Hungry Hearts Book Reviews

Hungry Hearts by Anzia Yezierska Book Summary

A collection of ten short stories portraying immigrant life in 1920s New York City by the acclaimed Jewish American author of Bread Givers.
 
Anzia Yezierska, known as the “Cinderella of the Tenements,” calls upon her own background as a child of immigrants who worked in sweatshops on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to bring to life stories of women struggling to survive in similar circumstances. From a hardworking woman who becomes the target of her children’s scorn and indifference when they find success to the young mother and her family who are subjected to humiliating rules and circumstances when offered a vacation in the country, these are tales of women who strive, dream, and fight to hold on to their dignity and identity in a harsh reality.
 
“Coping with scholarly dependents and chiseling landlords, chafed by the class system, ravenous for learning and desperate for beauty, Anzia Yezierska’s protagonists have emotions they express in great, big, attention-getting gestures. . . . Louis B. Mayer was so taken by Yezierska’s stories he brought her to Hollywood: The film adapted from Hungry Hearts is about as loud as silent cinema gets.” —Tablet, “101 Great Jewish Books”
 
“Poverty makes no one eloquent, and lack of opportunity to learn leaves its scars. Yezierska, despite her literary faults, is a remarkable writer, a recorder of a history that still is attached to us, that still follows us like a shadow.” —The Los Angeles Times
 
“These stories . . . are, in fact, slices of life as much as fiction, in that tradition of American social realism which harks back to Dreiser.” —The Irish Times

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Hungry Hearts (Anzia Yezierska) Book Reviews 2024

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