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    A Study Guide for Anna Yezierska's "Bread Givers"
    A Study Guide for Anna Yezierska's "Bread Givers"
    A Study Guide for Anna Yezierska's "Bread Givers"
    Ebook60 pages52 minutes

    A Study Guide for Anna Yezierska's "Bread Givers"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Anna Yezierska's "Bread Givers," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535819916
    A Study Guide for Anna Yezierska's "Bread Givers"

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      A Study Guide for Anna Yezierska's "Bread Givers" - Gale

      09

      Bread Givers

      Anzia Yezierska

      1925

      Introduction

      Anzia Yezierska came to America with her Polish immigrant family in the 1890s. She never forgot the hunger and hardship of their early days in the Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Her struggle to escape from the slums to an independent American life is fictionalized as Sara Smolinksy's journey in Bread Givers (1925), originally subtitled, A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New. It is the most closely autobiographical of Yezierska's early works.

      Yezierska was at the height of her fame in the 1920s when she wrote Bread Givers. She had already been exploring similar themes of surviving in a foreign culture in her short stories and novels. Her first collection of short stories, Hungry Hearts (1920), had been made into a successful film, and she had been accepted by Hollywood as the Sweatshop Cinderella, a rags-to-riches stereotype she came to resent as oversimplified. Returning to her roots in New York, she continued to pour out fiction about the hope, guilt, anger, and determination of the immigrant in America. All but forgotten after the Great Depression, she enjoyed a mild revival with her autobiographical novel about being a writer, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950). Not until interest in ethnic literature rose in the 1960s, however, was she rediscovered. Bread Givers, which had been out of print, was republished by Persea Books in 1975, and it has remained the author's most popular work. Yezierska's fame seems assured the second time around. Her primary topic, the clash of conflicting values in a multicultural world, is a timely theme in contemporary society.

      Author Biography

      Anzia Yezierska was born in Plotsk (or Plinsk), a small town in Russian Poland, around 1883 to a family with ten children. Her father was a Talmudic scholar. The family immigrated to New York around 1893, where the eldest son had moved first, changing his name to Max Mayer. The rest of the family changed their last name to his, with Anzia becoming Harriet (Hattie) Mayer, only later changing her name back. They lived in the Jewish ghetto on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yezierska left her family to live on her own in 1900, going to night school to learn English and working in sweatshops during the day. She lived at the Clara de Hirsch Home for Working Girls, a settlement house that helped immigrant girls train as servants. She was given a scholarship to study domestic science at Columbia University's Teachers College and became a teacher of cooking in the New York public schools from 1905 to 1913.

      To compensate for the intellectual education she had not gotten, she read and attended lectures, living in Rand School, a Socialist gathering place. There she met feminist activists and writers. In 1911 she married Jacob Gordon, an attorney, but quickly got an annulment and then married Arnold Levitas, the father of her only child, Louise, born in 1912. Finding marriage too confining, she tried to be a working single mother but finally let Levitas have custody of Louise so that she could devote herself to writing. Her first story, The Free Vacation House, was published in 1915 in Forum.

      In 1917 Yezierska met the philosopher John Dewey, who enrolled her in his Columbia class on social philosophy. He inspired her to write and helped her publish. Dewey also wrote love poems to her but broke off the relationship. Yezierska included older Dewey figures throughout her work, representing the wise American who accepts the immigrant woman for her gifts. In 1918 Dewey got her a job as a translator for a research project studying the Polish community of Philadelphia. Her story The Fat of the Land won the O. Henry Award as best short story of 1919. A collection of stories was published as Hungry Hearts in 1920. Hollywood made a film of it, and Samuel Goldwyn signed Yezierska to write scripts. Uncomfortable with Hollywood, however, she returned to New York.

      This was Yezierska's period of fame as the Sweatshop Cinderella who worked her way out of the slums. She wrote realistic scenes of ghetto life in an anglicized Yiddish idiom. Salome of the Tenements, a novel that was also made into a film, and Children of Loneliness, a collection of short stories, followed in 1923.

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