Rating: 
Summary: Should be required reading in every high school
Review: I read this for my history of childhood course (I'm a history major) and this was a fascinating read into the life of a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. She learns to find her own happiness after watching her father arrange marriages for her three sisters to men they don't love. After every chapter, I felt like going into the book and just screaming at Sara's pious, lazy Orthodox Jewish father who does nothing but study his Holy Torah. This book should be required reading not just in colleges but in high schools, too.
Rating:
Summary: Should be required reading in every high school
Review: I read this for my history of childhood course (I'm a history major) and this was a fascinating read into the life of a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe. She learns to find her own happiness after watching her father arrange marriages for her three sisters to men they don't love. After every chapter, I felt like going into the book and just screaming at Sara's pious, lazy Orthodox Jewish father who does nothing but study his Holy Torah. This book should be required reading not just in colleges but in high schools, too.
Rating: 
Summary: Bread Givers
Review: I really enjoyed Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. It was a book that I felt that others might be able to relate to. Bread Givers was a riveting read that I did not want to have to put down. It answered many questions thatI had about Jewish Life in the early 1900s, but it left many questions unanswered. I would definetly reccomend Bread Givers to any one that is interested in reaidng a book about fairly new immigrents struggling to live in New York at the turn of the 20th century.
Rating:
Summary: Bread Givers
Review: I really enjoyed Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. It was a book that I felt that others might be able to relate to. Bread Givers was a riveting read that I did not want to have to put down. It answered many questions thatI had about Jewish Life in the early 1900s, but it left many questions unanswered. I would definetly reccomend Bread Givers to any one that is interested in reaidng a book about fairly new immigrents struggling to live in New York at the turn of the 20th century.
Rating:
Summary: well-written, memoir-like, great story!
Review: I really enjoyed this book, it was well-written and good about including relevant cultural perspectives while being subtle. It was fast and easy read and you really felt for the main character. I had to read it for school.
Rating:
Summary: One Tasty Babka
Review: I started this book with the mentality that this was just going to be another one of those immigrant accounts where the characters tell their rags to riches story. I wasn't wrong, but the book held so much more. I would probably categorize this more as a feminist book since gender is such an issue. The main character, Sara Smolinsky, narrates the story of her family and their experience in living in perpetual poverty in early twentieth century New York. Her father, an Orthodox Russina/Polish Jew, spends his days studying the Torah so that he can bring 'light' to the world, while his daughters and wife take sole responsibility as being the burdern bearers. He adds further distress to their lives by arranging loveless and grim marriages for each of his daughters. Only his youngest, Sara, doesn't let him ruin her life, but rather sets out to make something of herself on her own terms. Also, the fact that both Sara and her father's lives are so intwined gives the lesson that no matter how far a person goes, they really can't escape thier past, as Sara tried to, but for her feelings of guilt could not. Overall the book displays various insights to the condition of the 20th century immigrant and displays how far the Old World really is from the New World. Most importantly, it shows that with the proper dose of good sense and courage, one can truly transform their life.
Rating:
Summary: Sara is a great character
Review: I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in America. Told at a time when America was more innocent yet the dark clouds, the roots of todays hegenomy, were gathering. Bread Givers is a largely autobiographical story of one woman's struggle to make a life for herself despite a time and place that conspire against her. Like the author Anzia Yezierska, Sara Smolinsky, the daughter of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants fights against the tyranny of her father, a rabbi, and his old-world beliefs in order to become a self-reliant person. In a broader sense, she also struggles against the social norms of the early twentieth century. Her journey is full of hardship and surprises, not the least of which is that...not to give it away. Sara is a character which is so full of life and vitality she seems to leep from the page. I wonder if Sara is a proto-type to characters seen in later fiction, espcially science-fiction of the early sixties.
Rating:
Summary: Sara is a great character
Review: I would highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in America. Told at a time when America was more innocent yet the dark clouds, the roots of todays hegenomy, were gathering. Bread Givers is a largely autobiographical story of one woman's struggle to make a life for herself despite a time and place that conspire against her. Like the author Anzia Yezierska, Sara Smolinsky, the daughter of poor Russian-Jewish immigrants fights against the tyranny of her father, a rabbi, and his old-world beliefs in order to become a self-reliant person. In a broader sense, she also struggles against the social norms of the early twentieth century. Her journey is full of hardship and surprises, not the least of which is that...not to give it away. Sara is a character which is so full of life and vitality she seems to leep from the page. I wonder if Sara is a proto-type to characters seen in later fiction, espcially science-fiction of the early sixties.
Rating:
Summary: Bread Givers: Words as Weapons
Review: It is difficult to read BREAD GIVERS by Anzia Yezierska and not feel the same barrage of competing emotions that afflict nearly everyone in the book. On a literal level, Yezierska writes of the struggle of Russian/Polish Jews to assimilate in the New York just before the First World War. The action is narrated over a period of some dozen years by Sara Smolinsky, who begins the novel as a ten year old girl, one of three other sisters. We see the action filtered through her eyes, so there is the natural reaction to perceive events as she does. But what she sees is so emotionally shattering that the reader soon learns to substitute his own experiences as that filter. Sara and her family live in New York but their world view is heavily shaped by their origins in the Old World of eastern Europe. In that society, the male head of the household is the master. Not only does he dare claim that women have no place in running a household, but he also can point to the Torah as justification. Sara's father, the Reb Smolinsky, is drawn in such a nasty, vindictive way that he all but emerges as a one dimensional caricature of all that can go wrong when one hides behind saintly words as an excuse to bully others. The Reb refuses to work for money; he expects his family to do that, leaving him time to study the Torah. He routinely squashes flat his daughters' confidence by insulting them daily. He arranges disastrous marriages for them, and when these marriages go predictably bad, he avoids responsibility by telling them, 'As you make your bed, so must you sleep in it.' But because he appears in every chapter, he, rather than Sara, becomes the center of dramatic focus. He is so vile and hateful that the reader even begins to question the source of the Reb's tirades: the Torah itself. Long before the final chapter, the reader begins to see the inevitable results of what happens when a weak-minded individual takes words and ideas which are intrinsically noble and bastardizes them into something monstrous. There is no evil that is beyond the Reb's ability to twist from a more benign source as the Torah. Sara's other sisters suffer long years of acquiescence, slowly building a fund of bitter gall that simply awaits the opportunity for a well-deserved revenge. For the longest time so does Sara, but what happens to her is the rarest miracle of all. Sara tries against stupendous odds to come to grips with the ages old paradox: should one return good for evil? It would have been so easy for her to take the route of her sisters, to return hate for hate. Sara is the only one in a book full of hurt people inflicting verbal pain on others who even tries to peek behind that curtain of verbal weapons that masks a festering sore of decades. She is a towering figure of strength and discipline that lingers in the mind long after the pathetic sadism of a reb finally begins to wear out its welcome in the lives of civilized people. BREAD GIVERS serves to remind the reader that words can heal as well as hurt.
Rating:
Summary: This wonderful book gives motivation about school.
Review: My comment on this book is Sara stood up for what she belived. My heart broke whan I read this book.I emagined being raised in to a family like this. Their father is the most horble person. It is sad that the mother soffered until her last breath. The stepmather is worst then the father. I like the way there let the father taste his own madicine. I am glad Sara finished her education. She wanted to be a teacher and she did it.It reminded me some of my own struggle for education in the US.
|
