HOW I FOUND AMERICA
By ANZIA YEZIERSKA
In 1896 Miss Yezierska came from Plotzk in Russian Poland, where she was born. After hard experiences in a “sweat shop” she became a teacher of cooking. She is the author of Hungry Hearts. Her dialect stories, strongly realistic and touching, appear in many magazines.
An autobiography is a straightforward story of the life of the writer. An autobiographical essay is a meditation on the events in one's own life.
How I Found America is an autobiographical essay. It does not tell the story of the writer's life: it tells the writer's thoughts preceding and after her arrival in America. As in all good essays, the subject is much greater than the writer. The meditation is purely personal, but it stirs a response in every thoughtful reader. It asks and answers the questions: “What do oppressed foreigners think America to be?” “What do immigrants find America to be?” “How can we make immigrants into the most helpful Americans?”
The anecdotes that make the parts of the essay are as graphic as so many bold drawings. The principal sections of the essay are as distinct as the chapters of a book. At all times this essay concerns the question, “What is it to be an American?”
In some respects this particular essay is like a musical composition; for it begins with a sort of prelude, rises through a series of movements, and culminates in a triumphant close, the whole composition being marked by the presence of a strong motif—the exaltation of the true spirit of America.
Every breath I drew was a breath of fear, every shadow a stifling shock, every footfall struck on my heart like the heavy boot of the Cossack. On a low stool in the middle of the only room in our mud hut sat my father, his red beard falling over the Book of Isaiah, open before him. On the tile stove, on the benches that were our beds, even on the earthen floor, sat the neighbors' children, learning from him the ancient poetry of the Hebrew race. As he chanted, the children repeated:
The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness,
Prepare ye the way of the Lord.
Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted,
And every mountain and hill shall be made low,
And the crooked shall be made straight,
And the rough places plain,
And the glory of God shall be revealed,
And all flesh shall see it together.