In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, many people arrived in the US from eastern and southern Europe during a third wave of Jewish immigration, many trying to escape religious or political persecution under Russian czars. Harsh treatment of Eastern European Jews was a long-standing paradigm, but in 1881, a czar was assassinated and the crime was blamed on a Jewish conspiracy. After that, a series of pogroms, or state-sponsored massacres, took place. This led to a mass exodus to America under dangerous conditions, consisting of perhaps three million Jews. These Jewish families came through the Port of New York and settled within ghettos in New York City among their Jewish-American neighbors, suffering hardships such as poverty and overcrowding.

Ultimately, these immigrants changed the landscape of the US in profound ways, but in the meantime the sheer numbers of immigrants—historians estimate that one-third of Russian Jews had left Russia by 1920 and half the US population of Jews settled in New York—led to poor conditions and limited resources. In “America and I,” author Yezierska gives a voice to her personal experience as one of this wave of Jewish refugees, arriving in America with hope and a faith in a utopia that doesn’t exist and which is stretched to the limit to provide enough for all the new people coming through its borders.