Anzia Yezierska (1880 – 1970) was a writer whose body of work focused on the Jewish immigrant experience in America in the early 1900s.

Born in an area that’s now Poland but which was part of the Russian Empire when she was was a child, her family arrived in New York City’s Lower East Side during the immigration wave of the late 1800s. Anzia, then in her early teens, never shed the feeling of being an outsider looking in.

All of Yezierska’s short stories are collected in How I Found America: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska, 1991. In her introduction to the book, literary critic Vivian Gornick wrote: Read More→