THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE IMMIGRANT
LOVE IN THE PROMISED LAND: THE STORY OF
ANZIA YEZIERSKA AND JOHN DEWEY. By Mary Dearborn.
The Free Press.
$22.95.
JOHN AND ANZIA: AN AMERICAN ROMANCE.
By
Norma Rosen.
E.
P.
Dutton.
$18.95.
It was a remarkable, unsuspected secret for over sixty years,
and one of the unlikeliest of liaisons - a love affair between Anzia Yezierska,
a strong-willed Jewish immigrant from Poland who yearned to be a writer,
and John Dewey, the eminent exponent of common sense and eminently
respectable professor of philosophy at Columbia University. She was thirty–
something (birth records weren't kept in the
shtetl
where she was born), he
was fifty-eight, and their involvement lasted for less than a year - from Oc–
tober of 1917 until the end of the following summer. That there was a ro–
mance is not in doubt, though whether their romantic attachment ever
developed into a sexually fulfilled affair is not at all certain. But there is
no
doubt that some kind of desire was aflame in Dewey and Yezierska in that
wartime year. Still amazing.
When they met, the slow-spoken Yankee philosopher had been
married
for many years and was the father of six children. Nothing in his public per–
sona or his published work hinted at the passion and ardor he revealed in
poems that invoked his "loins of fire" and the "thunder / Of my blood that
surges / From my cold heart to my clear head." Though the language of his
love lyrics is in the main mawkish, and even adolescent, what is interesting is
that he felt compelled to write poetry in the first place (even Dewey's
strongest admirers found his prose turgid and vague) to a woman some
twenty years younger, a greenhorn in "pushcart clothes" who with charac–
teristic flamboyance described a character obviously modelled on herself as
"the ache of unvoiced dreams, the clamor of suppressed desires," and who
regarded Dewey as "her father, her Pygmalion, her God." They were a
very odd couple indeed, the dry pragmatist from Vermont and the over–
wrought and tempestuous redhead from the Lower East Side.
How did this astonishing revelation surface after so many years? The
evidence lies in a cache of love poems that Dewey furtively wrote on scraps
of paper in the months he knew Anzia Yezierska. He showed some of the
poems to his beloved, and eventually tossed them all into the wastebasket of
his Columbia office. And that might have been the end of it, had it not been
