Pioneering a New World
In Anzia Yezierska's novel, Bread Givers, the main character, Sara Smolinsky, made a bold decision to take the road less traveled. As a young Jewish girl growing up in the Lower East Side of New York City in a Jewish immigrant community, Sara was at the intersection of the Old World and the New World. Sara's mother and father had immigrated out of Russia to the United States because of the poor treatment of the Jews by Stalin. Sara's father, Reb Smolinsky, was a holy man and set in his ways. As a holy man, he strictly adhered to the traditions and customs of the Old World of Russia. The old Jewish traditions and customs shaped Mr. Smolinsky's values and ideals. He brought those values and ideals with him to America, but American society held a very different set of values and ideals. The novel took place during the roaring twenties. Women began to declare themselves independent and free. Since Sara was young, she had the unique choice of which world of values and ideals she would follow. Bread Givers is told in the first person from Sara's viewpoint. She tells of her struggle with her tyrannical father as she tries to gain happiness in her heart. The author presents the conflicts between the values and ideals of the New World with which Sara identified and the values and ideals of the Old World which Father embodied and the struggle for reconciliation between them. In Book I, "Hester Street", Father preaches and strictly enforces his Old World values. Father's role as a holy man tied him even tighter to the edicts and expectations of the Old World. He repeatedly told his daughters that they were to serve their father by working to support him. He could not work to support them because his duty was to study the Torah and preach what he learned. Father was disappointed with Mother because she had not yielded any sons to read prayers at his funeral.
Father constantly preached to his daughters that they should be subservient, obedient, and inferior to their father and eventually their husbands. "Only if they cooked for the men, and washed for the men, and didn't nag or curse the men out of their homes; only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into Heaven with the men, to wait on them there" (10). Father said, "Any man who falls in love with a pretty face don't think to marry himself. If a man wants a wife, he looks for one who can cook for him, and wash for him, and carry the burden of his house for him" (64). Father presented all of his views with a righteous attitude. However, his preaching was ironic because Mother told Sara that she was the beauty of the village. Father was always preparing for the after-life; he did not want to be bothered with temporal worries like earning money to pay for the rent or food. Father also upheld the Old World ideal that his daughters must get married. Father spoke, "No girl can live without a father or a husband to look out for her. It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence. Only through a man can a woman enter Heaven" (137). The marriage had to be arranged by a matchmaker, or the gentleman had to be approved after careful inspection by the Father of the soon-to-be bride. In arranging marriages, Father did not care about his daughter's feelings; he cared only about the gentleman's financial prospects. Within their roles as submissive workhorses, women were also supposed to carry the guilt and shame for anything unfortunate that happened to the couple. Father's strict adherence to the Old World values eventually caused Sara to rebel against him. A combination of Father's enforcement of his oppressive values, his own hypocrisy, and her maturing in the New World led to Sara's rebellion against Father. Sara watched Father ruin her sister's lives by denying them marriage to the men that they loved. However, Sara's sisters externally maintained their obedience and submissiveness to their father, as Father taught them they should. When Sara saw the same fate for herself, she realized she had to rebel against the Old World values and expectations with which Father constrained her. With hope and desperation, Sara thought, "I want to learn something. I want to do something. I want some day to make myself for a person and come among people. But how can I do it if I live in this hell house of Father's preaching and Mother's complaining?" (66). She dreamt of the type of man she wanted to marry. "I'd want an American-born man who was his own boss. And would let me be my boss. And no fathers, and no mothers, and no sweatshops, and no herring!" (66). Within her desperation, Sara knew that she wanted the independence that New World values could grant her. Her dream of an American-born husband willing to allow her to reach her goals conflicted with Father's ideal of a rich Jewish husband who would make her bear the burden of his house for him. Sara adopted the New World values to justify her rebellion. "My gall burst in me! ... Should I let him crush me as he crushed them? No. This is America, where children are people" (135). Sara's internal rebellion intensified until she finally argued with Father about his expectations of her in the future. After Sara told Father, "I've got to live my own life" (137), they argued:
Father expected Sara to fill a mold. With resolute passion Sara decided she would break away from Father and the Old World values he enforced on her.
Sara broke free from the Old World ideals so she could pursue her own goals in the New World. As Sara struggled to reach her goals in book II, "Between Two Worlds", the emergence of New World values and ideals caused more conflict with Father. Despite Mother's conviction that all teachers became old maids, Sara decided she wanted to go to college to become a teacher. "Wherever I went...I had always before my eyes a vision of myself in college, mingling every day with the inspired minds of great professors and educated higher-ups" (184). Father detested the idea that his daughter would become an independent, self-sufficient woman without a family. He said, "Woe to America where women are let free like men. All that's false in politics, prohibition, and all the evils of the world come from them" (205). He could not accept the changes in his daughter or the New World values which she was adopting. Yet, she did not sympathize with his inability to accept change; she was just as strong-willed and stubborn as he was. "I no longer saw my father before me, but a tyrant from the Old World where only men were people. To him I was nothing but his last unmarried daughter to be bought and sold. Even in my revolt I could not keep back a smile" (205). Father tried to convince Sara to cease her dreaming and get married. He expressed the Old World doctrine that, "A woman's highest happiness is to be a man's wife, the mother of a man's children" (206). Sara burst out. "I want love. I'd give my life away to love and be loved. I want a home, a husband and children" (207). Desperate and frustrated, Sara spoke her needs. She needed love, but she also needed to be alone to accomplish her goals. "I saw there was no use talking. He could never understand. He was the Old World. I was the New" (207). He could not understand her desire to be independent, self-sufficient, and in control of her life. In their enraged exchange of misunderstandings, Father told Sara that she was without character, without morals, and without religion. To him, she was worthless. After his failure to understand her needs, she told him, "I have to live and die by what's in me ... Preaching don't change me. Why don't you let me alone'" (207). Thus, she decided to go to college in a state of hard-hearted aloofness and determination to become a teacher.
Sara decided she could not deal with the painful conflict with Father about her emerging New World values and ideals and strive for her goals at the same time. She had to be alone and hard-hearted so she could continue her work toward going to college and becoming a teacher. She could not reach an understanding with Father about her New World values before she reached her goals. At college, New World values continued to emerge in Sara, and after a series of epiphanies, she accepted a new understanding of herself. At first, Sara wanted to experience the apparent serenity she saw in suburban life. However, her new peers rejected her. She did not fit in. She thought she could not feel joy and love like her peers because her peers were absorbed in beauty and clothes that she never had. She realized that the joy and love she was seeing was superficial. With an enlightened attitude she prayed, "Help me not want their little happiness. I have wanted their love more than my life. Help me be bigger than this hunger in me. Give me the love that can live without love" (220). Sara realized that if she could love herself, she could attain her new ideals. She could be truly independent, self-confident, self-respecting, knowledgeable, and reach her aspirations. In class, Sara felt herself progress. She learned to quell her emotional impulsiveness. "But my anger did not get the better of me now. I had learned self-control. I was now a person of reason" (223). As Sara explored her aspirations, she realized that men come and go. "Almost I seem to touch the fiery center of life! And there! It was only a man. And I'm left in the dark again" (230). Women with Old World values would never say, "It was only a man." because men were everything to them. Sara realized she could live without a man, contrary to what Father preached. Finally, Sara accepted a new understanding of herself after she asked her friend, the dean, "Why is it that when a nobody wants to get to be somebody she 's got to make herself terribly hard?" The dean told her, "All pioneers have to get hard to survive ... But you, child-your place is with the pioneers. And you're going to survive" (232). His acknowledgment of her bravery, strength, and determination to be a pioneer filled Sara with the greatest joy. She had become her own person - a woman of the New World. With her newly found love for herself, Sara was ready to reach an understanding with Father. In the third book of the novel, "The New World", Sara celebrated her New World values and ideals in the first chapter "My Honeymoon with Myself". "My Honeymoon with Myself" is a chapter symbolic of her transformation into a woman of the New World. She celebrated her strength, initiative, accomplishments, independence, self-sufficiency, equality, and control of her own life. With attitudes of triumph and pride she declared:
She found her life more satisfying than it ever could be if she followed Father's expectations. "Once I had been elated at the thought that a man had wanted me" (241). According to Father, there was nothing better for a woman than a man wanting her. Yet, "How much more thrilling to feel that I had made my work wanted! This was the honeymoon of my career!" (241). Sara's career was far superior to being wanted by any man. Her career was the key to her New World values. With a career in teaching she had gained self-respect and independence. After celebrating her arrival in the New World, Sara returned home to seek the love from her family she had missed during her struggle for her goals and the emergence of her New World values and ideals. A chance for Sara to reach an understanding with Father about their differences in their values came only after Mother's death opened Sara's heart to Father, but Sara's old anger and hatred returned when Father remarried a greedy woman. When Sara first returned home, Father was still bitter about Sara's new life. He spoke, "A lot I have from it. She's only good to the world, not to her father. Will she hand me her wages from school as a dutiful daughter should?" (248). When Mother died, Sara promised her that she would take care of Father. At the moment of Mother's death Sara remembered, "the love-light of Mother's eyes flowed into mine. I felt literally Mother's soul enter mine like a miracle" (252). With Mother's compassion, Sara saw Father in a new light. "For the first time I realized that he was old and that he was without Mother. Rushing over to him I flung my arms around his neck, and wept with him" (252). However, Father adhered to his Old World values and insisted that he needed a burden bearer. He remarried quickly. Sara was enraged by Father's new marriage and agreed with her sisters that, "Never will I see his face again" (261). Sara's promise to her Mother was stronger than her anger because when there was trouble in Father's house, she admitted, "And yet, if Father was in trouble, I had to go" (262). Eventually Father won a place in her heart. "But as I came back to my quiet, sunny room, my heart ached for Father...I tried to still my conscience with reason. But my heart ached with the unceasing question, 'What will become of Father if we abandon him to the mercy of that woman?'" (268). However, Sara's hatred was restored after the new Mrs. Smolinsky wrote a letter demanding half of Sara's wages for her Father to the principal of her school, Hugo Seelig. Sara's attitudes changed from faithful to scornful and hateful. "My hate for Father...boiled up in me like a poison...I wanted to tear the roots of my father out of my flesh and bones, force my heart and brain to blot him out of my soul" (274). Sara's anger and hatred toward Father disappeared when she understood that he was an undeniable part of her, and the values and ideals that he had tried to impose upon her were the legacy of generations before him. When Sara bumped into Father selling chewing gum on the street, she immediately felt guilty for being happy when her Father had been suffering in poverty. "I had hated him. But where was that hate now? Whom else had he in this world if not me? How could I leave him in his need?" (286). Sara finally reconciled her hatred for her Father when she realized that she had gained everything from him regardless of her hatred.
With attitudes of tenderness, understanding, and compassion, Sara respected her Father for who he was and the traditions that he was trying to pass along to her by enforcing his Old World values and ideals upon her.
This was a gesture of reconciliation. She could no longer indirectly hate herself by hating Father; she had learned to love herself. She realized that he was the product of his parents and the traditions they enforced upon him. "I felt the shadow still there, over me. It wasn't just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me" (297). Sara had pioneered so much in the New World, and at last, she understood the roots from which she sprang. In this largely autobiographical work, Anzia Yezierska presents the conflict between Old World values and ideals and New World values and ideals that immigrant Jews had to face when they moved to America. The tone of the novel reflects Anzia's prideful and praiseworthy attitudes towards Sara. It maps the change in her attitude toward Father from accusatory to forgiveness. Father strongly and forcefully upheld his beliefs that women should be the burden bearers of the men. To him, women were meant to worry and take blame for hard times. Women were to be submissive and obedient. He expected his wife and daughters to support him by earning money, cleaning the house, cooking his meals, and making life easy for him in every way possible. Marriage to Father, was the means by which he could get his daughters into wealthy families. Sara saw the conflict and pain that Father's ideals had on her older sisters and decided that she would not acquiesce as her sisters did. She saw Father's hypocrisy and despised it. She hated it when he stifled her desire to live happily. Thus, Sara broke from her Father and set out like a pioneer to take control of her own life. She fought her way through college and became a teacher. In breaking away from her family, Sara allowed New World values to grow in her. She was full of initiative, independence, and self-control; qualities women were not allowed to have in the Old World of Father. After Sara was filled with her love for herself and the love that Mother passed on to her, she was ready to reconcile with Father. When she finally reconciled with Father, she realized that Father was a part of her that could not be erased. In addition, she saw Father no longer as a tyrant, but as a link to the heritage that he tried to pass to her, though forcefully, and she had rejected. In the end, Sara accepted her roots and felt their deep connection to her Father. |