Lies Her Mother Told Us: Louise Levitas Henriksen's Critique of Anzia Yezierska's Autobiography

Anzia Yezierska's autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950), was the subject of a transition in reader reception from its publication in 1950 to the 1970s and 1980s. First received as the story of Yezierska's life, it was later perceived as fiction, in part because of significant differences between it and the facts of Yezierska's life. One of these was the omission of her daughter Louise from Red Ribbon. In this paper, I use Louis Levitas Henriksen's autobiography of her mother, Anzia Yezierska, A Writer's Life (1988), and her comments on Red Ribbon to shed light on these issues. I claim that Henriksen's biography of Yezierska is largely an attempt to rewrite her mother's life, and that her need to carry out this project is connected with her need to tell her own story. Rewriting her mother's life story allows her to write her own story, and in doing so she reinserts herself into the biography of the mother who omitted her from her autobiography.