Shot in the dark, Anyone ever read Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska

It is difficult to read BREAD GIVERS by Anzia Yezierska and not feel the same barrage of competing emotions that afflict nearly everyone in the book. On a literal level, Yezierska writes of the struggle of Russian/Polish Jews to assimilate in the New York just before the First World War. The action is narrated over a period of some dozen years by Sara Smolinsky, who begins the novel as a ten year old girl, one of three other sisters. We see the action filtered through her eyes, so there is the natural reaction to perceive events as she does. But what she sees is so emotionally shattering that the reader soon learns to substitute his own experiences as that filter.

Sara and her family live in New York but their world view is heavily shaped by their origins in the Old World of eastern Europe. In that society, the male head of the household is the master. Not only does he dare claim that women have no place in running a household, but he also can point to the Torah as justification. Sara's father, the Reb Smolinsky, is drawn in such a nasty, vindictive way that he all but emerges as a one dimensional caricature of all that can go wrong when one hides behind saintly words as an excuse to bully others. The Reb refuses to work for money; he expects his family to do that, leaving him time to study the Torah. He routinely squashes flat his daughters' confidence by insulting them daily. He arranges disastrous marriages for them, and when these marriages go predictably bad, he avoids responsibility by telling them, 'As you make your bed, so must you sleep in it.' But because he appears in every chapter, he, rather than Sara, becomes the center of dramatic focus. He is so vile and hateful that the reader even begins to question the source of the Reb's tirades: the Torah itself. Long before the final chapter, the reader begins to see the inevitable results of what happens when a weak-minded individual takes words and ideas which are intrinsically noble and bastardizes them into something monstrous. There is no evil that is beyond the Reb's ability to twist from a more benign source as the Torah. Sara's other sisters suffer long years of acquiescence, slowly building a fund of bitter gall that simply awaits the opportunity for a well-deserved revenge. For the longest time so does Sara, but what happens to her is the rarest miracle of all. Sara tries against stupendous odds to come to grips with the ages old paradox: should one return good for evil? It would have been so easy for her to take the route of her sisters, to return hate for hate. Sara is the only one in a book full of hurt people inflicting verbal pain on others who even tries to peek behind that curtain of verbal weapons that masks a festering sore of decades. She is a towering figure of strength and discipline that lingers in the mind long after the pathetic sadism of a reb finally begins to wear out its welcome in the lives of civilized people. BREAD GIVERS serves to remind the reader that words can heal as well as hurt.

Even though this book is probably set anywhere from the late 1890's to early 1920's--as the book was first published in 1925--as a woman it is hard not to be totally offended by Reb. Smolinsky's attitudes towards women. He says: "A woman without a man is less than nothing. A woman without a man can never enter Heaven." As a Christian, I obviously find this belief to be totally untrue, but it is the statement that a woman is nothing without a man that just makes me wish that Reb. Smolinsky was standing in front of me so I could strangle him.

Even though I hated the father more than words can say, I still gave this book five stars because it is so unbelievably inspiring. Sara Smolinsky does not allow her father to completely dominate her. She does not allow him to marry her off to a man that she does not love--like he did her three older sisters. She leaves home around the age of seventeen and works in a laundry store all day and takes night classes at night for years so that she can go to college. She has to make so many sacrifices along the way, but she never gives up on her dream of graduating from college and becoming a teacher. The fact that she was able to work her way out of poverty, get an education, and obtain her dream of becoming a teacher was just so inspirational.

I read this book for a literature class on American Immigrants, and I am so thankful that teacher assigned the book because I got a lot out of it. Watching Sara's transformation in this book from an uneducated and emotionally uncontrolled woman into a cool and controlled professional who could succeed in America, in a way her father never could, was a kind of growing experience for me, as well.

Also, as I neared the end of the book, I kind of began to see the father in a different light. Yes he was a horrible tyrant to the women in his family, but he was also like a fish out of water flopping around helplessly. He had been uprooted from his home in Poland and replanted in America where nothing was like it was for him back in the Old World. Therefore, there are times when Reb. Smolinsky really comes off as this just completely pathetic character, and I almost would have felt sorry for him if he had not put all the blame for his failures on his wife and daughters--and made their lives even more miserable because of his failures.

Some 75 years after its initial publication, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers surely deserves recognition as a classic of Amerian literature. I regret not having read this moving and provocative novel earlier in my life; I know its themes of self-discovery, conflicted Jewish identity and Americanization would have encouaged both identification and introspection. I am astonished that high schools today do not include this as an essential core text (instead opting to use F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, also published in 1925 as a paradigmatic novel). Yezierska's novel has the ring of truth to it, resonating with such crucial themes as self-awareness, cultural marginalization of immigrants, loss and recovery of ethnic identity, feminist discontent and awakening sexuality. In my mind, Sara Smolinsky has far more to teach us about the American Dream than Jay Gatsby. Yet, the prevailing literary criticism lionizes the WASP world-view of Fitzgerald and essentially disregards the Jewish/immigrant sensibilities of Yezierska.

The novel is uncommonly accessible. Dialogue carries much of the action; the chapters could be read as independent short stories, and internal soliloquies provide us with the opportunity to test our own judgments against those of the earnest and self-actualizing Sara Smolinsky. The suffocating but omniscient presence of her tyrannical father best represents Sara's constant confrontation with conflict. The dilemmas provided by the father-daughter relationship ring with universal truths even though the setting is particular to the Hester Street Easter European Jewish experience. I know that my Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander students could easily translate this novel, some three generations old, into their own experiences.

The Persea Books edition owes its existence to the admirable efforts of Professor Alice Kessler-Harris, whose exceptional introductory forewards are worth the price of the edition alone. Professor Kessler-Harris sheds light not only on Yezierska's tumultuous life but provides a scholarly discussion of the significance of the novel.

First published in 1925, Bread Givers, Anzia Yezierska's autobiographical novel, endures for the way it relates universal truths about the poverty and despair of new immigrants to America at the turn of the century. Within that universality, Yezierska’s voice emerges as strong, female, and idiosyncratic as it reveals the particulars of her characters’ inner lives.

Like many of her female protagonists, Yezierska immigrated to New York’s Lower East Side in her early teens. She was born in a shtetl outside of Warsaw in the early 1880s – the exact year is not known. Her older brother Meyer had immigrated to America a few years earlier and had saved enough money to bring his parents and seven siblings to New York. Like many immigrants who passed through Ellis Island, Meyer was renamed, and Max Meyer set out to reinvent himself accordingly. Anzia, called Harriet Meyer when she joined him, later reclaimed her identity and took back her given name.

Yezierska’s preoccupation with ethnic identity permeates her fiction and is expressed in the Yiddish-English vernacular of her prose. Her empathy for the “greenhorn” she once was and the immigrant she would always be is reflected in the stark social realism of her books. Her choice of genre was also a subtle form of rebellion against the prevailing literary taste for abstraction and the emotional restraint that was endemic to polite society. Yet within Yezierska’s social realism there is also a brilliant, luminous strain of romanticism. Although Yezierska’s characters are steeped in the dire poverty of the tenements and subjected to the subhuman conditions of the sweatshops, they survive on their dreams for a better life. This is particularly evident in Bread Givers, the most widely read of her novels, in which young immigrants struggle to put their parents’ shtetl behind them.

The Smolinskys are on the verge of starvation. Six of them, including four daughters, live in two rooms. One of the rooms is solely occupied by the autocratic Reb Smolinsky and houses his volumes of “Holy Torah.” Reb Smolinsky is an odious man who expects his wife and daughters to serve his every whim. On Sabbath he alone eats the small portion of meat the family can’t afford. Bessie, the oldest, is a young woman defeated by twelve-hour days in an airless factory, She is the family’s economic mainstay – so vital to its survival that Reb Smolinsky repels a potential suitor by informing him that he and Bessie must continue to support him. Bessie is aware of her father’s cruelty, but too crushed to change the course of her life. When her suitor Beryl Bernstein asks her to marry him at City Hall, she refuses out of fear. “I know I’m a fool. But I cannot help it. I haven’t the courage to live for myself. My own life is knocked out of me. No wonder father called me the burden bearer.”

Fania and Masha are lively and fashionable. Predictably, both sisters fall in love with men their father does not accept. Fania’s love, Morris Lipsky, is a struggling poet. Her father’s hostility and her mother’s hysteria over their relationship transform them into a Lower East Side version of Romeo and Juliet. Masha’s boyfriend is a concert pianist from an Americanized, wealthy Jewish family. Reb Smolinsky objects to the match because Jacob plays piano on the Sabbath.

Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter, watches these small tragedies unfold from the sidelines of childhood. As the book’s perceptive narrator, she conveys how the burdens of womanhood are imposed by the entitlements of manhood. In one of many examples, Reb Smolinsky attempts to save face by contributing money he doesn’t have to various charities. He does so instead of buying Sara a proper winter coat or feeding his family. With no hint of irony he laments, “Woe to a man who has females for offspring.” “And woe to us women who got to live in a Torah-made world that’s only for men,” retorts his wife. And woe to a new generation trapped in old world ways.

Bread Givers is Yezierska’s most overtly autobiographical novel. Like Yezierska, Sara realizes that the only escape from the ghetto is through economic independence. And the only way to achieve that independence is through education. She takes her first steps towards a new life when she is still a young girl by buying herring for a penny each and peddling them for two cents per piece. Later she finds work in a paper box factory and takes on a second shift as a student in night school. Her father’s disapproval of her life becomes so unbearable that she strikes out on her own. She perseveres with her studies and wins a scholarship to college.

Throughout her travails Sara has her mother’s tacit support; one night Mrs. Smolinsky sneaks out of the house to bring her daughter food and the goose down wedding quilt she brought from Poland. The scene between mother and daughter in the cramped, cold room that Sara rents is one of the most poignant in the book. It’s a moment of pure female love and empathy, a moment that transcends generational and cultural obstacles.

Like her protagonist, Yezierska moved out of her crowded tenement at seventeen to live at the Clara De Hirsch Home for Working Girls, a residence and trade school founded by Upper East Side German Jews for immigrant Jewish girls. The clash of pedigree – between Eastern European and German Jews – as well as the patronizing attitude of established Jews toward the poor figure among Yezierska’s themes.

Getting by without a high school diploma, Yezierska won a four-year scholarship to Columbia University Teachers College with the stipulation that she study “domestic science.” Her sponsors reasoned that a practical degree would enable her to return to the community and teach. But Yezierska also took the opportunity to study literature and philosophy at Columbia. By 1910 she had graduated and married briefly. Her second marriage produced a daughter and lasted only a few years.

By 1917 Yezierska had met the educator and philosopher John Dewey, with whom she had a passionate yet platonic relationship. She fictionalized their bond in a number of short stories. But for Yezierska their relationship was yet another casualty of culture in a country that was ostensibly the social melting pot of the world. Besides Dewey, she had other high-profile admirers, including Samuel Goldwyn, who in 1920 took an interest in Yezierska’s work and asked her to adapt her collection of short stories, Hungry Hearts, for the screen. It was made into a silent movie in 1925.

Sara’s quest for personal fulfillment and social acceptance leads to physical deprivation as well as encounters with the spiritual poverty that has taken root in America. The more educated Sara becomes, the more she experiences America’s indifference to her and to her accomplishments. Yezierska suffered a similar plight when her work was trivialized because of its less-than-subtle prose style and subject matter. By the 1930s she fell into an obscurity from which she never fully recovered and died largely forgotten in a nursing home in 1970.

In Bread Givers Sara triumphs over her circumstances by understanding that her choices are not limited to an arranged marriage or a life of sweatshop servitude. In more trying conditions such a desperate young woman might even have turned to prostitution as a way to escape chauvinistic oppression. But Sara achieves success through hard work and unwavering determination. By the end of the novel she is a confident woman who strolls into a department store to buy herself a fine suit for her first day as a teacher. When she finds true love she never considers asking for her father’s approval. She is also a mature woman, a Jewish woman of valor who embodies one of the Torah’s highest ideals by forgiving her father and promising to take care of him.

When Bread Givers was first published, Yezierska was accused of perpetuating anti-Semitic stereotypes at a time when immigration had become restricted and Henry Ford had published the virulent Protocols of Zion. Moreover, Jews were actively attempting to shed their “greenhorn” image. But something deep at work in Bread Givers refutes that charge. Anzia Yezierska’s tendency toward melodrama is balanced by her descriptions of the harsh realities of immigrant life in general and the lives of Jewish girls on the Lower East Side in particular. Sara Smolinsky is more than a survivor of her tragic beginnings. Her fortitude transforms Bread Givers into an American classic.

If I could possibly give you more karma I would, thank you a bazillion time, holy shit

seriously though i hope you fail by not reading it.