The Smolinsky family; a poor Jewish family living on Hester Street struggling to make ends meet. The older daughters, Bessie, Mashah, and Fania, can’t find work, and Mashah spends what little money she has to make herself look more beautiful. Their father, Reb Smolinsky, doesn’t work at all, she spends his days reading holy books and taking his daughters’ wages. When Mrs. Smolinsky their mother talks of the struggle Sara goes out to the streets to sell herring and make the family some money. Already showing her heavy heart and willingness to help the family. Later in the book the older girls find jobs, and Mrs. Smolinsky rents out the second room, to help their financial situation. Bessie soon falls for a young man named Berel Berenstein and invites him home for dinner one night. The rest of the family is excited for Bessie, but when Reb Smolinsky finds out, he decides he can’t live without the wages Bessie brings in. Berel is willing to marry Bessie without a dowry, but still her father says Berel must also pay for the entire wedding and set him up in business as well. Berel refuses...
In the novel The Bread Givers, there was a Jewish family, the Smolinsky family, that had immigrated from Russia to America. The family consisted of four daughters, a father, and a mother. The family lived in a poverty-stricken ghetto. The youngest of the daughters was Sara Smolinsky, nicknamed ?Iron Head? for her stubbornness. She was the only daughter that was brave enough to leave home and go out on her own and pursue something she wanted without the permission of her father. The Smolinsky family was very poor, they were to the point of which they could not afford to throw away potato peelings, and to the point of which they had to dig through other people?s thrown out ash in order to gather the coal they needed. They could not afford to buy themselves new clothes or new furniture.
She is fairly new to the work world and has lied on her resume’ to get hired, and realizes that the job is harder than she first thought. All hope is not lost because Violet assures her that she can be trained. She ends up succeeding at the company and telling her husband she will not take him back after he comes back begging for her love again.
Further, throughout the book, Sadie and Bessie continuously reminds the reader of the strong influence family life had on their entire lives. Their father and mother were college educated and their father was the first black Episcopal priest and vice principal at St. Augustine Co...
Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers and Soap and Water. In Anzia Yezierska's works Bread Givers and "Soap and Water", she uses similar aspects of the characters that portray her own life. Both of the stories resemble similarities of Yezierska's life and appear to be autobiographical to her personal experiences. The author portrays, in both the stories, a belief that the majority culture is "clean" while the minority culture is dirty.
The novel tells the story of the Dollanganger family after their father dies suddenly in a car accident. Corrine, the mother, and her 4 children are left to deal with the aftermath. The children are given a rude awakening, they come to realize that their lovely lifestyle and all their beautiful, expensive things don’t truly belong to them. After a short time, their items and there home are going to be taken by the bank, which is when their mother reveals that they will be going to live with their grandmother. With promises of riches and luxury the children agree to go, but soon after arriving at the home of their grandmother they realize that it was a mistake. The children were forced to stay all in one room, because their grandfather did not even know they existed and could not ever hear or see them. The only place they had to roam free was an old attic. What their mother had told them would one be days, or even a week, turned into nearly three years of entrapment. During their captivity the children all slowly became more sick and weak, until one of the youngest dies. It is later revealed that the children’s mother had been poisoning them with arsenic, this revelations is what prompted the children to round up all the valuables and money they could get their hands on and make their
In Anzia Yezierska’s novel entitled Bread Givers, there is an apparent conflict between Reb Smolinsky, a devout Orthodox rabbi of the Old World, and his daughter Sara who yearns to associate and belong to the New World. Throughout the story, one learns about the hardships of living in poverty, the unjust treatment of women, and the growth of a very strong willed and determined young woman—Sara Smolinsky.
The cartoon shows the famous Bread March that happened on October 5, 1789. This cartoon depicts the women marching from Paris to Versailles. The flag the women are holding is a fictional flag that says “Blood or Bread”. The crossed pike and baguette symbolized how serious women needed bread to feed their children. The steak stick in the middle means that they would kill to get bread. There was an estimate of 6,000 women that were involved in the march. They walked 13 miles in the rain to get to Versailles for bread. After they went to King Louis XVI in the Palace of Versailles, they brought back the king and queen back to Paris which became there “prison”. All of these events had happened all during the French Revolution and during the Enlightenment.
Sara and her family had immigrated to America from a village in Poland. According to their Jewish traditions, the only role a woman had in her life was to take care of the family, and make life easier for their husbands. This idea becomes very clear right at the start of the novel. We learn that two of Sara's sisters, Bessie and Masha, are coming home after being out looking for work so they could earn wages for the family . The daughters of Reb Smolinsky were expected to be the wage earners. Women in Reb Smolinsky's household are expected to do all of the work required for keeping the family alive. Reb does nothing to earn money or make life better for his family. He is a religious scholar who has devoted his whole life to the study of the Torah, and his family's job was to make him comfortable. All of the burdens were placed on Reb's family; he carried none of them. Reb was a "dictator" in the household. When Sara's sister Bessie brought home a man for the family to meet, Reb kicked him out of the house. He said that this man was not good enough for his burden bearer. He appears to be very reluctant to ...
The constant hum of street vendors yelling, car horns blaring, and poor people complaining acts as the soundtrack to the family drama within the small apartment on Hector Street. There was never a quiet moment, and between the four sisters, an overworked mother, and an entitled father, the place was bustling and busy enough to burst. But to a young Sara Smolinsky, this chaotic ensemble was home. In the novel Bread Givers, immigrant author Anzia Yezierska writes about the realization of the American Dream for the ambitious and determined Sara Smolinsky, but the price of success is high. Sara starts her journey in the impoverished ghetto of Hester Street, and she escapes its dirtiness and shame, going on to achieve the American Dream. The apartment
Sara struggles in society with her lack of income and experience in America in Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska. With Sara’s economic background, she didn’t have the money to dress or the experience to act like others. Trying to find her place in society, she tried to fit in with her independence and determination. Being a Russian immigrant made life in society for Sara, difficult.
However, although Reb Smolinsky embodies the heritage of orthodox Jewish patriarchy against which Sara must struggle, the father himself seems to suffer a transformation, influenced by the money-seeking American society, from an eccentric whose piety is outmoded and economically disastrous to a shrewd neighborhood leader whose piety is a vehicle for mobilizing family and community. He begins to sell his services as a rabbi not through devout religious practice but through the abstraction of his faith into a symbol that generates success (Ferraro 554-55). His transformation is suggested in the chapter title, such as "Father Becomes a Businessman in America." But even though he partly accepts the American way of life, it does not necessarily mean that he gives up his tyranny in his family. On the contrary, his tyranny seems to become stronger when he tries to frustrate his daughters' love for the sake of making more money. Not any sort of bread giver,' he interferes with each case of love-affair of his daughters to earn more money by selling off each of his daughters to one unsuitable husband after another, and literally sells off Bessie to a fish peddler for five hundred dollars. When he urges his daughters to obey his will, he ceaselessly emphasizes woman's inferior status in the world: "What's a woman without a man? Less than nothing---a blotted-out existence. No life on earth and no hope of Heaven" (205).
What Grandmother does not realize is that Mrs. Shimerda is offering something of importance to her that she brought over from her homeland as a gesture of loyalty to Grandmother Burden because she brought food to them. This cultural difference of beliefs brings external conflict when Jake, one of Grandfather Burden’s farmhands, loans a horse collar to Ambrosch and he does not return it. When Jake goes to get it back, first Ambrosch acts like he does not know what Jake is referring to. Then when Ambrosch retrieves it and Jake sees the condition it is in and how it has been abused, he is angry and goes after Ambrosch. Ambrosch kicks Jake in the stomach, but ultimately, Jake hits him in the head, almost knocking him out. Mrs. Shimerda calls the police, and Jake has to pay a fine for hitting Ambrosch, “These foreigners ain’t the same. You can’t trust’em to be fair. It’s dirty to kick a feller. You heard how the women turned on you – after all we went through on account of ‘em last winter! They ain’t to be trusted. I don’t want to see you get too thick with
Joshua Foer, who delivered the TED talk that I was assigned to watch, starts his lecture off in a very unique way. He instructs the audience to all close their eyes and imagine that they are standing outside the front door of their house, and a group of nude, overweight cyclist is barreling towards you. Foer goes on to lead the audience through their imaginary house, stopping in each room to add a seemingly irrelevant and completely obscure character, such as the Cookie Monster or Britney Spears, to their image of the inside of their home. Joshua then tells the audience to open their eyes and moves on with his lecture.
Ethics, a word used to justify many illogical or irrational choices. Ethics can be considered as a guideline to living without regret or guilt. However there are no universal ethical standards, nor are there any good or bad ethical standards. In the article “A Framework for Thinking Ethically” five source ethical standards are depicted which can be used in a variety of situations, for example in Margaret atwood’s “Bread” the virtue approach can be applied to the situation with the two sisters starving. Though the virtue approach is a good method, it is not flawless and can cause you to face a dilemma over what choice to make which leads to anxiety for those making the choice.
The three Smales children, Victor, Royce and Gina, had not experienced, and therefore had not expected to live a life of luxury amongst people of their “own” kind. This innocence contributes greatly to the rate and comfort in which they adjust to living in July’s village. Bam and Maureen may not have felt prejudice towards the black race, but were certainly prejudice about the lifestyle in which they must now live, a lifestyle completely stripped of any and all luxuries they once enjoyed. All of the family members, facing a new way of life, adjust to their situation in radically different ways. Each one drifts in their own direction in search of comfort and acceptance throughout their experiences living amongst July’s people.