Homeland and America in the Work of Anzia Yezierska

Abstract

Jewish migration is a monument of remembrance of pogrom and discrimination of human beings in the modern world. Migration is a radical and complex process that causes political, social, economic difficulties to countries and people faced with it. The struggle and fight of all those women and men to find survive, to live their lives or to find their identity which they had lost, or which was forcibly taken from them; clashes with cultures and identities, trying to resist, survive and not vanish. It shall be a lesson that discrimination shall never be used as a tool for humiliation. This paper will look at the literary representation of Jewish migration to the USA in the early twentieth century. These literary representations are the experience brought by Anzia Yezierska, and reflected in her two short stories about America. This paper will be concerned with the hopes, illusions, disappointments and pain experienced through a recurring cycle of pogroms and flight. This paper will portray the sufferings of a nation, which are quite similar as well as quite contrast to the representation of two worlds, the home land, and “America, the promised land”. These representations are also treated as part of the genre of travel writings; left as evidence for generations to come.