Trauma and Event in Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts

Authors : Sinem Yazıcıoğlu YAZICIOĞLU

Pages : 135-158

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Publication Date : 2023-06-14

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Anzia Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1920); is a collection of short stories set in New York City’s Lower East Side district and portrays Jewish working class women as they experience the problems of urban poverty and immigration as trauma. This article analyzes Hungry Hearts as a short story cycle in light of trauma theories and argues that Yezierska’s protagonists suffer from what Maria Root calls “insidious trauma”. Therefore, it holds that the dialectic of fragmentation and cohesion in the short story cycle form conflates with the insidious trauma of Yezierska’s protagonists. From this perspective, the article claims that the narrative logic of Yezierska’s work illustrates the inevitable continuity of insidious trauma because the stories follow a sequence of gradually aging protagonists. However, Yezierska also offers an alternative by creating two evental moments of intergenerational interaction in her last two stories. Drawing from Alain Badiou’s concept of the “event” and Dominick LaCapra’s trauma theory, this article argues that such moments function as departures from the initial narrative logic and let the characters reformulate their futures.
Keywords : Anzia Yezierska, Short Story Cycle, American Short Story, Trauma, Event