First published in 1920, Hungry Hearts enters the tenements, sweatshops and crowded kitchens of New York’s Lower East Side through Jewish immigrant women whose hungers exceed the merely economic.

They want education, beauty, dignity, romantic freedom and some usable claim upon America—desires that the old world, the new world and the family home each find ways to punish. 

Yezierska writes in a deliberately heightened English shaped by Yiddish rhythm and immigrant speech. The result can be raw, repetitive and melodramatic, but that excess is the method to show people forced to speak themselves into existence inside a culture that treats assimilation as both promise and extortion. America here is fantasy and rent, self-invention and inherited obligation.

This edition also gathers later stories beyond the original collection, broadening Yezierska’s account of immigrant life into questions of class mobility, female ambition and the humiliations hidden inside philanthropy and reform. It is social realism with its nerves exposed—for readers of Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud and writing about migration that refuses the clean little myth of arrival.

Persea Books paperback, 1985. Light edge and cover wear; pages clean and binding sound.