Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers and Assimilation of Jews
An entire chapter of Eric Liu’s memoir, The Accidental Asian, is founded on the supposition that Jews today serve as a metaphor for assimilation into American culture. According to Liu, this is due to the ease with which Jews have been able to assimilate. However, the progress that Jews have made in embracing and affecting America has been gradual rather than instantaneous, as evidenced by the character Sara Smolensky in Anzia Yezierska’s novel Bread Givers. Sara is not the symbol of an assimilated Jew, but instead represents a period of transition between complete assimilation into American identity and complete dissimilation from her Jewish and Polish heritage, neither of which she can fully accomplish. Her identity was both “made” and “unmade” by her interaction with America, and she is left struggling for a new self that can interweave her ancestral past and her American present.
Perhaps the best example of Sara’s deviation from her Jewish heritage and her attempt to assimilate was her refusal to allow the undertaker to tear her suit during her mother’s funeral service. The clothing that she wears is a symbol to her of wealth and of being an American. For Sara the ripping of her clothing had become an “empty symbol,” a cultural construction with only symbolic meaning that could help to identify her ethnicity, and does not serve any logical purpose. After being distanced from her family and immersed in American culture for so long, she no longer understands the purpose of the action, and posits verily that “Tearing [her only suit] wouldn’t bring Mother back to life again” (Yezierska 255). This represents a clear distinction between volunta...
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...rself in between the two, and in doing so partially “unmakes” the ethnic identity passed on to her from her ancestors. The question of whether she is more assimilated into American culture or is more dissimilated from the culture of her ancestors is arbitrary and ambiguous. She is simultaneously both and neither; she is a new person who enjoys the American way of life but will always feel burdened by the “weight” of her ancestors “upon [her]” (297).
Works Cited
Liu, Eric. “New Jews.” The Accidental Asian. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. 145-74.
Sollors, Werner. Forward. “Theories of American Ethnicity.” American Quarterly. 33.3 (1981): 257-83.
Takaki, Ronald. “Between Two Endless Days.” A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1993. 277-310.
Yezierska, Anzia. Bread Givers. New York: Persea Books, 2003.
The novel Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska examines the roles and experiences of Jewish immigrants in America roughly after the years of WWI in New York City. The novel follows the journey of Sara, a young Jewish immigrant, and her family who comes to the country from Poland with different beliefs than those in the Smolinsky household and by much of the Jewish community that lived within the housing neighborhoods in the early 1900s. Through Sara’s passion for education, desire for freedom and appreciation for her culture, she embodies a personal meaning of it means to be an “American”.
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.
Takaki, R. T. (1993). A different mirror: A history of multicultural America. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.
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.
Islas, Arturo. From Migrant Souls. American Mosaic: Multicultural Readings in Context. Eds. Gabriele Rico, Barbara Roche and Sandra Mano. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. 1995. 483-491.
In order to obtain religious, social, political, and equality 23 million Jews immigrated to America during the years between 1880 and 1920 (Chametzky, 5). Anzia Yezierska wrote about her experiences as a poor immigrant in her fictional work becoming a voice of the Jewish people in the1920s. She struggled to obtain an education that allowed her to rise above her family’s poverty and gain a measure of autonomy. Rachel and Sara, the female protagonists, mirror the author’s life going from struggling immigrant to college graduate. Yezierska uses her own experiences to portray the Jewish immigrant experience with a woman’s perspective. She successfully gained a commercial following that allowed her to mediate the cultural differences between the mainstream culture and the Jewish people that helped resolve differences between the established Americans and these new immigrants for a time (Ebes...
...Multiculturalism: Essential Primary Sources. Ed. K. Lee Lerner, Brenda Wilmoth Lerner, and Adrienne Wilmoth Lerner. Detroit: Gale, 2006. 353-355. Opposing Viewpoints in Context. Web. 11 Apr. 2014
Stavans, I. (2005). Assimilation and Jewish Ethnic Identity. The Jewish Identity Project: New American Photography, Rpt. In Race and Ethnicity. Ed. Uma Kukathas. Detroit: Greenhaven Press, 2008. Contemporary Issues Companion. Retrieved Apr 4, 2014, from http://ic.galegroup.com.proxy.hvcc.edu:2048/ic/ovic/ViewpointsDetailsPage/ViewpointsDetailsWindow?failOverType=&query=&prodId=OVIC&windowstate=normal&contentModules=&mode=view&displayGroupName=Viewpoints&limiter=&currPage=&disableHighlighting=false&displa
Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. 2nd ed. New York, NY:
It is necessary, in order to grasp the role race has in immigration, to understand what exactly Americanness is. Based on the experiences of immigrants and the dominant culture of the nation, Americanness is the status attributed to an American citizen who is fully incorporated into the traditions, cultures, and lifestyle choices of mainstream America. On the surface, this appears to merely be an issue of musical preference, or religious beliefs. However, actual Americanness is transcendent and engrained in whiteness. Whiteness, curiously enough, does not necessarily relate to actually being white insofar as skin color is concerned, but rather, in being fully steeped in dominant American culture. Because of this connection, Americanness and whiteness are, essentially, one in the same.
According to Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, between 1880 and about World War I, the vast majority of Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians came to the United States populating neighborhoods in New York and the Lower East Side is the best example. One thing, which was common to the immigrant experience is that, all immigrants come to the United States as the “land of opportunity”. They come to America with different types of expectations that are conditioned by their origins and families. But every immigrant comes to America wanting to make himself/herself into a person, to be an individual and to become somebody. In this case, the author showed in Bread Givers, Sarah’s desire to make herself into something and bring something unique to America, which only she can bring. It is an effort to understand the immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants, from a woman’s point of view. The book shows that it was a challenge for Jewish immigrant children, particularly females, on the account of the intensity of their family’s connections and obligations that was so critical for the immigrant communities. This was true for the immigrants who came to settle in the neighborhoods like the one Sarah and her family settled in.
He mournfully tells his audience he has “moved away from the periphery and toward the center of American life, [he] has become white inside” (Liu 1). As a young chinese boy growing up in America, he was taught the way to assimilation was to abandon the language, culture, and traditions of his ancestors, and his essay is a remorseful reflection on the consequences of his sacrifice. Despite giving away so much, despite doing it all to ‘become white’, he will always be an outsider – race and skin color can never be the uniting factor of a community. Eric Liu goes on to talk about how “the assimilist is a traitor to his kind, to his class, to his own family” (Liu 2). Why does it need to be this way? The ‘a-word’ (assimilist) need not be a negative one, if only assimilation meant adapting to an ideology rather than one race’s culture. If that were the true meaning of assimilation, the idea that to assimilate is to betray would be eradicated. The current method of naturalization to American culture is unacceptable: The only thing that will unite Americans will be a common goal to promote good values and hard work within
Root, M., P., (1996) The multiracial experience: Racial borders as the new frontier. Copyright 1996 by Sage Publications, Inc.
1. What is the argument of Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America? How does Takaki make that argument?
Raya’s essay is an informative account of life for a multicultural American, because it is told from an actual multicultural author’s viewpoint. It gives the reader a sense that the information is accurate. It would be harder to accept the viewpoint if the author were for example, a white male writing about how a Mexican, Puerto Rican woman feels. As Connie Young Yu points out, information retold by someone who didn’t live the experiences is most often falsely perceived. Yu uses the example of white American historians writing about the lives of Chinese immigrants. Yu says that there is no accurate account for the lives of the immigrants, because they didn’t document their lives themselves. The little information that there is in history books only tells about their obvious accomplishments. There is no official understanding of their personal lives or feelings (Yu 30).