Resource kit

Anzia Yezierska’s “Bread Givers”

Resource Kit by Alan Robert Ginsberg, Lesley Yalen

In Bread Givers, Anzia Yezierska’s 1925 novel, Sarah Smolinsky escapes the poverty and oppression of life as an Eastern European Jewish immigrant on New York City’s Lower East Side and reinvents herself as a self-reliant American woman. The youngest of four sisters yearning to escape the squalor of the tenements, Sarah is constrained by family obligation, low economic status, religion, and cultural tradition. Her overbearing father is a melamed, a religious scholar and teacher, who presides over his family with implacable paternal authority, mandating traditional gender-specific roles and obligations from which Sarah recoils and rebels. Her mother is trapped in the thankless drudgery of life in the tenements, limits of privation and want, and frustrations imposed by social and religious custom. Sarah’s sisters are consigned to arranged marriages and lives of wifely servitude like their mother. Seeking to avoid this fate, Sarah takes the wrenching step of moving out of her parents’ home, after which she labors to support herself, works her way through college, and becomes a school teacher. Eventually, Sarah tries to reconcile her new life with the family, religion, and culture she can never completely leave behind.

 

Cover image: Sketch of Anzia Yezierska accompanying an article in the Cedar Rapids Evening Gazette, March 5, 1921.

Teachers' guide

Reading and Background

  • Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers was published in 1925 by Doubleday, Page & Co. It was republished by Persea Books with an introduction by Alice Kessler-Harris in 1975, 1999, and 2003.
  • For a short biography of Yezierska, see the Jewish Women’s Archive.
  • Yezierska’s daughter, Louise Levitas Henriksen, wrote a longer biography, Anzia Yezierska: A Writer’s Life, which was published by Rutgers University Press in 1988.
  • Hungry Hearts, the 1922 silent film adaptation of Yezierska’s short story collection by the same title, was restored by the National Center for Jewish Film, with the cooperation of Samuel Goldwyn Pictures and the British Film Institute.
  • For information about immigrant experiences on New York City’s Lower East Side, check out the Tenement Museum.