Briefly define the American Dream for Sara, her father, and one of her sisters.
In the novel Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, a young girl named Sara shares her experiences living in America as a Russian-Jewish immigrant. Her family is of very low economic status in America, which is the basis of her American Dream. Because of the poverty she and her family experience, working is of high value in the family. Although she is only 10 years old, Sara feels the responsibility of having to find work and make money somehow. When she starts peddling herring and making profit off of it, she realized that she enjoys the feeling of independence that making her own money brings. For Sara, the American Dream is taking what you have and working your way up to the point where you are the source of your own income and happiness. She doesn’t like having to depend on her sisters getting jobs or store owners letting them take goods to pay them back later; holding the 25 cents of profit she made the first time she peddled herring made her realize that that’s what she wants- to be independent.
Her family members have quite different ideas of what the American Dream is. After leaving Russia because of a Tzar that wanted to persecute Jews, Sara’s father, Reb Smolinsky, sought religious freedom. He does not work; he reads the Torah and prays. To him, the rewards he believes await him in heaven outweigh any suffering he may do on the Earth. His wife says at one point, “You’re so busy working for Heaven that I have to suffer here such bitter hell.” For Reb, the ability to practice his religion in peace in order to get to Heaven is part of the American Dream.
Mashah, Sara’s sister, seems to have the opposite view as her father on the American Dream. She is shown as quite selfish right from the beginning, buying only herself a towel and toothbrush and getting only herself food, not thinking about the hunger her family is experiencing. It seems that she believes that the American Dream is about enjoying the freedom of consumerism. The part that is most opposite to her father’s point of view is that she seems to believe that one must enjoy every possible thing while on Earth; if one day without a meal means new flowers for her hat, she is okay with giving it up. She sees the world through a sense of superficial beauty and material things. Her American Dream is to have enough money, to buy what she needs and wants to enjoy her life on Earth as much as possible.
Lucia Lopez
