Bread Givers and Immigrants in History

¶ … 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 sacrifice in financial terms, but also in terms of personal and cultural power and currency. Anzia Yezierska depicts this in the chronicles of the Smolinsky family in her novel The Bread Givers. The main focus of the novel is a family, the Smolinksys, whom have come to the America of 1930's East Side Manhattan in search of opportunity and freedom of persecution. But the Orthodox Rabbi who leads the clan is unwilling to give up his old European economic ways and patriarchal ideology even when the American economic system makes this life almost impossible to sustain. As a result, he nearly ruins his family.

The main character and narrator of the novel, Sara, must eventually give up conventional notions of close-knit Jewish family ties and her youth to realize her dream of getting an education and becoming a teacher. The themes of the novel underline that the American nation as a whole must give up conventional notions of America as a land of boundless opportunity, and recognize the sacrifices of culture, life and limb that immigrants must and have made to become a part of the American fabric. America allows Sara a different way of life, but at the price of estrangement of her father and her community.

The profound cultural shift the Smolinsky family endures is shown early on in the book, whereby the narrator bridles at the control wielded by her father over the family. The Smolinsky women struggle to keep the family economically afloat and to support the scholarly activities of the father. However, this older, European model of the torah-reading scholar supported by the labor of others is really not sustainable in America. In America, money matters more than learning, and there is no wealthy Jewish community or patrons or network of financial support and stability to keep the man in the style that would be customary in Europe. Although the Smolinsky patriarch may wish to keep alive the study habits, support of charities, and manner of life that would be practical, once, in a European Jewish community, in his perhaps equally idealized version of old Europe, he cannot in America. His determination to do so makes life hard for his daughters, and causes Sara to turn away from him first in her heart, and then to seek a new life.

Sarah believes that this demand of her mother and sisters, that they support her father is particularly unreasonable because she is both denied an education and the freedom to chose whom she marries, yet is compelled to work hard and long as a man in her jobs. She feels that her sisters must hate her father, although they say nothing. Part of the patriarchal model that is wielded in the home is that the girls never question the fatherly authority. However, in the American ideal, democracy and freedom of thought and expression is key, as is making a financial living to support one's life and studies rather than to live upon the bread earned by others. To live in America, the family must change its internal structures of governance, the way it values paid labor, and also the way it values female labor and choice.

Sara's father blames his family and particularly its all-female nature for his difficulties, but his real difficulty is that he must give up his old structures and ways of regarding labor, life, and his daughters. Even as an Orthodox Rabbi who clings to old ways, these ways cannot be fully imposed upon the economic culture of America, where financial profit and trade is all. Likewise, Sara is exposed to too many different models of womanhood to be fully satisfied with the life of her mother and older sisters, or the arranged marriage her father wishes to accept.

But even if America is a land of greater opportunity and freedom of speech, Sara comes to realize that it is hardly a paradise of perfection. Even when no longer required to sacrifice as her sisters did, she must sacrifice a great deal to realize her dreams and complete the wrenching process of creating a new culture in dialogue with her Jewish heritage and her new status as an American woman. Ultimately, she must work for many years, studying part time, before realizing her dream of becoming a teacher.

In many ways, Sara's fate is unsatisfying for the reader, for Sara must labor to realize her intellectual dreams in a way that her father did not have to. Even in the land of greater equality and opportunity of America, no one is completely free of the demands of the cruelties of the economy -- neither Sarah nor her father. The capitalist economy extracts a heavy price from the scholar, and a heavy cultural price of a man who came to America, seeking to recreate a certain religious way of life in an atmosphere of tolerance. But even though America may be religiously less persecutory than Europe, it makes merciless economic demands that are almost as depleting to Sara's father's soul and sense of manhood.