Anzia Yezierska portrays turn-of-the-century immigrant life with a colorful, fast-paced narrative. The story is not lacking in authenticity except as regards the character of the father, Reb Smolinsky. His repeated religious manipulations of his daughters really disgusted me but also seemed exaggerated and not quite believable. However, when I compared this story to Fiddler on the Roof, a film which bears some common themes involving the conflict between tradition and modernization, it became clear that the entire story was full of purposeful exaggeration, in the style of a folk story.

Reb Smolinsky, more than an actual person, seems to me to be a personification of what Yezierska sees as the tyrannical old Jewish male tradition, and is purposefully cast as an idealist with his head in the clouds. He pairs his three older daughters off in a fashion directly opposed to the matchmaking in Fiddler on the Roof. In a sense, Reb represents all the Yezierska herself viewed herself as resisting, and his characterization provided an easy straw man to knock down in her condemnation of certain traditions.

I enjoyed the more realistic approach Yezierska to to the conclusion, however, where she does not insert a formulaic break-with-tradition ending of complete separations but shows us how Sara, the main character, accepts her position of straddling two worlds — on old, one new.