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PARTISAN REVIEW
with the tools of fiction, Norma Rosen faced a daunting challenge.
What are the facts about Anzia Yezierska and John Dewey? She was
born in a Polish shtetl around 1880 and emigrated to America with her large
family in 1893. In the squalid tenements of the Lower East Side she
experienced the grim disillusionment of poor Jews who had envisioned a
"golden land" but found themselves at the end of the journey in a crowded
and filthy ghetto. The bitter reality of America in which Anzia slaved for
miserable pay in sweatshops became the substance of her early stories,
gritty accounts, artless but poignant, of men and women reduced by poverty
and brute labor to tatters of humanity, in constant fear of being
"dispossessed" - the dread word for eviction when they couldn't pay the
rent, their shabby belongings flung after them onto the street. (In my
Brooklyn childhood I thought "dispossessed" was a Yiddish word; in that
context, it was.)
This fiercely ambitious young woman, dishevelled but full of moxie,
was determined to become something more than an exhausted tenement
drudge bearing more children than she could feed. Before she was out of her
teens she knew, too, that she had to escape the stifling tyranny of her father,
a rabbi and Hebrew scholar who believed, as she wrote in the novel
Bread
Givers,
"Women had no brains for the study of God's Torah, but they could
be the servants of men ... Only if they cooked for the men, washed for the
men .. . only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they
could push themselves into Heaven with the men, to wait on them there."
Like so many young immigrants longing to become American, Anzia
realized that education was the magical key to escape from the ghetto. She
left home at eighteen, took courses at the Educational Alliance, and received
a scholarship to Teachers College - in the Department of Domestic Science.
Her diploma qualified her to teach cooking in the city schools, but of course
the fine art of making cocoa couldn't satisfy her dream of becoming a writer.
Nor could marriage and motherhood. Once she published her first story, im–
petuous Anzia threw caution to the winds and walked out on her stodgy
husband and her young daughter. For this brazen act, her father called her "a
daughter of Babylon."
Now that she was completely on her own, how would she live? Her
salary as a substitute teacher of cooking was pitiful; she desperately wanted
a permanentjob teaching literature or history. When the school board turned
her down for a better post, Anzia, never short on
chutzpah,
sought the help
of the Dean of Teachers College, whose name was John Dewey.
As
Norma
Rosen envisions that momentous encounter in an empty classroom:
"Trembling, losing my breath, my mouth dry again, I push open a door. A
man is stooping ... I see that not all scholars are old and white-bearded like
my father. The room wobbles dizzyingly. 'Professor Dewey - ' He is a
slow-moving man, but he springs up nimbly as I sink toward the floor." She
