According to Louise Levitas Henriksen, Anzia Yezierska’s daughter, Doubleday celebrated the publication of Bread Givers in 1925 with an advance printing of 500 numbered copies of the book to be presented to “important people” and a garden party in honor of the author. The novel would be, as Alice Kessler-Harris contends, the most autobiographical of the six novels Yezierska would write between 1920 and 1932 and remains as compelling today as it was in the mid-1920s. The novel received critical acclaim and remained popular until the onset of the Great Depression, after which it eventually went out of print, until Kessler-Harris rediscovered an old copy in a library and petitioned Henriksen to allow her to bring the text to the public’s attention once again in 1973.
The story told in Bread Givers addresses one woman’s struggle for education, a subject that finds a contemporary place within the American literary canon. Elizabeth Ammons has argued this point in her groundbreaking Conflicting Stories and posits Yezierska’s novel within a specific tradition of writing by American women who challenged existing definitions of gender roles and demonstrated that the new rights given to women, during the early part of the 20th century, were not only necessary but well deserved.
Bread Givers tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of a Jewish family that has immigrated to New York from Poland, only to face economic hardship in the ghetto surrounding Hester Street. The family—composed of the patriarch Reb Smolinsky, a Talmudic scholar, his sacrificing wife, and four daughters—lives in a small tenement apartment that allots one entire precious room in its meager space to Sara’s father and his numerous books, the only real belongings the family brought with them from the Old World. Sara struggles to find her own sense of identity, now caught between two cultures—that of the Old World, represented by her father and his traditional, though misogynistic, beliefs, and that of the New World, driven by capitalism. It is the painful conflict between Sara and her father that drives Yezierska’s novel, a conflict that reflects not only a clash in generational belief systems, but growing cultural differences. Sara begins to assimilate and becomes Americanized, while her father desperately clings to fading remnants of the culture he has left behind. Throughout the novel, Sara tries to negotiate a liminal space for herself between these two cultures—a space and resulting definition of self that, at times, causes both cultures to reject her.
The novel opens with Sara’s childhood on Hester Street and her family’s financial hardship, caused by her father’s scholarly devotion and his resulting refusal to find work and support his family monetarily. In Poland, her father possessed a traditionally accepted and highly regarded role in society as a Talmudic scholar, who enabled his research and study of the Torah by marrying a woman from a well-off family. After inheriting and losing his wife’s father’s business, Reb Smolinsky moves his family to America, only to find that the streets he believed to be paved with gold are in actuality not, and he must now work in order to support his family. He finds that masculinity in America is defined through a man’s employment. As a girl, Sara observes and grows to hate what she sees as her father’s tyranny and hypocrisy, revealed through his treatment of her three sisters, Bessie, Mashah, and Fania, either as workers who would give him their earnings or as property to be sold off in marriage. The women in this novel become the bloit givers (a Yiddish term that means “bread givers,” though part of its meaning is lost in translation) or burden bearers, who must support the father of the family, despite his belief in female inferiority and subservience.
Henriksen and, later, Kessler-Harris both emphasize the autobiographical elements of Bread Givers, showing how Yezierska’s difficulty with her own father fueled not only her ambition to escape from poverty, but her nuanced depiction of the educated, traditional Jewish European patriarch. Henriksen reveals that Yezierska visited her father, after the publication of the novel, in an attempt to make peace, to reconcile: “In Bread Givers Anzia had written out her anger at her father and the guilt he forced on her. The writing freed her. She had come to understand and sympathize with him as a zealot like herself, alone in a world of compromisers” (219). Sara, like Yezierska, through her fixed determination, earns the nickname Blut und Eisen, meaning “Blood and Iron,” from her father, since her passion for education supersedes all other needs—emotional, physical, and familial. Yet the very stubbornness that the father criticizes in his daughter is the same iron will he possesses and will enable Sara to accomplish her goals.
Unlike Yezierska, who, despite her attempts, never reconciled with her father, Sara does come to see her father as a victim who struggles to maintain his sense of identity in a world that no longer gives his vocation, as a private scholar of the Torah, any value. By bringing Hugo Seelig, a Jewish immigrant from Poland (who has ascended from humble beginnings to the position of principal of the school at which Sara teaches), home to her father, Sara gives her father a student eager to study the Torah, and thus validates his role as scholar and teacher. When the couple, Sara and Hugo, agree to invite Sara’s father to come and live with them, Sara is now able to allow her father a permanent place in her life, revealing her own maturity and willingness to finally accept her father as a flawed human being like herself. As the critic Martin Japtok suggests, Sara shifts from a sense of fierce independence, reminiscent of Emersonian self-reliance and individualism, to a renewed sense of responsibility connected to her community and family.
Sources
Henriksen, Louise Levitas. Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988.
Japtok, Martin. “Justifying Individualism: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers.” In The Immigrant Experience in North American Literature: Carving out a Niche, edited by Katherine B. Payant and Toby Rose, 17–30. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Kessler-Harris, Alice. Introduction to Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska. New York: Persea Books, 2003.
Konzett, Delia Caparoso. Ethnic Modernisms: Anzia Yezierska, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Dislocation. New York: Palgrave, 2002.
Schoen, Carol B. Anzia Yezierska. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982.