Bread Givers

Bread Givers is a novel by the Jewish-American writer Anzia Yezierska, published in 1925, and its narrator is a girl growing up in an immigrant household on the Lower East Side whose parents came from Poland.

The Smolinskys are destitute because Reb Smolinsky, Sara's father, spends his days with the sacred texts and considers paid work beneath him; it is her mother, Shenah, who takes in boarders and moves her husband's books under the bed to make room for them. The family's arrears bring the rent collector to the door, and that visit sets off the quarrel between the father's authority and the family's need to eat. Sara watches her three older sisters, Bessie, Fania and Mashah, be married off on terms that their father arranges and that none of them chose, and she decides that education is the only way out of the tenement. The novel follows her through her first jobs, the night school she attends while working, and the years she spends trying to become a teacher, with her father's disapproval never far behind. Yezierska writes hunger of several kinds at once, for food, for learning and for a self that does not belong to anybody else, and the book is one of the earliest American novels to give a Jewish immigrant woman her own voice in the first person.