| poor family in Plinsk, she moved to New York City's Lower East Side in the 1890s and it was there, amidst night classes and work in sweat-shops, she began to write novels and short stories marked by an intensity of feeling, with charactersespecially womenwho yearn for dignity, respect, and independence. At the time of Yezierska's death, in 1970, Freilich was already thirty years old, teaching and dreaming of one day becoming a novelist. Caracas never had a Jewish ghetto, at least not of the type that comes to mind when one conjures Delancey and Hester streets. In fact, at the turn of the century the arrival of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe could hardly constitute a "wave"; it was more like an ocean sprayless than 2,000 by the end of World War II. But those who came struggled just the same with the duality of tongues and citizenship and, as Clper testifies, with the shock of recognition. The manners of behavior they found were somewhat similar to the Russian and Polish spirits they had left behind: political volatility, an ingrained Catholicism, and a set of prejudices that included anti-Semitism. The static nature of Hispanic society seems to have depressed them at first; after all, much like in Europe, in the Southern Hemisphere an individual derives his sense of identity from his life-membership to a class. Of "Amerika," the English-speaking Paradise across the Atlantic, they had heard profusely; it was, in the words of cousins and friends that made it through Ellis Island, a country of hardship, restraining yet benign and penetrable, a place where status is temporary and success depends on achievement. Of di anderer Amerique, on the other hand, of the Spanish-speaking one they had just arrived into, they knew next to nothinga Paradise Lost, tropical, exotic, a bit too colorful. Could they climb the social ladder just the same? Could achievement push them to the top without denouncing their ambition? And indeed, they soon realized that Latin America has always had problems with the concept of change. Mobility is arduous. Renewal comes in the form of violent break-throughs. While the region, much as the United States, is the prod- |
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