Bread Givers By Anzia Yezierska Struggles

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Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers is a novel that describes the difficult life of a young Jewish girl who goes through many difficulties in her life in order to strive for success in America, only to find herself back at the same place where she was in at the beginning. The protagonist, Sara Smolinsky, is daughter of Jewish immigrants and belongs to a family of six. Under the dull household and extremely strict rules of her father, Reb Smolinsky, Sara struggles to become a person in society. The novel expresses issues related to religion, the struggle of fitting in society as a woman, and customs, all of which are faced through Sara. The entire novel describes in detail Sara’s quest to achieve peace and joy from independence and live her own life, …show more content…

No one had a sustainable job and Bessie, Sara’s sister, was the family’s only hope to continue living in their home. Sara could already see their “things kicked out on the sidewalk like a pile of junk. A plate of pennies like a beggar’s hand reaching out of our bunch of rags” (Yezierska 1-2). This poverty continued for a while as the customs set in society for women are only wives and mothers. Their father mostly relied on marrying them off to wealthier suitors and obtaining the dowries for the marriage arrangement as a source of income since he did not believe in women getting a job like men do. Sara faces yet another obstacle in her quest which are the customs and expectations that are in place in society. It is obviously wrong to think poorly of one’s parents since they provide food and care for their children, and put a roof over their heads. Sara faces an inner conflict deciding whether to blindly follow her father’s plan for her or create her own path. Being a free spirit, Sara recalls all the hardships her father has put her, her sisters, and her father through; he had ruined their lives and created their own personal hell in conformity. However, Sara would not follow the trend and inevitably chose to disobey his rules (Yezierska 135). Although Sara chooses what she thinks is right which is to disobey her father and find her true self-worth, there are still many repercussions that she faces along her quest for independence. For example, in the end she learns that no matter how hard you try, you cannot run away from family. She begins to wonder if her father, too, was just following customs because the shadow she felt “wasn’t just [her] father[’s], but the generations who made [her] father whose weight was still upon [her]” (Yezierska 297). Although Sara did reach her goal of being independent for a while, she ended up taking care of her father and found

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