Bread Givers

Name: Bread Givers
ISBN: 9781420972320

Anzia Yezierska

First published in 1925, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers is the tale of a young Jewish-American immigrant woman and her struggle to control her own destiny in Manhattan's Lower East Side at the turn of the century. The novel is based in large part on Yezierska's own life experiences immigrating from Poland as a child and growing up in New York City in an Orthodox Jewish family.

Bread Givers centers on the story of its main character, Sara Smolinsky, who lives with her older sisters and parents in a poor tenement in the Lower East Side. The Smolinsky family is destitute and struggles to make ends meet as the father, Reb, refuses to work and spends all his time studying the Torah and clinging to the traditions of the country he left behind. He arranges unhappy marriages for his older daughters in the hope of becoming rich himself. Sara vows to avoid her sisters' fates and takes her life into her own hands, pursuing an education and refusing to marry just because it is expected of her.

Bread Givers is both an engaging portrait of New York at the beginning of the twentieth-century and a timeless tale of a young woman's journey of self-discovery and determination.

About the Author

Anzia Yezierska (c. 1880–1970) was a Polish-born Jewish American writer whose fiction gave voice to the struggles and aspirations of immigrant women on New York’s Lower East Side. Born in a small village in Russian-controlled Poland, she emigrated with her family to the United States in the 1890s, where they settled into the crowded tenements of Manhattan. As a girl she worked in sweatshops and as a domestic servant while teaching herself English and pursuing an education, eventually earning a scholarship to Columbia University’s Teachers College.

Yezierska turned to writing in her thirties, drawing directly on her own experience of poverty, family tension, and the hunger to belong. Her breakthrough came with the story collection Hungry Hearts (1920), which attracted Hollywood’s attention and was adapted into a film, making her briefly one of the most celebrated immigrant authors in America.

Her best-known novel, Bread Givers (1925), follows Sara Smolinsky, a young woman determined to carve out an independent life in defiance of her tyrannical, Torah-obsessed father. Part coming-of-age story and part immigrant epic, the book explores the conflict between Old World tradition and New World ambition, and the cost of self-determination for women. Though it faded from view for decades, its rediscovery in the 1970s helped establish Yezierska as an important voice in American literature and feminist scholarship.

Her other works include Salome of the Tenements (1923), Arrogant Beggar (1927), and the autobiographical Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). She continued writing into her later years and died in 1970 in California. Today, her work is widely read and taught for its unflinching, passionate portrait of the immigrant experience.