Bread Givers (SparkNotes Literature Guide)

By SparkNotes

Bread Givers (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by Anzia Yezierska
Making the reading experience fun!

Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: chapter-by-chapter analysis
explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols
a review quiz and essay topics Lively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SparkNotes
• Release date: Aug 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781411474246

Book preview

Cover of SparkNotes Guide to Bread Givers by SparkNotes Editors

Bread Givers

Anzia Yezierska

© 2003, 2007 by Spark Publishing

This Spark Publishing edition 2014 by SparkNotes LLC, an Affiliate of Barnes & Noble

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4114-7424-6

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Contents

Context

Plot Overview

Character List

Analysis of Major Characters

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Important Quotations Explained

Key Facts

Context

Anzia Yezierska was born sometime between 1880 and 1885 in a small Polish village. Her father was a Talmudic scholar, and the large family lived on the money her mother made from peddling goods, as well as on contributions from neighbors, who honored the way the family supported their studious and holy father.

Yezierska and her family immigrated to New York City in around 1890. Her brother Meyer, one of Yezierska’s eight siblings, had come over several years earlier and changed his name to Max Mayer. He gave his new surname to his family, so for a time, Anzia Yezierska became Hattie Mayer. Young Hattie had a variety of jobs, first peddling homemade paper bags on Hester Street and later becoming a laundress, waitress, and sweatshop worker. Rebelling against her parents’ wishes that she assume a traditional path, she left home at age seventeen to live at the Clara de Hirsch home for working girls—one of the city’s charitable shelters. She continued her education and earned a four-year scholarship to study domestic science at Teachers College at Columbia University in New York City. Though bitterly disappointed that in many cases domestic science meant nothing more than cooking classes, she graduated and went on to hold a succession of teaching jobs before leaving for a time to room at the socialist dormitory of the Rand School, also in New York City. There, she socialized with well-known, outspoken women, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and absorbed iconoclastic ideas about marriage and women’s independence that expanded and strengthened her own views. During this period, Yezierska married two times: she