Of Science and Excess: Jacob Riis, Anzia Yezierska, and the Modernist Turn in Immigrant Fiction

The beauty of looking into these places without actually being present there is that the excursionist is spared the vulgar sounds and odious scents and repulsive exhibition attendant on such personal examination.¹

Jacob Riis’s description of the “vicarious adventure” offered by photo-journalistic jaunts into the tenements of New York’s Lower East Side provides insight into his unique brand of sensory tourism in How the Other Half Lives (1890). Riis’s best-selling text—a thorough and sweeping documentation of urban poverty and an influential call for housing reform and urban development in New York at the turn of the century—also serves as perhaps the nation’s earliest form of “embedded” journalism. From midnight raids and candid photos to conversations and walks through pubs, alleys, and dark tenement hallways, Riis uses his curiously come-hither prose style and raw amateur photography skills to lead his middle-class American readers from the comfort and safety of their hearths to the darkest corners of the urban ghetto.²

A firm believer in “organized, systematic charity upon the evidence of my senses,” Riis adopts the tone of a tour guide leading a group of excursionists. But his language hardly spares readers from “the vulgar sounds and odious scents and repulsive exhibition attendant upon such a personal examination.” On this journey, readers are addressed as if they are walking alongside Riis on Cherry Street. They are commanded to mind their step, to look out for the children, to listen to the odious sounds of the tenement—hacking coughs that threaten contagion, squeaking hydrants unable to quench the “great thirst” of the tenement dwellers. Suddenly, amidst the warmth of American middle-class firesides, there are obstacles, there is darkness and disease, there is thirst and the wailing of children—the tenement has entered.³

Jacob Riis serves not only as a guide through these tenements, but also as a native informant. It is through his own immigrant perspective—as a native of Denmark who once lived in the slums he describes in his work—that readers are able to penetrate this world, not just as onlookers observing from a safe distance, but as participants who allow it to seep into their cognitive space. The ghetto, translated and made visible through the prose and photographic evidence provided by the authenticating presence of Riis, awakens readerly sensation and experience. By smelling, tasting, and feeling with his body the things readers cannot feel with theirs from such a “safe distance,” Riis serves as a sensory translator of the tenements. Through the use of prose and photographs that reach across the cultural divide by capitalizing on the universal affective bonds of cognitive and bodily perception (the sound of a cough, the smell of stale bread, the sight of a small child playing), Riis humanizes this “other half,” the very people he describes as living in the most inhuman conditions.

This transport, this kind of sensory stirring, is of course one of the most vital and successful components of Riis’s unique call for social reform. As readers “picture” how the other half lives—how “these people” smell, how they sound, what they eat, what they look like, how it might feel to rub up against them in the street—they are no longer as far removed as they were before reading Riis’s document. The other half has made its way from the tenement into the private, domestic space of the white, middle-class American reader.

Riis’s narrative also serves as an assimilationist rite of passage of its own, bringing Riis from those darkened outskirts of American tenement culture from which he, too, emerged, into a position of cultural and professional expertise, an “anti-conquest” hero on American soil. Mary Louise Pratt famously coined this term to describe the curious position of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century western traveler who goes abroad to name and tame uncharted territory, not in the name of war or empire, but for the noble and lofty aims of science and progress—yet armed with the...