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

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 reign themselves in, under the 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.

About the Author
Anzia Yezierska (1882-1970) was born in Poland and came to the Lower East Side of New York with her family in 1890 when she was nine years old. By the 1920s she had risen out of poverty and become a successful writer of stories, autobiographical novels and one autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse. Her novel Bread Givers is considered a classic of Jewish American fiction and her other works include How I Found America: Collected Stories and The Open Cage.

Reviews
Bread Givers enables us to see our life more clearly, to test its values, to reckon up what it is that our aims and achievements may mean. It has a raw, uncontrollable poetry * New York Times *
A fine novel ... Yezierska's sense of vernacular is wonderful * Kirkus Reviews *



Book Information
ISBN 9780143137719
Author Anzia Yezierska
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Penguin Classics
Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Weight(grams) 201g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 132mm * 15mm