Anzia Yezierska - Yezierska and Hollywood

Yezierska and Hollywood

The success of Anzia Yezierska's early short stories led to a brief, but significant, relationship between the author and Hollywood. Movie producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the rights to Yezierska's collection Hungry Hearts. The film of the same title was shot on location at New York's Lower East Side with Helen Ferguson, E. Alyn Warren, and Bryant Washburn. In recent years, the film has been restored through the efforts of the National Center for Jewish Film, the Samuel Goldwyn Company, and the British Film Institute. In 2006, a new score was composed to accompany the film. Yezierska's 1923 novel Salome of the Tenements was also produced as a silent picture. The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival will show this restored print in July 2010.

Goldwyn, recognizing the popularity of Yezierska's stories, gave Yezierska a $100,000 contract to write screenplays. In California, Yezierska's sudden rise to fame prompted publicists to label her "the sweatshop Cinderella." Although Yezierska's own semi-autobiographical work had contributed to this rags-to-riches image, she found herself uncomfortable with being touted as an example of the American Dream. Frustrated by the shallowness of Hollywood and by her own alienation from her roots, Yezierska returned to New York in the mid-1920s and continued publishing novels and stories about immigrant women struggling to establish their identities in America.