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when I was working at the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of New York. When I was finished, I read the Bread Givers. The stories transported me inside the old, boarded up tenements to the world of my grandparents and my great-grandparents, speaking in a language I don’t know. They also took me into other tenement buildings, those that were inhabited by newer immigrants, speaking Spanish and dialects of Chinese that, again, I didn’t really know either. How different was the world of Yezierska’s stories to the lives of the people I passed and nodded at in the streets?
At the time, many visitors came to the museum to revel in the nostalgia of their immigrant past. Nostalgia can be a beautiful thing. But, in the gallery of the museum, and in the talks I gave, I wanted to make sure we didn’t leave the story of immigration in the past. While many visitors recognized the continuity of the neighborhood’s role as a home for new immigrants, others sought to distance the stories of their families from the newcomers living on the Lower East Side at the time. Their side comments often included familiar stereotypes, people were unclean, they refused to speak English.
I think I was able to connect past and present because of what I read from Yezierska. In her presentation of the juxtaposition between the Jewish world of Orchard, Essex, and Hester streets from life north of Delancy street, we are introduced to be what seems to be a universal gulf that we need to learn how to cross, between what Yezierska presents as “polite” society, and those trying to adjust to life in the United States. It may sound cliched, but her characters, often sketched broadly, were archetypes, but types that you could recognize, and even sympathize with if you spent time getting to know them, and were attuned to the world around you.
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