Bread Givers

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Bread Givers (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Anzia Yezierska
Making the reading experience fun!

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster.

Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides:

chapter-by-chapter analysis
explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
a review quiz and essay topics

Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.

Publisher: Union Square & Co.

Print pages: 80

Sample

Anzia Yezierska was born sometime between 1880 and 1885 in a small Polish village. Her father was a Talmudic scholar, and the large family lived on the money her mother made from peddling goods, as well as on contributions from neighbors, who honored the way the family supported their studious and holy father.

Yezierska and her family immigrated to New York City in around 1890. Her brother Meyer, one of Yezierska’s eight siblings, had come over several years earlier and changed his name to Max Mayer. He gave his new surname to his family, so for a time, Anzia Yezierska became Hattie Mayer. Young Hattie had a variety of jobs, first peddling homemade paper bags on Hester Street and later becoming a laundress, waitress, and sweatshop worker. Rebelling against her parents’ wishes that she assume a traditional path, she left home at age seventeen to live at the Clara de Hirsch home for working girls—one of the city’s charitable shelters. She continued her education and earned a four-year scholarship to study domestic science at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City. Though bitterly disappointed that in many cases “domestic science” meant nothing more than cooking classes, she graduated and went on to hold a succession of teaching jobs before leaving for a time to room at the socialist dormitory of the Rand School, also in New York City. There, she socialized with well-known, outspoken women, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and absorbed iconoclastic ideas about marriage and women’s independence that expanded and strengthened her own views. During this period, Yezierska married two times: she had the first marriage annulled, and she left the second after three years. The second marriage yielded a daughter, Louise, whom Yezierska eventually left for her former husband to raise.

Yezierska published her first story in 1915, and she began receiving wide recognition for her writing in 1919. She published her first novel, Salome of the Tenements, in 1923. In each of her books, Yezierska worked to recreate the feelings of the immigrant girl she had once been, trying to break away from the oppressive strictures of her religion and make a place for herself in a new land. Yezierska also recalled the conditions she’d grown up in by repeat. . .