Yezierska, Anzia: Bread Givers

First published in 1925, Bread Givers is Anzia Yezierska's powerful novel of immigration, generational conflict, and female self-determination in early twentieth-century New York. The story follows Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox Jewish immigrant family on the Lower East Side. Her father, a devoted but impractical scholar, insists on preserving Old World religious authority while his daughters labor to support the household. Determined to escape poverty and patriarchal constraint, Sara pursues education and independence, even at the cost of estrangement from her family. At once intimate and socially observant, the novel explores assimilation, class mobility, religious tradition, and the tension between filial duty and personal ambition. Drawing deeply on her own experiences, Yezierska crafts a work of American social realism that remains central to the literature of immigration and women's struggle for autonomy.