Bread Givers

$17.00

SKU: 9780143137719
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Description

The classic novel about an immigrant girl growing up on the Lower East Side who dares to challenge her Orthodox Jewish family’s narrow conceptions of a woman’s place in the world, featuring a new foreword by the author of the New York Times bestseller Unorthodox, the basis for the hit Netflix series, and cover art by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck

A Penguin Classic

This masterwork of American immigrant literature is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father’s rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. Sarah’s struggle toward independence and self-fulfillment resonates with a passion all can share. Bread Givers is an essential historical work with enduring relevance.“Yezierska captures American hunger with extraordinary intensity.” —Vivian Gornick, The New York Times

Bread Givers enables us to see our life more clearly, to test its values, to reckon up what it is that our aims and achievements may mean. It has a raw, uncontrollable poetry and a powerful, sweeping design.” —The New York Times

“[Bread Givers] is no convenient narrative of the American dream. . . . There is a great and uncomfortable truth in Yezierska’s masterpiece that may have been willfully or unwittingly overlooked by its earlier readers: that the story of the melting pot is a lie, that the American dream is a fairy tale, which, by its own logic, would require the immigrant to completely dissolve into society. . . . The experience of Americanness for me became one of minute fragmentation, of disharmony and friction resulting from the impossible and cruel demands of ‘melting.’ Depending on one’s perspective, the failure of Sara Smolinsky to melt into America can be seen as a tragedy or a triumph. Even I am on the fence about this.” ―Deborah Feldman, from the ForewordAnzia Yezierska was born in a small town in Russian Poland sometime in the 1880s. When she was about ten, she came to America with her impoverished family, whose plight and prej­udices she described in Bread Givers (1925). For years, she struggled to achieve an education and to write. Her story collection Hungry Hearts (1920) brought her fame, but over the years, Yezierska also suffered criticism and neglect. She died in 1970, and today her works―four novels, two short story collections, autobi­ographical essays, and a memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950)―are considered classics of Jewish American writing.

Deborah Feldman (foreword) is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Unorthodox, the basis for the Emmy Award–winning Netflix series. She was raised in the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and now lives in Berlin, Germany.US

Additional information

Weight 13 oz
Dimensions 5.0625 × 7.7500 in
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Subjects

classic literature, poland, rebellion, literary fiction, FIC004000, american literature, gifts for her, polish, jewish fiction, jewish books, penguin classics, women, lower east side, classic books, fiction books, books fiction, classics books, classic fiction, jewish novels, jewish fiction novels, bildungsroman, coming of age, religion, feminist, immigration, historical, family, classic, fiction, classics, families, literary, book club books, FIC044000, New York City, classic novels, women's fiction, jewish, gifts for women, Immigrants, 20th century