Bread Givers is a coming of age story set in the 1920s. As the novel begins Sara Smolinsky is a 10-year-old girl whose family has immigrated to New York City from Poland. Her father is an Orthodox rabbi who feels that it is up to his four daughters and his wife to support him as he studies the Torah.
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Bread Givers is a coming of age story set in the 1920s. As the novel begins Sara Smolinsky is a 10-year-old girl whose family has immigrated to New York City from Poland. Her father is an Orthodox rabbi who feels that it is up to his four daughters and his wife to support him as he studies the Torah.
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Hester Street on New York City's Lower East Side has become emblematic of the American Jewish immigrant experience. It is celebrated in a 1975 film based upon a story by Abraham Cahan and in many works of immigrant literature, including this outstanding novel of 1925, "Bread Givers" by Anzia Yezierska. Yezierska (1880 -- 1970) was born in Poland and came to the United States with her family just before the 20th Century. Her father was a learned, Orthodox scholar of the Torah and Talmud. Yezierska was a born storyteller and writer and "Bread Givers" is an imaginative novel drawn loosely from her experiences, heavily embellished and dramatized.
Her novel tells the story of a young girl who chafes under Orthodoxy and under her controlling father and who seeks her own life and, as she says to become a person. Yezierska's work was forgotten for many years but was revisited in the 1970s with the rise of feminism. The book is told in the first person by Sara Smolinksy, beginning when she is about ten and continuing through her young womanhood to about the age of twenty-seven. Sara is the youngest of four daughters of a rabbi, who devotes full-time to the study of Jewish texts and brings in no income. The four daughters and the wife struggle with menial jobs to support the rabbi and the family at a level of poverty.
The novel describes in no uncertain terms a familial arrangement that today would be called patriarchal. The father is controlling, bullying of his family and forces bad marriages on each of the first three daughters, after each has had love interests elsewhere. Young Sara rebels and leaves the family. She takes a miserable room by herself and struggles to take college preparatory courses to become a teacher. With great effort and sacrifice she is able to pursue her education and her dream of independence. She remains lonely for family and for love and male companionship.
"Bread Givers" is a passionate, emotive, melodramatic novel. It has the feel of immigrant life in the fractured English of its characters, in its portrayal of claustrophobic, crowded tenements and rooming houses, of pushcarts and peddlers, and of poverty. The father in this book who devotes his days to religious study is highly atypical as the book shows many male characters who strive hard to escape poverty and to find material success. The book also shows poets, dreamers, and scholars among the children of the ghetto.
American Jewish literature and life often dwell upon gender and feminist related themes, and this is certainly the case in Yezierska's novel. Reb Smolinsky many times expresses what he presents as a Jewish textual account of the relationship between the sexes in which a relationship with a man is necessary for the fulfillment of a woman. His wife and four daughters disagree in their ways, but only Sara has the strong will of her father to rebel and leave. The book has many feminist elements, but it would be unfair to see it as a feminist tract. There is a great deal in the book about the need for love, family and sexuality as opposed to (or in addition to) independence and career. Sara learns that independence and career are not enough to make her happy or to fulfill her dream of becoming a person. The book captures in its emotive writing something of the passions and ambiguities in the relations between the sexes.
The book explores issues even more basic that relations between the sexes. The book strongly rejects the Jewish Orthodoxy practiced by Reb Smolinsky. It also questions the relentless pursuit of money and of material success practiced as a means to escape the poverty of the ghetto by most of the characters with the partial exception of the Reb. The book suggests the importance of learning, reflection, and wisdom which may perhaps be found and practiced in many ways. There is some sympathy after all for Reb Smolinsky and his devotion to a life of prayer and study. Still, I found the book largely celebrates American secular life as liberating and as offering individual persons the opportunity to choose for themselves the life they find meaningful and rewarding.
I have read other literature set on the Lower East Side, including works by Abraham Cahan, mentioned above, Henry Roth, Charles Reznikoff, and Michael Gold. I have no family from that area and have never even visited, but I always feel a deep tug of familiarity and recognition. I felt at home with Anzia Yezierska and loved her novel. It brought home to me Jewish immigrant life together with an appreciation for the breadth and precious nature of the American experience.
Robin Friedman
BPhillips
Jan 30, 2010
Essential Reading
Bread Givers is essential reading for feminist scholars, historians, Jewish studies scholars, students of immigrant literature, and anyone with a heart. It is one of the classic novels on early-20th century Eastern European immigration to the United States.
I absolutely loved this book; its images are inelible.
rejoyce
Oct 3, 2007
Jewish Patriarchy and Womanhood
Anzia Yezierska's The Breadgivers is most valuable as a fictional account of Jewish immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side in the 1920s as told from the female perspective. The father, a Torah scholar, is a patriarchal tyrant who beats each of his daughters into submission with his unending needs. The writing is naturalistic and without frills. A companion volume to Henry Roth's Call It Sleep.
