I recently searched the library shelves for new alphabet authors, especially for some of the more obscure letters. My "Y" is Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers.
This is a novel written in 1925, which made me interested to see what was happening there; I confess that I had never heard of her, though the forward by Alice Kessler-Harris assured me that the book had been well received at the time. TSOR reveals that it is a popular book club or high school read.
Set in the shtetl of Hester Street in New York, following an immigrant family who'd come to America, it is a little slice of traditions and expectations set against the shock of modernism and desires. The Smolinsky family is 4 girls--Sara (our main character), Fania, Bessie, and Mashah--their mother and father. Bread Givers are the men in the lives of the daughters, beginning with their father who demands utmost respect from his daughters ("No girl can live without a father or a husband to look out for her...It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence") and from the neighborhood ("What? I work like a common thickneck? My learning comes before my living. I'm a man of brains. In a necessity I could turn to business." Turns out he has no head for business and is cheated in a deal when he buys a grocery). The girls work, giving their father part of their wages to keep him from having to work. As they fall in love, he ridicules and drives away their partners but the necessity of marrying off daughters leads him to make poor choices that the girls must live with. The beaux are all men of the New World--Berel is a shop clerk with aspirations of his own business but Reb Smolinsky drives him away and marries Bessie off to the widower fishmonger who needs a new wife to care for his 5 children; Jacob is a concert pianist son of a wealthy merchant but both fathers part them and she marries a man who sells jewelry but pretends to be a diamond dealer and a con artist. Fania falls in love with a writer but is married off to a rich man who doesn't love her and uses her as a walking status symbol.
Against this Sara desires to make something of herself. She is our feminist. She studies at night school, even though learning is not for girls. She works in the garment trades as an ironer and scrimps and saves (against a system that values men's work more than women's) to go to college and become a teacher. She works through college and fights against class prejudice and the difficulties of her upbringing. She begins teaching and finds love for herself. And as her mother passes away and her father remarries to a woman who only wants his insurance payout, Sara reaches a detente with her father and takes him in with her. The idea being that she sees his weakness and takes him back out of her own mercy not out of his demands (or even his merit). It's hard not to see this as turning her from a free woman into a proper woman but it's also easy to forgive that for it's time (and perhaps the desire to hope that when we are old and foolish, our children will forgive us).
It's a really compelling read--full of Socialism and feminism and American immigrant history. Glad I found a good "Y".
No comments:
Post a Comment