The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection

by Anzia Yezierska

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the lives of the Jews of New York's Lower East Side. The Open Cage collects sixteen of her best stories and excerpts from her autobiography to illustrate her extraordinary storytelling gift as well as her personal experience as an immigrant woman.

Along with her novel Bread Givers, the work gathered here constitutes her enduring achievement. Included are "The Fat of the Land," Children of Loneliness," America and I," The Lost 'Beautifulness,'" and other stories; vignettes from Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story; and four remarkable stories of old age. The introduction by Historian Alice Kessler-Harris and the afterword by Yezierska's daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen, place the writings in a rich and valuable context.

Genres: Historical Fiction

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

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

[Ronald · Rating 4 out of 5]

One cannot read Anzia Yezierska's heart-felt stories without feeling empathy and affection for her and the downtrodden characters she writes about.

Her daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, wrote her mother's biography, "Anzia Yezierska: A Writer's Life." Louise makes it clear that her mother's stories are composite tales of persons and events, as opposed to literal depictions of individuals.

Anzia takes the writer's liberty of masking names and places; but there's little doubt of the veracity of such suffering and grief during that era of mass immigration from Eastern Europe, as we know from other authors of the period, such as Upton Sinclair.

The hardship Anzia experienced in her climb from scrub maid and laundry slave to successful writer is palpable. And it thoroughly vindicates the passion evinced in her own works, although she was roundly criticized for fixating on the theme of the mistreated immigrant Jew, and for identifying with them even after she herself attained success.

After reading her biography and a couple of her books, it's pretty clear to me that Anzia didn't want success... she wanted to be heard and to be loved.

[Muriel Kudera · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found these stories about Jewish immigrants absorbing. Yezierska describes the conflicts the children of the immigrants have with the "old fashioned" ways of their parents. These short stories are really interesting.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

You read now.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yezierska was well known in her day, with two movies created based on her work. This collection is organized in sections that move through the phases of an immigrant's life, with later stories being clearly based on Yezierska's own life and conflicts. The stories in the first section are my favorite because I knew these people and their Americanized children, and the dialect and personalities are glowingly authentic and vital.