Ambiguous Pilgrimage
Red Ribbon on a White Horse.
by Anzia Yezierska.
With an introduction by W. H. Auden. Scribner’s. 220 pp. $2.75.
Anzia Yezierska achieved fame during the 20’s with a novel called Hungry Hearts about Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. The novel passed almost unnoticed until Samuel Goldwyn bought the screen rights and publicized book and author as build-up for the movie. When the telegram came announcing the sale, Miss Yezierska, herself a Jewish immigrant from Poland, was facing eviction from a miserable room on Hester Street. She had to pawn her only treasure, a shawl her mother had left her, in order to get the nickel to telephone the agent handling the negotiations and the dime for carfare to his office. Whisked overnight to fame and fortune in Hollywood, she was soon disillusioned with what she found there and decided to leave. This book, her spiritual autobiography, concerns that decision and the effect it had upon the rest of her career.
She decided to leave Hollywood, first, because she could not get over a guilty sense of having deserted her people and her class. She was oppressed by the cruel predicament of writers who make money out of social protest. Writing about the slums had enabled her to rise above them, to live among the exploiters. Writing about the Jews had made her somehow a meshumedes, an apostate. She had broken from her father and from the tradition of Jewish Orthodoxy in which she had been raised, not certainly for the sake of mere comfortableness, but because that other world, the world of secular culture, had seemed to offer more room for an expansion of the human spirit, for a certain free and disinterested pursuit of intellect and art not possible in the narrowly parochial ghetto. Yet intellect and art were the last things being pursued in Hollywood. Comfort was, in fact, all she was getting. She could not dispel from her mind the image of her pious father shaking an accusing finger from the grave: “Can fire and water be together? Neither can godliness and ease.” “Poverty,” he had been used to say, “becomes a Jew like a red ribbon on a white horse.”
Poverty, in any case, became her—indeed it had been the whole subject of her work. Detached from it, she found she couldn’t write. That was the second and main reason she left Hollywood. She had written to resolve an inner conflict caused by her rebellion against her ghetto inheritance—in the hope that “by writing out what I don’t know and can’t understand, it would stop hurting me.” But Hollywood does not recognize the vagaries of the creative impulse—that comfort, for example, even happiness, may be for some writers the very thing to stifle results. When Miss Yezierska told a producer that she never knew from day to day what she could write, “Who do you think you are?” he asked her, “Joan of Arc waiting for the voices?”
She returned to New York but she could not get back to the old setting. The rebellion she had expressed against her ghetto inheritance had been at least the sign of her tie to that inheritance. It had given her the subject for Hungry Hearts. Now, however, when she was successful and rebellion was no longer necessary, she found herself without an inheritance and, what was perhaps even more important, without any new subject for her work. She went on writing the same ghetto novel over and over, but with steadily diminishing success. She passed from notice—until today she addresses a public that does not for the most part know who Anzia Yezierska is or what she has done.
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Were this the whole of Miss Yezierska’s story, there would be little to recommend in her autobiography. She is no longer famous. She says nothing illuminating about the art she practices. She does not even offer the kind of memoir of her times, the intimate reminiscences of persons and places, one expects; for she is much too self-absorbed to give more than perfunctory attention to externals.
But she tells also another story—of the immigrant, particularly the Jewish immigrant, who having rejected his old culture finds in America no new culture to take its place. Americanism for him is a pure negation, emancipating him from old restrictions without providing any positive precepts by which to live. Having sacrificed his own manners, customs, and religion, he thinks of America as the place where manners, customs, and religion are necessarily sacrificed to the business of getting ahead. At the same time, he may retain enough of the older values to feel guilty, to feel he has sacrificed the better to the worse.
Miss Yezierska’s sense of guilt runs like a leitmotif through the book. She is haunted by the memory of her father’s disapproval. His admonitions stand, throughout, as the test of truth, while the life she struggled so hard to attain, the life of freedom and personal ambition, is presented as false and unrewarding. Having separated herself first from the ghetto and then from the business of getting ahead—from the only American life she knew—she found she had no connection with any life outside her own, and for that reason no subject for her novels. It was to establish connection with another kind of American life, with what she suspected might be an American tradition, that she settled, after years of poverty and anonymity, in a New Hampshire village. She hoped to strike roots there and write successfully again.
She struck no roots in New Hampshire but New Hampshire did send her back to her proper roots. For she learned there that she had already possessed and abandoned what she was now seeking; that her father, uncompromising old Jew who had scarcely stirred out of the ghetto, was actually closer in spirit than she to the tightly-knit village society, homogeneous and traditional. Her father and the villagers had in common the inner assurance of those who have never questioned the thing that they are or the traditions that formed them, who have never presumed to take upon themselves the burden of unlimited choice. She had presumed to choose—to accept or reject—at every step. And even now she was presuming—presuming this time to choose the tradition she would adhere to. That this was a mistake she learned when a friend quoted Emerson to her: “When a man has got to a certain point of truth in his career, he becomes conscious forevermore that he must take himself for better, or for worse, as his portion: that what he can get out of his plot of ground by the sweat of his brow is his meat; and though the broad universe is full of good, not a particle can he add to himself but through the toil bestowed on this spot.”
The story ends with the author on her way from New Hampshire back once again to New York, serene in the determination to be herself, to be it would seem a Jew and her father’s daughter.
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It is this story—“of an early twentieth-century immigrant,” as he calls it—that interests W. H. Auden. He tells us in the introduction that “it has a deeper and more general significance today when, figuratively, the immigrant is coming more and more to stand as a symbol for Everyman, for the natural and unconscious community of tradition is rapidly disappearing from the earth.” Thus Miss Yezierska contributes a personal analogue of a main question of our time. For if it is true that the unconscious community of tradition is disappearing, it is also true that the conscious talk about tradition, the clamor for it, increases steadily. We are all immigrants in the sense that we have deliberately separated ourselves from the past. But we are also, like Miss Yezierska, coming to feel the need for a new connection with the past, with a way of life permanent enough to withstand the shifting expediencies of the times and the rival claims of theories whose grounds dissolve with every generation.
We would for this reason be interested to know what it is Miss Yezierska returns to. The answer would particularly concern American Jews who would want to know, for example, where she will find her roots, whether her conversion has been religious, and how it will change her style of living. But to questions like these she provides no answer. She does not say what she considers to constitute the Jewish tradition nor how much of it she will retain and how much discard. This is unfortunate since traditionalists who have, like Miss Yezierska, denied before reaffirming, are perhaps the only ones to establish the validity of tradition for a generation of “immigrants.” We can suppose that she had not at the time of writing worked out the answers for herself, that experience had not yet carried her that far. For it is the prime virtue of this little book that the author passes on nothing at second hand, but only such wisdom as she has herself achieved genuinely and passionately through experience.
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