Anzia Yezierska wrote from experience then worked hard to make sure her work found an audience. Then a new audience found her Illustration by Katy Lemay; Image source: LOC In the 1890s, the crowded Jewish enclave on New York’s Lower East Side , filled with horses, pushcarts, clotheslines and Hebrew shop signs, drew fascination and derision from the American public. This immigrant community was considered exotic and creative; it was also decried as squalid and foreign. At the same time that uptown audiences were flocking to Yiddish theaters, novelist Henry James was writing with alarm about the “Hebrew conquest of New York.” Growing up in this crucible of a new America, a Jewish immigrant named Anzia Yezierska, through sheer force of personality, would overcome prejudice to become one of the Roaring Twenties’ most popular authors, one whom a New York newspaper dubbed “Queen of the Ghetto.” Yezierska’s writing gave voice to the ghetto’s dwellers, as she documented the struggles, particularly of immigrant…