America and I

Throughout this essay Yezierska draws upon the contrasting images of dark and light to illuminate elements of her story. Darkness, or blackness, represents despair, while light, fire, gold and sunshine are positive, passionate and life-giving. She calls the country a land of hope, “aflame with longing and desire” (Paragraph 2). In one of the beginning paragraphs she contrasts America and Russia by evoking “colors that never saw light” (Paragraph 5), intimating that her writing talents would go unrecognized in Russia, and then references “my golden hopes” evoking the promise of the American Dream. When talking about her employment with the Americanized family, she says, “Here was my chance to begin my life in the sunshine, after my long darkness” (Paragraph 15). Her promised wages are “shining like a light over my head!” (Paragraph 20), and in anticipation of her reward she shines the house up “like a jewel-box” (Paragraph 24). When she doesn’t receive them, she says, “It went black for my eyes” (Paragraph 37)—she is slowly understanding that perhaps the US and Russia are not so dissimilar in their ignorance of her talents after all. At the factory, her boss is “like a black witch of greed” (Paragraph 44), and she goes to work in a dark basement, comparing herself to “a thing following blindly after something far off in the dark!” (Paragraph 47).

Despite her despair, at night she finds solace in the stars above, and when she finally stands up to her boss, she says, “the light of self-assertion broke into my cellar darkness” (Paragraph 51). This foreshadows her later revelation that she will need to struggle and carve out a niche for herself in American society. She cannot expect success to be handed to her, but she must claim agency to garner it. She describes her frustration at not being able to communicate, and therefore not being able to claim agency over her future, when she visits the vocational guidance counselor who doesn’t understand her. She says, “All the light out of my eyes” (Paragraph 97). Yet, as she reads American history and learns more about the Pilgrims, she realizes she is begging for “a gleam of understanding from strangers who could not sympathize” (Paragraph 105). The result is that she becomes “fired up by this revealing light” (Paragraph 108) and is motivated to communicate her struggle to create a space for herself in American society. “[Her] burning eagerness” (Paragraph 109) for communication and understanding becomes her path to the American Dream.