Arrogant Beggar

Name: Arrogant Beggar
ISBN: 9780822317494

Anzia Yezierska

The target of intense critical comment when it was first published in 1927, Arrogant Beggar's scathing attack on charity-run boardinghouses remains one of Anzia Yezierska's most devastating works of social criticism. The novel follows the fortunes of its young Jewish narrator, Adele Lindner, as she leaves the impoverished conditions of New York's Lower East Side and tries to rise in the world. Portraying Adele's experiences at the Hellman Home for Working Girls, the first half of the novel exposes the "sickening farce" of institutionalized charity while portraying the class tensions that divided affluent German American Jews from more recently arrived Russian American Jews.

The second half of the novel takes Adele back to her ghetto origins as she explores an alternative model of philanthropy by opening a restaurant that combines the communitarian ideals of Old World shtetl tradition with the contingencies of New World capitalism. Within the context of this radical message, Yezierska revisits the themes that have made her work famous, confronting complex questions of ethnic identity, assimilation, and female self-realization.

Katherine Stubbs's introduction provides a comprehensive and compelling historical, social, and literary context for this extraordinary novel and discusses the critical reaction to its publication in light of Yezierska's biography and the once much-publicized and mythologized version of her life story. Unavailable for over sixty years, Arrogant Beggar will be enjoyed by general readers of fiction and be of crucial importance for feminist critics, students of ethnic literature. It will also prove an exciting and richly rewarding text for students and scholars of Jewish studies, immigrant literature, women's writing, American history, and working-class fiction.

"While Yezierska's writing stands in sharp contrast to the quantity of fiction by middle- and upper-class white women writers so prevalent in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth, what is particularly interesting about Arrogant Beggar is that it focuses more directly on class than do most of her novels. Katherine Stubbs's introduction is comprehensive, helpful, beautifully written, and convincing—a model of scholarship and insight." —Linda Wagner-Martin, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

About the Author

Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880–1970) was a Polish-born Jewish American writer whose fiction gave voice to the struggles and aspirations of immigrant women on New York’s Lower East Side. Born in a small village in Russian-controlled Poland, she emigrated with her family to the United States in the 1890s, where they settled into the crowded tenements of Manhattan. As a girl she worked in sweatshops and as a domestic servant while teaching herself English and pursuing an education, eventually earning a scholarship to Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Yezierska turned to writing in her thirties, drawing directly on her own experience of poverty, family tension, and the hunger to belong. Her breakthrough came with the story collection Hungry Hearts (1920), which attracted Hollywood’s attention and was adapted into a film, making her briefly one of the most celebrated immigrant authors in America.

Her best-known novel, Bread Givers (1925), follows Sara Smolinsky, a young woman determined to carve out an independent life in defiance of her tyrannical, Torah-obsessed father. Part coming-of-age story and part immigrant epic, the book explores the conflict between Old World tradition and New World ambition, and the cost of self-determination for women. Though it faded from view for decades, its rediscovery in the 1970s helped establish Yezierska as an important voice in American literature and feminist scholarship.

Her other works include Salome of the Tenements (1923), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and the autobiographical Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). She continued writing into her later years and died in 1970 in California. Today, her work is widely read and taught for its unflinching, passionate portrait of the immigrant experience.