Bread Givers - Anzia Yezierska

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Résumé :
Bread Givers is a coming of age story set in the 1920s. As the novel begins Sara Smolinsky is a 10-year-old girl whose family has immigrated to New York City from Poland. Her father is an Orthodox rabbi who feels that it is up to his four daughters and his wife to support him as he studies the Torah. Sara watches as her father manipulates and orders her sisters into bad marriages and sees his many business mistakes. Determined not to let her father ruin her life as he did her sisters', Sara sets off on her own path that leads to family conflict, but with a promise of a better life. Masterfully written, a Jewish American Fiction Classic.

Biographie:
Anzia Yezierska (1880-1970) was a Polish-born American novelist and short story writer whose work chronicles the lives of Jewish immigrants in New York's Lower East Side. Emigrating to the United States as a child, she drew on her own experiences of poverty, cultural displacement, and intellectual aspiration to create vivid portraits of immigrant women striving for dignity and independence. Her fiction, including Hungry Hearts and Bread Givers, occupies a significant place in early twentieth-century American literature and in the canon of immigrant and women's writing....

Sommaire:
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....