While Juniors learn about U.S. history, it is essential they learn about the hardships and experiences of immigrants who flooded to America. The Bread Givers is a historical piece about immigrant life in the 1920’s written from the perspective of Sara Smolinsky, a teenage daughter of Jewish immigrants. This novel is a necessary addition to Juniors required reading because of its authentic portrayal of the immigrant experience and generational divide with feminist themes that are still relevant to students’ experiences today. The Bread Givers gives first-hand insight into immigrants’ living conditions at the turn of the twentieth century. Sara and her family live in a Jewish ethnic enclave on the Lower East Side of New York City. This is highly indicative of immigrant life in this time period. Immigrants chose to live in close-knit, ethnically similar communities and shared a rich cultural heritage, not letting the traditions of their “Old World” die. Many students’ today can relate to honoring their traditions within their family and celebrating their heritage, customs, and religion. …show more content…
The Smolinsky sisters in The Bread Givers embody the struggle of immigrants to make ends meet and provide for their families.
Sara and her three sisters beg for work, waiting in lines in order to be able to put food on the table. Sara describes her experience at ten years old saying, “heavy on my heart the worries for the house.” Immigrants, like Sara, worked long, hard hours at the factory and often left school early to enter the workforce and provide for their starving families. This portrayal of immigrant life in The Bread Givers shows a more holistic image of American life through the lens of an impoverished, hard-working, second-generation immigrant, who had to grow up too soon. Many immigrants today empathize with these financial
hardships. Sara’s father, Reb Smolinsky, symbolizes the “Old World”, and Sara rejects this traditionalism to instead choose her own independence. Sara takes note of the generational divide saying, “it wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me.” Sara’s father is deeply religious and conservative, propagating patriarchal themes within the Torah including “what is a woman without a man.” As head of the household, he marries off Sara’s three sisters despite their resistance. Sara, instead, seeks an education and career by running away from home and putting herself through night school and college. As Juniors become young adults and seek independence, they can relate to Sara’s negative feelings toward older generations conservatism and the desire to make their own way. Sara earns her own independence, defying the traditional role of women in this time frame. She works hard to provide for her family in her formative years and sees the traditional experiences of her sisters’ fate with marriage. Sara shies away from their fate and empowers herself with education. Even when propositioned by a wealthy Californian businessman, Sara refuses and pursues her dream of becoming a teacher. Sara can be interpreted as a symbol of early feminism because she chooses education and a career over traditional domestic roles. Sara’s college experience gives high school Juniors insight into the importance of education for women in the early 1900’s and how knowledge can be a form of freedom. Symbolism and themes within The Bread Givers regarding independence, feminism, and financial struggle are at the core of teens’ experiences today. The Bread Givers offers a historical outlet to engage with these themes and empowers Juniors to reflect on immigrants’ experiences in the early twentieth century, which is essential in any study of early American literature.
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.
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.
Book three of the novel “Bread Givers,” written by Anzia Yezierska is set in New York. The story revolves around Sara Smolinsky, her family and the struggles they face in their daily lives. The main conflict in book three is Sara’s guilt for leaving her family and pursuing her career without seeing them for six years. For example, when she comes back to see her family, she realizes she is too late. Her mother is dying. Sara feels horrible that she didn’t come to see her mother and spend more time with her. She knows that she should’ve come to see her mother instead of investing so much time with school. Then, her mother dies a couple days later. She decides to stay and visit her father, Reb Smolinsky, often but doesn’t visit him after he gets married again only thirty days after her mother died. A couple months later, she sees Reb again but he’s working. She feels guilty for not supporting him and giving him money in his time of need. To see him working to get money for his greedy wife made her feel terrible. In the end, Reb can’t stand being in the same house as his wife and decides he wants to leave. He doesn’t know where to so Sara decides to take him in and let
Typical American by Gish Jen demonstrates the different struggles that a traditional immigrant family encounters. The book being discussed will be explained by means of historical influences and biographical influences during Jen’s life that affected the novel. This essay will also contain a critical analysis of the book and an analysis of the critical response from others.
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.
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.
In Jane Addams’s effort to try to assimilate immigrants into the American culture, she targeted the immigrant children first. Addams believed if the children became assimilated, the adults would follow suit. Hull House offered cooking classes and adolescents often took them so they could learn how...
For thousands of years people have left their home country in search of a land of milk and honey. Immigrants today still equate the country they are immigrating to with the Promised Land or the land of milk and honey. While many times this Promised Land dream comes true, other times the reality is much different than the dream. Immigration is not always a perfect journey. There are many reasons why families immigrate and there are perception differences about immigration and the New World that create difficulties and often separate generations in the immigrating family. Anzia Yezierska creates an immigration story based on a Jewish family that is less than ideal. Yezierska’s text is a powerful example of the turmoil that is created in the family as a result of the conflict between the Old World and the New World.
... lived in New York tenements. In Riis’s book, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York, he uses prolific prose coupled with emotionally powerful illustrations that paint a vivid picture of immigrant families living in tenements in the late 1800s. Throughout Riss’s book, exposes how immigrant children were forced to work in factories and sweatshops. As a result, Riss successfully achieves his goal of educating the middle class regarding the challenges that urban immigrants faced. Lastly, although Riss tact regarding racial epithets of the immigrants he wrote on and photographed are offensive, the importance of Riss’s photographs outweighs the racial insults because his pictures lie not only in their power to enlighten but also to move his readers regarding how immigrant families were forced into making their children work.
Shear, Walter. Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club. An excerpt from Critique, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 1993). 1993. Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation.
Family dynamics present interesting revelations, especially regarding the relationship between parents and children. While most families undoubtedly encounter dysfunction at some point throughout life, immigrant families seemingly experience such stress continually. A handful of short stories, including “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, “Who’s irish” by Gish Jen, and “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers” by Yiyun Li, demonstrate how strained relations erupt in immigrant families. Familial tension noticeably arises because of the immigrant parents’ inability to fully adjust to the American way of life. Further, immigrant parents adhere to strict expectations in an attempt to uphold the family’s conservative heritage. Finally, immigrant parents typically
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 subject of this paper is Liz, a 52-year old, 1.5 generation female immigrant from Hong Kong. What this means is that she immigrated to the United States when she was a child, around 7-years old (Feliciano Lec. 1/4/2016). As a child of a family that consists of five siblings and two parents that did not speak any English prior to immigrating, the focus of this paper will be on the legal processes that the family went through to become legal immigrants and the various factors that aided in her path towards assimilation.
In both Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska and All I Asking for is My Body the authors highlight the responsibility of children to their parents. In All I Asking for is My Body the idea of filial piety is a common theme and takes over the life of two of the characters. In Bread Givers Sara is burdened by her father’s constant need for her and her sisters to be around, provide for the family and be responsible for their father and mother. As second generation Americans Sara and Kiyoshi struggle finding their place in society because they feel closely tied to their roots but also want to be seen as Americans. The two struggle with the American values of independence and the old world values of filial piety and family piety. Both characters want