The Struggle for Independence in a New World
In Anzia Yezierska's novel Bread Givers, we learn about a struggle between Sara Smolinsky and her father. Her father, an Orthodox rabbi, is stuck in the traditions of the old world and will not tolerate Sara's longing for independence. This novel takes place in New York's Lower East Side, where the population mainly consists of Jewish immigrants who have come to America in hopes of living a better life than they lived in the shtetls. In America, for the family's who still lived by the traditions of the old world, life for the women was no different that life in the shtetls.
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 ...
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...to see her. He had disowned his daughter for leaving the family and not supporting him. After the death of Sara's mother, Reb even wrote a letter to the principal of Sara's school implying that the school should send part of Sara's wages to him because she abandoned her father.
Sara never did get out of her obligation to serve and take care of her father. The novel ended with Sara offering to let her father come and live with her so she could take care of him. This novel really illustrates the struggles immigrants who came to this country had to deal with. Like Sara, many other women wanted their lives to have more meaning that they were accustomed to. Coming to America gave money of them the opportunity to achieve their independence, just as Sara did in Bread Givers.
Bibliography:
Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers (New York:
Persea Books, 1999)
For awhile she feels deathly lonely "cheated and robbed of the life that more fortunate girls seemed to have (Chapter 16)." However, Sara manages to get into college and despite all the discouragement and hard work she graduates and gets a job as a teacher. She gets her own apartment, which she vowed to keep clean and empty, a dramatic change from her small and filthy childhood home she shared with her whole family on Hester Street. And even despite her mother's death, her father's rapid remarriage, and then his diamond earring wearing new wife's attempt to blackmail her into losing her teaching job, Sara still manages to find happiness. She gets married to the principal at her school, even when she thinks that her step mother drove him away. Yet, in the midst of all her good fortune, "[her] joy hurt like guilt (Chapter 21)." So much in fact that even through all her hatred for him, she still developed a longing to see her
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.
... while she still has time (257). She fails at first, thinking her father is “bereft of his senses” in his second marriage (258). She believes this despite the Torah saying, “a man must have a wife to keep him pure, otherwise his eyes are tempted by evil” (259). Gradually, Sara begins to understand her father: the only thing he has in life is his fanatical adherence to traditions; “In a world where all is changed, he alone remained unchanged” (296). Reb has a deep and true fear of God, to expect him to change beliefs that he believes have been handed down by God, beliefs that have persisted for thousands of years, is illogical. It is impossible to reconcile fully the New World with the Old, and it is the responsibility of the New to be the more flexible, unfair as it may be.
“It suddenly occurred to me that my grandmother had walked around here and gazed upon this water many times, and the loneliness and agony that Hudis Shilsky felt as a Jew in the lonely southern town-- far from her mother and sisters in New York, unable to speak English, a disabled Polish immigrant whose husband had no love for her and whose dreams of seeing her children grow up in America vanished as her life drained out of her at the age of forty-six--- suddenly rose up in my blood and washed over me in waves.”
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