In a Literary Digest issue from 1923, Yezierska shared her view of America as “a new world in the making, that anyone who has something real in him can find a way to contribute himself in this new world.” At the same time, she noted, “But I saw I had to wait for my chance…
Category: Literature
America & I by Anzia Yezierska – Setting
Immigrants in the 1900s Between 1891 and 1910, around twelve million immigrants arrived in the United States. Unlike the wave of immigrants the United States had seen in the mid-1800s, the majority of these so-called new immigrants came from countries in southern or eastern Europe. Most of the Jewish families fled their homelands to escape…
America & I by Anzia Yezierska – Literary Devices
Autobiographical Essay “America and I” is one of three autobiographical pieces that Yezierska included in Children of Loneliness. All of these pieces explore the immigrant’s preconceived notions about America, the inevitable disappointment, and finally the reconciliation of illusions and reality, which leads to the creation of a pragmatic, more helpful way of looking at life…
America & I by Anzia Yezierska – Themes
Poverty Yezierska describes the impoverished circumstances in which the immigrants in New York find themselves. People such as Yezierska came to America to escape such poverty; in Russia, they had to work all the time simply to survive. America, the land of opportunity, is supposed to be much different, but Yezierska finds this is not…
America & I by Anzia Yezierska – Characters
Americanized Man Yezierska’s first job is with an Americanized family who originally came from the same town as she did. The man and his wife both chastise Yezierska for speaking to them of her wages and refuse to pay her. Americanized Woman Like her husband, the Americanized woman belittles Yezierska when she speaks to them…
America & I by Anzia Yezierska – Summary
In “America and I,” Yezierska recalls her experiences finding work that expresses her creativity and thus the America of her dreams. She comes to the United States with hopes of building a new life, the kind of life that she and her ancestors were unable to achieve in Russia. She believes that in America, freed…
Tokyo Story: Summary & Analysis
Summary: The elderly Shukichi and Tomi Hiroyama leave their youngest daughter Kyoko in Onomichi to visit their other grown-up children in Tokyo. Mild disappointment dogs the whole enterprise as their presence is clearly considered burdensome. Only their widowed daughter-in-law Noriko shows genuine warmth and welcome. Returning home, Tomi falls ill and dies. The family expresses…
Young Goodman Brown: Analysis
Nathaniel Hawthorne was one of those rare writers who drew great critical acclaim during his own lifetime. To his contemporaries—Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Herman Melville—as well as to the next generation of writers, Hawthorne was a genius. Poe said in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales that Hawthorne has “the purest style, the finest taste,…
Young Goodman Brown: Setting
Lingering Puritan Influences in Nineteenth-Century New England Although the Salem Witch Trials had unfolded more than one hundred years prior, nineteenth-century New England was still reeling from inherited guilt, even as it rebelled against the constrictive morals of its forebears, the Puritans. It was into this Salem, Massachusetts, society that Hawthorne was born in 1804….
Young Goodman Brown: Themes
“Young Goodman Brown” tells the story of a Puritan man who loses faith in humankind after he thinks he witnesses his wife and respected members of his town participating in a Black Mass. His experience dooms him to a life of gloom and mistrust. Guilt vs. Innocence Hawthorne presents Young Goodman Brown’s evening of diabolical…