Blast From The Past

If you've never heard of Anzia Yezierska, she was a renowned Jewish novelist famous for stories about the life of Jewish immigrants on New York's Lower East Side in the 1920s. Her book of autobiographical short stories, Hungry Hearts, was made into a major motion picture, and her sudden rise to fame earned her the label "the sweatshop Cinderella." The film Hungry Hearts would have been lost to the ages were it not for the National Center for Jewish Film, which restored it and added it to its collection--the biggest repository of Jewish-themed films outside of Israel. And its thanks to NCJF that we were able to use Hungry Hearts in our documentary. Anzia's sudden fall from fame into poverty because of the Depression provided the perfect entry point into the story of the Federal Writers' Project, a sort of reverse Cinderella story, and we could have not brought Anzia to life so vividly without NCJF and Hungry Hearts. We owe them a debt of gratitude for preserving this invaluable part of our national history. Check out the excerpt of Anzia from Soul, and visit NCJF's site, they have an amazing collection of films and resources.