Comparison of “Bread Givers” and “Goodbye Columbus”

Introduction

This paper analyzes the two novels “Goodbye Columbus” and “Bread Givers” which represent the American dream of having prosperity and a wealthy lifestyle. In both these stories, the authors have given an account of how people have to sacrifice and suffer in order to achieve their dream in America (Baym et al, pp. 78).

Thesis Statement

The ideals in America require sacrifices and suffering and the “American Dream” is not meant for everybody.

Bread Givers

Published in 1925, Bread Givers, Anzia Yezierska's most popular novel, is a story about the successful integration into American society of a Jewish woman immigrant. Simplistically seen by many as the struggle between a father who cannot let go of the old Jewish ways and a daughter who buys into the values and mores of her newly adopted country, "die goldene medine," the golden land, as they called America, the novel surprises the modern reader with its depth and clarity of vision. Bread Givers is not strictly autobiographical; it is the fine product of an artist's sophisticated work. In this novel, Yezierska fuses aspects of realism and romanticism, ultimately frustrating attempts to categorize it.

Born in a Polish shtetl near the border with Russia, Yezierska experienced life in the European ghetto firsthand. At the age of 15, she exchanged the squalor of the mud hut in Poland for the dirt and poverty of the tenement on New York's Lower East Side. Yezierska and her family, as she describes in her novel Bread Givers, dared to dream of a better life in a wonderful place called America. They left the old country knowing nothing about the real America. They traveled to a place where "the streets were paved with gold," as the heroine's father says in the novel, a place where summer never ended, where they could shed the objects of their shabby existence and live as Jews without persecution. The characters of Bread Givers followed a dream, a fiction conjured up by poor Jews who could no longer endure the violence, the pogroms, the seemingly endless discrimination, or the poverty (Curley & Kramer et al, pp. 212).

In Bread Givers, Yezierska also portrays the America she experienced as an immigrant: a harsh, alien, and frightening land. The heroine's mother needs to work at menial jobs to support the family. The daughters too go out to work as maids and in sweatshops. Their life is difficult and their work unrewarding. Structured on two intersecting coordinates, immigration and acculturation, the novel focuses on the father-daughter relationship, which is hurled against a new set of complex codes and subjected to growing turmoil and change. By adopting this narrative strategy, Yezierska compels the reader who may be unfamiliar with traditional Jewish culture or the struggle of Jewish immigrants to take a new look at both Jewish and American history. A powerful Jewish-American novel, Bread Givers helps the reader reflect on what the heroine had to give up to become Americanized—family and culture.

Yezierska's novel offers a fine model for ...