Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland and emigrated with her family to the Jewish Lower East Side of New York City in 1890 when she was nine years old.  By the 1920s she had risen out of poverty and become a successful writer of stories, novels-all autobiographical-and a semi-fictional autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (Persea). Her novel Bread Givers (Persea) is considered a classic of Jewish American fiction and has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies since its reissue in 1975.  Persea also publishes How I Found America: Collected Stories and The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (a selection of stories, excerpts from Red Ribbon on a White Horse, and uncollected stories on old age).   Yezierska died in 1970.

Fanya, a young Polish Jew, living and working on the Lower East Side, attends a lecture by a famous educator, Henry Scott, that seems meant specifically for her.  Scott calls America "the meeting ground of all the nations of the world" and exhorts Americans to "blaze a trail to a future where people would be judged not by membership in a group  . . . but as individuals on their own merits."   On an impulse, Fanya goes to Scott's university office and boldly asks him to read the autobiography she has written. After a highly charged exchange, the rational, older, American professor is won over by the young, passionate, Jewish immigrant. She is his fascination; he is her "symbol of all she could never be." Scott becomes her mentor, leading Fanya to success as an author.  He also expresses romantic interest in her, but ultimately rebuffs her socially. Although she is crushed, instead of returning to the ghetto to live among "her own people," as so many before her have done, Fanya chooses to advance further into America. She buys a house in a quiet New England village, where, eventually, another newcomer becomes an unexpected soul mate-and she prepares to make a home.