Reviews for Love in the Promised Land

The average rating for Love in the Promised Land based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-10-15 00:00:00 Scott Mcdonald I was a big fan of Anzia Yezierska in my twenties. She wrote about leaving Judaism, and I was gradually embracing it, but since she always felt incomplete after leaving, I related to her. Not only did I read a fair bit of her fiction, I read her biography and wrote a paper about her in college. So the story of how educational philosopher John Dewey made her career and had a flirtation/almost-affair with her was not new to me. In fact, this book was cited as the source for that information in the biography that was the main source of my college paper. So I figured that if I’d read one, I didn’t need the other. So what got me to finally read the book after all these decades was not Anzia Yezierska. It was John Dewey. This summer, I was in Burlington, Vermont, and I met some lovely college professors in that university town. They happened to mention a colleague of theirs who is an expert on John Dewey. Unbeknownst to me, John Dewey is Burlington’s proudest native son. (Bernie is its proudest adopted son.) I told these professors about Dewey’s unconsummated love affair with Anzia Yezierska, and they were excited to know something to stump their colleague with. I recommended this book (who could forget its catchy title), and having done that, it felt like high time I read the book myself. By turns, the book gives over the biographies of Dewey and Yezierska, brings the two of them together in the middle, and then records their separate paths into old age. Another reviewer said that she was disappointed that the “love” in the book amounted to about one chapter, but that was the nature of it. For Dewey, it was a mere “interlude” in his life, and we only know about it because Yezierska told the story repeatedly. Really, she milked that connection for all it was worth. Dewey was famous when they first met, but because he promoted her writing, she ended up more famous than he. . . at least for a little while. She might be more widely read than he, too. The book gives an example of his prose, and it’s vague, dull, and academic. But secretly, he wrote poetry, and his love poems are presumed to have been about his forbidden passion for Anzia. (Both were married.) I’d imagine that if that expert on Dewey read this book, he’d find the biography rather cursory. The biographical sections on Anzia Yezierska didn’t teach me anything new. But because I knew so little about Dewey, I rather enjoyed the book. It’s a good thing I read about Jane Addams and her settlement movement earlier this year because she and Dewey were friends and colleagues. But oddly enough, knowing what I do about Yezierska, who would stretch the truth for the sake of the narrative, the book has made me wonder if the affair was as big a deal as she made it out to be. Did she really love him or was she just name-dropping? It’s hard to know, but it is an interesting literary and historical tidbit.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-02-19 00:00:00 Jackson Tyler Yezierska and Dewey's "affair" (maybe consummated and maybe not) only lasted a few months, and I was ultimately not convinced that it was worth a whole book. It's telling that the affair itself is the subject of just one chapter in this book, which otherwise alternates between biographical chapters on Dewey and Yezierska. The short-lived relationship clearly had an influence on Yezierska's writing -- one of her well-worn motifs is the passionate immigrant in love with but ultimately disappointed by a cold Anglo-Saxon intellectual man -- so I think that any biography of Yezierska should definitely include a chapter on the relationship. I couldn't tell from Dearborn's book that the affair had much influence on Dewey's life; Dearborn's argument that it was so important seemed like an overreach to me, given the evidence she cites. I was also kind of annoyed by -- what I took as -- Dearborn's sentimentalizing about Yezierska and her damning Dewey with faint praise. At the same time, I give the book three rather than two stars because I did learn valuable material about each of these important Americans.