Salome of the Tenements - Softcover

Yezierska, Anzia

3.49

220 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 141281300X ISBN 13: 9781412813006

Publisher: Transaction Pub Large Print, 1999

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Salome is a gritty portrait of life on the Lower East Side of New York City in the early 1900s. Wealthy philanthropists devoted to the settlement house movement make plans to eradicate poverty and to erase the more unsettling signs of foreigness found among the immigrant poor. Sonya Vrunsky is poor, smart, and beautiful. She hates being patronized and she craves the pleasure that money does buy. When the Yiddish newspaper she works for sends her off to interview a philanthropist, she decides she will marry him.

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From the Back Cover:

Salome of the Tenements shocked many critics and writers when first published in 1923, but its author was immediately hailed as a major new talent. A love story of a working-class Salome and her "highborn" John the Baptist, the novel is based on the real-life story of Jewish immigrant Rose Pastor's fairytale romance with the millionaire socialist Graham Stokes. It also reflects Yezierska's own aborted romance with the famous educator John Dewey. Yezierska's passionate but cynical novel poses oppositions such as cultural type/stereotype, passion/reason, and ethnic identity/assimilation, and it resonates powerfully to the contemporary reader.

Review:

"Both a biting critique of the liberal paternalism of the Progressive era and a utopian vision of assimilation and upward mobility." --The Nation

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