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Sara and her father are very similar in one respect; they are both very determined and often stubborn. Sara’s father is determined to be fully dedicated to his religion no matter how much it makes him or his family suffer. He refuses to work and makes his family support him so that he can continue his studies of religion. His books take up much of the space in their tiny home.

Sara is very different from her father in most respects except for her similar sense of determination to follow her dreams. Her sister and mother work themselves endlessly to help support the family. Her sister Bessie works especially hard and gives all her earnings to her father without any hesitation. Sara on the other hand feels a sense of entitlement to the money she earns. She does not understand why her father can just sit around all day while her and her sister work tirelessly just to keep food on the table. Her father is very unappreciative because he just simply expects all of this from his family. Being stubborn like her father Sara is more reluctant to jump at her father’s every command.

Sara has her own idea of the American Dream. Being the youngest she is able to witness the choices her sisters make and the fates they meet. Sara does not just want to be married off to a man of her father’s choosing. She is determined to make a life for herself on her own terms. This sense of determination is something her and her father share strongly.

In the novel Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, the main character Sara, expresses her dislike of her father. Sara is frustrated by her father’s tyrannical rule over her life and the lives of her sisters. As a result, Sara runs away in order to pursue a life of her own — filled with her hopes, dreams and ideas of love. Although Sara and her father are very different in their ideals and dreams, they are very much alike in character and actions.

Sara’s father comes to America with old-fashioned ideas like, women live to only serve the men in their lives, and women have no place in higher education. He thinks that his ideas are the only right ideas and that he is better and more enlightened than others. This is shown when he attempts to find husbands for his daughters and when he strikes the landlord.

Sara’s father is well versed in the Torah. He prides himself in being a very religious man. Despite his poor financial situation, he always has his eyes on money and that motivates many of his actions. Sara’s father does not earn any money but finds ways to spend it. Most of the money that he receives from his children goes to serve his desires. He takes away from the mouths of his family in order to fulfill his goals of helping others, buying books and contributing to different organizations.

Sara’s actions, and the motivations behind them, do not contrast those her father’s as much as one would initially believe. Sara, headstrong and focused on her beliefs and ideas, like her father, is willing to ignore the feelings of her parents and siblings and isolate herself in an effort to become a teacher. She does not force her beliefs on others but ignores their input and does what she believes is right in her mind. Because it was of no benefit to her, Sara didn’t go to see her mother until her final days, and even after the death of mother, refused to cut a piece of her clothing. Like her father, Sara is willing to sacrifice at all costs to reach her goals.

Although it may seem like Sara and her father are selfish, they are actually altruistic. Sara’s father donated near all of his money to the poor. In the end of the novel, Sara gives money to her father’s new wife to help him and even offers him the opportunity to live with her. Although they are both motivated to seek money and wealth, they also have hearts of gold when it comes to helping others. This is partly because they share appreciation of the ideas from the Torah. Later on in her life, Sara finds herself understanding and appreciating the religious teachings of her father.

Sara’s father has come to America refusing to give up the past, and Sara faces a similar situation after she runs away and becomes a teacher. Both of them feel a sort of gravitation to the past and their old roots in a new world. This gravitation is what brings Sara and her father back together but will always set them apart.

When did it all go down the drain? Life for the Smolinsky’s wasn’t bad before the young couple moved to New York from Russia. In fact, they were pretty well-off. But business went bad, and forced the two to make their way to the land of opportunity. What was waiting for them past Ellis Island can only be depicted as the saddest poverty story told, one that can cause any reader to become frustrated beyond words.

For Reb, the patriarch of the family, nothing was more important than the studying of the Torah. He titled himself the light between his people and God, and disregarded any shame that was cast among him. His own family muttered some nights in disgust about how hard they worked as women and how lazy and conceited he was on his hollow quest to be with God. Although he’s said so many times that riches meant nothing on Earth if it meant they were not awaiting in Heaven, he still carried on about finding his daughters rich entrepreneurs to marry. This was Reb’s American dream, coming to a land where he didn’t have to work, and marry off his daughters so he didn’t have to worry – the money they’d provide would give him his new business. The only sad part of his dream is it ruined the dream of his own children.

Through the eyes of Sara, we witness her three sisters all fall eagerly in love with men they couldn’t have. A poet, a businessman, and a pianist – all ready to take his girls for brides and all shunned by the bitterness of a stubborn, nonsensical father. They each dreamed of running away and chasing opportunity for all it’s worth. They dreamed of hard work for not only their husbands, but for their own independence.

As for Sara, her dream was similar to that of her sisters. The only thing that separated her from them was she had the will to escape. While all three of her sisters stuck true to their loyalty to their father, she cracked. It was no longer her priority to slave for him. It was her turn to make her dream into reality.

The title of Anza Yezierska’s novel captures the starvation and subjugation forced on the female characters by the culturally sexist influences in their family. Bread symbolized money in the 20^th Century. As Reb Smolinsky remained at home studying Torah, the daughters of the house worked to provide money for the family, all of which was given to Reb Smolinsky. Reb focuses his efforts solely on the objective of going to heaven and often gives alms to others, neglecting his own family. His overzealousness blinds him to his family’s needs, and thus he forces his daughters to be bread givers, rather than breadwinners.

Furthermore, the title highlights Sara’s struggle between her personal search for independence and her cultural and familial duties to her family. As a bread giver in her home, Sara cannot pursue her quest for knowledge. While attending college, she rarely visits her family unless there is a threat to her continuing her education. After Sara’s mother passes away, however, she comes full circle and brings her father back into her home. Her father’s return symbolizes the reconciling of her conflict; she learns to remain independent while still fulfilling her cultural duty as a bread giver.

Henry Burby

The title of Breadgivers implies many themes in the lives of immigrants, and specifically Jewish immigrants. By separating the compound word, two especially stand out.

The word bread serves as a reminder of a factor that defines the lives of many immigrants: hunger. The book begins with Sara pealing potatoes for dinner, and most of the early part of the book is taken up with food and the work which is needed to acquire it. It is something that everyone has to contend with from time to time, but for many people around the world, including immigrants, it is part of their core identity. Life is not easy without food. There is no time to relax when you face starvation. You need to work to live, a fact that is much easier to see for immigrants without a social or governmental safety net.

The term breadgiver is similar to the term breadwinner. However, their second words show the difference between them. Where a breadwinner brings home the food, a breadgiver gives it without expecting anything in return, even love. Giver points out the one-sidedness of the relationship between Bessie and her father. In Jewish culture, as seen in this book, the father contributes nothing to the family, and is given his bread for free. His service to the family is strictly relegated to their afterlives, and their acceptance of this situation makes sense at first. After all, an eternity in paradise is worth the fat from the soup. The first breadgiver in the family is Bessie. She carries the family almost single-handed. She works constantly, and gives everything she earns back to her family. She does this because, in her culture, she only exists within and for her father, and by extension, her family. She carries them at least until she marries, when she takes on the burden of her new family, and she may well need to support her previous family as well. This relationship contrasts with that of the modern American family, where the family is taken care of for love. In Sara’s family, there is a much stronger element of obligation.

For most immigrants, coming to America means sacrificing the comfort and civility of their homelands to venture out into the uncharted territory of the Western world. People give up friends, family, and even stability to move to a place for the promise of what is known as “the American Dream.” There is the ideal of achieving that grand opportunity; for the chance to live among the privileged and see one’s image of reaching fortune and success come to life. However, what the American Dream has in illusiveness, it lacks in execution. For most, the harsh reality of life in America dawns in an age of “survival of the fittest” mentality. In Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, the protagonist Sara, along with her father Reb and her sister Mashah, each have their own interpretations of what is means to live “the American Dream.” From self-invention to religious absolution to even unachievable beauty, each character’s interpretation of the maxim is influenced by what they value most and how they interact with the family around them.

Sara’s American Dream is molded by the deterioration of her family at the expense of her father’s iron reign. As she watches all three of her older sisters’ dreams for both love and the future fade away into the visions that their father has created for them, Sara realizes just how much she wants to be independent from the bounds of her family and her culture and create the person that she was meant to be. Sara is the most resistant to her father’s religiously-backed tenets, which is why it crushes her to see the potential in Bessie, Mashah, and Fania be devolved into something of her father’s creation. She strives to be a self-sufficient woman and to pursue her passions and goals, such as becoming a school teacher, at all costs, regardless of the consequences that she will face from her father.

On the other hand, Sara’s father Reb Smolinsky is dedicated to only one dream, and that is serving the teachings of his God and to live the most holy life on earth in order to prepare for what awaits him in heaven. For him, America is just a transient place; one that is meant to act as the intermediary between the religious nirvana he expects in the afterlife. While he does appreciate the money he receives once he wins the case against his landlady and the wages from his daughters, his primary concern is being the purist, most orthodox follower of Judaism. His religious background serves to juxtapose the Western secularism that Sara follows and also acts as a ironic motif throughout the plot, as all the troubles that the family faces are at the hands of Reb and his zealous religious reasonings.

Lastly, Mashah’s American Dream is laid out in her continual search for beauty. In the earlier passages of the novel, Sara describes her sister as caring more for her own image than the image of the family. Mashah is concerned only for her appearance and the upkeep of her lavish belongings. Because of her superficiality, Mashah dreams to marry a man who matches her in beauty and supplies her heavily in wealth. She wishes for a life greater than the one that her family can provide her, and one that is ornate and adorned with visual aesthetic and symbols. However, as with her other sisters, her dreams are crushed when her father chases the one man that she could ever love, and transforms into a being without care, faced with reality of the world that she lives in and the condition that she created for herself.

Lina Mohamed

Bread Givers Journal

Sara and her father were really different, some might say, but the reason they always were arguing is because they were actually very similar. First off, in the novel we see that Sara, her sisters and her father all have different meanings of the “American Dream”. Sara seemed to believe the traditional American Dream as she wanted to become American and become a “real person” throughout the novel. Also, Alice Kessler-Harris says “her elusiveness captures what is most American about her” (Page xvii). Sara fought for what she believed in just like her father fought to teach his religion to his family. Their contradicting beliefs is what led them to fight all the time. Their characteristics, however, are almost exactly the same. Sara’s desire is to find her light that she sees radiating from her father. She wants to be as passionate about something like her father is about his religion.

Sara was constantly looking to live her life as an independent woman even though she admired her dad’s dedication to his religion. Reb Smolinsky was strong willed in what he did and Sara was the same in everything that she did. Sara went off to gain knowledge and devoted all her energy to getting an education and being knowledgable just like her father does with his own holy  books. The similarities between Reb and his daughter keep getting more lucid as the story progresses.

Sara, however, began to resent her father when he wanted them to get married while still getting some money from them while they were nearly starving. Reb was so caught up in his books and his wife and daughters that he neglected them and often helped others before his family. Sara was doing the same when she disobeyed her father by leaving and going to look for a job because that was what she believed in and she was fighting for it.

She proved her family wrong when she got a job in the beginning of the novel because she did something by putting her mind to it similarly to how Reb was determined to do charity work and devote his life to god. Sara is constantly changing her mind about what she wants as she is constantly trying to become a “real person” but she does not even know what will make her ‘real’ or ‘American’. Therefore, this state of happiness she is yearning for is simply unreachable. This does not change the fact that she is extremely still similar to her father.