Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska

Tales of Jewish immigrant life told and retold

A young Jewish woman from Russian-occupied Poland emigrates to America, where she hopes to find love, education, and personal freedom. Although only in her early twenties, she is considered an old maid in her home country. Her family’s poverty means she has no dowry to attract suitors. Once arrived in America, she lives in a squalid tenement building in a Jewish ghetto and slaves away sewing “shirt-waists” in a factory sweatshop. Then she meets a man, also Jewish, but educated and of a higher financial class than herself. She falls in love at first sight, but the feeling is not mutual. Because of her lack of means and sophistication, he shuns her, breaking her heart. She then vows to raise herself out of the poverty and ignorance of her station in life so that she may make herself worthy of him.

While I don’t know much about the author Anzia Yezierska (1880–1970), I’m guessing that’s her life story, because at least half of the short stories in her collection Hungry Hearts, published in 1920, bear this exact same narrative. Perhaps these stories were originally published individually in various periodicals before being gathered together in this book. When assembled, however, they comprise an extremely repetitive whole. The best story in the collection, “How I Found America,” is also its longest. Told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, this selection might very well be Yezierska’s autobiography. It is the most believable glimpse into immigrant life that Hungry Hearts has to offer. As the book’s closing selection, however, by the time you get to it you’ve already read the same plot six or seven times.

I like realist writers who capture the history of their times in their works. In America, the heyday for literary realism and naturalism was the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m always looking to discover previously unfamiliar writers of that style and period. After stumbling upon Yezierska’s name, I was hoping I might find in her an unsung virtuoso of American realism, but I was mostly disappointed by the stories in Hungry Hearts, especially after I read essentially the same plot for the third or fourth time. The reader does get a bit of muckraking realism from these stories, but it’s mixed up with too much romantic fantasy (see next paragraph). The best work of literature to capture the Jewish immigrant experience from this period is Abraham Cahan’s novel The Rise of David Levinsky, published in 1917. Yezierska’s stories here really don’t hold a candle to it.

What really undermines the realism of Yezierska’s stories is her attitude towards love. Not only does she believe in love at first sight (and includes a subplot about it in almost every story), she also seems to believe that love means abject worship at first sight. When a young woman in these stories meet a man, within a half an hour she’s ready to either have his babies or kill herself. In matters of the heart, Yezierska’s otherwise spunky heroines exhibit a total lack of self-esteem. Rather than romantic tales of courtship and heartbreak, these love stories read like evidence in some case study of neurosis. 

Yezierska also wrote a handful of novels, which I suspect cover much of the same ground as the stories in Hungry Hearts. It is admirable that she rose from humble beginnings to realizing her dream of being an author, and it’s good that someone has chronicled the struggles of immigrant women. Within that milieu, however, I think there are more stories to tell than the one Yezierska keeps repeating.

Stories in this collection

Wings

Hunger

The Lost “Beautifulness”

The Free Vacation House

The Miracle

Where Lovers Dream

Soap and Water

“The Fat of the Land”

My Own People

How I Found America