This is not simply culturally but also because Bread Givers emerges as a far more hopeful work. Steinbeck shows the blood, toil, and tears it takes to produce the grain that the women of the bread givers make for the men studying Torah. Although the Grapes of Wrath became a novel, by reading John Steinbeck's Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, the reader gains access to the real-life portraits of the California's white migrant farm workers that inspired the book. These people were denied access to the American dream of the bounty of the family farm and the right of every American to his or her own plot of land in a way that seems far more insurmountable than Yezierska's immigrants. These migrants, rather than moving up in the world, suddenly lose everything and find themselves with no opportunities for social advancement and education. This occurs because of economic and class-based rather than cultural reasons. The long-time residents of America worry just as much about money as tenement residents, but can see no way out of their economic slavery to wealthy agribusiness capitalists. The migrant workers have little educational opportunities...
Yezierska's work is a thinly disguised autobiography, blending fictional techniques like dialogue with a passionate, personal narrative voice. Steinbeck's work is a nonfiction newspaper piece that eventually became one of the greatest works of 20th century Depression-era fiction, and it uses dialogue and other fictional techniques to make the reader care about the families, not merely take note of the facts about their existence, and thus promote outrage and political change. Although both works come to different conclusions about the possibility of hard work leading to advancement, they show the ability of emotion and anecdotal experience to paint a richer picture of the economic difficulties of making a new life in America, or sustaining an older form of sustenance.
Bread Givers -- America gives nothing, not even opportunity freely, without demanding something in exchange America is the land of the free, in its political theory and its popular rhetoric. Yet in the harsh realities of American capitalism, especially for recent immigrants with few social support networks, there is no such thing as a 'free lunch.' In other words, no one gains anything without sacrifice, in America -- one must
Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. Specifically, it will focus mainly (without ignoring the rest of the novel) on the concept of the father, as well as on the concepts of Nativism and Nation. "Bread Givers" is the moving story of one young woman's struggle to make something of herself in a new country. She struggles against the old world ideals of her family, especially her father, who hangs on
The conflict between Sara and her father mirrors that of Ana and her mother. Reb and Carmen both try to control and manipulate their daughters by appealing to traditional cultural values. Gender is at the heart of their struggle, as gender norms are critical to their old-fashioned worldviews. Interestingly, there are traditionalists in both Bread Givers and in Real Women Have Curves who retain their ethnic identities while promoting gender
Huckleberry Finn is the closest we have to a national hero. We trust the story of a boy with no home and who is restless as the river -- The genius of America is that it permits children to leave home; it permits us to be different from our parents. But the sadness, the loneliness, of America is clear too. What is Rodriguez telling us about a central feature of the
Patriarch Nothing stays with us in life as powerfully as the images of our parents we take with us into adulthood. A harsh father, a loving mother, a single parent who was on the edge of exhaustion, but always available... The emotions attached to these memories affect our adult decisions. These recollections influence how we see ourselves, who we believe we can be in the adult world, and who we
Ethnicity and American Identity The basic conception of American identity in the years between Cahan's Yekl, Yezierska's The Bread Givers, and Morrison's The Bluest Eye, is essentially unchanged. Each of the characters in these novels face a conception of American identity that is drawn along racial lines, and the arc of each novel's plot is centered on each character's attempt to transcend their racial otherness to be accepted by American society.
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