Remarkable book. The style is often melodramatic--and yet the emotions are so thoroughly felt and convincing that the melodrama is transcended. The narrative seems to be written in a naive Yiddish-inflected English... yet that inflection drops imperceptibly away as Sara, the protagonist, educates herself out of the impoverished Jewish Lower East Side life of her early years, goes to college, and becomes a teacher. Each of her sisters, by contrast, becomes trapped by marriage (even the one who marries rich), and all of them, including Sara, have forever to deal with the terrifying power that their tyrannical, ultra-pious father holds over them. Impoverishment in the broadest sense seems to be Yezierska's subject--whether material, emotional, or intellectual. Sara's attempt to breathe a freer air is genuinely heroic and greatly costly.

I read this in eighth grade English, the year we read books about monsters and girls coming of age, an odd dual theme for the year, no?

Anzia Yezierka has told a story as fresh in 2018 as it was in 1925, recounting the struggles of a young daughter of Russian Empire immigrants to assimilate and grow into her own personhood. All of the pain and sorrow, as well as a bit of joy here and there, as Sara Smolinsky finds and lives her patch of independence in America.

Lovely.

This family left Poland in the 1920s and resettled in the Lower East Side of New York City.

They, like many immigrants, came here with nothing.

This is the story of the interplay between an ultra-orthodox and domineering father, his wife, and four daughters, narrated by the youngest.

The father is consumed by prayer and less concerned about the well-being of his girls as they navigate adolescence and young womanhood.

Rather, he will decide the fates of his children through the oral and written laws conceived five thousand years ago.

Sarah, the protagonist, unlike her older sisters, wages a personal war against the old values of the fanatical religious Polish shtetls and those of her papa.

It is not a Hollywood-type story but steeped in realism.

Kudos to this authoress.

I found the novel, albeit autobiographical, wonderful in its innocent conveyance.

Highly enjoyable, relatable, and recommended to any reader.

This book was assigned reading as part of a course on immigration policy within the US. The professor recommended it highly and told the class that it was a good read and that we would all find ourselves absorbed in the book once we got into it. Truth was spoken.
Bread Givers is the story of Russian Jew immigrant Sara Smolinsky and her desire and struggle to achieve the pinnacle of what it means to be an American; the opportunity to invest one's self in individual pursuits.
As with any book I read through the foreword and introduction, written by Alice Kessler-Harris, and she tells of how she discovered Yezierska when she was a grad student and became entranced by her. I was intrigued by her passion for the text and encouraged further to read (I also had a deadline, the test was in one day and I hadn't started the book). Kessler-Harris uses the adjective "powerful" to describe the writing style, and it was appropriate. I became so engrossed in the book that I finished in one day (not a huge feat, the book is only 297 pages).

After the first chapter I was hooked. I felt the hunger of her family as they scrounged for food and warmth, the shame of being impoverished, and the singular hope of Sara's brave spirit to live free from the shackles of oppressive patriarchy. I wanted to throttle her sisters and I found Yezierska's adjective of "dumb" accurate to describe the broken, spiritless, acquiescence of her sisters and mother. In our in class discussion the professor mentioned the "necessary cooperation of women for any paternalism to exist" and I hoped silently that at least a few of the women in the classroom fully understood the comment. Line after line I found myself silently railing against the self entitled patriarch, and while I understand that much of his faults were enabled by social constructs I could not completely sympathize with his position. I was reminded of my own grandfather who had as much fault in his own death as the diabetes and strokes that were listed on his death certificate, the same sense of imperial entitlement. I was also reminded of him when Sara comes home from college to find that her mother's feet have rotted away from gangrene, and her refusal to have them removed to save her life. I had to take a few moments to reflect on my own past. I celebrated her Sara's strength of conviction to continue with her studies in the face of hunger, isolation, and discouragement. I felt like I was beside her in her dingy basement room covered in filth and lit by candle. I celebrated when she sees through the guise of the predatory suitor, I laugh knowingly as she falls for improbable crushes and I enjoy her triumphant completion of college and return to New York as a teacher. Her resolution with her father and stepmother left me a bit confused, perhaps I am a bit too hard. Then again I see much of my own family in the enabled, manipulative, and yet dependent father. So many emotions and so much commentary on social constructs.
The fact that this book was written in the 1920's and that it was not immediately recognized as a masterpiece of literary work, says much about American society in the turn of the twentieth century. Perhaps it is my American self that cries out for Sara to come among us and take her place as one of the brave and free. I hear her desire to stretch her wings to their greatest span and to live without imposed restraints of social obligation, because that is what it means to be free to live as you will. Understanding that celebration of the self is a celebration of life. Anzia Yezierska, I take my hat off to you. Well done madam, well done.

Very interesting in terms of Jewish-American history, feminist history, and cultural representation in literature; not so great in terms of plot and character.

I picked up Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska because my daughter recommended it. It is enjoyable, easily read, and only a few tedious faults keep it from being a great read. My daughter said it was how it ends that moved her, and I have to agree.

It’s from the viewpoint of Sara Smolinsky, a young girl growing up in New York under the (melodramatically tooled) authority of her rabbi father and mercurial mother. Sara’s father is a seemingly despicable man who imagines that others must provide for him because he has given over his life to the study of the Torah. Yezierska has no understanding or sympathy for him and displays him as both a tyrant (running off his daughters’ suitors) and a buffoon (squandering their money on a sham-grocery).

The mother is more sympathetic (at one point travelling hours to bring a feather-bed to her daughter), complaining loudly about her husband, but remaining with this learned man at whose touch she inexplicably (to Sara) lights up and smiles.

Her three older sisters are very different, but shallow, characters, that each have a single strength, and it is those strengths that bring them down.

Bessie is the dutiful ‘burden bearer’, who works her fingers to the bone and turns over every dollar she earns to her smirking father. She’s pawned off to a fishmonger by her father and enters into a miserable existence of selling fish and raising hellion stepchildren.

Mashah is the pretty one, always looking at herself in the mirror and contributing little to the family’s well-being. Her sole romantic interest is rejected by the father (because he plays the piano on the Sabbath) and rather than defy him, submits to a slavery agreement with the first well-to-do bachelor her father can pick out. Naturally, her new husband turns out to be a charlatan, and Mashah enters into a miserable existence as a poor, abused wife.

Fania represents dreams and hopes where duty and beauty fail. She falls in love with a poet, who of course is rejected by her father for some reason or another, and is sold into a miserable existence with a clothes merchant on the other side of the country who naturally turns out to be a gambler and doesn’t care about his wife. Or something like that. And of course, her father picked him out.

It took an effort to read through the ‘fall of the sisters’ part without rolling my eyes (I actually never succeeded). The results were predictable, and it irritated me to see the sisters give up so easily. Maybe that is Yezierska’s point. But both Sara and the author seem to take a bare-naked glee in the sisters’ misfortunes, parading each in front of the reader at strategic points in the book, possibly to serve as a cautionary reminder of something or other. The common theme is that one by one, the sisters fall, each a victim of . . . a man.

In fact, if you haven’t noticed by now, much of this book would bring an (unfamiliar) tear to the eye of a man-hating Dickens-channeling 1960’s feminist. It’s tiresome. After a temporary romantic interest in a rich and handsome suitor whom she rebuffs, Sara thinks: “I want knowledge. How, like a starved thing in the dark, I’m driven to reach for it. A flash, and all lights up! Almost I seem to touch the fiery centre of life! And there! It was only a man. And I’m left in the dark again.”

Yowtch.

Sara finally leaves her parents and sets out on her own, working in a laundry and going to school. She eventually perseveres through college and becomes a teacher. She begins to realize there’s a lot of her father in her, and that confuses her even more, at one point plaintively asking a favored instructor “why is it that when a nobody wants to get to be somebody she’s got to make herself terribly hard, when people like you who are born high up can keep all their kind feelings and get along so naturally well with everybody?”.

Well, it’s not your background, sweetie - it’s called character. And Sara never really gets it.

My favorite character in the story turned out to be Mrs Feinstein, the widow who marries Sara’s father after her mother dies. Maybe it’s my modern Jerry-Springer-enhanced sensibilities, but I wanted to see more of this greedy, imminently enjoyable character. For example, here some of Mrs Feinstein’s last words to Sara’s mother as she lay dying on her bed: “Anyhow, if you’ll get better, I’ll teach you how to make lokshen kugel for your husband the way I make it. You ought to see how he licked his fingers from every bite.” Hah.

Eventually, Sara begrudgingly falls in like with a man, which seems to soften her a little. With her father’s subsequent sickness, she discovers that awful dichotomy of loving someone one hates: “I almost hated him again as I felt his tyranny – the tyranny with which he had tried to crush me as a child. Then suddenly the pathos of this lonely old man pierced me. In a world where all is changed, he alone remained unchanged – as tragically isolate as the rocks. All that he had left of life was his fanatical adherence to his traditions. It was within my power to keep lighted the flickering candle of his life for him. Could I deny him this poor service? Unconsciously, my hand reached out for his.”

Did her sisters ever make this leap? I’d really like to see this story written from Bessie’s point of view.

Anzia Yezierska’s historical-fictional account of Sara Smolinsky’s fierce determination to assert her newfound identity as an American girl is riveting in its background detail of what it means to be a first-generation immigrant. By the account of her daughter, Ms. Yezierska was incapable of telling the truth so this isn’t exactly an autobiography thinly disguised as fiction. But the period detail rendered in her searing prose gives a richly textured feel to the story. Sara Smolinsky must strive to overcome a great deal of adversity: grinding poverty, her bourgeois accent, her clothing and her tyrannical father, whose contradictory behavior can always be backed by a passage handily yanked from the Torah.

It’s breath-taking to read Sara’s gradual climb to be self sufficient, her grim determination to be more than a dutiful daughter to her father, a biddable wife and mother to a husband. I found myself cheering her every step of the way from her focused learning in her poky room with no light to her outspoken brazenness in class with all the other students despising her for her intrusive questions. She wasn’t a feminist, this Sara, any more than her creator was. She was simply determined to succeed. It gave me a visceral thrill of accomplishment to read of her triumph even as I was left with a bittersweet sting at the novel’s ending. In spite of her attempts to escape her past, Sara realizes it will never let her go entirely. A mixed blessing but not a mixed message and a fitting end to this story of tradition, sacrifice, death, love and loss.

I did not realize until reading more about the book on Goodreads that this was originally published in 1925. I loved this book as it brings to life a time and people early in the 20th century who were emigrants because of oppression due to religion from their home country, in this case Russia. Very pertinent to our current debate about immigration. Sara Smolinsky is the narrator and protagonist of this work. The family lives under the thumb of the father who is tyrannical and lives solely to study the Torah. Sarah has dreams which because of her spark she achieves.
To me this book written from the female point of view should be a companion to Call It Sleep by Henry Roth who wrote about similar people but from the point of view of a young boy.
For anyone who cannot get to or has not been to The Tenement Museum in NYC this is a must read to learn in a very poignant way about the trial and tribulations of being a poor immigrant in the country.

I found the prose style difficult to get into but the book was well worth the effort! A fascinating portrayal of a Jewish daughter's struggle to find herself in the chaotic world of the 1920's where the much-vaunted wealth of the ruling classes did not reach that of the struggling working class, where women's rights were hardly recognized amongst the poor and the immigrant, and where patriarchy and religious oppression were powerful forces.

I read this book more than ten years ago when my son had to read it for a history class. He enjoyed it greatly and suggested I read it, too. We had many good conversations about it and that makes me treasure it even more.

Bread Givers is about a family whose father is a scholar and insists that the women of his family support him. This is not unheard of in Jewish life, but it is definitely not part of the mainstream Judaism. It saddened me to see that the mothers and daughters in the family seemed very ignorant of Jewish life. The daughters leave and marry the horrible husbands the father has ordained for them and maintaining a home that has any elements of Judaism doesn't seem to have been important to anyone. Even the father is inexplicably uncaring about whether his grandchildren will be raised in a Jewish way. OK! Obviously it is fiction!

I loved the description of the bright and fearless Sara. She was willing to work hard for her dream of becoming more than a beaten down housewife with what she described as a black and yellow face. She forces herself to grow and change, but I felt her pain when she tried to dress like the other college girls but could never seem to be accepted by them. She speaks up when she sees that the men get better soup in the cafeteria, but we quickly see that her quick wit and ready tongue don't always help her. She comes right back home to work when she graduates and can't seem to leave Hester Street.

It was an enjoyable book. I learned from it and I cared about the characters.