A timeless American novel about an immigrant girl growing up on the Lower East Side who dares to challenge her Orthodox Jewish family’s narrow conceptions of a woman’s place in the world, featuring a new foreword by the author of the New York Times bestseller Unorthodox-the basis for the hit Netflix series-and cover art by New Yorker cartoonist Liana Finck
A Penguin Classic
The youngest of four daughters in a family that left Poland in the 1920s for the crowded tenements of New York City’s Lower East Side, Sara Smolinsky has seen her sisters resign themselves, under their rabbi father’s iron fist, to loveless marriages and empty futures. They are “bread givers,” working to feed the family while their father studies the Torah-according to which, as their father reminds them, a woman without her father or husband is “less than nothing.” But Sara hungers for more. In defiance of her father, she breaks free, escaping home to see what the American dream holds for her in this poignant coming-of-age tale and striking portrait of feminist rebellion.
About the Author
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 prejudices 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, autobiographical 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.
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