Bread givers is good but faults in the same way most shorter books do. They lack something being enough like a character or setting. For this, it’s plot. The plot jumps from key idea to key idea to key idea in the matter of pages. It’s weirdly dense for a book this short. Other than that, I liked it! Sara is well written, the plot is interesting if not beefy enough, and Yezierska has been remembered for a reason.

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Still a ringing indictment of patriarchy.

I was pleasantly surprised by this read--it was assigned for a class I'm taking called Reading New York. I enjoyed following Sara through her pursuit of education and her hardheaded determination to get herself out of poverty. This reminded me very lightly of My Brilliant Friend and Elena's own hard work to get herself a better future.

Generally leaving the reader wanting more is a good thing, but knowing that I will always have unanswered questions about Sara and her family makes me feel like there is a gaping hole in the fabric made up of my favorite books.

How exhausting it is, thinking of all of the directions in which each character could have gone! I suppose that I will just have to learn to accept this shortcoming and to never forget the way that I felt while engrossed in Sara's life.

Thank you, Anzia Yezierska, for this utter masterpiece!

Written in the 1920’s I struggled to understand this story of Jewish immigrants in NYC. Maybe my ignorance of Judaism is at the core of my confusion.

Told through the eyes of youngest daughter Sarah, this is a story of a family where the father has no gainful employment. I guess he is a rabbi (?) but has no congregation in the way I have always assumed rabbis do. He simply studies the Torah all day, every day and puts his daughters out to work to maintain him.

The daughters…Bessie, Mashah, Faniah and Sarah are all dutiful daughters but when they find love…Reb Smolinsky rejects all the suitors and arranges marriages of his own (to advance his own aims) with disastrous results….then blames his daughters for not divining the true characters of the men he has chosen. When his wife passes, he heartlessly remarries after a scandalously short grieving period and when that marriage goes poorly, Sarah steps in to help him even after he has treated her and her ambitions horribly.

Is this truly the Jewish immigrant experience in America?

I listened to the audio and found that enjoyable, especially the parts where Smolinsky addresses his wife as “woman” and where Sarah says she wants to “be a person”. The accents and dialogue really make this story come to life.

Male Liberation

A gem in so many dimensions: King Lear with an extra daughter, a proto-feminist masterpiece, a profoundly moving documentary about the true cost of immigrant-assimilation, a charming remembrance of Yiddish-American dialect. It reads as fresh and possibly as scandalously as it did in 1925.

Most surprisingly, however, among its many surprises the book is also a charter for men's liberation long before the idea became a ‘thing’ in today's culture. Bread givers are husbands. Bread giving is what men not only do, it is their primary quality as human beings. It is what they should be valued for in the American culture as seen so accurately by those entering the culture from abroad. The way for a woman to get on is by identifying and capturing a reliable bread giver. The fact that this tactic most often ends in personal tragedy is not so much the fault of the (patently faulty) men involved but of the culture which seems to demand that this is their primary role.

Those most prone to the cultural myth of bread giving are of course men themselves, especially men steeped in the patriarchal culture of the Polish shtetl. And most particularly that man who dominates the lives of all females in his orbit, the rabbi-like paterfamilias of the piece, who has only studied Torah for his entire life and who has no skills with which to give any bread to anyone in his new world. The contradiction is obvious to everyone but himself so he ends up participating in the same tragedy which he has inflicted on his daughters by, as a widower, marrying a woman who expects nothing but … a bread giver.

American culture hasn’t changed much in the last 90 years or so, except to become a fair bit less direct in its expectations around marriage. Women are still considered second-class members of the human race by a large portion of the population, largely with biblical witness for support. Men are still considered for their economic achievement or their potential for achievement as ‘husband material’. The idea that a man could possibly waste his life in spiritual activity which, somehow, his family should fund is incomprehensible except in those orthodox Jewish communities that still seek to emulate the shtetl in America. The fact that Yezierska never has her protagonist, Sara, condemn this central aspiration/need/calling of her father is perhaps the most scandalous theme of the book to modern sensibilities, just as it undoubtedly was in 1925.

Published 95 years ago it made me thankful that I wasn’t an immigrant, Jewish woman at this time in history. It would have been very difficult to be a feminist “Only through a man has a woman an existence. Only through a man can a woman enter heaven.” What!!!! I liked this book. Never smiled or laughed once when reading it but there was a great deal of shaking my head in disbelief and a lot of cussing. I like books with strong, determined and brave women.

I enjoyed this peek into a different life that ends up having universal themes for any life. I’ve read various memoir of people from impoverished circumstances (financial poverty and otherwise), and I’m always struck by how hard it is to reach for goodness, maturity, and emotional care when your basic needs are not being met at all. I admit that I find the pettiness annoying, but I recognize that not being petty is that much easier when your stomach is full, you’re warm, and you have confidence in your future.

I came to enjoy the language of the author. I am sad for the dark lives of so many women for so many generations. I have a hard time seeing anything redeeming about the father. Maybe the fact that Sara took him in after everything shows how she rose above the pettiness. I especially liked how her psychology classes felt so illuminating to her; I had similar experiences in psychology classes and other things I’ve learned over the years.

I can’t decide how I feel about the mother. She was mean and complaining, but she was reliable, loyal, and strong. Was she faithful or stupid for respecting her husband’s “holiness”?

I also loved the final lines in the foreword: We cannot will into being the world we want to live in, but we can will into being the individual we want to be in the world.

That is a tale of New York's old Jewish community from roughly a century ago. It is difficult to imagine an indictment of the numbing adherence to a vision of religious tradition than Anzia Yezierska's "The Bread Givers." But not deep religiosity; for all Reb Smolinsky's study--his solution to a crisis is to shield himself with a "I am holding up the light of the Torah"--his Torah is quite malleable. He uses it to justify his pitiable effort to start a business and when he is defrauded, to justify his poverty. He uses it to deny his daughters marriages for love, views them as earners (supporting his holding up the light of the Torah) and basically sells them off. He ends arguments with his wife with by saying "Woman!" as an imprecation and notes repeatedly that women are nothing without men. Widowed, he quickly marries a woman who appears to think, straining credibility, that he has money. Out of this family the fierce Sara Smolinsky claws her way, leaving the household while still single, going to college, becoming a teacher, and marrying for love. But not even then she is not free; in the end, old Reb Smolinsky threatens to ruin even her new household by becoming so helpless that he lives with Sara and her husband. Proving that certain men are nothing without women.

I love books about immigrants during the early 20th century. The clash of cultures is fascinating. It's nearly impossible to comprehend a father sending his kids out to work and bring home every penny to him, while he sits at home reading his religious books. He then berates his entire family on a regular basis telling them how lucky they are for having such a devout father. It's infuriating, but of course one has to understand the behavior within the context of the religion and time period.

The beginning of the book has a discussion about the significance of the novel and what happened to the author and why it was not published until 75 years after its initial publication. This chapter helped me to appreciate the significance of the book and why it is being considered as a classic book of Amerian literature.

The classic novel of Jewish immigrants, with period photographs.

This book is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on Hester Street about a girl named Sara Smolinsky and all her struggles to attend college to become a teacher. Her struggles really focus on her understanding and growth as a person with her identity and responsibility towards family, love, and the feelings of being an outsider typical of many immigrants. I´m sure that other immigrants would be able to identify with the conflicts in the book.

As a view into Jewish tenement life in New York at the turn of the century, this book was fascinating. I was rooting for the main character the whole time.

As a novel, it was a little repetitive and choppy (though honestly, I think it made the narrative that much more real).

3.5 stars. Recommended for history/women's issues afficionados.