Who Are You?

U.S. Government Photo

Children almost always push back against the identity their parents assign them.  There were three short stories we read for this week in which children struggled with older generations to define their identities, both as Americans and as immigrants, as well as their notions of success and a good life.   Although each story addressed these issues, they all came to different conclusions.  While reading these stories, I could not help but think back to Sara Smolinsky in Breadgivers, and her generational struggle.  When these narratives are viewed side by side, one can see the wide variety of immigrant experiences. Some of this difference can be ascribed to the various cultures that the immigrant families are coming from: Chinese in “Children as Enemies” and “Two Kinds”, Pakistani in “Mr. Pirzada Comes To Dine”, and Jewish in Breadgivers.  However, class is equally important in determining the shape of the narrative in each story.

Ha Jin’s story “Children As Enemies” shows how younger generations can pressure more traditional members of their family into accepting American values.  It illuminates the progression from the traditionalist grandparents, to the more progressive parents, to the children who push for a wholesale rejection of their Chinese heritage, asking to have their last names changed.  It

is with resignation that the grandfather says at the end of the story “This is America, where we must learn self-reliance and mind our own business.”[1]  The economic circumstances of the family are key to this revelation, as it happens after the son rents his grandparents their own separate apartment.  The family’s money provides them with a simple solution to this generational clash.

The child in Amy Tan’s story “Two Kinds” is similar to Sara Smolinsky in Breadgivers in her resistance to a domineering parent.  The narrator in Woo’s story fights back against her mother’s plan for her to be a “prodigy.”  Unlike Sara Smolinsky, her resistance is not the result of a drive to succeed and pull herself out of poverty, but rather from her assertion of her American right to laziness and individualism.[2]  The middle class circumstances of “Two Kinds” means that the struggle for emancipation from a controlling parent takes a very different form than in Breadgivers with its setting of grinding poverty.

Rather than fight to reject up her heritage, the child narrator in Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” searches for connections to her parents’ culture.  She is thoroughly Americanized, and is mystified by the television reports about Pakistan that her parents watch every evening with Mr. Pirzada, and is desperate to learn more.  She attempts to find out more from books in her school library, but is unsuccessful.[3]  Eventually, she finds a connection in the piece of Halloween candy she eats every evening in Mr. Pirzada’s memory.[4]  This story is completely unique in comparison to Breadgivers and the other short stories.  There is no inter-generational turbulence, and the child is actively seeking a connection to her heritage, rather than rejecting it.  However, since the themes are the same it shows us that there are a practically infinite number of possible experiences for immigrants.

With these stories, I feel as if we have come full circle from our reading of Breadgivers earlier this semester.  When considered together, these stories show that there is no such thing as the “Asian Experience” or the “Middle Class Experience” or the “Immigrant Experience” or the “Jewish Experience”.  The characters in all of the stories wrestle with similar issues, but their reactions are motivated by a wide variety of factors including ethnicity, class, age, and gender.  This shows just how many factors go in to determining who we are as human beings.

[1] Ha Jin, “Children as Enemies,” in A Good Fall (New York: Pantheon, 2009), 86

[2] Amy Tan, “Two Kinds,” in Joy Luck Club (New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1989), 134-135 and 142-143

[3] Jhumpa Lahiri, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” in Interpreter of Maladies (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 33

[4] Ibid., 42

Bagels or Bust!

Where can you go to enjoy delicious Indian chicken tikka masala, Korean kimchi and Ethiopian kitfo all in the same place? The answer, not surprising to foodies, is most urban areas in the United States. Indians, Koreans, and Ethiopians are part of a new wave of immigrants to America, and, much like earlier Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, they are bringing their recipes with them and attracting an audience of Americans eager to experience new foods. Although these newest cuisines are still considered ethnic, many foods introduced by nineteenth and early twentieth-century immigrants have become staples of the American diet. This journey from ethnic speciality item to national culinary trend mirrors the move from exclusion to assimilation made by many American immigrant groups.

As I read the novel Bread Givers and encountered the Jewish community of New York’s Lower East Side, I considered the ways that Jewish foods and knowledge of Kosher law have entered mainstream American consciousness over the course of the twentieth century. The implications of this issue range from the lighthearted — where would we be without bagels and Hebrew National hot dogs? — to the more serious: how did Jewish Americans overcome the challenges of immigration to establish popular restaurants and delis?

Kosher Food Truck. Photo by Yanks9596, 2010. Wikimedia Commons.

Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana, an exhibit that opened in 2006 at the National Museum of American Jewish History, addressed this topic and chronicled the ways that Jewish food influenced mainstream American tastes [1]. Considered together, Bread Givers and Forshpeis (which means appetizer) provide a multifaceted picture of the relationship that Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century had with their traditional foods and dietary restrictions.

Forshpeis! celebrated Jewish assimilation into American life and the contributions that Jewish people made to American cuisine. The exhibit closed when the museum opened its new building in 2010, but it maintains an online presence and objects from the exhibit remain on view at the museum. Its narrative is one of overcoming obstacles, where hard-working Jewish Americans win themselves a steady living and community respect by operating push carts, opening restaurants, and starting food manufacturing companies [2].

The exhibit also highlighted the popular American food products that Jewish families consumed and the recipes and ingredients they introduced to America as a way to feel more at home. Forshpeis! did not focus on Jewish men and women who abandoned their Jewish culinary traditions and Kosher law in order to succeed in America. Indeed, that idea runs contrary to its positive message of Jewish assimilation, economic success, cultural enrichment and the wonders of the Carnegie Deli [3].

Bread Givers tells a different, more complex, story. Protagonist Sara Smolinsky is a young Jewish girl living with her parents on the Lower East Side in the 1910s. At the age of seventeen, she runs from her overbearing father and forges a life on her own terms. She lives alone, must work to support herself, can only afford to spend 34 cents a day on food and drools over sausages that she can’t afford [4]. Likely due both to her dire economic position and her desire to assimilate into mainstream America, Sara does not keep a kosher home [4]. Focused solely on surviving and obtaining an American education, she does not observe the Jewish holidays or other Jewish food rituals. Sara sacrifices those elements of her Jewish identity so that she can pursue her personal dreams. This presents a story very different from Forshpeis!, which promotes the idea that Jewish Americans embraced and utilized their unique Jewish traditions to thrive in America. Sara’s rejection of her heritage allows her to succeed in an American academic and professional environment.

After completing her education, Sara moves back to New York City and becomes a teacher. When she asks her aging father to move in with her, he initially refuses because her home will, “contaminate his eating.”[5] Because Sara left her family and does not follow Jewish food laws, her father does not consider her Jewish [6]. By not keeping Kosher, did Sara forsake her Jewish identity? Would others in her community agree that she is not Jewish, or is that an opinion held by her father alone? Does Sara herself even care or is she satisfied knowing that she has achieved her goals? Most importantly, is her story and the story of others like her one that should be addressed by a commemorative exhibit like Forshpeis!?

[1] “Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana,” http://www.nmajh.org/exhibitions/forshpeis/index.html

[2] “National Museum of American Jewish History Serves up Forshpeis! A Taste of the Peter H. Schweitzer Collection of Jewish Americana,” http://bit.ly/fiT2an.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers, (New York: Persea Books, 2003), 165.

[5] Ibid., 295.

[6] Ibid., 293.



In the Spirit of Love

Love and Bread: In Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers, the protagonist Sara Smolinsky becomes the most Americanized member of her family as she grapples with love of oneself, filial love, and romantic love.

The fast approach of Valentine’s Day has colored my academic lenses. Though some contend this is a holiday created by greeting card companies, I love the grocery store aisles of red and pink. I could (and have) spent more time than I care to admit reading card after card in store after store, all in search of that perfect message. However, I believe in the power of greeting cards to convey my message when I cannot be there to share my love with family and friends in person.

And so as I read Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers this weekend, I could not help but consider love as one of the most important themes of the book. Scholars like Alice Kessler-Harris have noted the emotional appeal of the story of Sara Smolinsky, an immigrant girl navigating the challenges of family life, societal expectations, and Americanization as she grows up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s. What makes Yezierska’s story so vivid and compelling is the complex exploration of several types of love: love of oneself, filial love, and the presence (and absence) of romantic love. [1]

Told through the first person perspective of the protagonist, Sara Smolinsky embodies love of oneself throughout the story. Driven to “become a person,” she defies familial and societal expectations of a young immigrant woman to live at home and support her family. Following a decisive fight with her demanding father, Smolinsky strikes out on her own in a quest to educate and Americanize herself.

Shortly thereafter, Sara finds herself eating alone. After growing up in a crowded tenement apartment, she relishes the experience: “I, alone with myself, was enjoying myself for the first time as with grandest company.”[2] As she discovers her own self-love, Smolinsky chooses to rent a private room with her own door that embodies this newfound freedom. She prefers the time alone focused on her education to the company of others.

However, filial love offers a direct contrast to Smolinsky’s value of self-love. Through Sara’s relationship with her father and mother, as well as the relationships of her sisters to the family, Yezierska’s story sheds light on the expectations of an immigrant family in the 1920s. Reb Smolinsky, the father, expects his daughters to earn wages to support the family so he can focus on Talmudic scholarship. When one daughter, Mashah, spends part of her wages on individual possessions like pink paper flowers or a personal toothbrush, she is called “Empty Head” for not recognizing the family’s collective lack of resources.

This conflict between self and filial love becomes especially poignant when Smolinsky’s father remarries shortly after her mother’s death and her new stepmother expects Sara and the married sisters to offer financial support to the couple. Still burning at the recent loss of their mother, they refuse these demands until one day Sara knocks into an old man selling gum on the street and realizes it is her father. She struggles to reconcile the blackmail of her stepmother with the need to care for her father, eventually achieving greater self-love by fulfilling her filial obligations.

Finally, Bread Givers presents an important historical view of romantic love. “‘I’ll even get married some day,’” Sara tells her mother, “‘But to marry myself to a man that’s a person, I must first make myself for a person.’” [3] In fact, of the four Smolinsky girls, Sara is the only character strong enough to fight her father for the opportunity to marry for love.

Though the three older Smolinsky girls fall in love on their own, their father rejects each suitor as a possible son-in-law. Instead, he chooses to employ traditional matchmaking to marry off his daughters. Defeated by the rejection of their lovers and overwhelmed by filial piety, the three sisters enter into unhappy marriages absent of romantic love.

In the end, Sara manages to succeed where her sisters fail: by the end of the story her devotion to the love of herself leads her to both find romantic love and reconcile with her harsh father. As an immigrant, she becomes the most successfully assimilated member of her family when all three types of love harmonize.

[1] Alice Kessler-Harris, foreword to Bread Givers, by Anzia Yezierska (New York: Persea Books, 2003), viii.

[2] Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers, (New York: Persea Books, 2003), 157.

[3] Ibid., 172.

I Struggle, Therefore I Am

“It says in the Torah, only through a man has a woman an existence”. [1] Groan. Throughout Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers, Reb Smolinsky makes multiple, groan-inducing comments about women needing men to become more than what they are. Such remarks likely elicit groans in nearly every reader. Yet, regarding the novel’s protagonist Sara Smolinsky, some of these comments hold truth.

Nope, I’m not a male chauvinist.

Rather, I’m considering Sara’s existence in a more abstract sense: Sara’s experiences with men enable her to grow into a person, and therefore “exist.” To be a person, to exist, one must have the ability to be autonomous and independent and to grow. In the male-dominated society transplanted from the Old World, “only men were people.” [2] In the New World, however, women could also ascend to personhood. Sara therefore embraces American culture and its opportunities for personal growth. The challenges of Old World society, embodied in her father, drive Sara to identify what she does not want from life and who she hopes to become. Similarly, Sara views romantic relationships and rejection as learning experiences that facilitate growth towards personhood. My argument should not diminish the importance of Sara’s mother and sisters and other women in shaping Sara’s person. But, most of Sara’s personal growth comes about through conflicts and experiences with men. Primarily through men does Sara achieve an existence.

In facing her father, Sara realizes the depth of her desire to leave behind the gendered constraints of the Old World. Seeing her father drive her sisters into miserable marriages underscores Sara’s drive to make her own autonomous life:  “In America, women don’t need men to boss them…. I’ve got to live my own life. Thank God, I’m not living in olden times. Thank God I’m living in America! You made the lives of the other children! I’m going to make my own life!” [3] In addition, Sara’s attitude towards money is a response to that of her father’s: whereas Reb Smolinsky seeks get-rich-quick schemes and feels entitled to all family wages, Sara views money not as an end itself but as a means of achieving her goals and a hallmark of independence.

Sara also learns and grows from her romantic relationships and infatuations. When Max Goldstein pressures Sara to abandon her studies, Sara clings to her books and refuses him; her ability to choose between a relationship and her studies nourishes her budding independence. After Max leaves, Sara observes, “There was a glow in my face that was never there before….I had an assurance that I never had before. I was thrilled. Flattered. Ripened for love….He only excited me. But that wasn’t enough.” [4] Sara realizes that she can one day find a man who embraces her whole self—books and all—and who encourages her to pursue her goals. Mr. Edman’s rejection is also a learning experience for Sara: “That affair…made me grow faster in reason…. Each time, after making a crazy fool of myself over a man, I was plunged into thick darkness that seemed the end of everything, but it really led me out into the beginnings of wider places, newer light.” [5] For Sara, rejections brought maturity and a clearer understanding of the world and herself. Furthermore, Sara’s existence is strengthened by her relationship with Hugo Seelig: she overcomes her loneliness, which she perceives as an obstacle to personhood. [6]

Despite her growth, Sara does not achieve absolute independence. Each visit home, she is entangled in familial struggles. Reb Smolinsky’s living with Sara and Hugo will also tether Sara to her old life. Even without her father under her roof, Sara will never fully escape the Old World: “It wasn’t just my father, but the generations who made my father whose weight was still upon me.”[7] The mixed tone at the novel’s end demonstrates that this tie to the old is not wholly undesirable. By reconciling old and new in her life, Sara comes to accept the Old World on her own terms, and this confirms her existence as an independent, thriving person.

[1] Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers, 3^rd ed. (New York: Persea Books, 2003), 137.

[2] Ibid., 205.

[3] Ibid., 137-138.

[4] Ibid., 200-201.

[5] Ibid., 231.

[6] Ibid., 279.

[7] Ibid., 297.

Wal-Mart gets Charitable

Reading through the New York Times after class today I was pleased to find this great article on Wal-Mart’s plan to give a proposed 2 billion dollars to food programs for the poor over the next five years. The article discusses many of the issues we talked about in class today such as the fact the 1 in 8 Americans receives food assistance. While I am not a fan of Wal-Mart, I must applaud them for this food assistance program and the way in which they are carrying it out. It is evident that they were advised by people who truly understand the problems facing food shelters. Instead of just giving away a lot of non-perishable food, Wal-Mart is giving money to improve food shelter infrastructure so that shelters will be able to provide fresh food to recipients. Since poor nutrition is unfortunately linked to poverty and the inability to purchase fresh food the emphasis on fresh wholesome food is a laudable goal. The article does not mention anything thing about it, but I am curious if Wal-Mart will be providing money for food education along the food itself. Even if this is just an act to improve the company’s image, the money spent on infrastructure should make a real difference in many communities.

“So, what are you?”, “I’m Irish.”

In truth, I’m American. My passport says that I am American. My parents and grandparents were American citizens. Yet, when asked that question; What are you? Americans typically answer with their heritage.[1] Why is that? In this country at the turn of the century, Americanization was the goal of most young immigrants. So, from where does this resurgence of pride in one’s heritage come? For Americans who are third or fourth generation the realities of immigration to the United States have faded. The immigration of the early twentieth century has been romanticized. Emma Lazurus’ words “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses” [2] have been immortalized and remembered. However the statue that welcomed the ships into New York City’s harbor often bore more welcome than what they actually received when they arrived on the shores. There is a disconnect between the generations that immigrated and the American born decedents. In different ways both Anzia Yezierska and The Lower East Side Tenement Museum attempt to create a bridge between the generations in order to facilitate an understanding of the past and present immigration.

Anzia Yezierska, through her novel Bread Givers, takes the romanticized notion of hard working nameless immigrants, and turns them into people. Though the depiction of her family is highly dramatized, the basic story surrounding her main character Sara is strikingly close to the life Anzia lived. She takes “the Jewish Immigrant story” and creates a novel that draws one in, allowing the reader to connect to the story on a personal level. Bread Givers is one of those rare novels that becomes a sensory experience.  Using space and spatial relations she paints the portrait of a young Jewish immigrant growing up in America. “A place for everything, and everything in its place,’ was no good for us, because there weren’t enough places”.[2] Cluttered and dark, Anzia paints the picture of young Sara’s life not only through her actions but also the spaces she moves through on her journey to Americanization; from dark and dirty to clean and open. The idea of experiencing your first moment of truly being alone at the age of 17 seems in contemporary standards unimaginable. [4] However the shock of  statements like that along with the numerous hardships depicted as she grows,  gives way to a better understanding of Sara’s experience and by extension the experience of many Jewish immigrants.

Just as Anzia uses her novel to create a bridge between the new generation and her own, The Lower East Side Tenement Museum uses the same techniques to engage its visitors. The types of tenements described by Anzia are recreated in multiple tenement houses on Orchard Street, in New York City. When you arrive at the main offices of the museum, the visitors are presented with different tours based upon different immigrant experiences. Every tour is guided and tells the story of a particular person, family or trade. Again it is a sensory experience. You are encouraged to touch the banister as you ascend the staircase all the while being reminded that this house was at one time a real tenement. All interactions with the tour guide are constructed to make the visitor’s experience that much more powerful. The Tenement museum has the advantage over Anzia in that they are able to engage their audience as they go ending with a Kitchen Conversation which draws the corollaries between immigration in the past and the present.[5]

As Bread Givers ends, Sara admits that she cannot escape her past completely. By taking her father in she accepts her heritage with an understanding that though she respects where she came from she will not bend to the constraints of her past. This is the stance of most immigration descendants. There is an understanding and even pride in where we come from however there is a separateness felt between those decedents and ourselves. Anzia’s novel and the Tenement Museum act as the bridge between these generations encouraging a personal understanding of the immigration experience in the past in order to help people understand the immigration experience of the present.

[1] Ruth J. Abram, “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side

Tenement Museum.” The Public Historian 29, No. 1 (Winter 2007) 59-76.

[2] Emma Lazurus, Statue of Liberty National Monument, 1883

[3] Anzia Yezierska, Bread Givers, (New York: Persea Books Inc., 1925), 8

[4] Ibid 156

[5] Ruth J. Abram, “Kitchen Conversations: Democracy in Action at the Lower East Side

Tenement Museum.” The Public Historian 29, No. 1 (Winter 2007) 59-76.

A Person is 60 Percent Water, the Rest is Blood and Iron (and Education)

All Sara Smolinsky wanted was to be a person.

For our Russian Jew immigrant protagonist of Bread Givers, it would take much of her formative years to figure out how to do that.  She had to become independent of the ways of her family, and the Old World, where “only men were people.” [1]  For Sara, she finds that her only path to achieving the independence necessary to being someone in America is through education.

The most striking issue with Sara was her insistence that, for most of her story, she was not yet a person at all.