‘I Want for to Be a Person’ : HOW I FOUND AMERICA: Collected Stories of Anzia Yezierska, <i> Introduction by Vivian Gornick (Persea Books: $24.95; 336 pp.)</i>

Anzia Yezierska was an immigrant girl who worked in sweat shops, who suffered the hunger and the poverty of the Lower East Side in the early years of this century. She had a fiercely passionate nature, a desire to better herself, to have an education, to live in dignity and decency.

She yearned for the America of her dreams where she would not be lonely, where she would be respected for herself, accepted as a stranger and welcomed to her new land. She accosts a teacher: “I want for to be a person.” To her, being a person meant being an American, with an education, without the grime of hard labor and the depredations of hunger.

Books that she published include “The Bread Givers,” “The Open Cage” and “Red Ribbon on a White Horse,” a memoir. Having written a widely read book, “The Hungry Hearts,” she went to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter. She rose from the rankest poverty to the wild riches of a newly opened society. She was dizzy from her flight upward. She was doomed to be apart, lonely, wherever she went. She was not a success writing for the movies and returned to New York, where she lived to an old age, never having fulfilled her dream or found her way.

Her story is not an untypical immigrant tale. The difference is that she wrote it down, that she was possessed with a burning need to write, to witness her life, to seek redemption and recognition and an end to isolation through the printed page.

We have several witnesses of this difficult and amazing passage of Jews into America. Henry Roth and Michael Gold are among those whom we read today. They are male.

Anzia Yezierska is among the few female voices we have. Her stories spill over with the hatred of bosses, the lack of bread, the hard hours to earn a penny, the fear of landlords, the cruelty of charity ladies. Over and over again her heroines fall in love with some representative of the Gentile world--cool, educated, controlled--and they are rebuffed, disappointed, ignored, teased or despised.

She tells us of rebuffs as a child by her father, by teachers and sweatshop operators, of her later rejections as a writer and as a woman. (Vivian Gornick states in her interesting introduction that Yezierska did in fact marry for a brief time, and have a child whom she later abandoned.) She writes of the pain of hunger and the excruciating anguish of mothers who cannot feed their children and who turn in anger against these very children. She writes of the contempt of the outside world for the immigrant who could not keep as clean or as orderly as was expected in the American environment.

Her character Hanneh Breineh, who appears in several different stories, is a woman who rages at her fate and curses everyone around, including her children. In her story “The Fat of the Land,” when Hanneh’s children make it in America and live on Fifth Avenue, they are ashamed of their mother and her greenhorn ways. She now suffers their contempt and indifference. She becomes a homeless person, literally and symbolically, because she belongs nowhere.

Hanneh’s inability to cross the bridge from the shtetl to the Golden Land with her soul intact, with her family together, with even the smallest degree of happiness, is an accurate description of the fate of many Jewish women whose strength and sheer nerve kept the family together but whose culture and upbringing left them out of their children’s future.

Yezierska writes of the bitterness that comes with poverty. In the story “The Lost ‘Beautifulness,’ ” Hanneh Hayyeh skimps and saves to paint her kitchen so that it will look like the kitchen of the Gentile woman whose laundry she does. Her landlord raises the rent and eventually she is evicted; she leaves the apartment in a shambles.

Another story, “The Free Vacation House,” tells of the fury of a young mother whom the charity people send to the country for a week with her children; they keep her in the back of the house, have rules that are intrusive and offensive and strip her of her dignity because of her poverty.

All the stories are rich with a primitive energy that rises with volcanic force from the deeply felt, the urgently experienced. We read them startled by their conviction and their sincerity. We are angered, too, by the circumstances that prompted them. The dirt and the disease, the overcrowding and the neediness, the failure of the religious men to earn bread and the failure of the women to stand up to their male oppressors in the home and in the sweatshops.

These stories remind us that the “world of our fathers” included mothers, and that the success story of Jews in America had a dark underside.

Yezierska herself had only a rudimentary education and this affected her writing. She is never subtle or controlled. She shouts everything. She telegraphs plot and she lectures the readers. She often is without specifics, and her characters act out a kind of propaganda art that today seems unsophisticated. All emotions are reported at top volume, and she slights the details that would bring her situations or characters more sharply into focus.

Her woman always are desperate. At the end of reading this collection, I felt as if I had watched someone tearing out all their hair, leaving behind bloody patches of scalp. The Yiddish intonations and literal translations make the words blunt and sometimes thick where lightness would help.

Nevertheless, Yezierska has made a significant contribution to our knowledge of the immigrant’s world. She tells the tale of the immigrant girl who sells her only possession, her grandmother’s petticoat, to reach America, only to find that her journey is just beginning and will have no happy ending.

Poverty makes no one eloquent, and lack of opportunity to learn leaves its scars. Yezierska, despite her literary faults, is a remarkable writer, a recorder of a history that still is attached to us, that still follows us like a shadow.