Anzia Yezierska, Hungry Hearts

(1920)

"Wings" -- Shenah Pessah, a "janitress" of a tenement, her uncle's, John Barnes, sociology professor

"the girl with her hungry eyes and intense eagerness."

John Barnes, instructor of sociology, "was preparing his thesis on the 'Educational Problems of the Russian Jews,' and in order to get into closer touch with his subject, he had determined to live on the East Side during his spring and summer vacation."

"When I only begin to read, I forget I'm on this world. It lifts me on wings with high thoughts"

Uncle:

"In America a person can't live on hopes for the next world. In America everybody got to look out for himself"

"if you oil the wheels you can ride. with dry hands you can't get nothing in America"

"I'm living in America not in Russia. I'm not hanging on anybody's neck to support me. In America, if a girl earns her living, she can be fifty years old without a man and nobody pities her."

"The blacker, the more stifling the ugliness of her prison, the more luminous became the light of the miraculous stranger who had stopped for a moment to talk to her."

"greenhorn shawl"

Took mother's mattress to pawn shop

"She gloried in his great height that made him so utterly unaware of her existence."

Him: "poor, lonely little immigrant!"

"He opened the wings of your soul"

"Hunger"

Shenah Pessah again, after a little while

tenements scrubbing

Leaves her uncle, goes to find work

meets Sam Arkin at Cohen brothers

"I'll yet show the world what's in me. I'll not go back to my uncle--till it rings with my name in America"