In six pages this 1975 novel is discussed in terms of immigrant family relationships as they manifested themselves in the America of the early twentieth century and includes an examination of the clash between father and daughter. Four sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: D0_BByerska.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
to find in their place between the New Worlds struggles, and the Old Worlds history. The clash is epitomized in the relationship between Sara Smolinksy and her father.
Her mother says, of her daughters strong will, "when she begins to want a thing, there is no rest, no let-up till she gets it." Anzia Yezierska The writer
has an old world lyrical tone in the voice of ten year old Sara, who has just made a profit selling fish, and describes her own happiness: "it began
dancing before my eyes, the twenty-five herring that earned me my twenty-five cents. It lifted me in the air, my happiness. I couldnt help it. It began dancing under my
feet." The Bread Givers All of us, in the final analysis, are like Sara Smolinsky, all women and men from all cultural backgrounds unveiling themselves and telling their stories;
it is a new people coming out of Egypt into the parting of the ways as they embark anew on the journey that was given to us from the beginning
by which to transform our lives. It is African Americans, Latinas/os, Asian Americans, Native Americans, European Americans and women as women dealing with the daily transformation of their
lives as they struggle to hold together the fabric of society and their authenticity. It is the sacred, discovering that it has a brown, white, red, black, yellow, feminine
face; it is in the end, each of us leaving behind the security of the known and rowing across a dark river with a deep and abiding faith that when
we reach the other side there will be a fundamentally more loving and compassionate reality to receive us. This is a reality which we cannot know or grasp