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Many immigrants came to America during the 1920s in hopes of escaping the harsh poverty of their previous country. After the initial excitement of the new country wore off though, immigrants once again found themselves poverty stricken but this time, in America. The novel, Bread Givers, written by Anzia Yezierska, reveals the struggles that immigrants often encountered in the new world through the eyes of seventeen year old, Sara Smolinsky, and her family. The Smolinsky family immigrated from Russia to America in the 1920s and lived in a dirty, crowded street tenement on the Lower East Side of New York. Living with her three older sisters, mother, and father, Sara became fed up with the life which she was living. She had to work hard every …show more content…
day to support her family and was frustrated that her father, a Jewish rabbi, would rather spend his days studying the Torah than get a job and help out the family financially. In an argument with her father, Sara exclaims, “I’ve got to live my own life. It’s enough that Mother and the others lived for you” (Yezierska 137), and decides to leave in order to pursue “the American Dream” without his permission. Living on her own and fighting for what she wanted, Sara ultimately succeeded in making herself into an “American” by breaking free from her previous life’s oppressive grip and acquiring the education, career, and material possessions that she badly wanted for herself. “Americanization” to Jewish women meant defying the traditional gender roles of the “Old World”.
Immigrant women often wore themselves out trying to care for their children, maintain their home, and manage finances all with the husband’s little wages that came in. Few immigrant women, like Sara, dreamed of becoming a more than a mere housekeeper and set out to achieve their goals even if it meant violating the expectations of her father and own community. The first thing Sara set out to do once she was on her own without her family and father was to find a room where she could live alone. In Sara’s eyes, renting a private room that she did not have to share with anyone else was a thing that rich Americans had the luxury of and immediately felt a since of accomplishment when her landlord handed her the keys to her new room. It was not easy, but eventually Sara acquired the material possessions she deemed necessary in order to fit into the American lifestyle. She had a private room to herself and the same clothes women during that time wore. Sara’s transformation away from the Old World became evident at her mother’s funeral. It was a Jewish tradition to have their clothes torn and Sara was the only one who refused. Her material possession of clothes meant more than the tradition she grew up with and it showed when she said “I don't believe in this, It’s my only suit, and I need it for work. Tearing it wouldn't bring Mother back to life again”(Yezierska 255). Sara achieved material success that she wanted and was not going to let Old World traditions ruin what she worked
for. The best part of America and often the reason for immigration was the idea of freedom. “Freedom” to Sara meant freedom of career choice and education seemed to be the only way to become a “person” in America. On her own, Sara packed her things, left New York for the first time, and set out to Columbus to attend college. Upon arrival, Sara first took note of the life in Columbus. It was quiet compared to New York without the noise of crowds and sight of dirty street tenements and Sara thought to herself “If I could lose myself body and soul in the serenity of this new world, the hunger and turmoil of my ghetto years would drop away from me, and I too would know the beauty of stillness and peace”(Yezierska 211). Sara was willing to give up everything about herself and the Old World to live a life similar to the Americans in the college town she was visiting. The initial transition into the college lifestyle was hard for Sara. She worked as an ironer in a laundromat to earn a living and at night would have to attend college. After failing a class her first term, Sara was determined try harder in order to achieve her dream job as a teacher. Enduring many years of discrimination for being a young woman on her own and fighting for herself, Sara finally makes it to Commencement Day. At the graduation ceremony they announced Sara as the winner of a writing contest and everyone began praising and chanting her name in triumph. At that moment Sara feels an immense amount of pride in herself because she finally succeeded in becoming a “person” in America by receiving an education in order to have her dream job. At the end of the novel, Sara finally left behind the Old World and “Americanized” herself, but some argue that she did not succeed because at the end of the novel, she asks her father to live with her and Hugo. Sara went off on her own at the age of seventeen and fought through constant discrimination to make a life for herself and is not going to let anyone take that away from her. She left her family behind for many years while he parents were struggling and may have a bit of remorse for her actions, but it was necessary to get what she wanted. Sara has grown up to be successful and even though she offers to take her father in, she is strong enough to hold her own ground and not crumble under her fathers tyranny as she did in her previous life. Sara Smolinsky abandoned the oppressive grips of her previous life which very few immigrants dared to do during the 1920s and ultimately succeeded in becoming an American. She acquired the material possessions of clothing and a room to herself, graduated with a teaching degree, and obtained her dream job which was all apart of her “American Dream”.
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”.
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.
...n the trying time of the Great Migration. Students in particular can study this story and employ its principles to their other courses. Traditional character analysis would prove ineffective with this non-fiction because the people in this book are real; they are our ancestors. Isabel Wilkerson utilized varied scopes and extensive amounts of research to communicate a sense of reality that lifted the characters off the page. While she concentrated on three specifically, each of them served as an example of someone who left the south during different decades and with different inspirations. This unintentional mass migration has drastically changed and significantly improved society, our mindset, and our economics. This profound and influential book reveals history in addition to propelling the reader into a world that was once very different than the one we know today.
How truly grateful are we for our possessions and what we have earned from the work we have done? Are we thankful for what we possess, or are we still jealous of that one friend, colleague, coworker, or even extended family member that has nicer belongings than we do? Jacob Riis opened our eyes and gave us a true, vivid description and idea of how American families in New York during the late 1800’s lived and worked. This eye opening account shows us today that we should be grateful for what we have and never think that everyone is better than us. Throughout How the Other Half Lives, Riis uses a variety of writing techniques such as word choice, imagery, and.
The two works of literature nudging at the idea of women and their roles as domestic laborers were the works of Zora Neale Hurston in her short story “Sweat”, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Whatever the setting may be, whether it is the 1920’s with a woman putting her blood, sweat and tears into her job to provide for herself and her husband, or the 1890’s where a new mother is forced to stay at home and not express herself to her full potential, women have been forced into these boxes of what is and is not acceptable to do as a woman working or living at home. “Sweat” and “The Yellow Wallpaper” draw attention to suppressing a woman’s freedom to work along with suppressing a woman’s freedom to act upon her
Immigrants come to America, the revered City upon a Hill, with wide eyes and high hopes, eager to have their every dream and wild reverie fulfilled. Rarely, if ever, is this actually the case. A select few do achieve the stereotypical ‘rags to riches’ transformation – thus perpetuating the myth. The Garcia family from Julia Alvarez’s book How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, fall prey to this fairytale. They start off the tale well enough: the girls are treated like royalty, princesses of their Island home, but remained locked in their tower, also known as the walls of their family compound. The family is forced to flee their Dominican Republic paradise – which they affectionately refer to as simply, the Island – trading it instead for the cold, mean streets of American suburbs. After a brief acclimation period, during which the girls realize how much freedom is now available to them, they enthusiastically try to shed their Island roots and become true “American girls.” They throw themselves into the American lifestyle, but there is one slight snag in their plan: they, as a group, are unable to forget their Island heritage and upbringing, despite how hard they try to do so. The story of the Garcia girls is not a fairytale – not of the Disney variety anyway; it is the story of immigrants who do not make the miraculous transition from rags to riches, but from stifling social conventions to unabridged freedom too quickly, leaving them with nothing but confusion and unresolved questions of identity.
This book talks about the immigrants in the early 1900’s. The book describes how they live their daily lives in New York City. It helped me a lot on Riis photographs and his writings on to better understand the book and the harsh reality this people lived. This comes to show us that life is not that easy and it will cost us work to succeed.
American culture has defined the ideal dynamic for a family for many generations as one with a single, or perhaps multitude of dominant male figures, a submissive role or roles usually filled by the women in the household, and of course, children, who are deemed more acceptable if they are “seen and not heard”. Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping deconstructs and twists around what has grown to be custom in American Literature, and challenges the reader to feel uncomfortable about missing or swapped gender roles within the story itself. In Housekeeping, Ruthie and her sister Lucille have been transferred through several relatives after their mother’s death, and find themselves aching for a “normalcy” that they have never experienced, one that
Moving from the unpleasant life in the old country to America is a glorious moment for an immigrant family that is highlighted and told by many personal accounts over the course of history. Many people write about the long boat ride, seeing The Statue of Liberty and the “golden” lined streets of New York City and how it brought them hope and comfort that they too could be successful in American and make it their home. Few authors tend to highlight the social and political developments that they encountered in the new world and how it affected people’s identity and the community that they lived in. Authors from the literature that we read in class highlight these developments in the world around them, more particularly the struggles of assimilating
The story is told through the eyes of seven year old Luke Chandler. Luke lives with his parents and grandparents on their rented farmland in the lowlands of Arkansas. It takes place during the harvest season for cotton in 1952. Like other cotton growers, these were hard times for the Chandlers. Their simple lives reached their zenith each year with the task of picking cotton. It’s more than any family can complete by themselves. In order to harvest the crops and get paid, the Chandlers must find cotton pickers to help get the crops to the cotton gin. In order to persevere, they must depend on others. They find two sets of migrant farm workers to assist them with their efforts: the Mexicans, and the Spruills - a family from the Arkansas hills that pick cotton for others each year. In reading the book, the reader learns quickly that l...
In the short story, “Girl,” the narrator describes certain tasks a woman should be responsible for based on the narrator’s culture, time period, and social standing. This story also reflects the coming of age of this girl, her transition into a lady, and shows the age gap between the mother and the daughter. The mother has certain beliefs that she is trying to pass to her daughter for her well-being, but the daughter is confused by this regimented life style. The author, Jamaica Kincaid, uses various tones to show a second person point of view and repetition to demonstrate what these responsibilities felt like, how she had to behave based on her social standing, and how to follow traditional customs.
Kuttner also agrees, “a lot of ugly realities were concealed by “traditional values”; the legal and economic emancipation of women was long overdue, and the task now is to reconcile gender equality with the healthy raising of the next generation.” (124). Before the 1890s, females had no other options but to live with their parents before marriage and with their husband after marriage. They couldn’t work and if they did, their wages were way lower than men.
Mary went from not even attending school in Russia, to star pupil in America, illustrating the promise that America had to offer immigrants. American afforded Mary with opportunities that were impossible in her home country of Russia. Even though Frieda also lived in America, her circumstances represent the realities of the Old World. For instance, Frieda’s only way of learning about American history was through Mary, as she was not afforded time to read while working. By not attending school, Frieda did not only became stuck in the Old World mentality in terms of education but also in terms of marriage. Her father “had put Frieda to work out of necessity. The necessity was hardly lifted when she had an offer of marriage, but my father would not stand in the way of what he considered her welfare” (Antin, 218). Frieda was not given the opportunity to marry for love, as was the American way, but was married out of necessity for her welfare, reminiscent of the Old World mentality. Public education provided Mary with the opportunity to marry not because she had to in order to survive, but because she wanted to. The stark contrast between the lives of Frieda, representing life in the
The term “Sandwich Generation” is what some are using to describe those people who, for one reason or another, are ‘sandwiched’ between the need to provide care not only for their own children but also for at least one aging parent. There has been much debate on what classifies someone as being included in such group, and little emphasis on the hardships that accompany the transition between child and caregiver. This paper will discuss the classification that make up the “sandwich generation’ and some of the financial and emotional stress that comes with this new responsibility.
Many women in modern society make life altering decisions on a daily basis. Women today have prestigious and powerful careers unlike in earlier eras. It is more common for women to be full time employees than homemakers. In 1879, when Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll's House, there was great controversy over the out come of the play. Nora’s walking out on her husband and children was appalling to many audiences centuries ago. Divorce was unspoken, and a very uncommon occurrence. As years go by, society’s opinions on family situations change. No longer do women have a “housewife” reputation to live by and there are all types of family situations. After many years of emotional neglect, and overwhelming control, Nora finds herself leaving her family. Today, it could be said that Nora’s decision is very rational and well overdue.