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When Sara Smolinsky, the protagonist and autobiographical figure in Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers, graduates from the university, she wins a prize for her essay on the topic "What the College Has Done for Me." As she sits down to draft the piece, she thinks,
What had the college done for me? I thought of the time when I first came here. How I was thrilled out of my senses by the mere sight of plain, clean people. The smashed hurdle in the gymnasium. The way I dashed into the bursar's office demanding money for my failed geometry [course]. (232)
Sara reflects on her college education as a series of discrete experiences, both positive and negative, that shaped her into the woman she became. But what did college do for her? Beyond referring to these experiences, Yezierska does not provide the text of this fictional essay or any insights into how college education has transformed her protagonist's life-and by extension, the lives of the working-class students that the character represents. The conspicuously absent text of her prize-winning essay underscores the unsettled question of whether education is more likely to help or harm working-class students.1
Although Sara's essay leaves this question unanswered, Yezierska returns to it in almost all of her work. In doing so, she inserts herself into an educational discourse that was taking place in the 1920s when her stories and novels were first published. It was a time of tremendous social and educational changes, including the turn-ofthe- century influx of millions of so-called new immigrants;2 the emergence of John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy of education; and, under the auspices of political and educational progressivism, a widespread push for Americanization of newcomers. As a writer keenly interested in Americanization and the immigrant experience, Yezierska frames much of her work as a response to these trends. This is not to say that she wrote primarily for an audience of scholars or education experts; her work was popular fiction, much of it melodrama and romance. But she also participated in public and scholarly discourse about education-publishing, for instance, a scathing review of her former mentor (and erstwhile lover) John Dewey's Democracy and Education in which she claims that his lifeless prose would alienate the working-class readers that...