Nava Atlas's Blog, page 30
January 18, 2022
In Her Own Words: Joan Didion Quotes on Life, Love, & Writing
There are hugely influential writers who inspire others within their lifetimes, and Joan Didion ( 1934 – 2021 ) was certainly one of them. But it’s after her passing that everything she wrote seems to resonate even more, because we realize that there will be no further words of wisdom. This selection of quotes by Joan Didion highlights her unique talent at examining life — its joys, sorrows, and challenges.
In her tribute to Joan Didion upon her passing, Nancy Snyder wrote, “Joan Didion had her sublime sentences filled with a myriad of details to convey her personal and wholly authentic stories. She wrote about nearly every cultural and political upheaval that transformed the U.S. from the 1960s to the present day.”
Another, equally significant part of Didion’s writing is her observations on day-to-day things in a way that many of us already think about. But the manner in which she expressed them was anything but commonplace. She faced tragedies, like the loss of a beloved husband and a daughter, with words that cannot help but move.
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“To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.” (“Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power” (essay originally published in Vogue, 1961)
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“I am still committed to the idea that the ability to think for one’s self depends upon one’s mastery of the language.” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)
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“Character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.” (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)
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Joan Didion, photo by Brigitte Lacombe
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“A writer is a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. I write entirely to find out what’s on my mind, what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing and what it means, what I want and what I’m afraid of.” (“On Keeping a Notebook,” essay included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)
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“So the point of my keeping a notebook has never been, nor is it now, to have an accurate factual record of what I have been doing or thinking. That would be a different impulse entirely, an instinct for reality which I sometimes envy but do not possess.” (“On Keeping a Notebook,” essay included in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968)
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“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there, embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.” (UC Riverside commencement address, 1975)
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“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” (“Why I Write,” essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review , 1976)
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“In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.” (“Why I Write,” essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review , 1976)
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“The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own, is one that soothes all children and many writers.” (The White Album, 1979)
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The Center Will Not Hold is the excellent
2017 documentary on Joan Didion
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“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses, we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” (The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005)
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“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.” (The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005)
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“I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. ” (The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005)
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“If you are doing a piece about somebody, even if you admire them tremendously and express that in the piece, express that admiration, if they’re not used to being written about, if they’re civilians … they’re not used to seeing themselves through other people’s eyes. So you will always see them from a slightly different angle than they see themselves, and they feel a little betrayed by that.” (Academy of Achievement Interview, June 3, 2006)
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“You get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something” ( The Paris Review interview, 2006)
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“When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.” (Blue Nights, 2011)
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“When we lose that sense of the possible we lose it fast. One day we are absorbed by dressing well, following the news, keeping up, coping, what we might call staying alive; the next day we are not.” (Blue Nights, 2011)
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“Do not whine … Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” (Blue Nights, 2011)
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Joan Didion books on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post In Her Own Words: Joan Didion Quotes on Life, Love, & Writing appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
January 17, 2022
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams turns 100
The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) by Margery Williams was published in 1922 and has been in print ever since. The best-known book by British-born author Margery Williams Bianco (1881 – 1944), it has been a children’s classic for generations. In 2022, we celebrate the hundredth anniversary of its publication.
The story is at its heart about the transformative power of love. The original edition was illustrated by William Nicholson, and has been through numerous editions, with artwork by various illustrators.
A 1924 review in The Detroit News observed, “How Toys Become Real is the inner story of The Velveteen Rabbit, but there’s no syrupy moral to it. It’s just that if a toy is loved enough, it finally, through the alchemy of love, becomes real.”
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Plot summaryThe Velveteen Rabbit is the story of a stuffed toy rabbit who wishes to become real. The title rabbit is a Christmas gift for a child we come to know only as “the Boy.” The book begins:
“There was once a velveteen rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid. He was fat and bunchy, as a rabbit should be; his coat was spotted brown and white, he had real thread whiskers, and his ears were lined with pink sateen. On Christmas morning, when he sat wedged in the top of the Boy’s stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws. The effect was charming.”
The Boy ignores the velveteen rabbit for a time, preferring to play with fancier, more modern toys.
The oldest toy in the nursery is the Skin Horse, who was passed down by the Boy’s uncle. He tells the rabbit of how toys can become real through the love of the children they belong to.
“The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any of the others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.”
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The rabbit fervently wishes to become real through the Boy’s love, yet has some misgivings:
“He longed to become Real, to know what it felt like; and yet the idea of growing shabby and losing his eyes and whiskers was rather sad. He wished that he could become it without these uncomfortable things happening to him.”
It takes some time, but after the Boy takes the velveteen rabbit as sleeping companion one night, he begins to love him at last.
“Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about. He didn’t mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn’t matter.”
When the Boy contracts scarlet fever, the rabbit says by his side. When the doctor orders a trip to the seaside so the the patient and recover, and at the same time, to disinfect the nursery, all the books and toys are to be burned.
The velveteen rabbit is put into a sack and left outside. A tear falls from his eye as he thinks of the Boy.
“Of what use was it to be loved and lose one’s beauty and become Real if it all ended like this? And a tear, a real tear, trickled down his little shabby velvet nose and fell to the ground.”
When the teardrop touches the ground, a flower springs up at once, and out steps a fairy.
The fairy tells the rabbit that because he had become real to the Boy who loved him so dearly, she would make him real to all the world. In the forest, in view of the other rabbits, the fairy kisses the velveteen rabbit, who becomes a real rabbit — a handsome one, at that — and joins the others.
A few seasons pass, and a spring day finds the Boy playing out in the woods behind the house:
“Autumn passed and Winter, and in the Spring, when the days grew warm and sunny, the Boy went out to play in the wood behind the house. And while he was playing, two rabbits crept out from the bracken and peeped at him. One of them was brown all over, but the other had strange markings under his fur, as though long ago he had been spotted, and the spots still showed through. And about his little soft nose and his round black eyes there was something familiar, so that the Boy thought to himself:
“Why, he looks just like my old Bunny that was lost when I had scarlet fever!”
But he never knew that it really was his own Bunny, come back to look at the child who had first helped him to be Real.”
The Velveteen Rabbit was well received from the time it first came out, becoming a beloved childhood classic and garnering awards and accolades for decades to come. Following is a review that appeared a couple of years after it was published.
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The Velveteen Rabbit (various editions) on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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From the original review in The Birmingham News, Birmingham, AL, April, 1924, by Mary E. Foster: Do you know the velveteen rabbit? He came one Christmas morning with “the Boy’s” other toys; there he “sat wedged in the top of the Boy’s stocking, with a sprig of holly between his paws …”
For many long months he lived in the nursery where the mechanical toys treated him with superior airs, and only the old Skin Horse was kind to him. They became great friends, and from his years of experience the Skin Horse told the Velveteen Rabbit of life and how a toy could become “real.”
The Skin Horse had been made “real” because the Boy’s uncle had loved him many years ago and one day the Rabbit asked him:
“What is real, does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long, time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the rabbit.
“Sometimes, but when you are real you do not mind being hurt,” said the Skin Horse.
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up, or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once. You become,” said the Skin Horse. “It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally by the time you are real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
What child of five or six (or really, a child of any age) could fail to unconsciously realize what his love for his toys can mean to them after such a story, and what grown-up but will stop to think before they lightly discard some well-worn treasure which to them has served a purpose?
Books like this will be real friends of the children who read them or to whom they are read. Its print is large and its many pictures irresistible. Children of all ages will love the Velveteen Rabbit and the wise Skin Horse to the very end. Picture books can be of things we know every day, told in a delightful way and made “real” through love.
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams turns 100 appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
January 16, 2022
Sydney Taylor, Author of All-of-a-Kind Family
Sydney Taylor (born Sarah Brenner; October 30, 1904 – February 12, 1978) was an American author best known for All-of-a-Kind Family. This series of autobiographical children’s novels portrays the life of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant family in New York City in the early twentieth century.
Though she wrote several other children’s novels, the five books in the All-of-a-Kind Family series proved to be her lasting legacy, earning a devoted audience for their warm and loving depiction of Jewish life in early twentieth-century America.
Photo above right, Sydney Taylor (Sarah Brenner) in the 1920s, from the private collection of her daughter, Jo Taylor Marshall.
Becoming an author unexpectedly
For New York City housewife Sydney Taylor, November 21, 1950, began as just another ordinary day. But after that day’s mail came, there was a significant change of status — the daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants had at once become a professional writer.
The letter that Sydney opened that day, addressed from Follett Publishers, informed her that she was the first-place winner in their Children’s Manuscript Competition. The prize included a gold medal, publication of the manuscript, and a cash award of $3,000 (equal to more than $30,000 today). The kicker was that she had no idea that she’d been entered into the contest.
After a brief conversation with her husband, Ralph Taylor, the mystery of the Follett prize was solved: the previous summer, Ralph had his secretary type his wife’s manuscript, which he’d found stashed in the closet. Ralph was convinced the stories were too good and too significant for them to go unnoticed by children’s book publishers.
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The real-life “all-of-a-kind” family —
Sarah (Sydney) is second from left, holding an apple
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The manuscript Sydney had written was the first in the five-book children’s historical fiction series, All of-A-Kind Family. The series was nearly autobiographical for Sydney. The tales reflected the real-life experiences of her own family, the Brenners, Jewish emigrants from Germany and Poland.
In 1901, Morris and Cecilia Brenner joined the wave of tens of thousands of European Jews coming to America, flush with big dreams and bigger ambition.
Sydney Taylor liked to tell these stories of her family in New York City’s Lower East Side to her daughter, Joanne, when she was young. These family tales were of her mother’s life growing up with four sisters (later there would be one brother, Charlie) in the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. Joanne so enjoyed the tales that Sydney began writing them down.
Sydney’s bedtime stories for Joanne reflected something larger, more historical than simply the Brenner family chronicles. When Sydney began recording her family’s Jewish immigrant life in the early twentieth century, she was preserving fragments of the experience of millions of Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
In 1880, seventy-five percent of the world’s Jewish population lived in Europe and a mere three percent of world Jewry lived in the U.S. By 1920, the demographics had climbed to twenty-three percent of the Jewish population living in the U.S. During those forty years, over two million European Jews had landed in New York harbor.
The Brenner’s voyage to America
When Morris and Cecilia Brenner voyaged to America in 1901, their traveling party included fifteen-month-old daughter Ella, Cecilia’s brother (also named Morris), and an uncle, Hyam-Yonkel.
To save every penny, they traveled in steerage for their twelve-day voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. Unfortunately, from the first day of their ocean journey, Cecilia became severely ill with seasickness that had Morris attempting to care for his ill wife. Soon, Cecilia needed her husband’s care every hour of the day and night.
That left the responsibility of caring for Ella to Uncle Hyam-Yonkel and her brother Morris. One day, much to the surprise and shock of Uncle Hyam-Yonkel and brother Morris, Ella had slipped under the ship’s railings and had almost toppled overboard. Uncle Hyam-Yonkel went into action — he grabbed Ella’s long gown and carried her to safety.
Another favorite Brenner family tale of their voyage to America was Morris’s reaction when he first saw the Statue of Liberty. As their ship was coming into New York labor, Morris became so emotionally moved by the sight of Lady Liberty and the poem at the statue’s base by Emma Lazarus (“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) that when the family finally disembarked the ship and cleared customs, Morris insisted that the family’s first stop would be locating the office where he could become a U.S. citizen. Of course, things didn’t work that way.
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Sydney in the 1950s
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Upon first arriving, the family stayed with Morris’s maternal aunt and uncle in their Lower East Side apartment until they found their own first home, an apartment nearby.
The Lower East Side was one of the world’s most densely populated areas, with a thousand residents per square acre. Yiddish was the dominant language heard in the streets. Immigrant Jews were packed into tenement housing; the apartments were impossible to clean and had inadequate ventilation, heat, and lighting.
The tenements had no hot water and often, only a communal toilet in hallways. It wasn’t unusual for twelve people to live in two rooms.
The Brenners’ first New York home of their own was on East 5th Street, a three-room apartment with the front room given out to Cecelia’s brother, and Uncle Hyam-Yonkel. After their second daughter, Henrietta, was born, the Brenners moved across the street to 708 East 5th Street. It was here that Sarah, the future Sydney Taylor, was born on October 30, 1904.
There would be two more daughters, Charlotte and Gertrude, spaced about two years apart, and after a longer stretch, brother Charlie was born. The real-life All-of-a-Kind-Family, plus one, was complete.
As conveyed in the five lightly fictionalized All-of-a-Kind Family books, Sarah and her four sisters excelled in the local public school, went to the Hamilton Fish Park Branch and Seward Branch Public Libraries on Friday afternoons, observed all the Jewish holidays and the Sabbath, helped their Mama with the housework, and every daughter, except for Henrietta, obeyed their parents.
What was also real, but not depicted in the series, was the unfortunate bouts of severe depression that plagued Cecilia. Otherwise, life for the five Brenner sisters unfolded around their public schools, their synagogue, and their friends and family.
Sarah becomes Sydney
When she was sixteen years old and a student at Morris High School, Sarah Brenner changed her first name to Sydney. It was the name she chose for her planned career in the theatre arts.
Sydney was forced to leave high school two years early to supplement the Brenner family income. She worked in the clerical field and continued to educate herself at night school.
In 1925, Sydney married Ralph Taylor, a pharmacist and businessman. Sydney acted in The Lenox Hill Players, a distinguished New York theatre company, from 1927 to 1929. Then, she became a professional dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. After their daughter was born in 1935, Sydney became a full-time housewife and mother to Joanne.
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All-of-a-Kind Family on
Bookshop.org
* and
Amazon
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All-of-a-Kind-Family , published in 1951, became the first of a series of children’s novels about a tight-knit Jewish family at the turn of the 20th century. Ella, Henny, Sarah, Charlotte, and Gertie are five young sisters (named for Sydney and her real-life sisters0 who live with their parents in the Lower East Side of New York City.
This story and its sequels depict the joys and challenges of immigrant life, with an overriding message of family love and loyalty. Notable for its emphasis on Jewish holidays and traditions, the book and its sequels presented them as joyous occasions, without resorting to stereotypes.
Readers wanted more after the success of the first All-of-a-Kind Family. Four more volumes about the five sisters (and now, one brother) followed: More All-Of-A-Kind Family (1954) All-of-a-Kind Family Uptown (1958), All-of-a-Kind Family Downtown (1972), and Ella of All-of-a-Kind Family (1978). In the long gap between the first three installments and the last two, Sydney published several other, unrelated children’s novels. Her last book, published posthumously, was Danny Loves a Holiday (1980), also unrelated to the series.
In the last half of the twentieth century, the All-of-a-Kind Family books were the best-known children’s works depicting Jewish life in America. Read more about the series here.
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From Sarah to Sydney (Yale University Press, 2021)
on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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When her status changed in 1950 to that of a professional writer, Sydney became active in touring public libraries throughout New York City and New York state to encourage literacy for young readers.
She also received voluminous fan mail and answered every letter. Towards the end of her life, her favorite letters were from grandmothers who had introduced the books to their daughters — and now joyfully watched as these daughters introduced the books to their children.
In an interview, Taylor shared why these books were so personally important for her to write. “I remember when I was a little girl and read books from the library that were always about Gentile children and never about Jewish ones. So when I grew up and had a daughter of my own, I determined I’d write a book for her about Jewish children.”
In 1978, Sydney Taylor died after a long bout with breast cancer. The next year, after Ralph brought the idea to the Association of Jewish Libraries, The Sydney Taylor Award for Excellence in Children’s Literature was established. The award recognizes a children’s book that displays literary merit and authentically conveys the Jewish experience.
The four sequels to All-of-a-Kind Family were republished in 2014 by Lizzie Skurnick Books. June Cummins, who would go on to write the first full-scale biography of the author (From Sarah to Sydney, 2021) contributed new forewords for these editions.
Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.
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Sydney Taylor’s books on Amazon*
More about Sydney TaylorNovels for children
All-of-a-Kind Family (1951), illustrated by Helen JohnMore All-Of-A-Kind Family (1954), illustrated by Mary StevensAll-of-a-Kind Family Uptown (1958), illustrated by Mary StevensMr. Barney’s Beard (1961), illustrated by Charles GeerNow That You Are 8 (1963), illustrated by Ingrid FetzThe Dog Who Came to Dinner (1966), illustrated by John E. JohnsonA Papa Like Everyone Else (1966), illustrated by George PorterAll-of-a-Kind Family Downtown (1972), illustrated by Beth and Joe KrushElla of All-of-a-Kind Family (1978), illustrated by Gail OwensDanny Loves a Holiday (1980), illustrated by Gail OwensBiography
From Sarah to Sydney: The Woman Behind All-of-a-Kind Familyby June Cummins with Alexandra Dunietz (2021)
More information and sources
Jewish Women’s Archive Meet Sydney Taylor: Unsung Creator of All-of-a-Kind Family (NY Times) Wikipedia Reader discussion of Sydney Taylor’s books on Goodreads A One-of-a-Kind Biography of the Author of the ‘All-of-a-Kind Family’ Stories. . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If the product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Sydney Taylor, Author of All-of-a-Kind Family appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
January 11, 2022
Anzia Yezierska, author of Bread Givers
Anzia Yezierska (October 29, 1880 – November 21, 1970) was a Polish-born Jewish-American writer who achieved renown for her fiction on the immigrant experience in the early twentieth century.
Her most notable novel has remained Bread Givers (1925). She also achieved renown with her first short story collection, Hungry Hearts (1920), and her 1923 novel, Salome of the Tenements (1923).
When her family immigrated to the U.S. in 1893, they were among the masses of Eastern European Jews who arrived between 1880 to 1924. Like many Jewish immigrants, they settled and lived in the immigrant neighborhood of the East side of Manhattan.
Early family life
Anzia Yezierska was born in Maly Plock, Poland. Her parents, Bernard and Pearl Yezierska, immigrated to America in 1893, six years after her eldest brothers had arrived and settled. They settled in the lower side of Manhattan, where most Jewish immigrants took refuge.
After arriving in the US, her family adopted Mayer as their new surname. Anzia changed her first name to Harriet (sometimes Hattie). In her late twenties, she changed it back to her original full name, Anzia Yezierska. Her father engaged in full-time study of the sacred text of the Torah and wasn’t gainfully employed.
Anzia’s mother worked at different unskilled jobs to support the family. Pressured to support her family, Anzia was forced to drop out of school after two years of elementary education. She began working a succession of domestic and factory jobs to support her family.
Eastern European culture, especially the Orthodox one to which her family belonged, didn’t support girls’ education. She and her sisters bore the brunt of this disadvantage. The boys of the family were all educated, and as adults worked in steady, reputable professions. Four of her brothers were pharmacists, another was a math teacher, and the other became an army colonel.
Education
Anzia clashed with her parents, especially her father, whose observance of the religion and Old World culture was a barrier to her full entry into American life. In search of independence and education, the young Yezierska left her home and went to Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls.
Anzia pursued her ambition of becoming educated wholeheartedly and with great determination. She promised the German patron in charge of the school that she would become a domestic science teacher to help improve the lives of her people.
The German patron awarded Anzia a four-year scholarship to Columbia’s Teachers College, studying domestic arts. From 1901 to 1905, Yezierska did menial work to support herself while studying in the college.
Her first job was as an elementary school teacher; she taught from 1908 to 1913. In 1913, she took a brief leave from her teaching job to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where she started pursuing the writing of fiction in earnest.
Longing to rise above her circumstances, she was somewhat hampered by her brittle personality and a measure of self-loathing. In her final book, the autobiographical Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), she wrote: “With a sudden sense of clarity, I realized the battle I thought I was waging against the world had been against myself, against the Jew in me.”
Personal life
In 1910, Anzia fell into a romantic relationship with Arnold Levitas, to whom she became engaged to marry. Instead, she married his friend Jacob Gordon, and due to guilt, this marriage was annulled. Anzia at once went back to Levitas, who she married in a religious ceremony. Her only daughter, Louise, was born in 1912.
In 1914, Anzia left her husband, taking her daughter to live in San Francisco where she took a job as a social worker. She had many responsibilities in that line of work, which made it challenging to take care of her daughter. She gave up custody of Louise to Levitas.
Yezierska and Levitas divorced in 1916, and the following year, having moved back to New York City, she fell in love with John Dewey, a philosopher and a professor at Colombia University. Dewey was one of the most prominent American scholars and social reform thinkers of the twentieth century. The love affair was in truth an affair, as Dewey was married, with a number of children. When Dewey was widowed in the mid-1920s, both he and Anzia had long moved on.
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Sketch of Anzia accompanying a 1920s interview
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Yezierska’s works were inspired by the struggles she and her family faced as new immigrants in the U.S. Her writing was mainly concerned with Jewish immigrants, and later, she also depicted the lives of newly arrived Puerto Ricans. She focused on the struggles of immigrants to fit into the American way of life as the central theme of her fiction.
Her fiction gave insight into the lives of Jewish immigrants, especially girls, who were more negatively impacted by their Eastern European roots. Though most of her work was fiction, there were many elements of autobiography. Her feminist leanings show through in her female characters’ striving for liberation from cultural constraints and independence.
Anzia started her writing in earnest in 1912, but like many women writers of her time, she faced many setbacks. The difficulties she faced in her personal life were reflected in her fiction on the problems of young married women. She couldn’t find a publisher for her work until December 1915, when The Forum published her story, “The Free Vacation House.”
Her writing career was boosted when her story “Where Lovers Dream” was published in The Metropolitan. One of her most inspiring stories, “The Fat Of The Land,” was featured in Edward J. O’ Brien’s collection, The Best Short stories of 1919.
The popularity of her short fiction caught the attention of publishers. In 1920, Houghton Mifflin compiled Anzia’s short stories into a collection titled Hungry Hearts. Some sections of this book were adapted into a successful 1922 silent film. Another collection of short works published two years later, was Children of Loneliness (1922) continued to explore themes of offspring of immigrants who came to the U.S. in pursuit of the American dream.
The characters’ speech patterns and even some of the prose retain a subtle Yiddish “accent.” Sara Smolinsky wants, like her real-life alter ego Anzia, “to become a person.”
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Anzia in HollywoodAnzia did a brief stint in Hollywood, where she prepared for the release of the silent film Hungry Hearts in 1922, based on her short story collection. Samuel Goldwyn gave her a lucrative contract to write screenplays, building off the popularity of Yezierska’s stories.
In 1925, her first novel, Salome of the Tenements, also became a silent film. She came to be known as “the Sweatshop Cinderella.” Resenting this rags-to-riches stereotype, and frustrated with the shallow ways of Hollywood, Anzia returned to New York.
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Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1925)
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Anzia Yezierska’s best-known work remains the semi-autobiographical novel, Bread Givers (1925). It was brought back into print after fading away for some decades.
This semi-autobiographical novel delves into the well-trodden theme of an immigrant family whose children strain against the ways of their Old World parents. The father, Reb. Smolinsky might be learned in the holy Torah, but he’s childish, impractical, and inflexible when it comes to his daughters.
The three daughters chafe under their father’s domination. The youngest and feistiest is Sara, oddly nicknamed Blut und Eisen (“Blood and Iron”) from the time she was tiny. She rebels from the start, fighting for her autonomy, seeking self-determination. Sara’s process of breaking away from her father’s domination is painful. Some of her strivings are awkward and uncomfortable, but she emerges as a person (mostly) in command of her world.
Though Bread Givers reflects Anzia’s lived experience, and though she had already written and published short story collections and Salome of the Tenements, it was a struggle for her to set it down on paper — perhaps because it hit so close to home. She observed in a 1925 essay:
“This conviction that the poorest life is rich enough for the greatest story, that the real struggle of the washerwoman, the shopgirl, the fishwife, no matter how sordid, how ugly, throbs with dramatic beauty goaded me to write. So without any plot or plan, without knowing how, I started to set down the life I had lived.”
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Anzia Yezierska page on Amazon*
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Anzia Yezierska continued to write for the rest of her life, even when, toward the end, she was almost blind. Long before her death, she all but disappeared from the literary world. She died on November 21, 1970, of a stroke in a nursing home in California.
The mid-1970s brought a wave of reconsiderations of her stories and novels. Bread Givers was reissued in 1975 and 2003, and some of her stories were anthologized, introducing them to new audiences. Since the 1980s, her work has been the subject of renewed academic interest, as one can see in this selection of critical studies.
Anzia Yezierska worked valiantly to achieve her ambition of being a published and respected writer, of “becoming a person,” as her most famous character, Sara Smolinsky, put it. In a 1921 interview she said:
No Don Quixote ever went fighting windmills more wholly unprepared than I as a writer. I began my schooling in a sweatshop. During the slack season, I did housework and cooking. In time I became proficient enough in cooking to get a free scholarship in a domestic science school.
Before the term was half over I went to the department and said, “I had enough of cooking—I want to learn to write.”
“A writer?” the woman stared at me. “My dear child, you may as well want to be a dean of the university. There are native-born writers who do not earn their salt. What chance is there for you with your immigrant English?”
“If I can’t get a chance to learn the American English I’ll write in immigrant English,” I answered, “but write I must.”
And without guide or compass, I plunged into the sea of the short story.
On this site
Anzia Yezierska on Her Struggle to Write Bread Givers Jewish Women in Novels by Early Jewish Female WritersMajor works
We Go Forth All To See America (vignettes,1920)Hungry Hearts (short stories, 1920)The Lost Beautifulness (1922)Salome of the Tenements (1923)Children of Loneliness (short stories, 1923) Bread Givers (novel, 1925) Arrogant Beggar (novel, 1927) All I Could Never Be (novel, 1932) The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection, ed. by Alice Kessler Harris (1979)Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story (autobiographical novel, 1950) How I Found America: Collected Stories (short stories, 1991)More information
Bread Givers and Becoming a Person (Tenement Museum) Jewish Women’s Archive Reader discussion on Goodreads Anzia Yezierska: Double Hunger Biography on Lerner.org. . . . . . . . . . .
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January 10, 2022
Anzia Yezierska on Her Struggle to Write Bread Givers (1925)
Anzia Yezierska (1890 – 1870), a Polish-born, Jewish-American writer was in her early teens when her family immigrated into the United States during the mass Jewish immigration between 1880 to 1924. They settled and lived in the immigrant neighborhood of the East side of Manhattan.
Bread Givers (1925) remains her best-known novel among a body of work that reflected the Jewish immigrant experience in America of the early 1900s. To set this kind of story down with a female perspective was quite a rarity in her time, reflecting the author’s unflagging determination.
When Bread Givers came out to general acclaim in 1925, Anzia had already published two other well-received works, Hungry Hearts (1920), a collection of short stories, and Salome of the Tenements (1922), a novel. Both were well received; parts of Hungry Hearts were even adapted into a 1922 silent film.
She wasn’t an inexperienced writer, then, while working on Bread Givers, yet from her description of the process, writing it was agonizingly slow, a process of fits and starts. Perhaps because it was somewhat autobiographical, creating it may have been emotionally painful.
Bread Givers delves into the well-worn theme of an immigrant family whose daughters chafe against the ways of their religious, Old World parents. The head of the family, Reb Smolinsky, is a scholar of the Torah, but he’s childish and impractical. He seeks to control and be supported by his daughters, who are longing to spread their wings in the new land of hopes and dreams.
Anzia Yezierska’s work faded away for a time, then rediscovered and reissued in the early 2000s. Here, from a 1925 syndicated article that appeared in numerous newspapers around the U.S. upon the release of Bread Givers, is her first-person narrative of the trials and tribulations she went through to write this novel. Her all-too-familiar struggles will surely resonate with today’s writers.
Anzia Yezierska’s struggle to write Bread Givers,
in her own words
I have often wondered, why the people I know and lived with were never found in stories. Whatever I read of the poor were not my poor: not the life I had lived. They were dressed up in romance, in drama, in colorful climaxes that made fine literature.
The stories were like the pretty pink and white faces on the magazine covers, or like photographs where all the lines and shadows of character were rubbed out, or else they were humorous caricatures, like the funny page of the evening paper. The living people in their everyday working clothes with all the lines and wrinkles of worry were not there.
The brutal fight over pennies at the pushcart, the cheap cafeterias where the hungry working girl goes for food only to come out hungrier after her meal than before; the terror of the poor on the first of the month when the rent has to be paid; these realities were too trivial, too sordid for stories.
And yet I know that in this grinding waste of the dull everyday lay buried rich drama, more colorful than any faked heroics of fiction.
This conviction that the poorest life is rich enough for the greatest story, that the real struggle of the washerwoman, the shopgirl, the fishwife, no matter how sordid, how ugly, throbs with dramatic beauty goaded me to write. So without any plot or plan, without knowing how, I started to set down the life I had lived.
For years I had been in the habit of jotting down anything that flashed through my mind. Feelings, longings, memories. A phrase, a sentence. Sometimes in the middle, or end, or the beginning of a thought. It was sort of company that made me forget my loneliness.
In the street, in the car, in the subway, on the way to the market, or out for a walk, an idea would suddenly fly through my head like a bird in the air, then I’d stop wherever I was and write it down on anything I could find — the edge of a newspaper or a lunch bag, All these scraps I threw into a soapbox under my bed.
When that got full, I threw the contents into an old brown bag that we had used to carry our pillows and featherbeds from Poland to America. I called this mess of written junk my rag bag of dreams.
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A review of Bread Givers (1925)
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How could I ever make sense out of this foaming about the boss, the shop, the high price of herring, the duties of parents to children, and the wild questionings as to why we were born into this world? It was a hodgepodge of chaos, sentimental slush without beginning, without end.
And yet all that formless confusion about nothing at all was me — me, more real than the Anzia Yezierska that sweated in laundries and slaved in shops. Sometimes, I would lose myself in a fairy tale: how I would weave out this rag-bag of dreams, stories so new, so different, so full of real life, that the whole world would rush to read my stuff.
This haunting vision of finished stories out of my groping confusion was to my starved mind what the vision of a full, square meal was to my starved body. It kept me wound up with hope, on tiptoes with excitement to reach up beyond my reach.
The short stories I wrote from time to time were little pieces of emotional junk from this rag-bag of experience. The utmost I could achieve at the beginning was to work into clearness a little fragment at a time.
Three years ago, I decided to get this elephant of confusion out of my way. While searching hopelessly for a few things to save, the idea for Bread Givers suddenly came to me. If I could only show Reb Smolinsky to the world! What a sublime fool! His innocence, his cruelty, his burning faith in God, his inhumanity to his own children.
I could not see the novel yet. What I sensed was veiled in thick mist. Reb Smolinsky, his wives, and his children stood out clearer and clearer. They set fire to my imagination till I could see and hear and feel nothing but these people burning me to come out into life.
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Bread Givers on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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I realized that all the notes on Reb Smolinsky that I had gathered almost all my life were useless in the form in which they had been written. I saw him now in a newer, truer light. The fancy phrases, the grand rhetoric, the gushing excitement of my immature youth was useless to me now. I felt a new simplicity of language stirring in me. And so, I threw away all my notes to follow my new version, to possess myself fully of any new inspiration.
At first, the loss of my precious notes left a hole in my heart. I experienced the feeling of the scientist who spend years and years experimenting to get at a certain fact. Suddenly he comes upon a new clue, to a new truth. And he must throw away all the years of toil to follow the flash. I now see those years of experimenting with worlds were not wholly wasted. I had to go through all that seemingly sterile effort to know and select what was what.
When I finally began my novel, I often spent weeks and months on a chapter only to destroy it and begin all over again when something better occurred to me. Sometimes it took all morning to write one page — sometimes only a paragraph or a sentence. Many times the morning passed with nothing but despair for my labors.
After two years I thought I had finished Bread Givers. I took it to an understanding critic, a friend.
“Only the first half of your novel is finished,” he said. “The last part is a series of essays, not fiction. You must do the last half again.”
“Do it again? I’m dead. I’m a wreck of exhaustion.”
“You’ve crashed through the first part of your novel. But you’ve grown tired and lost fire toward the end.”
“Blood was in my eyes before I saw the end of this,” I replied. “How can I ever do it over again?”
I began again. But it was another year of anguished writing before Bread Givers was ready for publication. Now my only regret is that I allowed the American hurry to produce rush me into print too soon.
More about Bread Givers Overview on Encyclopedia.com Bread Givers and Becoming a Person (Tenement Museum) Jewish Women’s Archive Reader discussion on Goodreads. . . . . . . . . . .
*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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January 8, 2022
Janet Flanner, Paris Correspondent for The New Yorker
Janet Flanner (March 13, 1892 – November 7, 1978) was an American writer and journalist who spent much of her career writing as Paris correspondent for The New Yorker. Under the pen name Gênet, she authored the magazine’s “Letter from Paris” for almost fifty years.
She was a prominent member of the expatriate community that settled in Paris between two World Wars, and made her home there until 1975, after which she returned to New York. Portrait at right, Janet Flanner in 1940 (National Portrait Gallery).
Early years
Janet Flanner was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Frank and Mary Ellen Flanner (née Hockett), both of whom were Quakers. Frank was a successful businessman, co-owning a mortuary and running the first crematorium in the state of Indiana. He also speculated in real estate. Janet was the middle child between her two sisters, Marie and June Hildegarde (known as Hildegarde.
The family was comfortably middle-class, enjoying the trappings of suburban life. All three girls attended Tudor Hall, a respected private school. Mary Ellen was known as a poet and playwright, and Frank was heavily involved in the local community.
Later, Hildegarde would recall, “We had a wonderful childhood. We were not rich, and we were not poor. And we did not lead dull lives. Mother was always putting on some kind of dramatic performance for family and friends, and Father had taste and liked to buy things…”
Family drama and tragedy
However, there were tensions under the surface. Mary Ellen was often frustrated at family life, and at times even resented her children and their talents in music, literature, and drama. She once told Hildegarde that, between them, they had “robbed her of all her talent.”
Later, Janet informed her mother that her decision not to have children was partly due to her belief that children had ruined Mary Ellen’s life, and in fact, Mary Ellen’s frustrations were often taken out on Janet, who was a precocious child who liked to do things her own way. Often, she was locked in the closet as punishment.
On February 17, 1912, the entire community was shocked when Frank killed himself at his mortuary. The family had just returned from a year spent largely in Berlin, where Marie was studying music, but had to return when Frank lost about $5,000 backing an invention that resembled the teletype machine.
Despite his property portfolio and the expanding mortuary business, he still felt the loss keenly. The man that most people knew as kind, good-natured and a pillar of the community became despondent, irritable, and unreliable, and he eventually took his life with a combination of prussic acid, strychnine, carbolic acid, and morphine. It became a local scandal, and the gossip and speculation would haunt Janet for the rest of her life.
Breaking away
In an attempt to escape the now stifling confines of the middle-class community, Janet enrolled at the University of Chicago. The city was buzzing with artists and writers, and Janet rejected the traditional university societies in favor of the clubs, bars, and theatres the city had to offer.
She had no real interest in classes, barely attending, and failed various courses, including political economy, psychology and English. She withdrew in 1914 and returned to Indianapolis. Later, she would say that she had dropped out because of her father’s suicide; even after two years, continued grief and confusion may have impacted her decision.
Once home, she took up her first writing post as film critic for the Indianapolis Star. She had kept in touch with some of her friends from university, in particular William Lane Rehm, who graduated in 1914. In 1918, to the surprise of all their family and friends, the two decided to get married. There was little formality and even less notice: the engagement was announced only two days before the wedding. The ceremony was conducted at the Flanner home.
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Solita Solano
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By August 1918, the couple was living in New York City, in an apartment on Washington Place in Greenwich Village. Janet was determined to live as independently as she could, and even had a prenuptial agreement drawn up with Rehm stating that neither would lay claim to the other’s finances in the event of a divorce. She had an income from her father’s estate, her own social life and standing; and Rehm was supportive of her.
Later Janet would fondly say that Rehm was “too good for me.” Known for her wit, she was quickly accepted into the social circles of the Village. She became close friends with Neysa McMein, one of the highest-paid magazine illustrators in the country, and with Harold Ross and Jane Grant, both well-respected journalists and editors.
Janet’s life was to change when, in December of 1918, Solita Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) moved to New York as the new drama editor for the New York Tribune. When the two women met, sometime during the winter, they fell in love. However, even in the bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village, it became clear that social conventions would not allow the two women to fully lead the life they desired.
In the summer of 1921, they were given an opportunity when Solita was asked to travel to Greece for National Geographic magazine. With Janet’s income and Solita’s salary, they could survive financially. It was the escape they had been looking for. While Janet wavered, ridden with guilt over Rehm (whom she would eventually divorce amicably), Solita was insistent, and Janet would always be grateful that Solita had persuaded her to leave.
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Janet Flanner in 1927 by Berenice Abbott, courtesy of Clark Art Institute
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After traveling through Europe, Janet and Solita found themselves in Paris. With no desire to return to America, they settled on the Left Bank, then a haven for expatriate artists and writers. Solita continued to write and edit for various magazines, while Janet worked on her first and only novel, The Cubical City, and entrenched herself into the social fabric of Left Bank life.
Janet and Solita became close friends with many of the most prominent members of the community, including Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
In 1925, after her old Greenwich Village friend Harold Ross launched The New Yorker, he and his wife Jane Grant were on the lookout for contributing journalists. He particularly wanted a regular European viewpoint for the magazine, and Jane approached Janet with the idea of a bi-weekly Letter from Paris. Janet took the offer and, writing under the pen name Gênet, would continue to write for The New Yorker for the next fifty years.
Her letters covered everything she felt her readers should know about what was going on in Paris and what the French thought of it all. She wrote about art exhibitions, fashion shows, theatre, music, literature, crime, current affairs (although she never felt that comfortable writing about politics), and celebrity gossip. Her prose came to epitomize what has since become known as “The New Yorker style” — sharp, witty, to the point, with little room for personal opinion.
Although she left Paris during World War II, she continued to write articles and profiles for the magazine, gathering information from her friends that had stayed behind. She didn’t return to Paris until 1944, when she covered the liberation of the city and also contributed a series of weekly radio broadcasts for the Blue Network.
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Janet Flanner page on Amazon*
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Janet’s personal life was never settled. In 1932, while in Paris, she met and fell in love with Noël Haskins Murphy, a singer who lived just outside Paris in Orgeval. Their romance didn’t affect her relationship with Solita (who also had affairs of her own), and Orgeval itself became an important escape for Janet. She felt the pressures of her position keenly and often doubted her ability as a writer.
While in New York in 1942, she met Natalia Danesi Murray, an Italian working at the National Broadcasting Company, at a party on Fire Island. The two were quickly smitten and, although their relationship would last until Janet’s death, Solita and Noel also continued to be important in Janet’s life. She found herself unable to break with any of her lovers, and it would cause her much guilt and anguish over the years, never feeling that she could give any of them what they deserved.
After returning to Paris, Janet frequently traveled back and forth to America to see Natalia and to care for her mother. Now elderly and frail, Mary Ellen Flanner lived in California with Janet’s sister Hildegarde, now a well-known poet. She was unwilling to give up her position at The New Yorker to move back to America permanently, but the constant travel took its toll; she grew exhausted and was unwell and irritable much of the time. Even after her mother died, in 1947, Janet continued her trips to the U.S. at least once or twice a year.
Last years
Between travels, Janet continued her regular Letter from Paris, as well as contributing longer articles about the Nuremberg Trials, the Suez Crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the Algerian conflict.
Only much later, in 1975, did she concede that the situation was no longer tenable. Her health was frail, and Noel and Solita were no longer able to look after her in Paris. Janet returned to New York permanently to be cared for by Natalia; a month later Solita died.
Janet grew more and more confused and frail, finally passing away of unknown causes on November 7, 1978. Her ashes were scattered over Cherry Grove on Fire Island, where she and Natalia had met.
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Accolades and legacyJanet Flanner was an intrinsic part of the history of The New Yorker, defining a style and a generation through her Paris letters. Many of her contributions can still be read on the magazine’s website, and Paris Was Yesterday is still popular, having been reissued by Virago Modern Classics.
During her lifetime, Janet Flanner’s work was recognized with a Legion d’Honneur and an honorary doctorate from Smith College. Her letters for The New Yorker were collected in various volumes, and Paris Journal won a U.S. National Book Award in 1966.
Her legacy is still very much in evidence: In 2019, Park Tudor School (the successor to Tudor Hall School), posthumously awarded her their Distinguished Alumni award, and also created a speaker series called the “Janet Flanner Visiting Artist Series.”
She is also credited as being one of the inspirations behind the 2021 film The French Dispatch. But she didn’t want to be known only as a journalist. She was a woman who cared deeply for those around her and for her friends. After her death, Kay Boyle recalled Janet’s own words: “When I die, let it not be said that I wrote for The New Yorker for fifty years. Let it be said that once I stood by a friend.”
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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is an author, poet, and artist with a serious case of wanderlust. She is originally from the UK, but has spent time abroad in Europe, the United States, and the Bahamas.
When not traveling or working on her current projects — a chapbook of poetry, “The Cabinet of Lost Things,” and a novel based on the life of modernist writer and illustrator Djuna Barnes — she can be found with her nose in a book, daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Visit her on the web at Elodie Rose Barnes.
More about Janet FlannerOn this site
Signed Gênet: Janet Flanner’s Letters from ParisBooks
The Cubical City (1926)Paris Was Yesterday, 1925–1939, edited by Irving Drutman (1972)Paris Journal, 1944–1955 (1965)Paris Journal, 1956–1964 (1965)Paris Journal, 1965–1970 (1971)Janet Flanner’s World: New and Uncollected Pieces, 1932–1975 (1979)Men & Monuments: Profiles of Picasso, Matisse, Braque, & Malraux (1957)Biographies and letters
Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner by Brenda Wineapple (Harper Collins, 1989)Darlinghissima: Letters to a Friend, Janet Flanner, edited and introduced by Natalia Danesi Murray (Harvest / HBJ, 1986)Janet, My Mother and Me by William Murray (Simon & Schuster, 2000)More information
Contributor for The New Yorker The Paris Journals of Janet Flanner Reader discussions on Goodreads Janet Flanner: A Writer of Not so Few Words. . . . . . . . .
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January 3, 2022
The Daring Fiction of Maude Hutchins
Maude Phelps McVeigh Hutchins (1899 –1991) was raised in an upper-class environment, born to wealthy parents in New York City. She was orphaned at a young age and brought up by her grandparents, prominent members Long Island society.
This introduction to Maude Hutchins’ creative life, first in the visual arts and then more predominantly as the author of fiction considered daring even by mid-twentieth-century standards, is excerpted from Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-20th Century Woman’s Novel by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.
A 1935 article about Hutchins (in her then role as a sculptor in Chicago) makes it clear just how aristocratic her family was. “Mrs. Hutchins’ mother was a Phelps, of a New England family that made their advent in Massachusetts in 1632. It was her Phelps grandparents who brought her up after her parents died.”
What upper class women could and couldn’t do
Women of Hutchins’ class had to contend with expectations as to what they could and couldn’t do, though being artistic wasn’t necessarily a problem. Critic Maxwell Geismar, in his 1962 introduction to Hutchins’ collection of stories The Elevator, called her “this country-bred, inherently ‘upper-class,’ and offbeat virtuoso (for Maude Hutchins is certainly that; while like most native aristocrats, she is profoundly democratic in her instincts).” Further:
It was nice for young ladies of fashion in her girlhood circles on Long Island to paint and draw. So Maude Phelps Hutchins had no traditional background of stern family objections thrown into her way of following her instincts to be an artist. Painting or drawing was one of the “accomplishments,” like playing the piano and doing needlework (as distinguished from sewing).
Her only problem when trying to be taken seriously as an artist was ‘the suspicion of being a dilettante,’ even though she did have an art degree from Yale University. But even there, women were treated differently. The main focus of the degree course was to get students on the Prix de Rome, but women were not allowed to apply for that so “the girls are allowed to develop pretty much as they please.”
The back cover blurb for Hutchins’ penultimate novel, Blood on the Doves, 1965 – an untypical, multi-voiced, Faulkneresque narrative – describes her background very nicely, underneath a photograph of Hutchins smiling broadly, sitting at the controls of the plane that she flew solo across America and looking nowhere near her age, which was then sixty-six. The logo on the side of the plane reads Super Cat, perhaps appropriately.
Although Maude Hutchins was born in New York and brought up on Long Island, she is half Virginian and half New Englander. Tutored, as she says, by a Connecticut Yankee, her grandfather, and a Virginian great aunt, she realized early that “I was always wrong.” This bringing up accounted also for her formal education ending at sixteen (grandfather said ladies do not go to college), and for her matriculation in the Yale School of Fine Arts after her marriage.
She received a B.F.A. from Yale University, but “piling clay on an armature in the basement of that University was not exactly an intellectual pursuit. I learned how to read, however,” she adds, “and had read most of ‘The Great Books’ before that term was invented.” She also learned to fly, and pilots her own plane.
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Girls in Bloom by Francis Booth on Amazon*
Girls in Bloom on Amazon UK*
Girls in Bloom in full on Issuu
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For Hutchins’ family, being an artist was just about respectable – though she did cause a stir in Chicago by exhibiting life-size nude male statues – being a writer was something else.
Long before she thought about writing novels Hutchins collaborated on an illustrated 1932 book called Diagrammatics, for which she provided lightly erotic, neoclassical line drawings of young, nude women – they are rather like more minimal versions of Picasso’s Vollard Suite, the first of which appeared in 1930 or his illustrations for Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published in 1931.
They also resemble the erotic, Beardsleyesque illustrations of young girls that Willy Pogány, by then a well-known illustrator and set designer living in New York, provided for a 1926 English-language translation of Pierre Louÿs’ Songs of Bilitis, which Louÿs had originally claimed were his French translations of Greek manuscripts from the same era and sexual orientation as Sappho.
It seems that Hutchins herself initiated this project and, not yet herself a writer, asked Mortimer J. Adler, a professor from Chicago University, of which her husband was then president, to write the words. Adler provided a truly terrible sub-Gertrude Stein text; it is not obvious whether the text is a spoof and the whole thing was a joke. The volume was privately published in a luxurious, limited edition. Although it was not widely distributed, Hutchins’ family was not amused.
“When I was fourteen and visiting a great-aunt, I was late to luncheon,” Mrs. Hutchins relates, “and I said, ‘But I beat Sylvia at tennis.’ My aunt looked at me coldly and said, ‘We have never had an athlete in the family before.’ Three years ago, I sent a copy of Diagrammatics to an elderly cousin. In a letter to me, he said, ‘We have never had an author in the family before.’”
Much worse, from her family’s, and her then ex-husband’s point of view, was to come when she started to write novels; though Hutchins did not publish anything until after her divorce, she wrote under her married name. Hutchins’ first novel was published in 1948, when she was forty-nine, the age Shirley Jackson was when she died.
The respective ages of their daughters when they were writing their novels may partly explain why Shirley Jackson’s teenagers are almost entirely sex-free – except Natalie Waite of Hangsaman (1951), whose one experience of sex is so awful she erases it from her mind and Jackson erases it from the novel – while Hutchins’ teen girls embrace sex and sensuality with great joy and a total lack of inhibition.
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Despite the aloof toughness her upbringing had given her, Hutchins is an example of a creative woman overshadowed – temporarily at least – by a dominant, alpha male. In 1921 she had married Robert Maynard Hutchins, who was to become the youngest dean of Yale Law School and then the youngest president of the University of Chicago. He was called Golden Boy even at the time.
Maude already had a moderately successful career as an artist and sculptor and was a rather glamorous figure: beautiful and striking, she was almost as tall as him. They were a golden couple and were compared to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; later they might have been compared to JFK and Jackie: it was at one time assumed that Robert Hutchins would either end up in the Supreme Court or running for president, though he did neither, partly at least because of the “trouble” he had with his wife.
In a memoir about Robert Hutchins, his former colleague Milton Mayer called Maude the “multifariously talented daughter of the editor of the New York Sun,” and said of her that, “her schooling was fashionable and her artistic talents were encouraged. She meant to have her own career – not her husband’s – and she had it. If he was shy, or stand-offish, she was genuinely aloof. She wasn’t meant to be a schoolteacher’s wife. (Perhaps she wasn’t meant to be anyone’s wife.)”
Scandalous stories
In a story published long after their divorce, “The Man Next Door,” published in her story collection The Elevator (1962), Hutchins writes a description of a man who seems to be a dead ringer for her ex-husband; it is by no means an unkind or unflattering portrait.
I am a country girl born and bred but my husband lives and thinks in a tiny city that he carries around inside his head. His handsome skull encloses very tall buildings and subways and elevators, and the buildings and subways and elevators are full of tiny cell-like people, each with his franchise, his exemption, and his problem. My husband is emperor, prince, chancellor, and his influence is like the handwriting on the wall.
In another story, Innocents,” in Love is a Pie (1952), a collection of stories and playlets (for which Andy Warhol designed multiple covers), Hutchins describes the relationship of a nameless couple that might possibly be a portrait of herself and Bob.
His outbursts of anger against her, which she feared, but which she preserved her strength for and which she made every effort to meet with the community, failing always, with the only “conclusions” he ever made. She was always fresh and he was always fatigued because it was her idea, not his; she was the artist. Unrequited love only comes to those who want it and even then it is not simple.
Artistic, creative, offbeat Maude never fit into her husband’s stuffy social milieu and caused him endless headaches. To “keep Maude quiet” and keep her busy, “poor old Bob” encouraged his wealthy friends to commission sculpted heads and busts from her – for enormous fees which many of his friends seriously resented – but this was never enough.
Maude scandalously paid undergraduates from her husband’s university, male and female, to model nude for her. She also produced family Christmas cards based on her own mildly erotic drawings that were sent to faculty and trustees; as one friend of Bob’s said about them in a memoir:
On at least one occasion with the nude figure of a going-on nubile girl holding a Christmas candle – the model was sensationally reported around town and gown to be the Hutchinses’ fourteen-year-old daughter Franja.
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Maude and Robert Hutchins
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In the end, Bob got tired of keeping Maude quiet; after twenty-seven years of marriage, he left her in 1948 and she divorced him. He never spoke to her again. Within a year he had married his secretary; worse still, she was called Vesta – for a wife to be left for a secretary twenty years younger and even considerably shorter than herself is one thing, but if the other woman is called Vesta the horror is unimaginable.
Maude moved with her two younger daughters to the backwaters of Southport, Connecticut and stayed there, never remarrying and never – at least publicly – having any other serious relationship with a man; despite their differences, Bob must have been a tough act for any man to follow. And Maude didn’t need to work: Bob, whose salary was $25,000 a year, paid her $18,000.
Still, Maude was something of an alpha female herself, and thrived as an independent woman: she soon got her pilot’s license, as we have seen. Being left without a husband also seems to have encouraged Maude to write novels rather than concentrating on her visual art. She published nine novels between 1948 (the year of her divorce, so she must have been writing while she was still married) and 1967, plus two collections of her short stories, many of which had been published in leading magazines and printed in anthologies, including New Directions.
None of her publications were the kind of thing that the wife – even the ex-wife – of a highly respected member of Chicago society would be expected to produce, and she probably delighted in that fact.
Robert Hutchins published around twenty books of educational and political theory from 1936, when he was thirty-seven, to 1972, but, as mentioned earlier, Maude Hutchins was forty-nine when her first novel was published. She was sixty years old in 1959 when Victorine was released, and sixty-eight when her final novel was published.
The critics are shocked (or at least, uncomfortable)
Older women writing about sex makes middle-aged, male critics squirm; as we shall see, Hutchins suffered at their hands for daring to suggest that the mature woman – indeed any woman – might have lascivious thoughts. The New York Times said of her, “the sensuous is her window on the world; sexuality is the sea for all her voyages.”
Unlike Anaïs Nin’s work, most critics saw the sexual rather than the sensual; there was far too much sex in Hutchins’ novels for many people. At this time censorship was still very much the norm: Hutchins’ second novel, A Diary of Love was nearly prosecuted for obscenity; even the title seems designed to upset the prurient.
Some of Hutchins’ novels were, indeed, republished with sleazy, pulp-fiction covers: A Diary of Love was issued in at least three different pulp covers, all of which had above the title the teaser: “the sexual awakening of a teen-age girl.” At the bottom of the book’s cover, readers were assured that this was “complete and unabridged” — it had been previously issued in a censored version.
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The Hands of Love (formerly titled Victorine)
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Victorine was reissued as The Hands of Love, with the blurb, “a strange love transforms a young girl into womanhood,” and Maisie was issued by the Paris-based, erotic-novel specialist Olympia Press with the quote “the shockeroo of the literary season.” The cover featured a woman in bed who looked like she might be a prostitute in the saloon of a Western movie.
“Poor Bob” must have felt each of these as an arrow in the back; her family was likely not amused either. Maude could have used a pseudonym, but where would have been the fun in that? These trashy covers and blurbs are entirely misleading and readers would have been seriously disappointed. It is not obvious whether she approved the lurid covers for these reprints of her books – as we saw with the now-classic lesbian pulp novels, authors at that time had little to no control over titles and covers – though Maxwell Geismar implies that she would not have:
Mrs. Hutchins would resent, I know, any description of her work as “erotic.” The curious thing about her writing, so remarkably open about all forms of personal behavior, was the prevailing tone of candor. If nothing human was foreign to her, everything human was a constant source of delight, of pleasure and gaiety.
When her book was banned by those sagacious guardians of the public morals, the Chicago police, Mrs. Hutchins was quite naturally bewildered. “I can assure you that I have no desire to shock, disrupt the morals or undermine the conventions of the general public,” she wrote at the time. “My defense for A Diary of Love is that having written it, I published it; and that I would not willingly withdraw any of it. My intention was purely artistic, and the subject matter innocence.”
Yet some of Hutchins’ books are still in the list of the prestigious literary house New Directions with far more sober covers, though A Diary of Love has a very slightly naughty line drawing by Hutchins and Love is a Pie still has its original 1952 Andy Warhol line drawing of a woman as a cover. Surely no twentieth-century writer except Nabokov has been represented by such a range of cover art.
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Maude Hutchins’ books on Amazon*
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Victorine has even been reissued recently as a New York Review of Books Classic, part of an eclectic list that ranges from Balzac to Leonora Carrington, and includes Colette‘s The Pure and the Impure. Hutchins is now becoming part of the American literary canon and moving slowly out of the ghetto of sex-obsessed writers, where she had been closeted, but the critics of the time were generally not kind to her, variously accusing her of being too experimental/literary on the one hand and of being too raunchy on the other.
A review of the short story collection Love is a Pie in the Saturday Review, for January 3, 1953, took the former line.
The stories, written in a prolix and often impenetrable prose, have the self-conscious literary stamp of the little magazines which first published several of them… For a book devoted to the tender human emotion, Love is a Pie seems curiously aloof and unemotional. It consists largely of strained and wearisome cerebral exercises.
Nine years later, a review of Honey on the Moon in the same magazine for February 29, 1964, slung at her the second kind of criticism.
According to all traditional criteria, the book is almost a complete failure. It has no core of moral significance; it takes place in no recognizable social context; most of the characters never come alive, and ninety percent of Mrs. Hutchins’s dialogue could never have been spoken by a human being.
But, although she never distinguishes between love and love-making, Hutchins writes about pure, animal sex with a genuine lyrical passion unmatched by any other contemporary American woman. And the blurry, schizoid interior monologues are almost as good – and hard to read – as those in Tender Is the Night.
If you are willing to endure a banal, pointless novel just for a few first-rate passages of good old you-know-what and a brief close-up of a personality tearing itself apart, you will like Honey on the Moon.
Even as late as 1964, critic Stanley Kaufmann was advising the then-sixty-five-year-old Hutchins to grow up and stop being so obsessed with sex; male critics have always tended to treat female novelists like naughty children – perhaps Hutchins was old enough to be his mother, and perhaps that was his problem with her. Male novelists, of course, never grow up and are allowed, even expected, to hang on to their obsession with sex their whole life.
Many novelists pass through such a period, but there comes a time when ‘then they went to bed’ suffices; or when the bed is to society what war was to von Clausewitz, a continuation of politics by other means. To remain as interested in sex as Colette was all her life long, and as Mrs. Hutchins continues to be, requires an almost monastic single-mindedness.
To be compared with Colette may be considered no insult: Anaïs Nin certainly meant it as a compliment; Colette wrote a series of novels that show the coming of age of her heroine Claudine, begun in 1900 with Claudine at School. Hutchins and Colette are probably the best exemplars of Nin’s ideal of an author who can write erotically without having any – or at least not very much – actual sex in her work.
The Memoirs of Maisie is a good example: despite the lurid picture on the cover of the pulp edition, which misleadingly shows a woman lying seductively on a bed in her underwear and despite the “shockeroo” quote in the blurb, Maisie is a grandmother on the verge of dementia, surrounded by her daughters and granddaughters (men are rarely at the center of Hutchins’ novels and here, they’re pushed way out to the periphery). Maisie does however have reveries of her younger, passionate self, almost like an older Molly Bloom.
The nearest Maisie gets to a sex scene is written erotically, but no actual sex happens – because of the man’s temporary impotence. Colin and Sissy are both married, but not to each other; she agrees to meet him. Colin returns to his wife, knowing that he “had been fooled. He felt as if he had been lifted out of a magician’s hat by the ears and exposed to ridicule, wet and slinky, pink-eyed rabbit.”
Some of the short stories collected in Hutchins’ The Elevator also contain wonderful examples of erotic but sex-free writing. Hutchins can even make a description of a bride’s bouquet at her wedding crackle with an erotic charge. This is from ‘The Wedding,’ also in The Elevator.
The bride looked at the bouquet and saw that it was beginning to droop. One of the topaz roses turned brown, Violette began to shrink and a pink carnation trembled as if in a convulsion. A number of petals detached themselves and floated aimlessly in the still air and a hatch of yellow pollen, riding some tiny updraft, shone like powdered gold. She felt the stems grow feverish and then cold.
A pair of stamens detached themselves and floated downward, a pistil was bathed in perspiration, and the Shasta daisies, as if they were guillotined, lost their heads. She felt what remained of the bouquet struggling to be free of her hands, the flowers were delirious and the pulses in her own wrists began to beat like drums.
In The Future of the Novel, Nin points out perceptively that Hutchins tended to center her works around and see the world through the eyes of young people, especially adolescent girls, who are set against their awful parents while we see them coming of age:
Some of her parents resemble the parents of Cocteau’s Les parents terrible. It is the adolescents in her book who carry the burden of clairvoyance. They see, they know. It is not a battle between innocence and evil but between awareness and hypocrisy. Her adults are hypocritical. The novels are requests for truth, and this truth is usually uttered by those at the beginning of their lives. The work is unique, rich, animated by a sprightly intelligence and verve.
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture:
Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.
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*These are Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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December 28, 2021
Joan Didion: A Tribute to the Writer’s Writer
On December 23, 2021, when I learned that writer extraordinaire Joan Didion had passed away at the age of 87, I did what any friend would do: I canceled the day’s planned activities and concentrated on everything Didion.
For forty-four years, Joan Didion had been my own constant and portable companion: of course I needed to devote time to adjusting to the news of Didion’s passing. Our friendship was, obviously, one way. I can proclaim to know piles of intimate Didion facts and details, but of course Didion never knew me.
But that’s besides the point. Didion will remain one of the most significant influences on my writing life: what one remembers about her is the strength and authority of her writing. No one could imitate her; indeed, whenever anyone tried to channel Didion they were detected immediately.
My longterm Joan Didion love affair began in 1977. One of my very favorite English professors at San Francisco State University held up a copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “We learn best from what is good,” Professor Ritter stated, “and Joan Didion is the best.”
Our class was being introduced to the “New Journalism.” Professor Ritter had no problem in declaring that Joan Didion’s nonfiction easily surpassed the New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. Tom Wolfe needed his white suit and Hunter S. Thompson demanded personal physical excess to showcase the New Journalism.
Joan Didion had her sublime sentences filled with a myriad of details to convey her personal and wholly authentic stories. She wrote about nearly every cultural and political upheaval that transformed the U.S. from the 1960s to the present day.
Didion was compelled to find the story behind the story: what was meant by the “disparate images” that was presented to the American public as news.
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Joan Didion in 1977 (AP photo)
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“Didion often uses a detail that has stuck with her from a certain moment, which many seem extraneous nut which she uses for a purposes,” fellow writer Sara Davidson explained. “A hallmark of her work is that she repeats those details, almost like a phrase that recurs in a symphony.”
When Davidson asked Didion why the repetition of details, Didion responded with the advice, “I do it to remind the reader to make certain connections. Technically, it’s almost a chant. You could read it as an attempt to cast a spell.”
And cast a spell she did. The writer reads a few paragraphs where Didion does her repetition of fascinating and beguiling — nearly lyrical — phrases as she may describe a wholly depressing scene of heartbreak. Didion is the writer’s writer: her writing may appear deceptively easy, but she’s the prose master other writers return to in hopes that they can do what she does: explain the world with an authentic perception that cannot be imitated.
“Writers are always selling someone out”
Another Didion lesson that I have used for forty-four years came from a phrase — explained by SFSU Professor Ritter for over ninety minutes — of this oft-repeated sentence of Didion’s: “Writers are always selling someone out.”
It’s a line that Didion critics and detractors dislike and disparage for its hint of arrogance. I understood this line as the writer’s only compulsion is the search for truth, the story behind the story, and if the reader is uncomfortable with the outcome, the writer bears no responsibility. The writer need not pay attention to someone’s discomfort: there is too much going on in the world for the writer to stop reporting.
Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, explained that line this way: “No one sees oneself as others do, and if you truly write how you see an individual, that person may be disturbed.”
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Joan Didion books on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Thus, it is the writer’s solemn duty to write the story behind the story in search of the truth. And, to write that story well in their own authentic style — or, what was the point in writing at all if one avoids the reality of our times.
Forty-four years ago I first read these lines from Slouching Towards Bethlehem from the essay On Keeping a Notebook:
“It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering to the mind’s door at 4am and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.”
Thinking about Didion and the tremendous legacy that she gave to her readers, I turn to that phrase in gratitude. I like to re-visit my younger writer self who waited for the release of The White Album and was inspired to write the found details in my own 1960s tale. Or, I go forward two more decades and I find myself still searching for some hidden truth, the story behind the story, and I find it.
I credit Joan Didion for that. Often Didion would state that she dreaded going to her writing desk every morning but she knew she must. And that is the another lesson that Didion gave to me: you just keep on writing because you are committed to the stories that need to be told.
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment …” (from a 1975 Commencement Speech at University of California Riverside)
Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who writes about women writers and labor women. After working for the City and County of San Francisco for thirty years, she is now learning everything about Henry David Thoreau in Los Angeles.
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The Center Will Not Hold is the excellent
2017 documentary on Joan Didion
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
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Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1925)
Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1880 – 1970) is the best-known novel by this immigrant writer whose work reflected the Jewish immigrant experience in America of the early 1900s. To set this kind of story down with a female perspective was a rarity in her time, reflecting the author’s chutzpah and determination.
At the age of ten, in 1890, Yezierska arrived with her family to New York City’s Lower East Side. A product of the immigration wave of the late 1800s, she never quite shed the feeling of being an outsider.
Longing to rise above her circumstances, she was somewhat hampered by her brittle personality and a measure of self-loathing. In her final book, the autobiographical Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), she wrote: “With a sudden sense of clarity, I realized the battle I thought I was waging against the world had been against myself, against the Jew in me.”
Bread Givers, an autobiographical novel, delves into the well-trodden theme of an immigrant family whose children strain against Old World parents. The father, Reb. Smolinsky might be learned in the holy Torah, but he’s childish, impractical, and inflexible when it comes to his daughters. One 1925 reviewer described his character as “Dickensian.”
The three daughters chafe under their father’s domination. The youngest and feistiest is Sara, oddly nicknamed “Blut und Eisen” (Blood and Iron) from the time she is tiny. She rebels from the start, fighting for her autonomy, seeking self-determination. We can imagine that she is Anzia, through and through. The process of breaking away from her father’s domination is painful. Some of her strivings are awkward and uncomfortable, but she emerges as a person (mostly) in command of her world.
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Anzia Yezierska
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Bread Givers bestowed a greater measure of success to Yezierska, who three years earlier had published the novel Salome of the Tenements. She wrote many fine short stories and even had a stint as a Hollywood writer. Hungry Hearts (1920), her first collection of short stories, was made into a successful 1922 silent film. Yezierska came to be known in Hollywood as “the Sweatshop Cinderella.” though she resented this rags-to-riches stereotype.
Long before her death in 1980, she all but disappeared from the literary world. The mid-1970s brought a wave of reconsiderations of her stories and novels. Bread Givers was reissued in 1975 and 2003, and some of her stories were anthologized, introducing them to new audiences.
In a 1925 essay in the Salt Lake Telegraph, Yezierska mused on what prompted her to write Bread Givers:
“I have always wondered why the people I know and lived with were never found in stories. Whatever I read of the poor were not my poor; not the life I had lived. They were dressed up in romance, in drama, in colorful climaxes that made fine literature …
The living people in their everyday working clothes with all the lines and wrinkles of work and worry were not there. The brutal fight over pennies at the pushcart, the cheap cafeterias where the hungry working girl goes for food only to come out hungrier after her meal than before; the terror of the poor on the first of the month when the rent has to be paid: these realities were too trivial, too sordid for stories.
And yet I knew that in this grinding waste of the dull everyday lay buried rich drama, more colorful than any false heroics of fiction. This conviction that the poorest life is rich enough for the greatest story, that the real struggle of the washerwoman, the shop girl, the fishwife, no matter how sordid, how ugly, throbs with dramatic beauty, is what goaded me to write.”
Despite occasional awkward and overwrought prose, Bread Givers is still eminently readable, and was highly praised upon its publication. In its 1925 review, the New York Times praised the novel for “enabling us to see our life more clearly, to test its values, to reckon up what it is that our aims and achievements may mean. It has a raw, uncontrollable poetry and a powerful, sweeping design.”
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See also:
How I Found America by Anzia Yezierska
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From the original review in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 5, 1925: When Anzia Yezierska wrote Salome Of the Tenements, all applauded. New York has a ghetto, a legendary yet pitifully and stubbornly real maze of dingy brick walls, where cobblestones make wagons rattle and trucks bounce; where every one of long rows of pushcarts has its screaming peddler and haggling customers; where streets are crowded and each fire escape has its ragged washline and show of bedding airing …
… Where basements are gloomy and attics are fetid and men and women and squalling children cling despairingly to traditions that are worn out even in the Old World. as they reach out eager hands for the milk and honey of the Promised Land. this America of ours.
It has been in this ghetto that the sociologist has written his books and quarreled with his brothers, jealous, as though the place belonged to him, and, because it did not suit his purpose, angry if anyone suggested the same sightless urge people for color and beauty was fermenting along with the disease and living blight, in the melting pot.
Anzia Yezierska, however. dared to find poetry, ideals, and even a measure of grimy contentment on Old Hester Street. The Russian immigrant Jew, to her, is a person and not a specimen for study.
Bread Givers, the latest Yezierska panorama of ghetto lives, published by Doubleday, Page & Co., has its human feeling, the divine comedy of the dreadful commonplace, and the glory of achievement, small to who inherited North America from our ancestors. but great to the family of circumstance reduced in Europe, poverty-stricken here and risen again from the basement by the second generation.
The ghetto has its flavor. Flavors being so much a matter of odor, he rest of New York City avoids its Lower East Side as much as possible. Stomachs that can stand herring and rye bread three times a day make it so. Yet Yezierska does not grow hysterical over these, her people. There is a saving sense of humor in Bread Givers.
The reader is looking at real people, living with them, suffering their little scandals, dreading the arrival of the rent lady, stuffing butter-less bread to ease the gnawing pangs of hunger, Papa shouting Hebraic invocations to Jehovah. while his daughters fight to keep him supplied with soup and the roof over his head.
Papa dabbles in his weak business ventures and his moments of religious elation while the landlady bangs at the door; selling his daughters to fine husbands—or at least. to any husbands—for the sake of his old age and sold out by his own bargaining—it would be sardonic if there were less feeling and filial affection woven into the tale.
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Bread Givers on Bookshop.org* and Amazon*
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Marrying off Bessie to the fish merchant, for instance, the fish merchant who was so carried away by his wrath that he threw dollars’ worth of change into a distracted woman’s face in a mutually greedy argument over the price of flounder. Papa, who chanted from the Torah and who worshiped Jeremiah, drove the bread from his mouth by breaking the hearts of his daughters and wearing out that stolid machine, his wife.
The naked simplicity of the poor which strips them of all inhibitory reserves and leaves them free to climb upward, since they cannot sink lower, comes to life in Bread Givers. Anzia Yezierska does what Fannnie Hurst tries to do. One admired the expert craftsmanship of Lummox, but it was, after all, only a somber piece of storytelling. The rise of little “Blut und Eisen” (Blood and Iron) — what Papa calls Sara, his most stubborn, determined daughter, comes only from a deep suffering and a great experience.
Chanting the Torah did not pay the rent but it did drive Sara from her Papa. As the dean of her college told her, she was a pioneer. And she was an immigrant, escaping from the ghetto to the other side of town. There are many like her, all over. We do not always like their presence, but that is because we fail to understand them.
We have not taken into account the brave adventure they set out upon, uprooting themselves from the tenements and pushing painfully into a new land of sunshine, grass, and sky, a paradise that to us means only a lawn to be cut, storm windows to be put on, and a commutation ticket to be bought the end of every month.
Going so high that she married a school teacher made Sara a success in her world. It is a crude world. too. But the author, wringing the story out of the depths of her heart, somehow transforms herself into a stately Druid priestess, singing sagas.
Bread Givers belongs among those few books that are of contemporary America, a faithful picture without monotony, an exciting account without cheapness. It lacks cant and it lacks prejudice. It is a perfect example of high art in heartthrobs. “It wasn’t my father. but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me,” concludes the story.
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You may also enjoy:
Jewish Women in Novels by Early Jewish Female Writers
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*These are Bookshop Affiliate and Amazon Affiliate links. If a product is purchased by linking through, Literary Ladies Guide receives a modest commission, which helps maintain our site and helps it to continue growing!
The post Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (1925) appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.
December 24, 2021
Jewish Women in Novels by Early Jewish Female Writers
Depictions of Jewish women in fiction or memoir by Jewish female writers prior in the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th were exceedingly rare, whether in English or translation. That makes the works discussed ahead rare gems, even if they weren’t brilliant by the highest of literary standards. All are eminently readable, however, and completely fascinating.
Working back from Vera Caspary’s Thicker Than Water (1932) to Amy Levy’s controversial Reuben Sachs (1888), these novels, often autobiographical (as well as one memoir) offer gritty, realistic glimpses into Jewish family and romantic life of their times.
Excerpted from the forthcoming book A Girl Named Vera Can Never Tell a Lie: The Novels of Vera Caspary by Francis Booth, reprinted with permission.
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Thicker Than Water by Vera Caspary (1932)
Vera Caspary’s Thicker Than Water (1932) is unlike any other of her novels: it is a family saga spanning forty-six years, starting in the 19th century and bringing us right up to date at the end of the 1920s twenties flapper era with no concern for tradition or history, only for the present. Caspary made it clear that the family in this story is her own family.
Out of memories awakened in Mama by my descriptions of the sister she had not seen for so many years came the notion of a novel. This was another novel I had to write. Nothing could keep me from it, neither fear nor practical considerations nor intimations of future gutters. I wrote as I had always wanted, completely absorbed in a tale of my mother’s generation, my sister’s girlhood and my own time, a novel that recorded the passing of forty-six years in a family; my family disguised, dramatized, but essentially the Casparys.
Caspary herself was a thoroughly modern working woman, earning unheard of sums of money for a woman her age. Unencumbered by family, religion, or husband, she traveled the world writing. As the review of Thicker Than Water in the New York Times said:
Writing is not necessarily a sedentary occupation – not when Vera Caspary is the writer. A new book, Thicker Than Water, announced for immediate publication by Liveright Inc., was started in Great Neck and continued on the boat en route to England. The first few chapters were thrown away in London, and the author started all over again in Paris. She continued writing on the boat coming back to the United States, finished the book in New York, corrected it in Chicago and proofread it in Brookfield, Conn.
The central character at the start of Thicker Than Water is Rosalia, the name of Caspary’s grandmother’s sister and an anagram of Solaria, the central character of Caspary’s first novel The White Girl. She herself is a modern woman by the standards of the end of the 19th century and has no wish to find a husband.
However, her younger brother wants to marry, and by family and social tradition, he cannot do so until his elder sister is married. Rosalia isn’t considered attractive, is rather old for the marriage market, and has very little money – she was adopted by her uncle when her father lost his fortune. She settles for a Jewish man of German extraction, despite her family – like Caspary’s family – looking down on any Jewish families not of Spanish or Portuguese descent. As Caspary wrote in her autobiography,
Indifferent though we were to religion, we were contemptuous of Jews who denied being Jewish or changed their names and contradicted ourselves with scorn for those whose names ended in -witz or -ski. Papa’s sister, my beloved Aunt Olga, the most merciful of women, would often tell me in a hushed voice, “They’re not the finest kind of Jewish people, dear.”
Rosalia’s husband takes a mistress. And then another. He buys Rosalia a house, where she feels stuck with her daughter, unable to fulfill all the dreams she had, most of which came from books. As the years go on, her daughter Beatrice leaves home and then leaves her husband; she goes off on her own to make a fortune in business which she then loses in the 1929 Wall Street crash.
And then there is a granddaughter called Rosalie, or Little Rosie, who marries an impecunious artist. In a gesture of reconciliation with both her granddaughter and the modern world, Rosalia gives Rosie a family heirloom which she has guarded zealously a whole life.
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Salome of the Tenements (1922) and Bread Givers (1925)by Anzia Yezierska
Anzia Yezierska was one of the precursors to Caspary’s saga of Jewish family life, Thicker Than Water. Like Caspary, but unlike most traditional Jewish writers, Yezierska put women at the center of her writing— those born into poverty-stricken Jewish families in New York’s Lower East side. Her stories were first collected in Hungry Hearts, 1920, and made into a silent movie in 1922.
Bread Givers (1925) remains Yezierska’s best-known works. The novel depicts the struggle of Sara Smolinsky and her three sisters with their orthodox father, a Torah scholar who refuses to work. He therefore earns no money and tries to force his daughters to marry against their will so they can support him.
Fortuitously, Sara wins a thousand dollars in an essay competition at her college and becomes a teacher, escaping from her slum background and the tyranny of her father, “the tyranny with which he tried to crush me as a child,” and comes of age as an independent single woman in America.
A triumphant sense of power filled me. Life was all before me because my work was before me. I, Sara Smolinsky, had done what I had set out to do. I was now a teacher in the public schools. And this was but the first step in the ladder of my new life. I was only at the beginning of things. The world outside was so big and vast. Now I’ll have the leisure and the quiet to go on and on, higher and higher.
Once I had been elated at the thought that a man had wanted me. How much more thrilling to feel that I had made my work wanted! This was the honeymoon of my career!
In Yezierska’s Salome of the Tenements (1922) Sonya Vrunsky is another poor but strong-minded, independent Jewish woman, another creation worthy of Caspary herself.
The title of the novel is a reference to the biblical Salome, who made her stepfather cut off the head of John the Baptist for her. In the New Testament gospels of Mark and Matthew however, it is her mother who makes Salome ask for the severed head.
A woman should be youth and fire and madness — the desire that reaches for the stars. A man should be wisdom, maturity, poise. (Anzia Yezierska, Salome of the Tenements)
Sonya Vrunsky decides she is going to escape poverty by marrying an “Anglo-Saxon” millionaire. She does, though in the end she decides he is not for her, goes off with someone else and carves out a career for herself as a fashion designer.
Manning, the millionaire husband, having previously always been “fastidiously aloof,” unravels when he realizes that Sonya has been deceiving him; this is her coming-of-age moment both as a woman and as a Jewish woman.
Dazed, struck into sudden awakening by her repulse, his burning gaze covered her from head to foot. Hair disheveled, waist torn away, revealing the heaving bosom, the white throbbing neck, she stood there, superb, ravishing in her fury … Her scorn stripped him naked, exposed him to himself.
“So this is Manning, the Anglo-Saxon gentleman, the saint, the philanthropist – the savior of humanity.”
Wonder was in her eyes and cold anger in her voice.
“You didn’t want me when I was burning for you,” she laughed harshly, remembering how she had lain beside him night after night, sleepless, nerves unstrung, hungering in vain for a kiss, for a breath of response, for a sign of his need of her. “Now I don’t want you.”
In the triumph of her sex which he had once so cruelly mortified she looked fully at him. This was her moment. She had it in her to bring this wreck back to life – to give him the warmth, the passion, the ardor that none of the women of his kind could give. There he stood perishing for her. . . Here was a child that needed comforting. And she was a woman. For the first time in all her life she was a woman.
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I Am a Woman — and a Jew by Leah Morton (1926)
I Am a Woman – and a Jew (1926) is an autobiographical novel by Leah Morton (1889 – 1954; born Elizabeth Gertrude Levin) repeats this idea of the superiority of Spanish and Portuguese descent and promotes the idea that there is an ancient Jewish race memory:
… we Jews are alike. We have the same … sensitiveness, poetry, bitterness, sorrow, the same humor, the same memories. The memories are not those we can bring forth from our minds: they are centuries old and are written in our features, in the cells of our brains.
Morton combines this idea with the anti-Polish racism of her family, identical to the racism of the Piera family in Thicker Than Water, although Morton herself was born in Poland.
I, very tall for my age, very thin, with enormous brown eyes, and excessively high forehead that we all thought the acme of homeliness, and a funny nose that had neither the exquisite delicate curve of Hannah’s, nor the round impudence of Simeon’s, but was only a sort of parody of the Polish noses servants had.
They called me the “Polak,” because I was quick and vivid, dreamy and intense, and sometimes obstinate as a stupid Polish servant who will not see what her bettors tell her. When my father said quietly, “Do thus,” and I asked, “Why?” he would look at me with his deep glance and reply, conclusively, “Do not be a little Polak.”
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The Promised Land by Mary Antin (1912)
Another female Jewish author to write of the experience of immigration was Mary Antin (1881–1949) born, like Yezierska in Polotsk (or Polotzk), then part of Russia and now in Belarus. Antin’s parents were trying to escape the rampant anti-Semitism in Russia:
… they considered it pious to hate and abuse us, insisting that we had killed their God. To worship the cross and to torment a Jew was the same thing to them. That is why we feared the cross. Another thing the Gentiles said about us was that we used the blood of murdered Christian children at the Passover festival.
The title of Antin’s memoir, The Promised Land (1912) is not ironic: unlike the fictional Sonya in Salome of the Tenements, the autobiographical Mary transcends the poverty into which her new life in Boston plunges her family, at first in her own head and later in the achievements of her life. For her, America really is the promised land, where everything is possible.
Antin describes herself in the book as “striving against the odds of foreign birth and poverty, and winning, through the use of abundant opportunity, a place as enviable as that of any native child.” Mary’s family live among the slums of Dover Street in Boston’s ethnic South End but, in her head, Mary is in a different place altogether.
Dover Street was my fairest garden of girlhood, a gate of paradise, a window facing on a broad avenue of life. Dover Street was a prison, a school of discipline, a battlefield of sordid strife. The air in Dover Street was heavy with evil odors of degradation, but a breath from the uppermost heavens rippled through, whispering of infinite things.
In Dover Street the dragon poverty gripped me for a last fight, but I overthrew the hideous creature, and sat on his neck as on a throne. In Dover Street I was shackled with a hundred chains of disadvantage, but with one free hand I planted little seeds, right there in the mud of shame, that blossomed into the honeyed rose of widest freedom.
In Dover Street there was often no loaf on the table, but the hand of some noble friend was ever in mine. The night in Dover Street was rent with the cries of wrong, but the thunders of truth crashed through the pitiful clamor and died out in prophetic silences.
Antin did break free of poverty and of the prejudice against her creed, by her own efforts. She attended the Girls’ Latin School in Boston, married a scientist and went to the women-only Barnard College in New York.
There I took all the honors that I deserved; and if I did not learn to write poetry, as I once supposed I should, I learned at least to think in English without an accent. Did I get rich? you may want to know, remembering my ambition to provide for the family.
I can reply that I have earned enough to pay Mrs. Hutch the arrears and satisfy all my wants. And where have I lived since I left the slums? My favorite abode is a tent in the wilderness, where I shall be happy to serve you a cup of tea out of a tin kettle and answer further questions.
Yezierska’s stories and Antin’s memoir are set among deep poverty in New York and Boston, from which the heroines attempt to escape in their various ways, whereas Caspary’s Jewish family, both the real-life version recounted in The Secrets of Grown-Ups and the fictional Thicker Than Water are bourgeois and living in Chicago.
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Reuben Sachs by Amy Levy (1888)
Closer to Caspary’s fictional family in social standing if not in geography are the wealthy Sachs family in Reuben Sachs (1888) by Amy Levy (1861 – 1889). Sachs, a British novelist and feminist essayist, was the first Jewish woman at Cambridge University, Levy lived the life of the “New Woman” with a circle of literary and sometimes lesbian friends, especially her probable lover Vernon Lee.
Levy’s novel The Romance of a Shop (also published in 1888), is a “New Woman” novel about four sisters trying to make it in business. In 1886, Levy had published “The Jew in Fiction,” in the British Jewish Chronicle. She said that no novelist so far had succeeded in “grappling in its entirety with the complex problems of Jewish life and Jewish character. The Jew, as we know him today … has been found worthy of none but the most superficial observation.”
Levy took her own life at the age of twenty-seven and became the first Jewish woman to be cremated in England; Oscar Wilde, who had published her stories in his Woman’s World, wrote an obituary for her.
The Sachs family lives in the most prestigious parts of London, England (Levy’s own parents lived in Bloomsbury). The Sachses are “a family of Portuguese merchants, the vieille noblesse of the Jewish community.” Both Caspary’s real family and her fictional family in Thicker Than Water share this pride in their ancient Portuguese heritage, especially compared to more recent German and Polish Jewish immigrants, on whom they look down.
In the Sachses’ London Jewish community, “with its innumerable trivial class differences, its sets within sets, its fine-drawn distinctions of caste, utterly incomprehensible to an outsider, they held a good, though not the best position.”
Levy’s short novel, subtitled An Essay, was written in response to what she considered the over-sentimental treatment of the Jewish characters and what she considered the naïve, romantic view of Zionism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) with its “little group of enthusiasts, with their yearnings after the Holy Land.” When Daniel finds out that his mother has hidden his Jewish heritage from him, Daniel is ashamed of her rather than of being Jewish:
It would always have been better that I should have known the truth. I have always been rebelling against the secrecy that looked like shame. It is no shame to have Jewish parents—the shame is to disown it.
But his mother is unrepentant.
I rid myself of the Jewish tatters and gibberish that make people nudge each other at the sight of us, as if we were tattooed under our clothes, though our faces are as whole as theirs. I delivered you from the pelting contempt that pursues Jewish separateness.
Despite the man’s name in the title of Levy’s Reuben Sachs, the novel is at least as much about Reuben’s cousin Judith Quixano, a Caspary woman in the making, similar in some ways to Rosalia, her counterpart in Thicker Than Water and to Solaria in The White Girl. Judith’s patrician Portuguese ancestry comes out in her looks.
She was twenty-two years of age, in the very prime of her youth and beauty; a tall, regal-looking creature, with an exquisite dark head, features like those of a face cut on gem or cameo, and wonderful, lustrous, mournful eyes, entirely out of keeping with the accepted characteristics of their owner.
Judith (whose name references the Biblical story of Judith and Holofernes), who has been adopted by her aunt and uncle after her family lose their money, doesn’t have a financial inheritance of her own and, despite her good looks, she knows her adoptive parents will find it difficult to marry her off into another good Jewish family.
Judith is in love with Rueben and vice versa, although they are first cousins. It looks for a while as if they will marry, but Judith receives a marriage proposal from the non-Jewish, wealthy Bertie. She reluctantly accepts.
Material advantage; things that you could touch and see and talk about; that these were the only things which really mattered, had been the unspoken gospel of her life.
Now and then you allowed yourself the luxury of a fine sentiment in speech, but when it came to the point, to take the best that you could get for yourself was the only course open to a person of sense.
The push, the struggle, the hunger and greed of her world rose vividly before her. Wealth, power, success—a flaunting success for all men to see; had she not believed in these things as the most desirable on earth? Had she not always wished them to fall to the lot of the person dearest to her? Did she not believe in them still? Was she not doing her best to secure them for herself?
Judith regrets her decision almost immediately and wishes she had held out for Reuben. Then she hears that Rueben has died. The novel ends on a low note, with Judith’s dark thoughts.
It seemed to her, as she sat there in the fading light, that this is the bitter lesson of existence: that the sacred serves only to teach the full meaning of sacrilege; the beautiful of the hideous; modesty of outrage; joy of sorrow; life of death.
Although it was a commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic, the British Jewish press hated Reuben Sachs, with its merciless portrayal of such shallow, unsympathetic characters. Jewish World said of Levy: “She apparently delights in the task of persuading the general public that her own kith and kin are the most hideous types of vulgarity.”
The Jewish Chronicle didn’t even review it, despite having published Levy’s earlier essay, but referred to it as being “intentionally offensive.”
In an interesting coda, Reuben Sachs was responsible for another novel about a young Jewish woman coming of age, though the novel itself was fictional, a novel within a novel. The year after Reuben Sachs appeared, and soon after Levy’s death, the future Zionist campaigner Israel Zangwill, who coined the phrase “melting pot” in the title of a play, was commissioned by the Jewish Publication Society of America to write Children of the Ghetto, concerning a group of characters in the Jewish East End of London.
In the novel, Esther Ansell, many of whose views seem to echo Zangwill’s own, writes a novel, Mordecai Josephs, under a male pseudonym; no one knows she is the author; her novel seems to be based on Reuben Sachs. Everyone in Esther’s set hates the book and the way it betrays the mercenary and unspiritual bourgeois Jewish inhabitants of London, exactly the criticism the Jewish press had of Reuben Sachs.
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Contributed by Francis Booth,* the author of several books on twentieth-century culture: Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1960 (published by Dalkey Archive); Everybody I Can Think of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde; Girls in Bloom: Coming of Age in the Mid-Twentieth Century Woman’s Novel; Text Acts: Twentieth-Century Literary Eroticism; and Comrades in Art: Revolutionary Art in America 1926-1938.
Francis has also published several novels: The Code 17 series, set in the Swinging London of the 1960s and featuring aristocratic spy Lady Laura Summers; Young adult fantasy series The Watchers; and Young adult fantasy novel Mirror Mirror. Francis lives on the South Coast of England. He is currently working on High Collars and Monocles: Interwar Novels by Female Couples.
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