Symbols And Characters Of

“Bread Givers” Essay, Research Paper

Symbols and Characters of “Bread Givers”.

One of the significant features of Jewish history throughout many centuries was migration. From the ancient pre-Roman times to medieval Spain to the present days the Jews were expelled from the countries they populated, were forced out by political, cultural and religious persecution, and sometimes were motivated to leave simply to escape economic hardship and to find better life for themselves and for their children. One of the interesting pages of Jewish history was a massive migration from Eastern Europe to America in the period between 1870 an 1920. In that period more than two million Jews left their homes in Russia, Poland, Galicia, and Romania and came to the New World. The heaviest volume of that wave of Jewish emigration came between 1904 and 1908, when more than 650 thousand Jewish emigrants came to the US. The Eastern European Jews fled from pogroms, religious persecution and economic hardship. We can learn about those times from history text books, but a better way to understand the feelings and thoughts of the struggling emigrants is to learn a story from an insider, who herself lived there and experienced first hand all the challenges and hardships of the emigrants’ life. Anzia Yezierska’s novel “Bread Givers” is a story that lets the reader to learn about the life of Jewish Emigrants in the early Twentieth Century on Manhattan’s lower East Side through the eyes of a poor young Jewish woman who came from Poland and struggled to break out from poverty, from tyrant old traditions of her father, and to find happiness, security, love and understanding in the new country. The book is rich with symbolism. Different characters and situations in the novel symbolize different parts of the emigrants’ community and challenges that they faced. The characters range from the father, the symbol of the Old World, to the mother who symbolizes struggles and hopelessness of the women of the Old World, to the sisters and their men, who together represent the choices and opportunities that opened before the young generation of the Jewish emigrants in the New World.

The father of the storyteller, Sarah Smolinsky, is an orthodox rabbi, Mosheh Smolinsky, with rigid old-fashioned conceptions, who cannot or simply does not make an effort to realize himself in America and spends his days poisoning lives of his family by preaching his useless “wisdom”, marrying off his daughters to men they don’t love and living off wages the daughters earn. Father’s old-fashioned sexist views about women clearly represent the Old World with its outdated traditions, and life-crippling laws. Practically everything he preaches is contradicted by his actions and later proves to be false. For example, when confronted by his wife about unpaid bills, he preaches that money is not important and that spiritual life guided by God’s laws should be a goal of every human. Yet, later, when the time comes to merry off his daughters, the only thing he cares about is money. He does not care about his daughters’ feelings. Their desires and opinions mean nothing to him. He thinks that women are dumb and are not capable to pick a right spouse. He also thinks that they don’t deserve to make a choice and their happiness in marriage is not important. He vies all women, including his Daughters and wife, as brainless slaves, who are born to serve their men. “It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence.” he proclaims. So he sees the marriages of his daughters simply as business transactions between him and the highest bidder. The goal of the transaction is to provide the new husbands with servants and give him, the father, a material benefit in the future.

He calls Sarah “hard heart” and blames her for deserting him, not working in his store, and not sending him part of her wages. He says that she is selfish, heartless, and does not remember all the “good” things that he did for her. Again, his actions contradict his words. In real life he was the selfish, lazy tyrant who refused to work, who did not support his family in any way, who put all the troubles of life on his wife’s shoulders and sent his little daughters to work, so they could support him. He did not care that his children did not receive a decent education and because of that might not have a chance to succeed in life, he did not care that that his wife’s life became a sorry existence, that primarily consisted of worries about how to make ends meet. He never took action to make his family’s life easier. He found an excuse, his religion, to do nothing, to exploit his wife and children, to abuse them emotionally by his ” preaches of wisdom”, and by constant reminding that he was a man – a superior master, and they were dumb women, born to be his servants.

His own intelligence and ability for good judgement are questionable, however. He proves to be a fool on several occasions. First, he wastes all the money that his father in law left him. Then he marries off his daughter Mashah to a swindler, pretending to be a diamond dealer. Then he takes all his family’s money and overpays for a grocery store that almost has no merchandize in it. He is too arrogant to bring his wife to evaluate the store and too foolish to do it himself. He prefers to waste the money to helping his wife and daughters. His vises represent the vises of the Old World, suc