Making It New: 1900–1945 467The story speaks for many immigrants of the time, who wanted to play their part in
the creation of what Randolph Bourne had called a “trans-national America.” It also
speaks for those immigrant writers who wanted to write that America into existence,
by sharing their world with “the American-born” and making it play a part in the
process of a developing national identity. Of those writers, Yezierska, who emigrated
with her family from Russian Poland when she was 15, was an important one, not least
because she was the only immigrant Jewish woman from Eastern Europe of her
generation to produce a body of fiction in English. Her family settled in the Lower
East Side of New York City, and all her writing expresses the lives and feelings of char-
acters leading underprivileged lives, marginalized by mainstream American society,
but still ready and eager to become “Americans of tomorrow.” “As one of the dumb,
voiceless ones I speak,” “America and I” begins. “One of the millions beating, beating
out their hearts at your gates for a breath of understanding.” And that cry articulates
the motive and material of her fiction. Yezierska was considerably better educated and
more widely experienced than most of her ghetto characters and narrators: she was
close to John Dewey (1859–1952), the philosopher and educator, she worked in
Hollywood in the 1920s and for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s, she reviewed
for the New York Times and lectured in the 1950s. Nevertheless, her emotional
experiences as an immigrant were her inspiration. They were the source of her stories,
many of them collected in Hungry Hearts (1920) and Children of Loneliness (1923),
and several novels, including Salome of the Tenements (1922) and Bread Givers (1925);
and they formed the basis of her fictionalized autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White
Horse (1950). Her narrators and characters range from feisty immigrant girls making
their way in the world, thanks to a combination of hard work and native wit, to older
women, isolated, disenfranchised, frustrated by years of domestic life and demeaning
labor. Always, though, there is the same vision shaping them as there is in the creation
of the characters of Wolfe and Steinbeck, of an America still ripe with promise. And
the voice is, invariably, the same one that sounds in “America and I,” and many other
immigrants’ fictions of the time: which declares that the full story of America has yet
to be told – and that this is someone who will help tell it.
That hopeful message does not shape all immigrant writing of the period. It is not
there, for instance, in the fiction of Pietro Di Donato (1911–1992), a self-taught
son of Italian immigrants who described the lives of exploited workers in a rich,
lyrical prose that imported the rhythms of his ancestral home into the language
of his adoptive one. Di Donato was haunted by the central, personal experience of
his young life that came to express for him the full measure of suffering, the
crucifixion suffered by the poor. When he was only 11, his father was killed in a
terrible accident on a construction job; and he was suddenly forced to take over his
father’s role of bricklayer and financial support for his family. Laid off from work in
the 1930s, Di Donato found, he said, “the leisure to think” and to read “the immortal
minds of all countries.” “That gave me freedom,” he remembered. He began to write
a short story, “Christ in Concrete,” based on the death of his father. Published in
1937, it supplied the germ of a novel, also called Christ in Concrete, which appeared
two years later. Centered on a man like his father, an immigrant caught betweenGGray_c04.indd 467ray_c 04 .indd 467 8 8/1/2011 7:54:01 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 01 AM