Anzia Yezierska, novelist and short-story writer, belonged to that generation of Jewish immigrant authors who wrote about the Jewish migration from the pogrom-ridden Eastern European shtetl to the cities of America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like her contemporary Abraham Cahan, author of The Rise of David Levinsky, Yezierska focuses upon the struggles of her protagonists to become Americanized and to better themselves economically. She dramatizes as well the way in which traditional Jewish values--piety, dedication to religious studies, filial obedience, loyalty to one's own group--are eroded as her immigrant characters become increasingly assimilated. Yezierska's special contribution to American-Jewish literature, however, lies in her depiction of the Jewish immigrant experience from the point of view of the Jewish woman, whose struggles to achieve autonomy both within the family and in the larger American society she describes sympathetically and persuasively.

Born in a mud hut in...