Bread Givers

A determined young woman challenges her Jewish immigrant family’s rigid norms in this "raw, uncontrollable" (The New York Times) classic American novel

More and more I began to think inside myself, I don’t want to sell herring for the rest of my days. I want to learn something. I want to do something. I want some day to make myself for a person and come among people. But how can I do it if I live in this hell house of Father’s preaching and Mother’s complaining?

Sara Smolinsky and her sisters are bread givers: They work to support their mother, who once lived a life of luxury, and their father, who cares more about studying the Torah than feeding his family. As Sara watches her father trade her sisters’ futures for his own financial gain, she sets out to find happiness for herself, even if that happiness goes against the traditions she was raised to follow.

Originally published in 1925, Bread Givers draws inspiration from Anzia Yezierska’s own experiences growing up in an Orthodox Jewish family in New York City. This witty, fiercely hopeful novel tells the story of a young woman searching for herself as she navigates Old World expectations and New World dreams, the misery of defeat and the glory of success, and finding what it means “to be a person among people.”Anzia Yezierska (1882-1970) was born in Poland and came to the Lower East Side of New York with her family in 1890 when she was nine years old. By the 1920s she had risen out of poverty and become a successful writer of stories and novels, all autobiographical, and an autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse. Her novel Bread Givers is considered a classic of Jewish American fiction. Her acclaimed books also include How I Found America: Collected Stories and The Open Cage. She died in 1970.Modern Library Torchbearers; Introduction by Emma Copley Eisenberg