FREE ESSAY ON SYMBOLS AND CHARACTERS OF BREAD GIVERS

SYMBOLS AND CHARACTERS OF BREAD GIVERS

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, such as poverty lack
of education, outdated traditions, lack of human rights for women, and hopelessness of
their situation. The hypocrisy of his preaches show that many Old World views and laws
are false and thus should be rebelled against and left behind.
Unfortunately, women of the Old World did not have the option to rebel. The Jewish
society of Eastern Europe would not tolerate it. So the women had no choice but to be
servants of their men and their situation was hopeless. Sarah's mother represents the
hopelessness of the Old World. She was born to a relatively wealthy family, had a happy
childhood and grew up to be a beautiful, spirited and happy young woman. But the
happiness was not meant to last because her father decided to marry her off at the age of
fourteen. She naturally had no voice in the decision and was married to a man who her
father perceived to be most educated. The educated man turned out to be good only for
wasting her father's money, fathering four daughters and leaving the burden of raising
them completely on her shoulders. On top of that he had an audacity to blame her for all
his troubles and to teach her his useless wisdom. In the end, the mother from a spirited
young beauty, who loved to dance cozachek, became an old burnout with a dead soul, gray
unhealthy face, and lifeless eyes, that projected nothing but sadness and hopelessness.
The tragedy of her life was that there was nothing she could do about it, there was no
way out. 
Her children, however, did have a way out. They could rebel; they could go against their
father's will, get an education and become self-sufficient and independent. American
society would accept it and that together with other things was the promise of the New
World. The second generation of emigrants: Sarah and her sisters represent the new
choices that Eastern European Jews had in America. Unlike their mother, they could chose
to go different ways. The choices were not easy. They required strength, courage,
determination and stamina but nevertheless they were real.
The simplest choice was to carry on the parents' traditions, obey them and to suffer
through life much like the mother. That's the choice that Sarah's sister Bessie took. She
did not find an inner strength to rebel against parents and wound up married to Zalmond,
the fish-peddler, who was an ugly old man with a lot of children, and who suffered, like
many other lower East Siders, from poverty, financial insecurity, and the struggle to
become someone in the new country. Poor Bessie served to his father until she was thirty,
suffered humiliation of his preaches and at the end could not find courage to run away.
She simply went from one servitude to another, even more harsh. Instead of an old master,
her father, she received a new one, Zalmond.
Mashah has made a similar choice only was a little more lucky. She did have to put up
with bad treatment from her swindler husband but at least he was young and she did not
have to raise stepchildren. Fania faired even better. She went away to California. Though
feeling very lonely with her businessman-gambler husband, she at least broke out of
poverty.
Sarah makes a radically new choice. She realizes that she can rebel and succeed, and she
has strong will to do it. The choice to rebel and to get education was a completely new
choice offered by the New World. The choice was far from easy. She suffered from hunger,
poverty, alienation, and humiliation of the ghetto but her dreams kept her spirit alive
and kept her going. College experience was also not easy. She was different from other
students because she was poor, plain looking, and probably because she was Jewish. So she
struggled to fit in. She never did and suffered a great deal from loneliness. Sarah's
experience, I think, is somewhat typical for a determined emigrant who chooses not to
give up, to be strong, and to succeed. Her experience and represents the struggle and
ambition of the young Jews from the lower East Side, who in the twenties received
education and became successful members of American society. Her experience represents
the ambition of the Jews who went Hollywood and established a whole new industry, the
Jews who came from poor uneducated families and became lawyers, doctors, and
businessmen.
Not every Young Jew became successful through an education. Many became economically
successful by making a quick fortune through legal, somewhat legal and often clearly
illegal ventures. Fania's husband and Max Goldstein represent that part of young Jewish
community. Those young men substituted education with sheer aggressive drive, burning
motivation, quick wit, and often willingness to break the law if it was profitable. As
Max Goldstein said, ...It's money that makes the wheels go round. With my money I can
have college graduates working for me...I can hire them and fire them. And they, with all
their education, are under my feet, just because I got the money.
Through the lives of different characters the author tells about struggles and sacrifices
that any emigrants have to face when they come to a new country and try to get on their
feet. The first generation usually gains the least, because older people already have
deeply rooted cultural traditions and language barrier that do not let them to assimilate
and to feel fully at home in the new place. Just like Sarah's parents in Bread Givers the
majority of first generation older emigrants that I know feel somewhat alienated and
disadvantaged in America. Many of them were naive and thought that America was a Golden
Amadina where money grows on the trees. Many were intelligent enough to realize that they
were going to a tough land of opportunities where they would have to fight and struggle
for a spot under the sun. But those who were realistic came here anyway, because they
hoped for a better future for their children who could fully benefit from new
opportunities, ethnic equality, and democracy that the New World had to offer.
Bibliography
Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska