Bread Givers

“Yezierska captures American hunger with extraordinary intensity.” —Vivian Gornick, The New York Times

“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 and a powerful, sweeping design.” —The New York Times

“A Jewish Little Women . . . with more humor . . . Yezierska’s sense of vernacular is wonderful. . . . [A] fine novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The beauty of Bread Givers is that, even though it was written almost 100 years ago, it still feels fresh and real. . . . I might never have read the novel if Penguin Classics had not offered this new version and commend the publisher for doing so.” —Rabbi Rachel Esserman, The Reporter

“[Bread Givers] is no convenient narrative of the American dream. . . . There is a great and uncomfortable truth in Yezierska’s masterpiece that may have been willfully or unwittingly overlooked by its earlier readers: that the story of the melting pot is a lie, that the American dream is a fairy tale, which, by its own logic, would require the immigrant to completely dissolve into society. . . . The experience of Americanness for me became one of minute fragmentation, of disharmony and friction resulting from the impossible and cruel demands of ‘melting.’ Depending on one’s perspective, the failure of Sara Smolinsky to melt into America can be seen as a tragedy or a triumph. Even I am on the fence about this.” ―Deborah Feldman, from the Foreword