Growing Up in the Last Century– MY FIRST TASTE OF POLITICS: GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE POLLS BY THE ALBANY MACHINE, June 1972

        This story is complicated, so bear with me.

        I was just a 20 year-old college kid when I got my first real bloody nose – figurative and almost very literal – in the political world.  Welcome to Albany, New York, my hometown (scenic aerial photo above), back in the days of the Democratic machine, party boss Daniel P. O’Connell, and mayor-for-life Erastus Corning. Continue reading “Growing Up in the Last Century– MY FIRST TASTE OF POLITICS: GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE POLLS BY THE ALBANY MACHINE, June 1972”

Growing Up in the Last Century: TEAR-GASSED in WASHINGTON, D.C., May 1970

         I was just 18 years old, a college freshman, on May 4, 1970, when National Guardsmen in Ohio opened fire and killed four student protestors at Kent State University.  Fifty years later, I still remember the looks on peoples’ faces as news of the shootings spread like lightning across my own college campus a thousand miles away at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Continue reading “Growing Up in the Last Century: TEAR-GASSED in WASHINGTON, D.C., May 1970”

Boss Tweed Audiobook : The Images

 

Audiobooks are heard, not seen, but the story of Boss Tweed is immersed in visual arts: newspaper cartoons, headlines, and charts.   If you just downloaded the audiobook version, read by the excellent Scott Ellis,  here are all the images from the story, laid out by chapter, either to follow while you listen or to enjoy later.  

Continue reading “Boss Tweed Audiobook : The Images”

Thoughts on the Covid-19 Crisis

We are living through a crazy historical time. The whole country literally has shut down almost two full months, schools, offices, gyms, colleges, restaurants, street corners, all closed, all in response to a pandemic disease that so far has in the USA alone had killed over 55,000 and infected nearly a million. No riots, no resistance, not even much grumbling. Continue reading “Thoughts on the Covid-19 Crisis”

Trotsky’s take on the Carnegie Hall anti-war meeting, February 8, 1917, from the original Russian

Trotsky wrote this article after attending a highly-touted rally at Carnegie Hall of groups opposing American entry into World War I, just days after Germany had declared unrestricted submarine warfare against American shipping and President Woodrow Wilson, in response, had severed American diplomatic relations with Germany. Though it doesn’t mention him by name, the article was intended as a slam against Morris Hillquit, leader of the Socialist Party in New York City and the principal speaker at the rally. Continue reading “Trotsky’s take on the Carnegie Hall anti-war meeting, February 8, 1917, from the original Russian”

Coverage of Trotsky’s arrival in New York, from the German and Yiddish press

Trotsky’s ship, the Spanish steamer Montserrat, landed at pier 8 at the bottom tip of Manhattan at about 3am on Sunday, January 14, 1917, a cold winter morning.   Still, the ship’s landing attracted a carnival atmosphere, with at least six newspapers covering the event including the English-language the New York Times, Tribune, and Call.   Continue reading “Coverage of Trotsky’s arrival in New York, from the German and Yiddish press”

Grisha Ziv on Trotsky, 1917, as translated from the original Russian

Trotsky, right, and Ziv, front, circa 1898.
Trotsky, right, Alexandra Sokolovskaya, standing, and Ziv, front, circa 1898.

Of all the people Leon Trotsky met during his 1917 ten-week stay in New York City, few were more personally hostile then Grisha Ziv.  Continue reading “Grisha Ziv on Trotsky, 1917, as translated from the original Russian”

Guest Blog: David Taylor on Anzia Yezierska, America’s Immigrant “Hungry Heart” of the 1920s

 

 

 

Publicity photo of Anzia Yezierska from Goldwyn studio period, circa 1922.
 
Click here for Part II on Anzia, her legacy on Broadway, on more. 

You’ve probably never heard of Anzia Yezierska.  But not too long ago, this foreign-sounding name was the toast of New York publishing and Hollywood films.  Anzia Yezierska got attention because she wrote in a voice that demanded it.  She spoke not only for the flood of new immigrants flooding New York’s lower East Side in the early 1900s – Jews, Poles, Italians, and the ethnic strangers to Old America – but also for women carving out a strong new role.

 
Even if you haven’t read her books (click here for her Amazon page), you certainly know her characters.  This winter, Hollywood and Broadway give us two striking glimpses into Anzia’s world of the 1920s, a fitting tribute a century later, but more on that in Part II of this Post.
 
Anzia directly confronted the bastion of white male writers dominating American letters in the 1910s and 1920s.  Speaking out in the prestigious New York Times Book Review for a foreign-born author denied a university job in 1922, she openly threatened the cloistered old regime: “The generations that went before in America have little to say to us,” she wrote. “They could not begin to imagine the new world of the Melting Pot.”
 
Her Novels:
 
Scene from film version of Hungry Hearts, 1922.

Anzia Yezierska made her name through critically acclaimed novels set in Manhattan’s impoverished Lower East Side – her immigrant world — that earned her the sobriquet “Cinderella of the Tenements.”  Her stories like Hungry Hearts and Salomé of the Tenements featured tough, independent characters.  Her 1920 Hungry Hearts—tracing the lives and loves of Jewish immigrant women—became a well-reviewed Hollywood film in 1922 for the Goldwyn Company, the first time this Jewish-owned firm tried to show actual lives of Jewish people. (Click to see a clip.)

 
Born in Poland and reaching New York as a child in the 1890s, Anzia had to create her destiny by fighting both poverty and tradition.   Her parents refused to send her to college, so she sent herself.   Anzia’s daughter, writing years later, described how her mother “withheld from her wages enough money to pay for a year at the New York City Normal College.” Anzia ironed clothes in a laundry before and after classes.  Ultimately, she won her college degree. But having to defy her parents made her feel like a nomad. “She wrote about this as homelessness,” her daughter Louise wrote, “being lost between her parents’ Old World and the new world.”
Notice how, in the newspaper drawing, Anzia’s
Jewish features — nose and eyes — seem to disappear.

Her voice:

Anzia’s prose could be clunky and melodramatic, but she had an ear for tart dialogue and vivid characters.  In her story “Hunger,” a young woman balks at her uncle’s complaints about the meal she’s made for him: “What a fuss over a little less salt!” she cries. When the old man says the Talmud gives a man the right to divorce his wife for not salting his soup, the young woman fires back: “Maybe that’s why Aunt Gittel went to the grave before her time – worrying how to please your taste in the mouth.”

 
Yezierska didn’t enter the limelight to please.  Among other targets, she took  on the state of male-female relationships: “American Man Must Be Nearly 60 Before He Really Loves, Says Novelist,” sounded the NY Evening Telegram in a profile of her in early 1923. 
 
Hollywood:
 
Yezierska’s rollercoaster fame finally rode her to Hollywood, where she received $200 a week as a studio-employed screenwriter.  It was a fortune at the time, but it gave her vertigo.  She felt lost in California, cut off from her stories and people. She left after a few months, writing “This is What $10,000 Did to Me” for Cosmopolitan.  She married twice and ended both marriages, raised a daughter, had an affair with philosopher John Dewey, published five more novels and another collection of stories, and struggled.
 
Craft
 
In 1964, speaking at Purdue, Anzia described just how the Lower East Side’s voices first inspired her to write:
http://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Hearts-Penguin-Twentieth-Century-Classics/dp/0141180056/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389994008&sr=1-3&keywords=anzia+yezierska“What started me on [my first] story was the sight of a crazed mother, looking among the pushcarts for her lost child. ‘People! My child! Find me my child! My Benny! My best child from all my children!’
 
“And when a policeman came, leading a frightened, pale-faced little boy, the way that mother slapped and cursed her Benny, her best child of all her children! “A fire should burn you! The waters should drown you! Thunder and lightning should strike you! Haven’t I enough worries over my head, without you getting lost on me?”
 
It was this voice that she turned into literature – and in portraying complex characters in a society contorted by change, she offers a model of courage for all of us today who call ourselves writers.
 
 
Next: The price of being a renegade, and the legacy.
 
David A. Taylor is a Washington, DC-based writer of prize-winning books, articles and films. His books include Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America and The War of 1812 and the Rise of the U.S. Navy. Twitter: @dataylor1

Continue reading “Guest Blog: David Taylor on Anzia Yezierska, America’s Immigrant “Hungry Heart” of the 1920s”