All I Could Never Be

by Anzia Yezierska

Anzia Yezierska (c.1880-1970) was born in Poland, emigrating to the United States in 1890. All I Could Ever Be is a semi-autobiographical account of a young Polish woman emigrating to the United States and becoming a successful writer.

256 pages, Paperback

First published December 28, 2010

About the author

Anzia Yezierska was a Jewish-American novelist born in Mały Płock, Poland, which was then part of the Russian Empire. She emigrated as a child with her parents to the United States and lived in the immigrant neighborhood of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Reviews

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Nella Larsen's "Quicksand", this is the story of a woman who struggles to find her place in life, except that this novel has a happy ending. Fanya is a Polish-born Jewess who immigrated to America after the death of her parents. She gets a big break when a leading sociologist recruits her as a translator for an in-depth study of the American Polish community in Chicago. Although Fanya has no academic background and constantly denigrates the work of her team-mates, Professor Henry Scott listens to her and briefly falls under the spell of her youth and vitality. On her part, Fanya worships him like a god, so that when he kisses her, she gets confused and fails to respond. A few years later, Fanya is still obsessed with Scott and their misunderstanding, although she has become a successful author, and attained greater success than she ever thought possible. When she develops a bad case of writer's block, she attempts to reconnect with her inner self through manual work. Initially her attempts to land a job in a factory or a department store meet with failure as she is too old (early 30s) and too educated to look and sound like the pliable employee these places want. Eventually she is hired as a waitress, but gets fired when she tries to talk her fellow workers into unionizing. After toying briefly with the sentimental notion of settling back into the so-called Jewish ghetto of the Lower East Side, Fanya hits on the idea of moving to a New England village. There she is received with much kindness and respect, until she gets friendly with a local woman who was ostracized after various family tragedies left her nearly crazy destitute. One fine day, a penniless Russian-born painter blows into town and is referred to her by the librarian. Fanya immediately takes a shine to Vladimir Pavlowich, whom she initially mistakes for a fellow Jew, and tries very hard to find accommodation for him with sympathetic neighbors. However, when everybody turns out to be afraid of harboring a homeless man, she decides to let him sleep inside her own home, propriety be damned. The novel ends with Fanya, at last at peace with herself and the world, about to embark on some sort of relationship with this younger soulmate. At various points I feared the narrative was going to veer into caricature or sentimentality, since the opposition between the Slav/Jewish temperament and Anglo-Saxon coldness and rationality seems to function as the one-size-fits-all explanation. However, in the end Yezierska charts the course of her heroine in a remarkably unconventional way. This is neither a rags to riches story nor a tragedy of unachievable assimilation but a rather unique story of many false starts and lucky breaks more or less astutely handled. Along the way Fanya learns that no human community is perfect and that, like deaf Jane, you can end up being an outcast even in your own village. Yet it is possible for each one of us to strike out and make a home of our own choosing.

[Eve · Rating 3 out of 5]

The mix of melodrama and realism seems off in this one, the last third of the book is a muddle