Educational Media Reviews Online

Adapted from Anzia Yezierska’s first published work, Hungry Hearts, a story collection that was a cause celebre when it was published in 1920, this silent film was considered lost when it appeared in London in the 1990s. This fascinating if flawed film has been preserved and restored, and an evocative new score, composed, orchestrated, conducted and performed by students of the USC Thornton School of Music, was added. Yezierska, a Jewish proto-feminist writer immigrated to New York City’s Lower East Side from Eastern Europe in 1890 when she was ten. She is the author of Bread Givers, which is now taught in many colleges. According to Ljiljana Coklin, Yezierska was the “only ethnic woman invited to Hollywood to write scripts and the only literary accomplished immigrant woman whose work was filmed.”

The film opens with a shot of the Statue of Liberty. It then cuts to a pastoral shetl scene titled “1910, Jewish quarter of Russia.” A long shot of children frolicking in a pond is followed by the intertitle “The hut of the Levin family,” and a shot of the bearded Abraham Levin, (E.A. Warren), teaching the Talmud to children, which was forbidden at the time by the Czar. Moments later, the Cossacks arrive, flinging straps and hitting everyone. The small children scurry under the bed, and there’s a close-up of a black boot stepping on a challah bread. Soon after, the oppressed family receives a letter from their friend Gedalyah Mindel, (Otto Lederer), telling them that the “sun is beginning to shine in America,” and urging them to join him in the Promised Land. Abe’s wife Hanneh (Rose Rosanova) and pretty teenage daughter, Sara (Helen Ferguson) exchange longing looks, and they meet with Abe’s resistance by telling him they’ll sell everything they have to get the money for ship tickets. Soon after, they’re on the ship to America.

Archival footage of the Lower East Side portrays pushcarts and crowded streets. As Gedalyah is leading them to their tenement apartment, a young Levin son asks him, “Where are the flowers in the fields?” Gedalyah replies, “How should I know? Am I a florist?” Hanneh asks Gedalyah, “How much rent do we have to pay yet for being squeezed like herring in a barrel?” He tells her $10 a month. Abe sells food from a pushcart, and Sara becomes a janitress, and then a miserable sweatshop worker. She yearns for her piece of sunshine. Sara asks Gedalyah if she can make something of herself, and he tells her not in those greenhorn clothes. So she asks her father when they’ll have money to get her American clothes. Clothing was a pervasive theme for Yezierska, one that is woven throughout Salome of the Tenements, her 1923 novel, about a Jewish immigrant who has an affair with a millionaire WASP, and eventually becomes an artist, a clothing designer. This book was also filmed, in 1925, but it is considered a lost film.

Sara finds her light in her romantic attachment to the handsome, dapper David Kaplan (Bryant Washburn) the landord’s nephew. David’s a lawyer who comes to collect the rent. The couple fall in love, and David promises he’ll help her to learn to read. He promises to take her to night school and help her with her lessons. Sara’s beatific smile is transcendent, as is the swelling music. Learning to read and write will be her sunshine. But darkness is visible again when the bully landlord, a kind of a Jewish czar, finds out the couple is getting engaged. He forces David to break up with Sara, saying she and her family are nobodies.

The story The Lost ‘Beautifulness’ serves as the dramatic center of the film. Hanneh decides to paint her kitchen white to prepare for her daughter’s engagement party. White paint is a symbol here for beauty and grandeur, and for the American Dream. When the landlord sees how beautiful Hanneh has made her kitchen, he tells her he’s doubling the rent. She rails against him, but he stands firm. In a fit of explosive rage, the kind one rarely sees expressed by a woman, let alone an old-fashioned, babushka-wearing, heavy-set, old world woman, Hanneh takes a knife and with a manic, psychotic fury, hacks the walls of the kitchen. It’s a cathartic and rousing scene of shattering violence. Hanneh is empowered by her destructive revenge. The threat of being punished for pursuing the American Dream provokes her to become hysterical, lose self-control, and lash out. But she comes to her senses and seeks justice: she takes the landlord to court, and in the movie, Sara’s beloved David stands up to represent her. The judge has compassion for Hanneh, and decrees that the rent won’t be raised. The Hollywood ending is happy, Hanneh is triumphant, and David and Sara are reunited and get married. In the short story, however, the family is thrown out of the apartment, and is left homeless.

This film is a universal assimilation story, but it is also a love story. The film, quoting directly from Yezierska’s work, vividly captures the unique immigrant idiom of the Jews, a Yiddish-infused, sometimes broken English. Characters utter words like, “Nu?” which means what’s up, and “Oi weh,” or oy vey, which means oh no, terms I grew up hearing my mother say. Yezierska chronicles the “hungry hearts and the pack of dreams” the Eastern European Jews brought to this country. Her characters grapple with a different kind of oppression as they transition into Americans. The screenplay by Julien Josphson doesn’t completely cohere into a satisfying narrative, due to the challenging nature of its source material, but the Levins’ struggles are tempered with humor and humanity, and though the episodic nature of the story takes too long to do it, it does eventually cohere.

Yezierska achieved fame in her own time, though she died in New York City in obscurity in 1970. She was known as the “Sweatshop Cinderella” because in the words of the newspaper columnist Frank Crane, “She dipped her pen in her heart.” The National Center for Jewish Film has done a mitzvah, the Hebrew word for an act of kindness, preserving this film and making it available. It should be seen by anyone who is hungry to learn more about the heart of the Jewish immigrant experience in America, and the woman who was, in her own words, “crazy for writing,” and determined to make a somebody of herself.