"Drunk with the fiery rhythms of jazz:" Anzia Yezierska,

Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

Lori Harrison-Kahan

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 416-436
(Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2005.0041

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/184608

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416 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

"DRUNK WITH THE FIERY

f RHYTHMS OF JAZZ":

ANZIA YEZIERSKA, HYBRIDITY,

AND THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

Lori Harrison-Kahan

In the opening paragraph of her autobiography, The Promised

Land, Mary Antin proclaims her transformation from "greenhorn" to
American by stating, "I was born, I have lived, and I have been
made over" (1). With these words, Antin invokes a trope common to
immigrant narratives: through "rebirth," immigrants create a new
identity distinct from and unfettered by the one that existed before.
Because Anzia Yezierska's heroines take a similarly aggressive ap-
proach to assimilation, longing to be a part of an America from which
they are excluded, Yezierska and Antin are often paired as fellow
Jewish immigrant writers. However, in Yezierska's work, the pro-
gression toward assimilation is rarely smooth and straightforward;
not only do her protagonists encounter many obstacles along the
way, but more often than not, when they do achieve success, they
become disillusioned and end up returning to their immigrant roots.
Although Yezierska's heroines may also speak of being "born
again" (usually in the oft-repeated refrain of "making myself a per-
son"1 ), rebirth turns out to have quite a different meaning for Yezierska
than it does for Antin. In Arrogant Beggar, for example, Adele Lindner,
disheartened by the hypocrisy of charity institutions such as the
Hellman Home for Working Girls, is taken in by the motherly

MFS Modern Fiction Studies,Volume 51 number 2, Summer 2005. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
 Harrison-Kahan 417

Muhmenkeh upon her return to the ghetto; following Muhmenkeh's

death, Adele opens a café-cum-artist's salon in the older woman's
basement home, providing two kinds of sustenance to her fellow
ghetto-dwellers. With her new vocation, Adele undergoes a transfor-
mation: "I've lived with Muhmenkeh. I've died with her, and I'm born
again." Adele combines her own experiences as a partially assimi-
lated immigrant with the Jewish spirit of Muhmenkeh to become "a
different person" (127). Instead of relinquishing the Old World for
the New, Yezierska's protagonists ultimately strive to bring the two
worlds together. For Yezierska, "rebirth" signifies a new identity as a
hybrid self.
While critics have begun to reconsider her fiction in terms of
the politics of cultural pluralism and hybridity, the initial tendency to
pair Yezierska with assimilationist immigrant writers who preceded
her may have led to some early misreadings of her work. To under-
stand fully Yezierska's model of hybridity, a model that encompasses
gender as well as ethnic identity, this article argues that we should
not consider her solely in the context of the Jewish immigrant expe-
rience, but rather allow a broader ethnic context for her writing,
placing her narratives in the modernist milieu of the Jazz Age and
Harlem Renaissance. It is no accident that Yezierska's vogue—her
literary fame and her subsequent transportation to Hollywood—oc-
curred in the 1920s and coincided with the "vogue" of the "Negro"
(Hughes 223), since the decade saw an unprecedented interest in
the primitivism of ethnic minorities. In particular, this fascination
with racial others led to the objectification of ethnic women, both
black and immigrant, who were often stereotyped as exotic and sexu-
ally free.
African American women writers of the Harlem Renaissance
such as Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen actively resisted these limit-
ing representations in their fiction, creating genteel, light-skinned
female characters—women so close to whites in manner and looks
that they are able to blend easily into the white world. Fauset and
Larsen have been criticized (and sometimes overlooked) due to the
middle-class sensibility of their fiction; yet in depicting African Ameri-
can women who imitate white bourgeois ways, their work attempts
to mobilize stereotypes in order to overturn them, especially through
the theme of passing for white, which both writers return to throughout
their fiction. One of the most often discussed characteristics of pass-
ing narratives, such as Larsen's Passing (1929) and Fauset's Plum
Bun, is the fact that the protagonists who pass find themselves dis-
appointed by the sterility of the white world and desire to return to
the more vibrant black community—much as Yezierska's heroines
make their way back to their Jewish communities. While the initial
418 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

reaction may be to read this return to the race as proof of essential-

ism, the passing protagonists in Larsen's and Fauset's fiction do not
come full circle back to their black roots. Instead, they formulate
new conceptions of identity in which black and white are no longer
antithetical but rather operate in a dialectic. In Plum Bun, for ex-
ample, after openly declaring her black identity, the protagonist does
not move to Harlem (certainly an option given her artistic proclivities
and the ongoing renaissance), but rather becomes an expatriate art-
ist in France, refusing to label herself as either black or white. This
dialectic of identity was distinctly modernist in the way that it mani-
fested itself both thematically and formally in the writing of ethnic
women such as Larsen, Fauset, and Yezierska.
Recent scholarship on American modernism emphasizes the need
to consider the literature of the 1920s in terms of hybridity. Ann
Douglas argues that American culture of the decade was a mongrel-
ization of black and white influences. George Hutchinson similarly
urges a reevaluation of the Harlem Renaissance that takes into ac-
count the fact that "'white' and 'black' American cultures [are] inti-
mately intertwined, mutually constitutive" (3). While Hutchinson fo-
cuses on the ways that New Negro writers expressed "both their
blackness and their 'Americanism'" (1), Michael North and Walter
Benn Michaels have examined how much of modernist literature is
deeply invested in the rhetoric of race. Focusing specifically on lit-
erature by white writers, North shows that high modernist texts
employ racial language, what he calls "the dialect of modernism." In
their discussions of hybridity in Yezierska's fiction, most critics also
focus on her use of language. For these critics, Yezierska's work is a
linguistic hybrid because she not only integrates Yiddish words into
her English text, but also uses Americanized Yiddish idioms that dis-
tinguish her work stylistically.2
This article takes a different approach, exploring the ways that
Yezierska's writing further expresses a model of cultural hybridity by
symbolically addressing the dialectic of black and white. Images of
whiteness and blackness appear throughout her novels and short
stories, calling to mind Toni Morrison's notion of the "Africanist pres-
ence" in American literature (Playing 5). Scholars remain divided on
whether representations of blackness serve to whiten and American-
ize immigrants (as Morrison argues) or operate as points of identifi-
cation with and affirmation of their own outsider status. In his analy-
sis of blackface minstrelsy, Eric Lott describes the relationship between
whites and black culture as one of "contradictory racial impulses"
(4)—what he calls "love and theft." For the Jewish women repre-
sented in Yezierska's texts, this ambivalence was even more pro-
found, their associations with blackness more complex. Not only did
 Harrison-Kahan 419

they experience the in-betweenness, the not-quite-whiteness, of being

Jews in America, but they were also doubly marginalized, perceived
as outsiders because of their ethnic or racial status and their gender.
My analysis of Yezierska accounts for this complexity by considering
how her heroines' attempts to Americanize themselves, often through
the consumption of products that represented America, were coinci-
dent with their attempts to fashion femininity. In their rise from the
ghetto, her female protagonists usually encounter a glass ceiling that
leads them to refashion themselves as a mélange of immigrant and
American cultures. In this context, the images of blackness, includ-
ing references to jazz, that appear in Yezierska's writing ultimately
mark her protagonists' ambivalences about assimilation, even when
they might at first appear to construct their whiteness.

From "Blackest Poverty" to "Beautiful Whiteness":The

Africanist Presence and the Ambivalences of
Assimilation
In Arrogant Beggar, when Adele first arrives at the Hellman
Home for Working Girls, she finds herself amidst an ethnically di-
verse group of working-class women. As one of the girls unflatteringly
describes the scene, "Hollering and fighting like a League of Nations.
Kikes, Wops, Micks, and Polacks. Only thing missing's a Chink to
make it perfect" (22). In this reference to the ethnic animosities
among members of the working class, which tellingly distinguishes
white ethnics from people of color, the absence of blacks is also no-
table. Although Yezierska published concurrently with the writers of
the Harlem Renaissance, direct references to African Americans, who
undoubtedly shared the urban world of her characters, rarely appear
in her fiction.3 Blackness as a trope, however, does make an appear-
ance. The adjective "black" appears over and over again throughout
several of Yezierska's novels and most of the short stories, almost
always used to deepen the negative connotation of the noun that
follows. Thus, Yezierska's work, on closer examination, might be said
to exhibit an "Africanist presence." In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness
and the Literary Imagination, Morrison shows that, in American lit-
erature, constructions of white national identity depend on their jux-
taposition with representations of darkness, whether through the
literal presence of black characters or through more metaphorical
manifestations of racial difference. In a 1993 essay that appeared in
Time magazine, Morrison made it clear that the "Africanist presence"
extends beyond the traditional American literary canon to include
immigrant narratives; the essay opens with a scene from Elia Kazan's
420 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

film America, America (1963), in which a Greek immigrant is trans-

formed into "an entitled white" through an "act of racial contempt"
against a black man. Immigrants construct themselves as white
Americans, according to the title of Morrison's essay, "on the backs
of blacks."
In Yezierska's writing, the "Africanist presence" at first appears
to function according to Morrison's model, facilitating the transfor-
mation of her protagonists into white ethnics, as they seek to leave
behind all that is associated with darkness and blackness.4 Yezierska's
most renowned novel, Bread Givers, for example, employs many
images of blackness and whiteness in telling the story of an assimi-
lated daughter, Sara Smolinsky, who rebels against her tyrannical
father and resists the path of marriage that her three older sisters
were forced to follow. From the very opening of Bread Givers in which
the protagonist describes the "dark hurt" in her sister Bessie's "weary
eyes" (1), the life of the ghetto is associated with darkness. Descrip-
tions of the "black, choking tenements" (85) and references to the
immigrants' "blackest poverty" (163), a phrase that recurs through-
out Yezierska's work, align penury with blackness. Like Adele Lindner
of Arrogant Beggar who initially saw the Hellman Home for Working
Girls as "[t]he first real way out of my black life" (7), Sara, too,
desires to break away from her "black life" and longs for the "dark
night of poverty [to be] over" (136, 238). The characters' destitution
metaphorically colors their features; just as Bessie's eyes are "dark"
(1) from the burdens she bears as bread giver for the family, Sara
describes her sister Mashah's face as "so black with want!" (145)
Darkness and blackness are also invoked to convey feelings of isola-
tion and despair, aside from those that arise from their poverty. When
Sara leaves home to forge an independent life for herself, "The lone-
liness of my little room rose about me like a thick blackness, about to
fall on me and crush me" (186). She finds herself similarly engulfed
upon her mother's death: "[A]ll became dark. Blackness drowned
me" (252). Even the Yiddish curse, "a black year on them" (163),
that Yezierska often employs, implies negative associations with black-
ness.5 The unpleasant aspects of ghetto life—and of life in general—
are conveyed through this "Africanist presence."
In contrast, beauty and the possibility of a life beyond the ghetto
are described with images of light and whiteness, but such images
tend to be fleeting, perhaps because Yezierska links them to materi-
alistic desires that are at the heart of her critique. In Bread Givers,
one of the sisters refers to the "beautiful whiteness" (38) of the lace
curtains and oilcloth with which she decorates their home when it
looks like the family's fortunes might be rising. Sara's frivolous sister
Mashah covers her pink dress with "a white sheet, like a holy thing"
 Harrison-Kahan 421

(40), ascribing divinity to consumer goods. Andrew Heinze describes

how many American Jews used luxury items to maintain their rela-
tionship with God; in addition to ritual objects, special clothes and
household items such as table settings were saved for use on the
Sabbath or on religious holidays. These nonreligious objects formed
a link between Jewish tradition and American materialism, allowing
the "newcomers [to] articulate their dual identity as Jews and Ameri-
cans" (Heinze 67). In Yezierska's stories, however, the consumption
of material goods itself becomes a holy rite. When America and white-
ness are the ideals worshipped, the result is tragedy. This is nowhere
more evident than in Yezierska's heartbreaking short story, "The Lost
Beautifulness," one of several stories in Hungry Hearts that contains
black and white imagery.
In "The Lost Beautifulness," a laundress, Hanneh Hayyeh, paints
her tenement kitchen white in preparation for the return of her son,
Aby, who is serving overseas. The story opens with the image of the
woman exulting in her freshly painted kitchen as she "cast[s] a glance
full of worship and adoration at the picture of her son" in the military
uniform that has transformed him, in her mind, into an American
(52). Her desire to have a white kitchen reflects her own desire to
imitate the ways of white Americans—"So long my Aby is with America,
I want to make myself for an American" (55)—for she models her
decor on the kitchen of her Anglo-Saxon employer, Mrs. Preston.
When she shows the kitchen to the local butcher, promising that it
will "light up your heart with joy," he proclaims, "What a whiteness!"
(57, 59). These images of lightness and whiteness quickly give way
to ones of darkness, however, when Hanneh Hayyeh's landlord raises
her rent because her improvements mean the flat is now worth more
money. Her earlier cries of exultation in her handiwork turn tragic:
"Black is my luck! Dark is for my eyes!" (67). In retribution, she
decides to destroy the kitchen, going so far as to release the gas-jets
in order "to blacken the white-painted ceiling" (75). Unexpectedly,
the chiaroscuro imagery does not maintain its strict binary of dark
versus light, bad versus good, but instead becomes more complex.
When Hanneh Hayyeh wakes up to her newly decimated home, "The
first grayness of dawn filtered through the air-shaft window of the
kitchen. The room was faintly lighted, and as the rays of dawn got
stronger and reached farther, one by one the things she had muti-
lated in the night started, as it were, into consciousness" (75). For
the first time in the story, light bears a negative connotation, sug-
gesting that the hopes stored in whiteness were false ones; echoing
the tragic mulatto narratives prevalent in African American litera-
ture, Hanneh Hayyeh's attempts to attain whiteness lead to tragedy,
a development foreshadowed in the opening of the story when the
422 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

laundress finds the "smell of the [white] paint . . . suffocating, but .

. . inhale[s] in it huge draughts of hidden beauty" (52). In the story's
ending, Aby returns, the Statue of Liberty ironically stitched to his
uniform, to discover not a clean, white kitchen, but his mother and
all her belongings evicted from their apartment. The immigrant
woman's homelessness stands in sharp contrast to her dream of
finding a home in America.
Rather than transforming immigrants into white Americans, the
play of black and white achieves just the opposite effect, as the
desire for whiteness brings Hanneh Hayyeh to even lower depths.
Instead of describing her protagonist's tragic fate in terms of black-
ness, however, Yezierska suggests that (the yearning for) whiteness
itself may be responsible for the suffocation. The inability to escape
blackness seemingly proves ethnic difference to be immutable, but
"The Lost Beautifulness" also provides an important clue as to why
this whiteness is unattainable and for whom. The space of the kitchen,
the room Hanneh Hayyeh invests with the potential for transforma-
tion into whiteness, is representative of women's domestic sphere; it
marks the limitations placed on the immigrant woman due to her
class, ethnicity, and gender. In contrast to some of Yezierska's male
immigrants who achieve success because they are able to enter the
public sphere of business, the immigrant women who are at the cen-
ter of her narratives are caught in a catch-22; in order to realize the
rewards of America, they must work, confined to jobs deemed suit-
able for women, but by virtue of their labor, they render themselves
unfeminine, different from the American "ladies" they hope to emu-
late through their consumption. As long as she takes in laundry,
Hanneh Hayyeh can never become a Mrs. Preston with her "Anglo-
Saxon forebears" (62). Whiteness, as a position of power, often be-
comes inextricably entwined with masculinity and is thus unreach-
able for Yezierska's heroines.
Recognizing this connection between masculinity and white-
ness, several of Yezierska's protagonists pursue other means of
Americanization. If they cannot be men, so the logic goes, they can,
at the very least, have men. When her protagonists set out to cap-
ture men who will make them American, Yezierska indicates that the
interest in the opposite sex has little to do with heterosexual ro-
mance and more to do with the desire to wed one's self to America.
The protagonist of "The Miracle" cannot separate her dream of immi-
grating to America from her dreams of the imaginary lover she be-
lieves is waiting for her there: "How I was hungering to go to America!
. . . By day and by night I was tearing and turning over the earth,
how to get to my lover on the other side of the world" (95). Since it
is through the consumption of clothes and other commodities that
 Harrison-Kahan 423

immigrant women are able to make themselves into American la-

dies, Yezierska's protagonists must first find men who can satisfy
their material needs. While the sought-after men are sometimes suc-
cessful immigrants, the ideal mate is an Anglo-Saxon, whose white-
ness itself serves as cultural capital. Linking gender relations to eth-
nic desires, black/white imagery repeatedly comes into play when
Yezierska discusses romantic relationships between men and women.
In "Wings," the opening story in Hungry Hearts, a janitress's dark
and desolate existence is transformed by a brief love affair with an
educator, one of many Anglo-Saxon male characters modeled on John
Dewey with whom Yezierska had a similar affair. In exuberant lan-
guage, Yezierska describes the initial meeting between the two lov-
ers: "The blacker, the more stifling the ugliness of her prison, the
more luminous became the light of the miraculous stranger who had
stopped for a moment to talk to her. It was as though inside a pit of
darkness the heavens opened and hidden hopes began to sing" (12–
13). In "Hunger," the very next story in the collection, the same
janitress laments the loss of this love, the memory of him a "white
radiance" that brightens up the "dark hallway" where she scrubs the
floors (28).
In Bread Givers, a similar technique is illustrated in an episode
that involves Sara's sister, Mashah, and Jacob Novak, the American-
ized pianist with whom she has fallen in love. In preparation for
Jacob's visit, Mashah learns to cook American food, serving the fam-
ily "American salad and American-cooked vegetables instead of fried
potato loktes and the greasy lokshen kugel that Mother used to make"
(56), and cleans the house, setting the table so that the "tablecloth
and napkins glistened with . . . fresh-ironed whiteness" (55). How-
ever, when Jacob's father, a prosperous department store owner,
arrives to meet Mashah, he disapproves of her poverty-stricken fam-
ily and so the relationship soon comes to an end. As Yezierska de-
scribes the father's visit, "The riches from his grand clothes so much
outshined all the little riches that we shined up for him that in a
minute it shrank into blackness the white tablecloth and the white
napkins" (58). Again, Yezierska emphasizes the whiteness of con-
sumer goods, such as the table linens, that represent the material-
ism of the American dream for the women; the presence of the male
suitor and his father, however, turns them black. Through the con-
trast of blackness and whiteness, the text reveals the limits of con-
sumerism as a means of assimilation for ethnic women. Heinze has
written of the power Jewish immigrant women wielded through do-
mestic consumption, purchasing items that "facilitated Jewish adop-
tion of American habits" (115).6 But this power shrinks in the face of
men's greater power of production. As a department store owner,
424 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

Jacob's father, whose clothes "hollered money, like a hundred cash

registers ringing up the dollars" (58), is associated with selling and
profit-making rather than spending. While men can achieve success
and thus assimilation through manufacturing and business, women's
only access to America seems to be through consumption; Yezierska
suggests that such attempts to buy whiteness, without any access to
its production, are destined to fail.7
As marriage serves as a means to assimilation, the failures and
disappointments of romance, a recurring theme in Yezierska's work,
are also depicted through images of blackness and darkness. A woman
without a man—or without the right man—is destined to lead a life of
blackness. When one of the daughters in Bread Givers finally agrees
to what her parents see as a providential match with Zalmon the
Fish Peddler, she shudders "in horror of her black wedding day" (108).
Failed romance leads Sara, too, to be consumed by darkness. After
being rejected by a teacher with whom she has fallen in love, she
comments, "It was only a man. And I'm left in the dark again. What
was that flash of light that lured me into this blackness? Was it desire
for the man, or desire for knowledge?" (230). Sara openly acknowl-
edges what many of Yezierska's other protagonists do not: that they
have conflated love of American institutions—such as democracy and
education—with love for the men who have easier access to the prom-
ised ideals. As in "The Lost Beautifulness," the quest for lightness
and whiteness only leads back to blackness. The attempt to assimi-
late, to seek a life beyond the ghetto and the patriarchal home, ends
up bringing one back to where one started, if one is a woman.
Perhaps the most obvious attempt by an immigrant woman to
construct herself as white occurs in Bread Givers when Sara realizes
that she must change her appearance—in her "black shirtwaist," she
describes herself as "dressed . . . like an old lady in mourning" (181)—
so as not to be perceived as an outcast at school and at the laundry
where she works. Again, whiteness is linked to consumerism. In con-
trast to Jacob Novak's father, whose Americanization results from his
position as department store owner, Sara tries to create a more
Americanized appearance by shopping at a department store.8 With
the aid of the clothes, makeup, and accessories she purchases, Sara
works hard to transform herself: "Late into the night I spent fixing
myself up, pinning the roses on my hat, trying on my lace collar this
way and that, to show off the whiteness of my throat" (182). Clothes
play an important role in Yezierska's fiction, as her immigrant female
protagonists dress in American garments in order to remake them-
selves.9 For Sara, the process of dressing like an American means
emphasizing the "whiteness" of her skin. In addition to dressing in
American clothes, immigrant women also turned to makeup, as Sara
 Harrison-Kahan 425

does, "express[ing] their new sense of national identity and personal

freedom by consuming beauty preparations" (Peiss 188). But Sara is
unsatisfied with this quest for whiteness alone and ends up going too
far in her attempt to resemble the other Americanized girls at the
laundry; realizing that her life has been pale and colorless, a "wild-
ness possesses" her as she imagines herself in "bright red and daz-
zling green and gold," letting "loose [her] love of colour" (182). Sara's
"love of colour" interestingly parallels that of Harlem Renaissance
heroines such as Helga Crane, the mixed-race protagonist of Larsen's
Quicksand (1928). Helga feels ostracized at the Southern school where
she teaches because her brightly colored, elaborate clothing defies
the "drab" dress code adhered to by Negroes who stay in their place
and "knew what was expected of them" (Larsen 3). Through their
predilection for vibrant clothing, Sara and Helga resist conforming to
roles that will make their ethnic difference acceptable to others.
Even as Sara tries to show off her "whiteness," she finds her
efforts thwarted. She ends up feeling "shamed and confused with
[her] false face . . . as though the rouge had turned into a mask"
(183). The use of makeup and other feminine accoutrements in this
scene make it clear that becoming white involves the manipulation
of gender identity, the manufacturing of a specific brand of feminin-
ity. Anticipating by several years psychoanalyst Joan Riviere's 1929
essay on "womanliness as a masquerade" (as well as Tania Modleski's
clever pun on Riviere, "femininity as mas(s)querade"), Sara recog-
nizes that her attempt to construct herself as a lady renders only a
false femininity. Having found that she "tried to be like the rest and
couldn't" (183), Sara's solution is to create a hybrid identity instead.
She eventually rises out of the ghetto through education, but, in the
end, she returns to her people, becoming a teacherin and forming an
uneasy reconciliation with her father. The novel ends ambiguously,
but suggests the bringing together of the Old World and the New in
the form of Sara's beau, Hugo Seelig, American-born and secularly
educated, who wishes to become a student of Hebrew under Sara's
father. While Yezierska's protagonists start off in search of men who
represent whiteness, it is men who themselves have found ways to
reconcile their Jewish and American identities who are reconfigured
as ideal mates.
While whiteness and blackness are often used contrastingly in
Yezierska's work, there are also a number of examples in which the
two colors are more compatible, representing this potential for hy-
bridity. The color imagery that eventually makes its way to the title
of Yezierska's autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse, earlier
appears in Bread Givers (providing fodder for critics who argue for
the autobiographical nature of her fiction). As Mr. Smolinsky warns
426 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

his daughter, Fania, of the "black life" she will lead if she marries the
penniless poet Morris Lipkin, Sara jumps in to defend her sister's
choice, reminding their father of one of his favorite aphorisms: "pov-
erty is an ornament on a good Jew, like a red ribbon on a white
horse" (Bread Givers 69, 70). Given that poverty is associated with
blackness throughout the novel, and in this very scene itself (like her
husband, Mrs. Smolinsky warily questions her daughter's choice: "Ain't
it black enough to be poor, without yet making poems about it?"
[67]), the saying seems to carry with it a certain ambiguity. While
Jews are equated with whiteness in the regal image of the white
horse, the blackness of poverty is what makes them "good." As in
"The Lost Beautifulness," the initial dichotomy of (negative) black-
ness and (positive) whiteness is reversed or, at the very least, com-
plicated. This ambiguous image of the red ribbon on the white horse,
in which the contrast of darkness and lightness seems to have a
more celebratory connotation, has significant implications for
Yezierska's heroines whose longing after "beautiful whiteness" even-
tually brings them back to the "black life" of the Lower East Side,
alluding to the possibility of hybridity between two disparate worlds.
Yezierska's work never fully resolves whether the "blackness" of life
within the ghetto serves as an "ornament" or obstacle for her Jewish
characters, but subtle references to the "black life" of the Harlem
Renaissance suggest that blackness can also be transformed into
something exhilarating and productive for Yezierska's heroines.

More Her Kind: Anzia Yezierska as Jazz Age Jew

Just as Yezierska's protagonists remain conflicted as to whether
the hardships they face as ethnic others are a source of tragedy or
pride, a similar dilemma plagued the writers and artists of Jazz Age
Harlem: is "double-consciousness" an impediment, or does it pro-
vide a unique insight that is more strategic than tragic? Although the
Harlem Renaissance is strangely absent from Yezierska's fiction de-
spite her engagement with many of the same themes that occupied
the New Negro writers, the best evidence that she was aware of the
larger racial dynamics of the time occurs in a number of references
to jazz music. During the height of Yezierska's writing career in the
1920s, jazz provided a cultural site that brought blacks and whites
together. Jews in the music industry, as Jeffrey Melnick has shown,
often served as middlemen between black culture and whites; their
in-between status allowed them special access to black music that
they could then translate for white audiences. In the process of trans-
lation, Jews were simultaneously able to construct themselves as
white, "to situate Jewishness as a kind of white identity—a kind that
 Harrison-Kahan 427

today we would call ethnic—in an age when this was very much in
doubt" (Melnick 12). Similarly, Michael Rogin has argued that this
middleman role led to assimilation because Jewish appropriations
and translations of blackness reenforced binaries of black and white,
especially through the medium of blackface entertainment. To illus-
trate this point, Rogin uses the example of the 1927 film The Jazz
Singer, in which jazz music becomes the basis of the struggle be-
tween the older generation of Jews, represented by the recalcitrant
father, and their assimilated children—a theme echoed in Yezierska's
writing, especially Bread Givers. Next in a line of great cantors, the
jazz singer, Jakie Rabinowitz, forsakes his father in order follow his
true musical passion as a blackface performer, changing his name to
Jack Robin. Although at the end of the film Jakie returns home on
Yom Kippur to sing Kol Nidre in place of his dying father, in a final
scene, he appears in his famous blackface performance of "My
Mammy," suggesting that he ultimately follows his own path and
seals his assimilation by marrying a gentile dancer.
In Rogin's reading of The Jazz Singer, Jakie Rabinowitz's trans-
formation into Jack Robin is unambivalent; the association with black
culture turns Jakie white. As Rogin states, "Blacking up and then
wiping off burnt cork" becomes "a rite of passage from immigrant to
American" (5). Without fully examining what it is about jazz that
makes it a representation of Jewishness as well as blackness, this
reading downplays the fact that Jakie is drawn to jazz music because
he believes it conveys a sense of his own ethnic difference. The film
opens with a sequence of two titles: TITLE 1: In every living soul, a
spirit cries for expression—perhaps this plaintive, wailing song of
Jazz is, after all, the misunderstood utterance of a prayer. TITLE 2:
The New York Ghetto—throbbing to that rhythm of music that is
older than civilization. The Jazz Singer establishes a link between
jazz music, as "misunderstood" prayer, and the "music" of the Jews
who populate the New York ghetto. In explaining his love of jazz to
his father, Jakie also creates an analogy to prayer, insisting that any
music can be "the voice of God" and that the songs he sings have the
same effect on his audience that his father's chants have on the
synagogue congregation. Jakie's mother enforces this parallel when
she says of her son: "He sings like his Poppa, with a tear in his
voice."10 Toward the end of the film, when a corked-up Jakie looks
into the mirror, he sees reflected back at him not his own black face,
but a cantor in the synagogue. Rogin suggests that this displace-
ment of Jewish difference with black difference reestablishes a black/
white binary in which the Jewish jazz singer comes out on the white
side, but the scenes can also be read as revealing more ambivalence
about assimilation than Rogin allows for.
428 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

On the other side of the debate, Irving Howe sees blackface as

an assertion of Jewishness, not whiteness, "a mask for Jewish ex-
pressiveness, with one woe speaking through the voice of another"
(563). In Jazz Age Jews, Michael Alexander concurs that Jews wore
blackface as a sign of outsider identification; rather than enable as-
similation, blackface actually "thwarted [Jews'] own upward mobil-
ity" (8). I suggest here that there is another possibility between
these two extremes of Rogin on the one hand and Howe and Alexander
on the other. Blackface and jazz may in fact operate contradictorily
for Jews: they facilitate assimilation while simultaneously disclosing
ambivalence about assimilation.11 The critical trend to read Jewish
associations with blackness as unambivalent, as solely formative of
whiteness, may very well have to do with the fact that the scholar-
ship to date has focused largely on male figures whose masculinity
affords them the privileges of whiteness. The same privileges were
simply not available to Jewish women.12 Note, for example, the im-
portant difference in the endings of The Jazz Singer and Bread Giv-
ers: as a man, Jakie becomes a patriarch himself and thus escapes
the law of the father, but women, as Yezierska makes clear when
Sara finds herself with the "weight" of her father upon her in the last
line of the novel (297), cannot fully escape patriarchal rule. While
Yezierska does not bring up blackface per se, her references to jazz—
like her use of black and white imagery—serve as a marker of am-
bivalence for her female characters.13
Once we situate Yezierska's texts in the Jazz Age, it is no longer
incidental that this black musical form is a source of inspiration for
several of Yezierska's heroines. In a scene from Bread Givers, Sara
spends an evening on the town with a wealthy suitor, Max Goldstein,
who almost succeeds in whisking her off her feet. Their date, how-
ever, does not get off to a good start. Sara finds herself offended by
the gender politics of the crude vaudeville show they attend together:
"There was a chorus of dancing women. A disgusting-looking come-
dian with a false red nose wagged his finger and leered grossly at the
shimmying shoulders. He was cracking jokes about the different
women." Failing to see the humor in the act, Sara is equally dis-
turbed by Max's open amusement: his "hearty laughter at the show
shocked [her] and pushed [them] apart." Noting her disappointment,
Max promises to "take [her] to something more [her] kind" (192).
What is more Sara's "kind" turns out to be a dance hall. "[U]ptown
among the glittering electric lights of Broadway," Sara is energized:
"Women's white shoulders against men's black coats. Women and
men letting go toward each other, drunk with the fiery rhythms of
jazz." In contrast to vaudeville's objectification of women, jazz rep-
resents freedom, expressed in terms of the loosening of sexual re-
 Harrison-Kahan 429

straints: the "fiery rhythms" allow the dancing couples to "let . . . go

toward each other." Sara, too, loses herself "in the mad joy of the
crowd. Whirl away wild and free from all worry and care." As she
dances, Sara's descriptions become even more exuberant, "The joy
of the dance burst loose the shut-in prisoner in me. I was a bird that
had leaped out of her cage. Wild gladness sang in my veins, swept
me up, up, away from this earth" (193). Although the language is
not overtly erotic, jazz seems to instill in Sara a sense of sexual
empowerment, much as female blues singers in the 1920s expressed
their sexual agency through their music.14 Because dance halls of-
fered women like Sara freedom from the ghetto and, potentially,
from patriarchy (at least the familial kind), they were a source of
gender anxiety in the immigrant community. As Elizabeth Ewen ex-
plains, even as the dance halls gave young immigrant women a taste
of independence, they also turned them into sexual prey for strange
men, causing many women to be led into prostitution. Sara eventu-
ally realizes that her newfound power has its limits. Goldstein pro-
claims his desire for her, insisting that he likes her "more because
[she's] independent" (197), but Sara comes to recognize that mar-
rying him would strip her of this independence.
Once again, this scene from Bread Givers has a fascinating re-
verberation in Larsen's Quicksand, a comparison worth noting be-
cause it brings to light the racial undertones in Yezierska's texts and
provides insight into the ways that sexual and ethnic differences
operate together in the representations of her heroines. While Larsen's
protagonist, Helga Crane, is staying with her white relatives in Den-
mark, her Danish beau, Axel Olsen, takes her to a vaudeville house.
Helga is offended by the "cavorting Negroes on the stage" and
"shocked at the avidity at which Olsen beside her drank it in" (83).
The entertainment awakens her to the realization that she too is an
object of exotic fascination to Olsen and her Danish relatives. Just as
a similar realization leads Sara to reject Goldstein's proposal of mar-
riage, this episode contributes to Helga's decision to turn down Olsen's
proposal, which comes only after his insinuation that she become his
mistress.
As this comparison indicates, jazz, as an alternative to vaude-
ville, is appealing to Sara because it represents freedom from the
limitations placed on her by her gender and her ethnic status. As a
symbol of race mixing and authenticity, jazz contrasts with the vaude-
ville acts that trafficked in gender and ethnic stereotypes, often
through impersonation and minstrelsy. In addition to signifying a
sexual threat, the dance halls also generated race and class anxi-
ety—and simultaneously attracted young Jews—because of their as-
sociations with blackness. In her history of black-Jewish relations in
430 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

the early twentieth century, Hasia Diner mentions articles in the Jewish
press about Harlem night life that discouraged Jews from "slumming
there" (65). Although the dance hall scene from Bread Givers con-
tains a reference to "uptown," the setting is more likely midtown
rather than Harlem, especially since this Broadway locale would be
"uptown" to Sara's Lower East Side home. While Sara has probably
not arrived in Harlem, where blacks and whites literally mixed in the
jazz clubs and cabarets, the text alludes to the metaphorical mixing
of the two races in the image of "women's white shoulders against
men's black coats" (193). As Jeffrey Melnick points out, when the
dance halls were not integrated, blackness was still very much present
since the music played was typically jazz and ragtime and the enter-
tainers themselves often African American. In jazz, writes Melnick,
was the "conflation—at least on the level of symbol—of dance,
ethnicity, and sexual danger" (22). But jazz has further attractions
for Sara. Not only did it serve as a site of race mixing because of its
appeal to white audiences, but the origins of jazz are highly con-
tested. As Melnick explains, jazz is difficult to define because it is, in
the words of George Gershwin, "a conglomeration of many things,"
including ragtime, the blues, classical music, and spirituals (qtd. in
Melnick 70). As a hybrid form itself, jazz is more Sara's kind because
it serves as a reflection of her own multiplicity as an ethnic American
woman.
After this evening, Sara finds herself "a changed person" (194),
mistakenly attributing her transformation to the presence of Goldstein
rather than the musical inspiration. She ends up rejecting Goldstein
when she realizes that she would be just another piece of property to
a successful businessman who is overly concerned with money. "Even
in the ecstasy of our kisses," she recognized that "he was not my
kind" (201), echoing Max's earlier statement that the dance hall would
be "more [her] kind." Sara is closer in "kind" to the jazz music than
to this successful, assimilated immigrant man. The text does not
make explicit the analogy between her own commodification as an
ethnic woman and that of black culture through jazz, but as Max
points out when he draws a parallel between Sara and the uptown
venue, Sara herself represents the same qualities that were associ-
ated with African Americans at the time: freedom, primitivism, and
fieriness. This equation of Sara with the dance hall also makes sense
in light of descriptions of jazz that associate it with a sexualized
femininity.15 Like blacks, Jewish women were exoticized as sexual
beings, even, as the scene indicates, by Jewish men. Just as Euro-
pean immigrants defined themselves as white in relation to blacks,
alrightnik figures like Goldstein could participate in the dominant
ideology by adopting mainstream views of ethnic women. The en-
 Harrison-Kahan 431

counter with Goldstein draws attention to Sara's status as a sexual

object and suggests that her attraction to jazz has much to do with
her own sense of her Jewishness as a form of cultural hybridity.
Like Sara, Adele Lindner in Arrogant Beggar identifies with and
is inspired by the jazz music played by one of the girls at the Hellman
Home, Minnie Rosen: "How wonderful it all was. The pounding jazz.
The shuffling feet. The joy flowing through their swaying bodies. . . .
We gave it to them livelier and livelier. We were little roughnecks of
the tenements, dancing free and wild in front of the street organ"
(25). As is the case for Sara, jazz brings out in the girls an authentic,
unfettered quality of their Jewishness; the fire and liberation that is
associated with jazz is also embodied in the spectacle of the immi-
grant women "dancing free and wild." In giving "it to them livelier
and livelier," the girls play up these cultural associations, feeding the
stereotype of the "little roughnecks of the tenements." Thus, even
as it projects authenticity, this passage seems to be aware of the
ways this identity is a construction; the Jewish girls are not literally
"little roughnecks of the tenements," but are rather taking on that
role as a part of a public performance.
In Yezierska's novels, jazz symbolizes the particularities of eth-
nic female sexuality. Her male characters do not have the same rela-
tion to jazz and blackness that her female characters do. In Arrogant
Beggar, the classical pianist Jean Rachmansky, the man Adele even-
tually marries, is defined in opposition to jazz. Like Adele, Rachmansky
is taken in by the Hellmans, who become his patrons. When he per-
forms at one of their parties, a female guest who is "dying to dance"
requests that the "prodigy play, You Made Me Love You" and is told
to "Have a heart! . . . Rachmansky is no jazz player" (77). In con-
trast, Adele's performances, even when they are not musical, are
analogous to jazz. Moved to recite a poem at a social sponsored by
the Hellmans, she describes the "urge to stand upon the stage" and
"to fire the crowd with my voice as Minnie did with her jazz" (30).
Although Adele intended to exert agency through her speech, her
recitation ends up positioning her as a sexual object; it attracts the
attention of Arthur Hellman, the man she desires but who remains
unreachable due to their class differences, and simultaneously earns
her the unwanted sexual advances of her date, Shlomoh Hershbein.
Toward the end of Arrogant Beggar, Adele finally does find a suitable
public role for herself, a way to have as strong an impact as Minnie's
jazz, when she leaves the Hellman Home behind and becomes the
proprietress of the café in Muhmenkeh's basement. Combining an
artist's salon with a coffee shop, the space is a fitting representation
of Adele's hybridity. Although Adele situates herself within down-
town bohemia, she also aligns herself with the uptown literary sa-
432 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance

lons of the Harlem Renaissance. (In Plum Bun, Fauset's protagonist

similarly dreams of opening a salon because she sees it as one of the
few ways that women can exercise power over artistic production.)
Replacing the Hellmans, Adele becomes the primary supporter of
Rachmansky, who draws crowds to the café by playing "[a]ncient
Hebrew melodies, folk tunes, chords that struck at the very roots of
their long-forgotten past" (145). "No jazz player," Rachmansky dis-
plays an access to his past through his music that seems relatively
free of ambivalence, but Adele's café serves a conduit between the
New World and the "the memories of homeland," which will remain
"forever beyond reach" (145).

In this article, I have examined the competing uses of black-

ness in Yezierska's writing. On one hand, she uses images of black-
ness and darkness in a typically negative way, which seems to con-
firm Morrison's extension of the "Africanist presence" to the immigrant
experience. On the other hand, as Yezierska's narratives develop,
associations with blackness take on new meaning: they become
sources of invigoration for Yezierska's female characters. This con-
tradiction in itself is important, illustrating how the immigrant writer
is caught between two worlds, between white aspirations and ethnic
loyalties. In Yezierska's later work, which was written as the impact
of the Jazz Age spread beyond Harlem and as African American writ-
ers and artists were in the process of redefining blackness in terms
of pride rather than shame, the seeming contradictions transmute
into complements. Blackness takes on a more positive connotation
as her female protagonists are pulled away from whiteness by "the
fiery rhythms of jazz."
Although Yezierska at times seems to be mimicking stereotypi-
cal depictions of black culture through her descriptions of jazz and
its liberating effects, a strong parallel between her fiction and the
cultural products of the Harlem Renaissance explains the affinity of
her rebellious protagonists for jazz music. Objectified as exotic primi-
tives, Yezierska's heroines often have the same effect on their audi-
ences that jazz music did. Just as jazz was closely associated with
the spectacle of black culture, Yezierska's Russian Jewesses come to
represent the spectacle of Jewishness in its most authentic form. In
both cases, however, this authenticity is, in actuality, the complex
interplay of multiple influences. While jazz transforms The Jazz
Singer's Jakie Rabinowitz into a white American in Rogin's reading, it
remains a manifestation of ethnic ambivalence for Yezierska's pro-
tagonists who could not be said to be fully assimilated at the end of
 Harrison-Kahan 433

their novels. In Bread Givers and Arrogant Beggar, the female pro-
tagonists return to the ghetto, even as they are changed in their
return. Rather than rendering themselves in the dichotomous con-
trast of black versus white, they instead establish a hybridity that
solidifies their likeness to jazz.

Notes
I thank Lydia Fisher and Maren Linett for their assistance with this
essay.
1. For example, in "Hunger," the protagonist speaks of "the hunger to
make from myself a person that can't be crushed by nothing nor
nobody" (51).
2. For analyses of language and hybridity in Yezierska's fiction, see, for
example, Codde, Drucker, and Konzett.
3. On the historical encounters between Jews and blacks in the early
decades of the twentieth century, see Diner. One exception occurs in
Red Ribbon on a White Horse, where Yezierska describes her friend-
ship with Richard Wright, whom she met through the WPA. Their
initial meeting prompts her to wonder "whether it was harder to be
born a Jew in a Christian world than a Negro—a black skin in a white
world" (158).
4. My understanding of Jews "becoming" white, a process that occurred
over the course of the twentieth century in the United States, owes
much to the scholarship of Brodkin and Jacobson. With its many
references to Jews as a race who share common racial traits,
Yezierska's writing confirms that Jews in the first half of the twenti-
eth century were not viewed as white.
5. In The Image of the Black in Jewish Culture, Abraham Melamed
warns against ahistorical readings of black imagery in Jewish texts,
claiming that American scholars often tend toward apologetics due
to the contemporary political situation between blacks and Jews. He
shows that, historically, Jewish images of blacks have been fraught
with ambivalence; although blackness operates as a marker of infe-
riority in Jewish culture, at times it also has more positive connota-
tions. While Yezierska's references to blackness are certainly influ-
enced by her Jewish background and the word's various connota-
tions in Yiddish, we cannot separate these meanings from the Ameri-
can context given the racial politics of the period in which she was
writing and the prevalence of black and white imagery in other cul-
tural productions at the time.
6. Lizabeth Cohen agrees that mass consumption can be a political act,
allowing the disenfranchised to establish citizenship: "For social groups
not otherwise well represented, in particular women and African
434 Anzia Yezierska, Hybridity, and the Harlem Renaissance
Americans, identification as consumers offered a new opportunity to
make claims on those wielding public and private power in American
society" (32).
7. In her first novel, Salome of the Tenements, Yezierska provides a
possible antidote to this dilemma. Her protagonist, Sonya Vrunsky,
begins the novel as a voracious consumer, shopping for the clothes
and other material goods that will transform her into an American
and help her lure the Anglo-Saxon millionaire she intends to marry.
However, by the end of the novel, Sonya has divorced the millionaire
and refashioned herself into a successful Fifth Avenue dress designer,
establishing her independence by reversing her position in the mar-
ketplace.
8. Several writers and scholars have commented on the role of the
department store in the Americanization process. In The Promised
Land, Antin describes the department store as a "dazzling beautiful
palace" (149), one of the first stops for immigrants after Ellis Island;
there, they purchased garments that allowed them to fashion new,
American selves. In Adapting to Abundance, Heinze discusses how
most of the well-known department stores in the United States were
founded by German Jews, "illustrating the fluid relationship between
immigration and urban consumption in America" (183).
9. On the role of clothes in Yezierska's fiction, see Stubbs and Gold-
smith.
10. In his introduction to the play on which the film was based, Samson
Raphaelson, author of the play The Jazz Singer (which he adapted
from his short story "The Day of the Atonement"), suggests that he
viewed jazz as an expression of Jewish ambivalence: "Jazz is prayer.
It is too passionate to be anything else. It is prayer, distorted, sick,
unconscious of its destination. The singer of jazz is what Matthew
Arnold said of the Jew, 'lost between two worlds, one dead, the
other powerless to be born'" (qtd. in Carringer 23).
11. W. T. Lhamon has argued that such ambivalence is characteristic of
minstrel performers more generally.
12. Jewish cultural studies has certainly not been blind to issues of gen-
der, but the emphasis on the feminization of Jewish men has often
led to the elision of actual Jewish women.
13. Although there are no representations of blackface in Yezierska's
writing, Jewish women writers such as Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst
do represent blackface (both literally and metaphorically) in their
texts. These narratives are largely left out of the critical discussion
on blackface and are worthy of investigation in the ways that they
challenge the accepted theories. See, for example, Ferber's novels
Show Boat (and its subsequent film and musical adaptations) and
Saratoga Trunk, as well as Hurst's short story "The Smudge," which
features a female blackface performer of unspecified ethnicity.
 Harrison-Kahan 435
14. For an analysis of female blues singers as sexual subjects, see Carby.
In response to Carby, Ann DuCille explores the limits of this sexual
agency in women's blues.
15. For example, Melnick describes imagery in which jazz is portrayed in
terms of "a ripe but unauthorized femininity, evoking the vaguely
scandalous confines of the vaudeville theater or the dance hall" (21).

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