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.

First published in 1925, Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers is the tale of a young Jewish-American immigrant woman and her struggle to control her own destiny in Manhattan's Lower East Side at the turn of the century. The novel is based in large part on Yezierska's own life experiences immigrating from Poland as a child and growing up in New York City in an Orthodox Jewish family. Bread Givers centers on the story of its main character, Sara Smolinsky, who lives with her older sisters and parents in a poor tenement in the Lower East Side. The Smolinsky family is destitute and struggles to make ends meet as the father, Reb, refuses to work and spends all his time studying the Torah and clinging to the traditions of the country he left behind. He arranges unhappy marriages for his older daughters in the hope of becoming rich himself. Sara vows to avoid her sisters' fates and takes her life into her own hands, pursuing an education and refusing to marry just because it is expected of her. Bread Givers is both an engaging portrait of New York at the beginning of the twentieth-century and a timeless tale of a young woman's journey of self-discovery and determination. This edition is printed on premium acid-free paper.

A timeless American novel about an immigrant girl growing up on the Lower East Side who dares to challenge her Orthodox Jewish family's narrow conceptions of a woman's place in the world, featuring a new foreword by the author of the New York Times bestseller Unorthodox―the basis for the hit Netflix series―and cover art by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck

A Penguin Classic

The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City's Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves, under their rabbi father's iron fist, to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are bread givers, working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah―according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is less than nothing. But Sara hungers for more. In defiance of her father, she breaks free, escaping home to see what the American dream holds for her in this poignant coming-of-age tale and striking portrait of feminist rebellion.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

This masterwork of American immigrant literature is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father's rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. Sarah's struggle towards independence and self-fulfillment resonates with a passion all can share. Beautifully redesigned page for page with the previous editions, Bread Givers is an essential historical work with enduring relevance.

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.

The target of intense critical comment when it was first published in 1927, Arrogant Beggar's scathing attack on charity-run boardinghouses remains one of Anzia Yezierska's most devastating works of social criticism. The novel follows the fortunes of its young Jewish narrator, Adele Lindner, as she leaves the impoverished conditions of New York's Lower East Side and tries to rise in the world. Portraying Adele's experiences at the Hellman Home for Working Girls, the first half of the novel exposes the sickening farce of institutionalized charity while portraying the class tensions that divided affluent German American Jews from more recently arrived Russian American Jews.
The second half of the novel takes Adele back to her ghetto origins as she explores an alternative model of philanthropy by opening a restaurant that combines the communitarian ideals of Old World shtetl tradition with the contingencies of New World capitalism. Within the context of this radical message, Yezierska revisits the themes that have made her work famous, confronting complex questions of ethnic identity, assimilation, and female self-realization.
Katherine Stubbs's introduction provides a comprehensive and compelling historical, social, and literary context for this extraordinary novel and discusses the critical reaction to its publication in light of Yezierska's biography and the once much-publicized and mythologized version of her life story. Unavailable for over sixty years, Arrogant Beggar will be enjoyed by general readers of fiction and be of crucial importance for feminist critics, students of ethnic literature. It will also prove an exciting and richly rewarding text for students and scholars of Jewish studies, immigrant literature, women's writing, American history, and working-class fiction.

In stories that draw heavily on her own life, Anzia Yezierska portrays the immigrant's struggle to become a real American, in such stories as Yekl, Hunger, The Fat of the Land, and How I Found America. Set mostly in New York's Lower East Side, the stories brilliantly evoke the oppressive atmosphere of crowded streets and shabby tenements and lay bare the despair of families trapped in unspeakable poverty, working at demeaning jobs, and coping with the barely hidden prejudices of their new land.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Individually, each of these 27 stories is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next; taken together, they comprise a vivid, enduring portrait of the struggles of immigrant Jews--particularly women--on New York's Lower East Side.

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the lives of the Jews of New York's Lower East Side. The Open Cage collects sixteen of her best stories and excerpts from her autobiography to illustrate her extraordinary storytelling gift as well as her personal experience as an immigrant woman. Along with her novel Bread Givers, the work gathered here constitutes her enduring achievement. Included are The Fat of the Land, Children of Loneliness, America and I, The Lost 'Beautifulness, ' and other stories; vignettes from Red Ribbon on a White Horse: My Story; and four remarkable stories of old age. The introduction by Historian Alice Kessler-Harris and the afterword by Yezierska's daughter and biographer, Louise Levitas Henriksen, place the writings in a rich and valuable context.

The story of a young, aspiring Jewish woman from the ghetto who will do anything to get her man in this case an upper-class WASP. When she discovers he is not really what she wanted, she will do anything to get away. Based on the real-life story of the Jewish immigrant activist Rose Pastor's fairytale romance with the millionaire socialist Graham Stokes, the novel also reflects Yezierska's own doomed romance with the famous educator John Dewey. Passionate and engagingly sardonic, it criticizes the concept of the American Melting Pot in the language of the Lower East Side and exposes the hypocrisy of the good works of the privileged class and their so-called dedication to the poor. Gay Wilentz's introduction discusses Anzia Yezierska's life and work.
Originally published in 1923.

Here is Anzia Yezierska's life story, from the Polish ghetto to the sweatshops of New York's Lower East Side, from success as a writer in Hollywood in the 1920s to disillusionment and a return to poverty. With courage and emotion, Yezierska reveals what success and failure felt like and what they meant to her, as a woman and as an artist.

In evoking the joy and pain of the Jewish immigrant experience, Anzia Yezierska has no peer. Her stories and novels, written from the 1920s to the 1960s, immortalized the Jews of New York's Lower East Side and their struggle to escape poverty and to partake of America's promise. How I Found America gathers together all of Yezierska's short fiction: the two collections published during her lifetime--Hungry Hearts and Children of Loneliness--and seven additional tales. Each story is authentic and immediate, as memorable as family history passed from one generation to the next. taken together, they constitute an enduring portrait of a time and a people.

2024 Reprint of the 1925 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition and not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. This is the life story of Anzia Yezierska and her struggle as a Jewish immigrant woman.The novel is set in the 1920s on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and tells the story of Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter of an Orthodox rabbi, who rebels against her father's rigid conception of Jewish womanhood. First published in 1925, Yezierska's fine novel describes a young girl struggling to survive the chaos and poverty of the Lower East Side tenements. Like her author, Sara Smolinsky emigrated from Poland with her family-in Sara's case, several sisters, a worrying, nagging mother, and a holy fool of a father. While Sara and her sisters hire themselves out to shops and factories, bringing home their scant wages, their father stays at home, consulting his holy books. More and more, Sara thinks, I began to see that Father, in his innocent craziness to hold up the Light of the Law to his children, was as a tyrant more terrible than the Tsar from Russia. Yezierska's sense of vernacular is wonderful: The book, which was written in English, bears a strong Yiddish imprint. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother, Sara thinks near the beginning. The gradual smoothing-out of the language, as Sara herself becomes more assimilated, is subtle. But Yezierska can also be heavy-handed, as when the landlady bursts in on the Smolinsky family demanding My rent! while waving her thick diamond fingers before Father's face. The book is saved from its own bleakness by Yezierska's sense of humor-there is a helter-skelter kind of slapstick comedy throughout-and by Sara herself. After watching her sisters married off, one by one, to unpromising (to say the least) husbands, Sara decides to strike out on her own. She finds a small room of her own and starts attending night school: I want to learn everything in the school from the beginning to the end, she tells the teacher. Kirkus Reviews,

It was a bright Sunday afternoon in May, and into the gray, cheerless, janitor's basement a timid ray of sunlight announced the dawn of spring. Oi weh Light breathed Shenah Pessah, excitedly, throwing open the sash. A little light in the room for the first time And she stretched out her hands hungrily for the warming bit of sun. The happy laughter of the shopgirls standing on the stoop with their beaux and the sight of the young mothers with their husbands and babies fanned anew the consuming fire in her breast. I'm not jealous she gasped, chokingly. My heart hurts too deep to want to tear from them their luck to happiness. But why should they live and enjoy life and why must I only look on how they are happy? She clutched at her throat like one stifled for want of air.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

Fanya, a young Polish Jew, living and working on the Lower East Side, attends a lecture by a famous educator, Henry Scott, that seems meant specifically for her. Scott calls America the meeting ground of all the nations of the world and exhorts Americans to blaze a trail to a future where people would be judged not by membership in a group . . . but as individuals on their own merits. On an impulse, Fanya goes to Scott's university office and boldly asks him to read the autobiography she has written. After a highly charged exchange, the rational, older, American professor is won over by the young, passionate, Jewish immigrant. She is his fascination; he is her symbol of all she could never be. Scott becomes her mentor, leading Fanya to success as an author. He also expresses romantic interest in her, but ultimately rebuffs her socially. Although she is crushed, instead of returning to the ghetto to live among her own people, as so many before her have done, Fanya chooses to advance further into America. She buys a house in a quiet New England village, where, eventually, another newcomer becomes an unexpected soul mate--and she prepares to make a home.

This moving portrait of a vibrant and talented immigrant woman is based on the author's true relationship with John Dewey, the important and famous educator who was her most significant influence. It depicts the workings of American society during the 1930s, especially between the privileged class and immigrants who were striving for a better life. It is an early and optimistic story of Jewish assimilation, and grapples with issues still faced by immigrants today.

The comprehensive introduction by Dr. Catherine Rottenberg, who rescued the novel from obscurity, describes the novel's significance, placing it in the context of Yezierska's work and life, as well as within the Jewish American literary tradition.

Hungry Hearts is a collection of short stories by Jewish/American writer Anzia Yezierska first published in 1920. The short stories deal with the European Jewish immigrant experience from the perspective of fictional female Jews, each story depicting a different aspect of their trials and tribulations in poverty in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The stories were adapted into a film of the same name.

Hungry Hearts is a collection of short stories by Jewish/American writer Anzia Yezierska first published in 1920. The short stories deal with the European Jewish immigrant experience from the perspective of fictional female Jews, each story depicting a different aspect of their trials and tribulations in poverty in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The stories were adapted into a film of the same name. (wikipedia.org)

Hungry Hearts is a collection of short stories by Jewish/American writer Anzia Yezierska first published in 1920. The short stories deal with the European Jewish immigrant experience from the perspective of fictional female Jews, each story depicting a different aspect of their trials and tribulations in poverty in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The stories were adapted into a film of the same name. (wikipedia.org)

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.