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Anzia Yezierska was born in a small town in Russian Poland sometime in the 1880s. When she was about ten, she came to America with her impoverished family, whose plight and prej-udices she described in Bread Givers (1925). For years, she struggled to achieve an education and to write. Her story collection Hungry Hearts (1920) brought her fame, but over the years, Yezierska also suffered criticism and neglect. She died in 1970, and today her works―four novels, two short story collections, autobi-ographical essays, and a memoir, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (1950)―are considered classics of Jewish American writing. Deborah Feldman (foreword) is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Unorthodox, the basis for the Emmy Award-winning Netflix series. She was raised in the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and now lives in Berlin, Germany.
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 [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
