Increasing multicultural awareness through teaching the works of Anzia Yezierska

Multicultural Education, Spring 2003 by Schaffer, Deborah

Increasing students' multicultural awareness and tolerance of diversity has been a major concern for educators in th United States for some time, and a frequent path taken to accomplish this goal has been the teaching of literature from diverse cultures. In fact, a search I conducted in August of 2001 of two education-related online indexes for documents relevant to teaching multicultural literature produced 717 references on ERIC OCLC FirstSearch and 711 on Ask ERIC. Obviously, this area of research is an active one.

However, some cultures are hotter than others. For example, while references in the same two indexes relating to Native American, African American, and Hispanic literature numbered in the hundreds, only 51 and 50 references, respectively, were found for teaching Jewish literature (and even fewer for other groups). These differences suggest to me that while teachers should be able to find a large number of resources for teaching literature relevant to the first three groups, they might have a harder time finding Jewish-literature materials. In fact, they might conclude that Jewish culture (among others) has been somewhat underrepresented in the move to broaden our students' cultural horizons, probably due to a fairly common (and understandable) reluctance to engage with religious topics in the classroom.

Yet religious diversity is as integrally a part of Americans' cultural differences as race or ethnic background, and so ought to be addressed in any curriculum aimed at expanding multicultural awareness and tolerance, especially given the continued activities in this country of white Christian supremacists and Holocaust deniers. And teaching about a religious group's beliefs and culture is not the same thing as teaching the religion itself, a view reinforced by inspecting the resources in the ERIC databases dealing with teaching Jewish literature and themes; see, for example, Kaplan (1998) on Jewish-themed youngadult literature and Nadel (1980) for a unit plan on Jewish-American literature.

Certainly, there are abundant choices for all age groups of well-written, thoughprovoking Jewish-themed literature. On the high-school level, most teachers are probably familiar with classics such as Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, Elie Wiesel's Night, Chaim Potok's The Chosen and The Promise, and the short stories of Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. But some readers might feel that a gap exists in the culture or experiences depicted in the fiction just mentioned-a gender gap. Most of the best-known Jewish-themed literature does, in fact, focus primarily or exclusively on boys and men, and while these works are certainly important to read and teach, a wider variety of women's and girls' experiences would also be useful to include in any reading list, as both Kaplan (1998) and Oliver (1994) did in theirs.

A Suggestion

In light of these concerns about religious and gender representation, I would like to suggest another author for inclusion in a high-school or college course incorporating multicultural literature into its content: Anzia Yezierska. If her name fails to ring any bells, I would hardly be surprised; I first encountered it only during the summer of 1994, while I was selecting material for a fall Jewish-American literature studies course. The anthology I chose (Fishman, 1992)included Yezierska's "The Fat of the Land," and that story, plus Fishman's accompanying discussion of Yezierska's life and work, piqued my interest. I read her best-known novel, Bread Givers, and found that it provided a view of Jewish-American experience complementary to those offered by my other reading selections: a portrait of a young Jewish immigrant woman struggling to find herself in the midst of family and cultural pressures to conform to traditional female roles in her society.

What intrigued me most about Yezierska's work-and indeed, life-was the window she opened on an aspect of Jewish experience that I, a Jew who has read a fair amount about Judaism, Jews in America, and Jewish literature, had never encountered before, either in the detail or from the point of view she provided. Certainly, Jewish assimilation in America, the limitations placed on pre-feminist-era American women, and the struggles of poor immigrants in the United States are all themes taken up in many fiction and nonfiction works over the past century, but how many of them considered the options and conflicts specifically facing the young Jewish immigrant woman, especially those written before the 1950s? Jewish females were mothers, sisters, and love interests, but not central characters in their own right.

Culture, Gender, and Religion

Yet here is an author who, in five novels and many short stories, raised cultural, gender, and (to a lesser extent) religious issues still relevant today. In story after story, Yezierska painted linguistically and culturally authentic portraits of the lives of women like her who break free of their poor and restrictive upbringings in early-twentieth-century New York City to realize their own dreams, but at a heavy cost: alienation from their families, their home culture and religion, and their assimilating culture.