novelist Henry James was writing with alarm about the “Hebrew conquest of New York.” Growing up in this crucible of a new America, a Jewish immigrant named Anzia Yezierska, through sheer force of personality, would overcome prejudice to become one of the Roaring Twenties’ most popular authors, one whom a New York newspaper dubbed “Queen of the Ghetto.”

Yezierska’s writing gave voice to the ghetto’s dwellers, as she documented the struggles, particularly of immigrant women, to lead full lives in the United States. Her work helped nonimmigrants understand the striving of the foreign-born—and though her fame has wavered, her work remains as vital today as it was 100 years ago, capturing the immigrant experience with a vividness rarely matched in American letters. 

Yezierska’s family arrived in New York from Poland in 1890 when Yezierska, the youngest of nine children, was about 10 years old; they were among the two million to three million Jewish people who migrated to the U.S. between 1880 and the early 1920s. While her parents encouraged her brothers to pursue careers, they expected their four daughters to gain a minimal education, then do menial work in sweatshops before quickly marrying. Her father, Bernard, stressed that a woman without a man was less than nothing. Yezierska disagreed, and her father came to call her “Blood-and-Iron” for her willfulness. 

When she was still a teenager and working long hours in a laundry, she left home and took a room on East 63rd Street in the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, where staff prepared immigrant girls to be garment workers or servants, or to train as stenographers. This was the first phase of Yezierska’s effort (as some of her later fictional characters would say) “to work myself up for a person.” A benefactor provided her with a scholarship to Teachers College at Columbia University. After graduating in 1904, she became a cooking instructor in city schools. Teaching, though, was not her calling: She later described the work as a “treadmill of deadness.”

Yezierska’s 1911 marriage to Arnold Levitas, a typographer, proved no escape. After giving birth to their daughter, Louise, in 1912, Yezierska detailed her ensuing discontent with the role of stay-at-home mother in an unpublished essay, “The Rebellion of a Supported Wife.” She ended the marriage in 1916 and dedicated herself to writing short stories. 

For several years, Yezierska collected rejection slips. She was brimming with ideas, but the writing didn’t come easy. As she described it, “Sometimes, the vivisection I must commit on myself to create one little living sentence leaves me spent for days.” 

Yezierska developed a style she termed “immigrant English,” mimicking the idioms of New York’s Yiddish speakers: “I told her my head was on wheels from worrying.” Her characters are hungry—for food and for fulfillment—and feel impeded in the effort to become “a person” in America. 

Their relentless drive reflects the author’s rage at women’s subordinate roles, at their poverty and at the widespread disdain they received. As the narrator says in the short story “How I Found America,” without the public’s understanding, the immigrant “would forever remain driven back upon himself, corroded by the very richness of the unused gifts within his soul.” 

Her own gifts she was determined to use. In 1917, Yezierska was in her mid-30s, had published only a few stories and was unable to find full-time teaching work. So she followed her mother’s advice to direct her complaints—as at a department store—to the top. On a cold day late that year, she dropped unannounced into the Columbia University office of John Dewey. A major force in progressive education, Dewey was a dean at Teachers College, where Yezierska had trained. That day, as she spoke passionately to him about her dreams, the tall sage was stunned—and charmed. She gave him several short stories to read, and Dewey grew infatuated. Soon he was writing her love letters and poems. In one, he prophesied that from Yezierska, “a great song shall fill the world.” 

Dewey bought her a typewriter, encouraged her to audit his graduate seminar and, to help subsidize her writing, employed her on a sociology project in Philadelphia. He also forwarded an essay of hers to the New Republic. The romance between upper-crust philosopher and passionate immigrant, which was to inspire many of Yezierska’s later writings, didn’t last more than a year. After the breakup, Dewey demanded she return his letters. She refused—and lifted some of his phrases for upper-class characters in her fiction. 

After the New Republic ran the piece Dewey had sent them, editors began snapping up her stories. The critic Edward J. O’Brien gave Yezierska’s “The Fat of the Land” the top ranking in his annual anthology of “Best Short Stories” for 1919. The tale offered a fresh portrait of the immigrant Jewish mother in the character of Hanneh, a woman of frayed nerves and wild emotional swings. When her children snatch food from her market basket, she shouts, “Murderers! What are you tearing from me my flesh? From where should I steal to give you more?” The children prosper. While Hanneh’s old-country ways remain an embarrassment, as adults they settle her in a comfortable townhouse with servants. Ambivalent about her new status, Hanneh is caught between worlds. She feels at home neither during a return visit to the ghetto nor amid the new comforts of “the fat of the land.” 

When Houghton Mifflin published Yezierska’s short story collection Hungry Hearts in 1920, sales were sluggish. Serving as her own publicist, she knocked at the door of Hearst newspaper columnist Frank Crane and handed him a copy of the book. In his syndicated column, Crane wrote with awe about Yezierska, insisting that her stories revealed “an alien people’s naked soul.” That’s when Hollywood came calling. 

In the 1910s and ’20s, film producers, many of them Jewish, were looking for stories that highlighted the humanity of Jewish immigrants at a time when groups such as the Immigration Restriction League and supporters of eugenics were stoking fear of foreigners. Movie studios produced more than three dozen silent films set in the Jewish ghetto in the 1920s, making the “ghetto picture” its own genre. In 1921, the pioneering film magnate Samuel Goldwyn offered Yezierska $10,000 for film rights to Hungry Hearts and put her on salary to complete the script. 

She stepped off a westbound train in Los Angeles in January 1921, wearing a simple blue suit, felt hat and sandals. Journalists had gathered to cover her arrival, and before climbing into a limousine, she spun tales to them suggesting that Goldwyn’s contract had saved her from hard labor in Manhattan’s sweatshops and laundries. (She did not mention her long stints as a teacher and writer.) Headlines followed: “Sweatshop Cinderella Wins Fortune in Movies.” 

Yet Yezierska soon wearied of the star treatment and the studio system. The script was completed in a few months, and she briefly remained in Hollywood to work on a novel but found no inspiration. After rejecting contracts from Goldwyn and producer William Fox, founder of Fox Film Corporation, she returned east for the most productive period of her life.

In 1923, she published her first novel, Salome of the Tenements, which featured a streetwise Jewish girl who marries an upper-class philanthropist. Famous Players-Lasky, the predecessor to Paramount Pictures, bought the film rights for $15,000, and the movie appeared in 1925. In that same year, Doubleday published Yezierska’s finest novel, Bread Givers, a coming-of-age tale with echoes of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Yezierska describes the fate of a group of four sisters, three of whom are forced into dubious marriages by their father, Moisheh Smolinsky. Sara, the feistiest of the sisters, breaks away from her family as a teenager. In their frequent arguments, her father (like Yezierska’s own) calls Sara “Blood-and-Iron.” After many struggles, Sara achieves independence by becoming a schoolteacher. In a coda, Sara and her husband, a school principal, take in her widower father, unruly as ever, whom Sara has found selling chewing gum on the streets. A reviewer in the New York Times hailed the novel’s “raw, uncontrollable poetry.” 

But it was the last of her books to sell well. Yezierska wrote two more novels, to diminishing interest, and the 1929 stock market crash wiped out her Hollywood earnings. Within a few years, the onetime “Queen of the Ghetto” applied for government relief and joined the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, where, for one assignment, she employed her creative talent to describe the different species of trees in Central Park. 

In 1950, her autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, with a foreword by the poet W.H. Auden, gained critical praise but few readers. She wrote book reviews for the New York Times but otherwise lived out her days far from the spotlight and died in 1970 at a California nursing home after a stroke. 

Her work would soon emerge from obscurity after a chance rediscovery. In the late 1960s, Alice Kessler-Harris, a British-born historian, later a professor at Columbia University, was researching Jewish participation in New York’s labor movement. Finding references to Yezierska in Yiddish materials, she took breaks from the library’s microfilm machines to read Yezierska’s out-of-print books. In the early 1970s, as the women’s movement gained momentum, Kessler-Harris shared her photocopy of the novel with publishers, painting Yezierska as an unsung hero of an earlier feminist moment. In 1975, thanks to her efforts, Persea Books published a new edition of Bread Givers. 

Now a century old, the novel has sold more than 400,000 copies since its reissue. Many readers still identify with its portrait of a demanding immigrant father. “I can’t tell you the number of Chinese and Indian [and] Nepalese...who’ve written to me to say how the book resonates,” Kessler-Harris tells Smithsonian. “The father in the book is clearly an exaggeration, but that exaggeration is familiar to so many people from different cultures that it’s one of the things ... that give the book its standing power.” 

Yezierska’s blood and iron—the passion and stubbornness that informed her prose—explain her endurance, and the jolt of recognition her words continue to offer readers. Not bad for someone who once said of her early days that she was just one of many new Americans “beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding.” 

Fred Nadis | Read More

Based in Santa Barbara, California, Fred Nadis writes about American history and popular culture. His work has appeared in the Atlantic, Discover, Vanity Fair, Earth Island Journal and other publications. He has published three nonfiction books, the most recent of which is Star Settlers: The Billionaires, Geniuses and Crazed Visionaries Out to Conquer the Universe. Website: frednadis.com