Bread Givers

Garden City NY: Doubleday, Page & Company. Near Fine. 1925. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [sharp-looking copy with only minor shelfwear]. Yezierska's second novel (and fourth published book), "a struggle between a father of the Old World and a daughter of the New," begins on New York's Lower East Side, where the immigrant Polish Smolinsky family lives on the edge of poverty in a Hester Street tenement. The Orthodox Jewish father's strict adherence to his religious practices -- including the rejection of his three elder daughters' suitors in favor of marriages he arranges for them for his financial benefit -- and his lousy business sense (which results in him being swindled when he buys a small grocery store in Elizabeth, New Jersey) cause numerous tensions and rifts within his family. His daughter Sara, although she tries to stick it out by helping with her father and mother in the grocery store, finally grows frustrated by his stubbornness and decides to escape his controlling ways by moving back to New York City and getting a college degree in order to become a teacher. She succeeds in landing a teaching position, but eventually finds herself drawn back into the orbit of her family due to her father's various misfortunes (illness, a bad second marriage after his wife's death). As with most of Yezierska's fiction, there are strong autobiographical elements. Hanna 3924. ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .