Bread Givers By Anzia Yezierska

I read Bread Givers super fast. One, because it is not that long (297 pages), and two (but mainly) because it was a compelling story and well written. It reminded me a little bit of the book The Glass Castle. I was always wondering what could happen next, with such different perspectives from the "old world" parents and the daughters struggling in the new. It is written from the voice of the youngest daughter. It also had a hint of Pride and Prejudice, because the different daughter characters are being married off. (The book is unique from the two books I mentioned...so hopefully I have not misrepresented the book. As LaVar Burton would say, "you don't have to take my word for it!")

Bread Givers is perfectly titled. Bread Givers, or bread winners; who has the responsibility to feed a family, and where does that responsibility come from? Our culture, time and religion puts emphasis on the father. In America there is more about self, and less about family or roots. This mentality is not just a modern idea. The American Dream. The perspective of a Jewish Rabbi from Poland is set in his tradition. What is right? She writes, "More and more I began to see that Father, in his innocent craziness to hold up the Light of the Law to his children, was as a tyrant more terrible than the Tsar from Russia". But in his world that is correct. The well written perspectives, help the reader think deeply on the subject. Beside the physical need to be fed by bread, this book also address the deepest human need of love and acceptance.

Bread Givers is the author's, Anzia Yezierska, own biography. She was an immigrant. A young woman in a world were ambition was the path to Americanization and ambition seemed designed for men. She says, "I would spend years trying to reconcile what appeared even to me to be my own selfish desires with the profound need to find a place in the culture I had adopted." She wanted to be a "person".