In five pages works by Bruno Lessing, Anzia Yezierska, Sandra Mano, and Barbara Roche Rico, who have personally experienced what it means to be an immigrant explain the experience to others in a way that can be related to by nonimmigrants as well. Four sources are cited in the bibliography.
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served as the backdrop for countless stories of depravation and loss of identity as well as stories of great opportunity and accomplishment. Such stories are particularly poignant when they are
written by people such as Anzia Yezierska, Bruno Lessing (the pseudonym of Hearst Publications editor Rudolph Block), along with the editors of "American Mosaic" Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Mano,
all of whom have personal knowledge of the immigrant experience. Each wanted to explain the experience of being an immigrant in ways than non-immigrants could understand and to which immigrants
could relate. One statement, made by Anzia Yezierska in "America and I" encapsulates the efforts of immigrant writers who share the immigrant experience through their words. She explains that she
writes: "As one of the dumb, voiceless ones I speak. One of the millions of immigrants beating, beating out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding" (pp.
144). Fictionalized True Stories Anzia Yezierska (1880?-1970) wrote stories of the cultural forces that clash in Jewish immigrants, especially women, to the United States. She was an immigrant to
the U.S. from Russian-dominated Poland sometime around 1890. Her stories and novels have been criticized in modern times for their melodrama and sentimentality but her readership was attracted to such
tales of courage, determination and, most important of all, success in America. The characters she created in her stories were the victims of poverty, exploitation by cruel bosses in
sweatshops, loneliness, and ultimate disillusionment with their American experience. According to Zierler (1993), Yezierska was: "something of a household name. Countless newspapers and magazines told and retold her rags-to-riches story
of literary success. Hers was a spectacular and particularly American ascent into the limelight" (pp. 414). Her genuinely honest (if somewhat "embroidered") and impassioned stories about the Jewish immigrant
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