Bread Givers

If you want to FEEL how a protagonist feels in a story, then this is a story for you. If you can read about the sad lives of the Smolinsky women--at the hand of a selfish "holy man" who deserves a BAD father of the year award every year--without feeling enraged, sad, sympathetic, and wanting to go back in time and strangle a few people (men), well...I can't imagine you can. It's an engaging read, not a happy jaunt but educational in its historic telling of New York in the 1920s through the eyes of a young Jewish girl/woman who is NOT taking it lying down.

I didn't think much of the title/plot when I picked the book up, but it is a better story than you'd think, and written by Yezierska with all the nuance of the language at that time--you need "only to look on" this book to be charmed.

The Long Way to Independence: A Book Review of Bread Givers

Persea,2003,336pp.,$9.99
Anzia Yezierska ISBN:0892552905

Wanting independence and freedom is everyone's wish. Everyone wants to live their own life without anyone controlling it. However, it is not that way for Sara Smolinsky. With her controlling and old world like father, Sara struggles to gain independence. Holding all her anger in as she watches each one of her sister fall into the traps of their father, Sara plans to make a stop. She will not and could not let her father do the same thing to her as he did to her sisters.

I thought this book was an amazing book because it talks about how it is like living like an immigrant that just moved to America. As I read this book, I felt so much emotions. From happiness to sadness, anger to calmness. This book has many description that made me think as if I was living with Sara.

The way the author describes their father made me really dislike him. It was interesting to see some Jewish culture in the book. This book made me think of how culture can affect a person and why they act this way. Sara's father thought that he had to do what he did because of his religion and the fact that he is a rabbi made it more important.

I would recommend this book to everyone. Not only can you relate this to history and immigration, but you can also relate it to the desire for independence.

A pretty accurate portrayal of the Jewish immigrant life in early 20th century New York. That being said, and even understanding the culture of the day, it was hard not to get really annoyed (to put it mildly) with the characters - the ridiculously selfish, over-bearing father and the poor me attitude of each of the females in the book.

I first read Bread Givers in the late 1980s, and I don't think I had the life experience or enough understanding of the immigrant experience in America to fully grasp how powerful the story is, even though it was part of a feminist literature course that included near-contemporaries of Yezierska like Ann Petry and Nella Larsen. Then, I read it as a novel about father-daughter conflict (which it definitely is); this time around, the wider implications about women's work, poverty, and cultural dissonance in the "New World", both of America and the 20th century, were much clearer to me. It's obvious why this author (and later, this novel, with the help of Columbia University professor Alice Kessler-Harris, who wrote the foreword and helped it get re-published) experienced a resurgence of interest in the 1960s and 1970s, as women were expanding their definition of freedom and equality within the women's movement, the labor movement, and the Civil Rights movement. Yezierska was a pioneer on all those fronts, as this compelling, semi-autobiographical story demonstrates. My book group had a very strong discussion of the book and the issues it raises. Highly recommended.

This is a novel about a poor Jewish immigrant family in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1920’s. The father is devoted to studying the Torah and does not work. So his wife and four daughters are expected to provide for him. The main character and narrator is the youngest daughter who rebels against her father after seeing him chase away three men her sisters loved and then arranging what turned out to be bad marriages for all of them. The daughters range from large and homely (the father calls her ‘the burden bearer’) to beautiful and self-centered. The father gets the cream, the best soup, and often, the only piece of meat.



How poor are they? As a young girl, one of the main character’s chores include hunting through ash bins on the street looking for tiny bits of coal. They have one rag that serves as towel for all of them. Her mother yells at her for not peeling the potato skins thin enough. They brush their teeth with ashes using a common toothbrush.

The father is always spouting off verses telling the women of the house that “only through a man has a woman an existence“ and that “No girl can live without a father or a husband to look out for her.” The youngest girl rebels and goes off on her own to get a job. Her father disowns her and eventually (after six years of work and study drudgery) she finishes college and becomes a teacher. All this time she has no love in her life; no contact with her family other than through letters, and no girlfriends because she has no money for fashion and no time to hang out making friends.

She asks a dean at the college a key question: “Why is it that when a nobody wants to get to be a somebody she’s got to make herself terribly hard, when people like you who are born high up can keep all their feelings and get along so naturally well with everybody?”



The narrator’s goal, she tells us several times, is to “become a person.”

The language is interesting, even odd at times, because we don’t know if it a translation, or written by an author with imperfect English, or, most likely I suppose it reflects the imperfect English spoken by the family at home. Here are some phrases thought, not spoken, by the narrator: “From him it hollered money, like a hundred cash registers ringing up the dollars.” “I want some day to make myself for a person and come among people.” “It smelled from him yards away, the fish he was selling.” “When I met him at the corner he was blowing from himself like a millionaire.”

The author, who grew up at the time of this story and in this neighborhood, wrote a few novels and collections of short stories which brought her some fame and money. But her work fell out of vogue and she died in poverty. Alice Kessler-Harris, a history professor at Columbia, is credited with brining her work back into notice. She provides an extensive foreword and introduction telling us about the author’s life and to what extent the story is autobiographical. Although the story is fiction, the writer of the introduction tells us that the author and the main character are “emotionally interchangeable.”



A good story - a classic American story of an immigrant (Old World vs. New) pulling herself up by her bootstraps. An inspirational story for women, especially young women.

Top photo of Orchard St., the main shopping district of the Jewish community on the Lower East Side in the 1920's from static01.nyt.com/images
Middle photo from www.nycvintageimages.com
The author from www.azquotes.com/picture-quotes

If you are American, and probably even if you are not, you have heard this story before: determined immigrant leaves the Old World behind to seek their fortune in the New; working their way out of a life of crushing poverty, they encounter the prejudices of those better-established than they are, and struggle to find a balance between honoring the traditions of their family while at the same time becoming acculturated to their new, adopted country. Anzia Yezierska's The Bread Givers presents this archetypal plot-line with little to no variation: the specifics of the Smolinsky family's Polish, Orthodox Jewish background and their life on Hester street in New York City's Lower East Side tenements, let alone the characterization of individual family members, often seem secondary to the overwhelming familiarity of the plot. I found this to be particularly true due to Yezierska's simplistic, episodic style of narration, which skips from event to event, sometimes encapsulating whole years in two or three pages, and allowing most characters to remain mere sketches rather than rounded individuals.

Given these initial reactions, though, there are a few things that distinguish The Bread Givers from other versions of the "immigrant experience novel." Surprisingly unusual, especially given its 1925 publication date, is the simple fact that Yezierska's narrator protagonist, Sara Smolinsky, is a woman. Reading of Sara's clashes with her Orthodox rabbi father, I was reminded of such modern immigration tales as Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory—in both of which, as in The Bread Givers, the female protagonist's primary point of conflict is with the traditions and assumptions of her family or culture of origin, rather than with the dominant American culture. Sara, for example, manages to win over her initially aloof professors and college classmates, but making peace with her own father is much more challenging. This is, of course, also true of many immigrant tales with male protagonists (Chaim Potok's The Chosen leaps to mind), but I wonder if it's a more common theme in those centering around women. Even in The Chosen, Danny has only to fight against his father's prescriptiveness, which stems from a cultural assumption that he is too precious, too valuable to make his own decisions. Sara Smolinsky, on the other hand, struggles against cultural assumptions that she is worth nothing, has no value of her own outside of serving men:

"God put people on earth to get married and have children yet. It says in the Torah, Breed and multiply. A woman's highest happiness is to be a man's wife, the mother of a man's children. You're not a person at all. What do you make from yourself? Why do you hold yourself better than the whole world?"

Indeed, this concept of "a person" is one of the more interesting linguistic specifics in The Bread Givers, and forms a thematic thread outlining Sara's attempts to clarify her own goals in life. She wants to be "a person" in her own eyes and the eyes of the world, and perceives her home of origin—a cramped tenement on Hester Street—to be below the "bottom starting point" on the road to this goal. In some contexts, "a person" seems to mean simple humanity, as in Reb Smolinksy's quote above. In this sense, Sara's comment about her family's living quarters is strictly true: they are living in de-humanizing conditions. But "a person" or "a person among people" can also mean more than this. When little Sara goes in search of herring to re-sell cheaply, she insists on paying for them: "I want to go into business like a person. I must buy what I got to sell." Likewise, upon leasing her first flat away from her family, she thinks of the closing door as "the bottom starting point of becoming a person." After her graduation from college, she muses "How grand it felt to lean back in my chair, a person among people, and order anything I wanted from the menu." Being a "person," then, relates to economic and lived independence—the ability to assert one's own selfhood. It also relates to self-respect; "a person among people" doesn't make money or secure lodgings any way she can, but does it in a manner that lets her respect herself. A real "person" is also respected by those around her, accepted and valued by others who also live up to the standard of person-hood. To Reb Smolinsky, this means allying his family with others further up the social ladder:

"The impudence of that long-haired beggar—wanting to push himself into my family! I'm a person among people. How would I look before the world if I introduced such a hunger-squeezed nobody for a son-in-law?"

For Sara, on the other hand, it means self-actualization, and finding a community that values the same things she does, that shares her own estimation of her own value:

"Don't worry. I'll even get married some day. But to marry myself to a man that's a person, I must first make myself for a person.

Fully "being a person," I suppose, means at the most basic level that one matters, that one asserts one's own value, and that one has succeeded in finding a community that agrees with that assertion.

Another thought-provoking element of The Bread Givers was its depiction of Rabbi Smolinsky's self-justification for living off the labors of his wife and daughters. Despite my utter secularism, I must say that the value placed on textual study and reasoned, informed argument is something I find pretty inspirational about the tradition of Judaism. I may not restrict my own textual analysis to scripture (or even, I may as well admit, include scripture in the texts I study), but I do feel strongly the spiritual importance, in my own life, of keeping sacred some time to study, to think and reason, to engage with texts, to discuss and interpret. In order for that activity to remain sacred, however, I feel it must either be self-supported, or supported consensually by one's whole community (a congregational ministry model, in which the rabbi or minister is presumably giving something of value BACK to the community supporting him or her—and let me just acknowledge that in my limited experience of modern-day rabbis and ministers, many are radically underpaid for the value they offer their congregations). Reb Smolinsky's self-satisfied assumption that he deserves to live off the sweat of his wife and daughters, while the only way he contributes to their spiritual well-being is to berate them with self-serving aphorisms, is therefore undeniably horrifying to me, as it becomes to Sara herself.

And I wonder if the mixture of "traditional" American values with Smolinsky's Orthodox background, make for a particularly violent collision. After all, the United States is known for fetishizing individualism, particularly male individualism, and particularly male individualism that manifests itself in monetary earnings. Americans, collectively, are obsessed with the notion of the "self-made man." When Americans come into contact with a culture or an individual that values knowledge, education, or artistic expression over self-earned income, we are often at a loss. Reb Smolinsky's case is more complex than this: he obviously does value wealth, and uses it as a yardstick to measure the worth of his daughter's suitors and others, but one gets the sense that this kind of value exists, for him, on one level, whereas he himself exists on a more rarefied plane. Whether this is a genuine belief of his or a mere self-justification for his hypocrisy, it's severely problematic, especially since he is unwilling or unable to acknowledge that others may not share his own priorities. Sara, for example, has moments of admiration for her father's dedication to his Torah studies, but he is largely incapable of admiration for her own drive to educate herself, let alone of respecting her on her own terms.

So um, not sure how long I'm going to keep this up, but...

BREAD GIVERS

Hibbledy hobbledy
Sara Smolinsky, she
Worked her way up from the
Lower East Side;

Fighting her patriarch's
Ultra-misogynist
Hellfire and brimstone helped
Toughen her hide.

I enjoyed this book but must say that it was rifled with typos which I found annoying. It deals with Sara Smolinsky's struggle to defy the expectations of her parents and, particularly, those of her father. As I began to write this review I read the biographic sketch of the author's life and realize that the story parallels in many ways the author's life. I am humbled by Sara/Anzia's courage and grateful the extent made life easier for women of my generation.

"Wow." That was how I felt after I first finished this novel. I regret selling the book after I bought it for one of my classes. It was the first time I read a book in a long time about immigration. The novel follows the life of a Jewish girl who comes to America. She lives in New York City and struggles with her faith.

Most novels that cover the loss of faith focus on tragic loss. Meanwhile, Sara is unsure about her faith due to tradition. At the start of the book, Sara is only ten years old and the rest that follows is her coming of age.

Since the novel takes place in the 1920s there is a different type of clash of culture. Tradition should be left in the old world. She wants to grow up and to be happy. Sara wants to become a teacher yet she is unable to because she is a woman.

The author, Anzia Yezierska, does an excellent job at depicting the way Judaism views women. Sara is forced to watch the fate of her mother along with her sisters when she instead she fights for a different life. When Sara leaves for school to try to escape her life, she faces American culture. The contrast is fascinating and yet tragic all at the same time.

I have never read a book more miserable and depressing as this. If it's possible to say, I mean that in the best way possible. Sara struggles from day to day life because of her family. There isn't tragedy as in death compared to a lot of books. Yet there is the tragedy and hardships of Sara doing her best to find herself.

Bread Givers is said to be slightly based on Anzia Yezierska who provides her personal views on the topic. She was born in Poland then raised in America. Therefore, her views and opinions on such a subject are more interesting/enlightening due to real life experience rather than painstaking research. There is a certain passion in her words. The style is simple yet captivating as she delves into the reasons behind her culture and decisions in life while going through the motions.