"Autobiography in translation: Anzia Yezierska's fables of identity"

The article is an expanded version of the paper delivered at the A.I.S.N.A. XIX Biennial International Conference (Macerata, October 4-6, 2007). As Werner Sollors argued in Beyond Ethnicity (1987), the melting-pot metaphors created by the pseudo-scientific language of politics, sociology and philosophy were patently inconsistent and unrealistic. Literary fiction provided instead much more sophisticated as well as ‘realistic’ scenarios to the controversies of the U.S. identity during and after the Progressive Era. Previously excluded from the domain of ‘real’ literature because ethnicity presumably impaired literariness and artistry, the fiction of the ‘hyphenated’ Americans has recently been radically re-interpreted, deeply recasting both ethnicity and modern, or modernist prose fiction (Sollors, Ethnic Modernism). Within the multilingual canon of Modern Jewish American literature, Anzia Yezierska (1880?-1970), both as a writer and in her works, disturbed the evolutionary binary of Americanization. By now, Yezierska’s paradoxical stylistic cipher – the fictionality marking her autobiographical works and the confessional quality of her fiction – is widely acknowledged, but at the time of her literary debut and in the postwar context, the omissions and melodramatic inventions, the irony implicit in her ‘Jewish adaptation’ of the US bildung narrative – “from rags to riches” – were not perceived. Through the reading of short stories, novels and autobiographical works, my essay argues that Yezierska’s identitarian, linguistic and literary strategies both adopt and disrupt racial, ethnic and gender stereotypes to evoke the difficult, problematic and troubled making of a tertium quid between Theodore Roosevelt’s True American and the unassimilated immigrant from Eastern and Southern Europe. Yezierska’s tertium quid consists in an ‘ethnic’ residuum resisting the centripetal force of assimilation which complicates the linearity of the aesthetic and ideological narratives of the ‘Progressive’ Era.