One Hundred Great Jewish Books by Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman

Author:Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BlueBridge
Published: 2012-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

Anzia Yezierska was a heroic, troubled, and tragic woman. She arrived as an immigrant child from Poland and grew up alongside eight siblings on New York’s Lower East Side. While her father escaped responsibility under the pretense of being a student of Talmud, her mother raised the family by working at whatever she could find. At age seventeen, Yezierska left home with the dream of becoming a teacher.

At first, she rented a succession of tiny, dreary rooms while working in sweatshops and laundries and learning elementary English from a janitor’s daughter. Eventually, she attained a scholarship to Columbia University’s Teachers College, graduated in 1905, taught school for a brief period, and then turned to writing.

Yezierska’s personal life reads like a soap opera. Her marriage in 1910 to her first husband, Jacob Gordon, lasted less than a year, after which she married his friend (and the man she had loved to begin with) Arnold Levitas. Their daughter Louise was born in 1912. Two years later, she left Levitas and moved with Louise to San Francisco, where she tried her hand at becoming a social worker. Unable to support herself, she conceded child custody to Levitas and returned to New York, where she developed a love affair with philosopher and educator John Dewey, who had been her professor at Columbia. Looking back, years later, she described her life as perennial loneliness punctuated by skepticism.

Yezierska’s writing career was likewise a somewhat sorry tale, in that her books were barely read—in part, perhaps, because they focused so exclusively on the very poverty of the ghetto that would-be readers were anxious to forget. Her luck promised to improve in 1922, when Samuel Goldwyn filmed a silent movie based on her 1920 novel, Hungry Hearts, and three years later Sidney Olcott did the same with her 1923 book, Salome of the Tenements. Goldwyn even brought her out to Hollywood for a brief stint as a screenwriter. But she missed New York, turned down a lucrative contract to remain in Los Angeles, and returned to the city she loved to write about. She survived the Great Depression through a government grant in support of writers that saw her cataloging trees in Central Park, and by the 1950s, although still a writer who had yet to be fully “discovered,” she was at least writing reviews for The New York Times.

Bread Givers is Yezierska’s semiautobiographical novel. Its heroine, Sara Smolinsky, is a fiercely independent woman ahead of her time, scarred by the traditional world of the Lower East Side she spurns, without social support for the alternative way of life she seeks, and continually beset by conflict and doubt.

Haunting almost every page of Bread Givers is Sara’s father, a domineering man who rigidly controls his wife and four daughters, making them support the family while he pursues a parasitic life that he claims to be consistent with religion and Talmud study. In fact, he is rarely true to either. He never cites tradition’s many compliments to women, preferring instead a steady barrage of “pseudo-Talmudic” quotes demeaning women, generally manufactured by himself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.