Bread Givers Bread Givers tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, whose life is almost the same as Anzia Yezierska, who is the author. Through Sara we see the collapse of a family because of religion and old world ways. Sara tries so hard to get away from her past but in the end it shows that your family will always be there, for good or bad. Sara Smolinsky is the youngest of four sisters; the eldest is Bessie, whom everyone calls the “Burden-bearer” because the whole family lives on her pay check. “I knew the landlord came that morning hollering for rent. And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world.”(1) The second eldest daughter was Fania, who loves to read and speaks her mind. The third sister is Mashah, “empty-head, loves her own pretty face and spends out her earnings for clothes and drugstore accessories, to the scandal of her sisters, the disgust of the mother and the outspoken rage of her father.”(Turbulent) The final daughter is Sara who is the most independent and is searching for her own life, way from their father. “Reb Smolinsky, wise in the lore of the Torah, comfortably immured in the seclusion of his learning, calmly collects the earnings of his four daughters and chants of the terrors and the hatreds and the punishments from the Old Testament and the Hebrew writers.” (Turbulent) We do not hear much from the girl’s mother, Shena but know she revels in Reb’s holiness. The family structure is very important to Reb and Shena but not to Sara, she believes she can make her own family the way she wants. With or without religion. “Four young immigrant daughters and their selfless mother are pitted against a... ... middle of paper ... ...fying Individualism: Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers." The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving Out a Niche. Ed. Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999. 17-30. Rpt. in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 205. Detroit: Gale, 2008. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 11 Apr. 2014. • "Overview: Bread Givers." Novels for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 29. Detroit: Gale, 2009. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 2 May 2014. • "Turbulent Folkways of the Ghetto in a New Novel." The New York Times Book Review (13 Sept. 1925): 8. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 46. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Artemis Literary Sources. Web. 11 Apr. 2014 • Yezierska, Anzia, and Alice Harris. Bread givers: a novel ; with photographs. 3. ed. New York, NY: Persea Books, 2003. Print.
Anzia Yezierska’s 1925 novel Bread Givers ends with Sara Smolinsky’s realization that her father’s tyrannical behavior is the product of generations of tradition from which he is unable to escape. Despite her desire to embrace the New World she has just won her place in, she attempts to reconcile with her father and her Jewish heritage. The novel is about the tension inherent in trying to fit Old and New worlds together: Reb tries to make his Old World fit into the new, while Sara tries to make her New World fit into the Old. Sara does not want to end up bitter and miserable like her sisters, but she does not want to throw her family away all together. Her struggle is one of trying to convince her patriarchal family to accept her as an independent woman, while assimilating into America without not losing too much of her past.
The author, Melina Marchetta applies a variety of familiar and stereotypical events in the book. From cases such as the different characters, their characteristics and their reaction upon certain events that occur in the book. One great example of a stereotypical event in this book is the relationship between Josephine Alibrandi and Jacob Coote who is the school captain of a public school called Cook High. “He cracked two eggs on my glasses once” (32).
Krupnick, Mark.. "Jewish-American Literature." New Immigrant Literatures in the United States: A Sourcebook to Our Multicultural Literary Heritage. Ed. Alpana Sharma Knippling. WEstport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996. 295-308.
Throughout Anzia Yezierska’s novel “Bread Givers,” the character Sara Smolinsky goes through an elliptical journey from a rebellious youth appalled by the individual limitations of her cultural heritage to her gradual acceptance of her inability to escape her ancestry. At first rejecting her Orthodox Eastern European Jewish culture, Sara views the world in terms of a sole American identity. As ...
American Literature. 6th Edition. Vol. A. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 2003. 783-791
This is an Interview that I conducted when checking the historical accuracy of the story. Not only was this a helpful source to that but also explained how she saw the Holocaust in her eyes of a young girl that was only a year older than Sarah. Though she was young and at times it was hard for her to talk about or even remember, there were not many gender defining roles that she
Charters, Ann. The Story and Its Writer – An Introduction to Short Fiction. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011. Print.
Stein, Karen F. "Amy Tan." Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition (2001): 1-3. Literary Reference Center Plus. EBSCO. Web. 13 Apr. 2011.
Anzia Yezierska has written two short story collections and four novels about the struggles of Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side. Yezierska stories explore the subject of characters’ struggling with the disillusioning America of poverty and exploitation while they search for the ‘real’ America of their ideals. She presents the struggles of women against family, religious injunctions, and social-economic obstacles in order to create for herself an independent style. Her stories all incorporate autobiographical components. She was not a master of style, plot development or characterization, but the intensity of feeling and aspiration are evident in her narratives that overrides her imperfections.
August is the eldest Boatwright sister, and she is the most successful at dealing with grief. She experienced the suicides of two sisters, but she managed to retain her optimism and perspective, unlike June or May. One way August relinquishes grief is through religion. She is the leader of a group called the Daughters of Mary – a group of African-American women who worship Our Lady of Chains. August “manifests the Madonna’s wisdom and protection, balancing out June’s excessive intellectual qualities and May’s excessive emotional qualitie...
Charters, A. (2011). The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction (8th ed.). Boston: Bedfor/St. Martin's.
Margolies, Edward. “History as Blues: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.” Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Negro American Authors. J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968. 127-148. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Daniel G. Marowski and Roger Matuz. Vol. 54. Detroit: Gale, 1989. 115-119. Print.
Belasco, Susan, and Linck Johnson, eds. The Bedford Anthology of American Literature. Vol. 1, 2nd Ed., Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2014. 1190-1203. Print.