Bread Givers By Anzia Yezierska Sparknotes

Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska is a great book that accurately describes life as an American immigrant. The book is set in the early 1920’s on New York’s Lower East Side. The book follows a family of Jewish immigrants called the Smolinsky’s that immigrated from Russia. The Smolinsky’s are composed of Reb, an Orthodox rabbi who doesn’t work, he is the father of the family. Next is Shena, the mother of the family and Reb's wife. They have 4 daughters, the oldest being Bessie, then Mashah, Fania, and the narrator of the book, the youngest of the family Sara.

Bessie, Mashah, and Fania all find people that they love, and want to marry. One by one they bring the people they love to meet their father. He finds faults with all of them and says

With this new money, Reb starts to look for business opportunities. One day he finds a grocery store for sale in the newspaper and decides to go check it out. Shena warns him not to buy the store until she inspects it so Reb calls for Shena to come see the store. Once Shena is there, she sees that the store’s business is booming, there are tons of customers rushing around to buy goods. The amount of people in the store worries Shena. This leads to her wanting to inspect the store closer, but Reb says he already bought it earlier that day. They then check out the stock they have in the store and find out that the previous owner had filled the store with fake stock and expired items. This causes Shena to be furious yelling at Reb. Reb fires back saying how bad his life is because he has a wife that hates him. On page 126 he tells his wife, “Stop making me miserable. You were always looking for worries, so now you have something to worry about.” This pushes their daughter Sara to her breaking point, and she decides to run

I especially enjoyed the pictures throughout the book.The pictures are of Sara, and have captions relating to that part of the book that say what Sara is thinking. The pictures really added to the book allowing me to fully understand what life was like in New York during the 1920’s, and how Sara was feeling during different parts of her life. I especially liked the image used between page 166 and 167, it is a picture of her looking sad and hungry, with the caption, “ I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the food.” The pages around this image talk about how she didn’t have enough money for food at the time, this picture really enforces how hungry and desperate she