Red Ribbon on a White Horse

Born in an East-European ghetto, Anzia Yezierska emigrates to the US. She wants to become a writer, but has to survive as a sweatshop worker, until she hits a jackpot: a fabulous contract with a Hollywood studio. But she fears to be grinded by the `Hollywood machinery: Produce! Produce!'. For her, `a writer cannot withdraw from life'. She did not accept to sell her soul: `In my lust for recognition, I had cheated, denied and duped myself for so long. I no longer had the integrity to say what I believed.' `I had sought security in the mud and in the stars, sought it in quick riches and glory of Hollywood. I sought it everywhere but in myself.' She leaves Hollywood ... to become one of the victims of the great depression: `Destitute millions of unemployed roamed the highways, hungry, homeless. I was one of them.' All her life she was heavily marked by - the ghetto life (`The anxiety that had hounded me from the day I was born. The ghetto was with me wherever I went - the fear of my nothingness'), - by poverty (`Poverty is a bag with a hole at the bottom: give a beggar a dime and he'll bless you. Give him a dollar and he'll curse you for withholding the rest of your fortune'), - by taboos ('I had not dreamed that God could become flesh'), - by her father and his religion (`I could never escape him. He was the conscience that condemned me: Poverty becomes a Jew like a red ribbon on a white horse. But you are no longer a Jew. You're a meshumeides, an apostate, an enemy of your own people.'). All her life she was confronted with racism (at work), intolerance, religious fanaticism (in her family) and phariseism (the only gospel the book and movie business knows is `the gospel of the cash register'. Literary pontiffs were not more than talent scouts for the book trade. `I was their find as long as I reflected glory on them. At my first flop their blurbs would go on the next best seller.') Her American dream was also completely shattered: `This is the richest country in the world. There's money for the Army, the Navy, for wars. Why not for life?' This book is a rare find.

This is an extraordinary account by the author of one of the great, but insufficiently known, American novels, Bread Givers. Although Anzia Yezierska offers the book as an autobiography, that is not literally the case. Instead, the book includes selective episodes filtered through memory and ego and supplemented with some misleading "facts." Nevertheless the compelling narrative is always fascinating. There are no better introductions to immigrant Jewish life, especially as seen through the eyes of young women, than Yezierska's incredible work.