Hero In Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers

Sarah is a very selfless person because in the short story she put each of her family

In “Bread Giver’s”, Sara Smolinsky transitioned from being financially dependent and bound to her father, to a person who was able to make vital decisions without heavy external influences, like her father’s cultural values. In the beginning, Sara was not able to make her own choices. A good example of this is when Sara trusts a customer to pay her back later, but the father frowns on Sara trusting a customer to pay back two cents. He implies her dependence to him by stating “Without asking me? I’m the one to decide who is to be trusted” (Yezierska 134). The quote emphasizes the Father’s authority over Sara, as well as her dependence on him. To further explain, when he says the phrase: “I’m the one to decide ...” he clearly states that it was him that makes any choices in the store, rather than Sara. A smaller, but significant example of Sara being financially dependent on her father is when her father doesn’t give Sara her earned-money for herself. Sara states “And yet, when I’d bring home the wages to Father, he’d never let me have money to buy something I needed” (Yezierska 89). The significance of this quote can be found after a couple of paragraphs after, where the father refuses to buy a coat for her daughter, even though the weather was freezing cold.

In Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska Sara is growing up as a Jewish immigrant migrated from Russia. From a young age she has only wanted to support herself and her family. As she grows older she begins to aspire to be “something”. What that something is seems unclear even to Sara. Sara is so unsure of what she hungers for that multiple points can be argued. Some may say she hungers for money because of the way her family has always had to scrape for pennies just to survive. Some may argue she quests for freedom because she runs away from her family. These are decent analysis but they do not dive as deep as they should. Sara’s aspirations are so much more than just money to buy more clothes or just freedom from her family. Sara is an

Sara Smolinsky is the youngest of four sisters; the eldest is Bessie, whom everyone calls the “Burden-bearer” because the whole family lives on her pay check. “I knew the landlord came that morning hollering for rent. And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world.”(1) The second eldest

“You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them”, says Maya Angelou, an American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist. This quote reflects to Sarah’s journey in the novel Sarah’s Key by Tatiana De Rosnay, since the main character, Sarah, faces events that affect her well being, as they make her both weaker and stronger. These events causes her to lose her innocence, makes her persistent, and then eventually drives her to be pessimistic. Sarah experiences traumatic events through her journey, which leads her to change both in a positive and negative way.

Before she begins the essay with the imagery, Allison adopts a persona of a mother who is formerly poor as a child, and now middle class with a large family. This is when she describes her past in an anecdote, and when she moves to describe cooking for her son and family. Her persona responds well to her intended audience, who may be poor families experiencing rough times, or young mothers in need of something to relate to.

Sara faces a number of serious hindrances on her way to making a life of her own. One of them is her father, who she looks up to and starts to resent later on in life. Her father, Red Smolinsky wants his all daughters to fulfill their gender roles: maintain the household, take care of children, cook, etc. Women, in his opinion, do not exist without men and their own function is to serve men in all senses – sexual, psychological and spiritual. Red Smolinsky represents the Old World with its conservative view on the womanhood. She also starts to hate her father when she understands the ways he has denied his daughters, her older sisters, lives of their own. Sara tries to resist this “new” world and her

Sarah's father is an immigrant who holds Jewish traditions as the highest importance of life. The role of Sarah's father strikes her hard and creates an enormous hatred for him. Sarah has been Americanized and feels strongly that her father should be the provider for the family. Instead her father lives off the work of his four girls as they slave away to make ends meet. Sarah sees this as the main reason of why her family is in poverty and is in such pain. If her father would work then at least some of their misery would lesson. She appears to view her father as a leech, as worthless man, who has lives in the days of the past. "I can't respect a man who lives off the blood of his wife and children" (Bread Givers 130). Sarah appears to believe that his idea of family does not fit the American recipe for being successful and more important happy. America has a standard cultural, "nuclear family", of a providing man, a caring mother, and student children. Her apparent hatred for her father's preaching's reflects how she feels about her Jewish religion and traditions. This influences her enough to turn away from her upbringing for an attempt to better her self.

In just a matter of months, Sarah has hastily experienced and heard things that she hadn’t thought she would. As she moved into her cousin’s home, she begins to see how the

She has just lost her mother and her father is at war or possibility dead, which is taking a huge toll on her. All these things hit Saranell at time moment in time, causing her to believe she is alone in this dreadful world. This tragedy causes her to doubt herself and her purpose. Her will to go on and fight is challenged, but she was able to overcome with the help of Renny, the family slave. “She put her fingers over her quivering mouth to control the laugh as Renny swooped and caught the piece of cornbread.

     In Anzia Yezierska’s novel entitled Bread Givers, there is an apparent conflict between Reb Smolinsky, a devout Orthodox rabbi of the Old World, and his daughter Sara who yearns to associate and belong to the New World. Throughout the story, one learns about the hardships of living in poverty, the unjust treatment of women, and the growth of a very strong willed and determined young woman—Sara Smolinsky.

Most people follow the footsteps of their parents because those are a person's role models. It is very difficult to break out of an economical class and make a better life for themselves than what they were raised up into. In The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara, Silvia is a young girl growing up a poor section of New York City. Miss Moore is a educated lady that moves to Silvia’s neighborhood in order to help educate the youth on some important life lessons. Silvia is reluctant to listen to anything Miss Moore has to say until one day when they go to a nicer part of the city seeing how the other half of society lives.

Sara was the youngest daughter, she was the only daughter to leave the home and go and try and make her life better, by pursing what she wanted to do without permission from her father. While she is out catching her dream, she is looking for love despite not living the Jewish life her father wanted for her. The father seems worried, but at the same time he always seems kind of nonchalant, he stated, “I’ll be happy and thankful to live in poverty, as long as I know that our reward will be completed in heaven” (Yerzierska, 12). It seems that the father was very into religion and did not agree with striving for the American Dream, and he seems to knock family member when they go out and reach that goal. While the mother does not believe the father full understands. She said to him, “You’re so busy worrying from heaven that I have to suffer here such bitter hell” (Yerzierska, 10). To know they live in these poor conditions and the father isn’t really doing much to help, he thinks he is helping by telling the daughter they need to find a job. You can see within the novel that each family member has their own view of the American Dream and how to achieve it. "This is America," a place "where everybody got to look out for themselves" (Yerzierska, 49). To go along with this quote, the father is still living in what his wife calls the old world, while the rest of the family lived in the new

First, Sarah had two deaths in her life and they were both extremely close family to her. “But Sarah's happiness was well lived. Just 42 days after she was born, Sarah’s daughter suddenly died. Sarah was still mourning her child 10 years later, when William died of tuberculosis” (Bachko 6). This is important because after her husband and daughter died, she was living with no one and was alone by herself.

Bread Givers was written by Anzia Yezierska and published in 1925. In the novel, the Smolinsky family had immigrated to America looking for a better future and escaping from the pogroms in their native country. The family moved to New York City where they live in a tenement on Lower East Side of the city. The book focuses in Sara Smolinsky who is the youngest of the Smolinsky daughters. She wants to be independent, so more than anything she wants to live her own life. At a young age, Sara is smart enough to understand the unhappiness and frustration that her and her family go through poverty and tradition of the old world. A sense of purpose is spread in her mins to achieve freedom, so she rebels against the values of her family’s traditions