This short story is about a mother who is trying to make her house 'beautiful' for the arrival of her son who is coming back from some sort of armed services. As Hannah Heyyer is so proud of her painting of her kitchen, she decides to show it off to her friends and then her landlord. This then backfires when her landlord raises her rent as he believes that the painting of her kitchen increases the value of the flat, but knows that she will be unable to pay it as she is poor and can barely pay the rent as it is. Hannah tries to raise a bit more money with the help of the woman who she works for, Mrs Preston. Even though she does start earning more money, the landlord puts her rent up again. After she realises that she will have to move out, she decides to trash the kitchen that she painted so to spite her landlord. The story ends with her son coming home from the army, but finds that is mother is now homeless and all of their belongings on the street.
The moral of this story seems to be that living in America for immigrants is not all it claims to be. The night before her eviction, Hannah says:
"Someone who got nothing but only money will come in here and get the pleasure from all this beautifulness that cost me the blood from my heart. Is this really America? What for was my Aby fighting? was it then only a dream - all these millions people from all lands and from all times, wishing and hoping and praying that America is? Did I wake myself from my dreaming to see myself back in the black times of Russia under the czar?"
This implies that the work done by immigrants to America is not recognised by the white Americans and they take what they want from them as they think they are better off. The 'beautifulness' of Hannah's kitchen could represent anything that immigrants found pleasure or were proud of as citizens of the US, and the rise in rent and her eviction could represent America taking that way from them as soon as it becomes valuable and not caring what the outcome is for them. Overall, I think Yezierska is trying to put across that the moral is that immigrants shouldn't expect to have a beautiful home and make money right away; making a life in America is a lot harder than stories of success make it out to be. Soap and Water:
'Soap and Water' is a story about a woman who is trying to earn a diploma to be a teacher, but it being denied it because of her rugged appearance. The teacher who is withholding her qualification keeps on repeating "soap and water are cheap. Anyone can be clean". This could imply that white Americans saw immigrants as being dirty and unkept and so didn't deserve to have such things as diplomas if they still looked like that. The story goes on to explain why she didn't have time to keep clean and looking nice; she had to work in a laundry in the evenings till late to earn money to pay for school and then get up early in the morning to go to her lessons. The story also delves into the womans past and how, even though she was a poor Russian immigrant, she could still go to college and get some sort of education. She says how she only became conscious of the way she looked when she went to college, as it was seen as college was more for the wealthy and well dressed. This may suggest that the moral of the story is that even if you can work hard to make it in America, you can still be looked down upon because you are not American and don't come from a wealthier background. This shows the difficulties that immigrants faced when moving to America and how isolated and pushed out they felt from the rest of society. This shows the other side of the story of coming to America, as it is mostly seen as a positive move with mostly positive outcomes.
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