Bread Givers Thesis

Bread Givers is a novel written by Anzia Yezierska it was originally published in 1925 and rediscover in the 1970s. Anzia Yezierska was a writer, novelist, and essayist that published eight books other the Bread Givers. She was also given a Hollywood contract in the 1920s to write screenplays, however she found it hard to write when she was so far away from her humble begins. Most of Yezierska’s books are semi-autobiographical based on her time spent in the Ghettos of New York. The forward and introduction of this book is written by Alice Kessler-Harris who discovered Yezierska books in the 1960s while studying for her dissertation at the New York Public Library, on New York Jews, in the 1890s. Harris became fascinated with the story that Yezierska had to tell about …show more content…
Yeziersaka was born in Maly Plock, Poland around 1882, which during this time was part of the Russian Empire. Her family immigrated to the United States when she was a child to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Bread Givers is a fictional story, however like most of Yezierska books it resembles closely the life of her and her family and their struggles with class, religion, ethnicity, gender, and martial status. The charters of the book Sara, Bessie, Mashah, and Fania deal with being oppressed by their father as they become adults and more Americanized in a new world, very different from the old world they left behind. Bread Givers is the story of a group of women struggling to elevate themselves from poverty to middle-class American society, the American dream. Religion and ethnicity play a major role throughout the novel. Reb Smolinsky the father of the girls spent his days in the Talmudic study of the Torah. The Jewish faith was for men and men alone, “The prayers of his daughters didn’t count because God didn’t listen to women. Haven and