Bread Givers Character Analysis

Anzia Yezierska is a polish immigrant who came to America in 1890 when she was just eight years old. The struggles her characters encounter are struggles that Yezierska herself overcame. English is an extremely difficult second language to pick up. Yezierska uses English to distinguish her immigrant characters from natural speakers of English. The more a character has assimilated to American culture in her novels, the more developed their language skills become. At the start of the novel, the main character Sara, speaks much the same as her family does, but, as she acquires an American education, and becomes more indoctrinated into American society her English improves. Grammar is used in the novel to depict character growth, and to separate the characters from the native born Americans. Through language, the characters are further separated from becoming ‘a person’ in America, and the best way to show this is to capture the language divide.
The book is written in three different languages, English, Yiddish and Hebrew; sometimes combining the three into a single sentence. Her combination of the languages has been dubbed “Yinglish; of a mixture of English and Yiddish, as she is credited with starting the trend of the bilingual Yiddish - English novels during her life. The way the Yezierska uses language in her novel shows how her …show more content…
Syntax, according to Rhetorical Grammar, is defined as “the way in which the words of the language are put together to form the structural units, the phrases and clauses, of a sentence “(Kolln and Gray 270). The syntax of sentenes is important because it places emphisis on certain parts of a sentece, and when we flip that around, it can change the meaning of a sentence all together, or get the meaning