Bread Givers

My reconsideration of Anzia Yezierska’s marvelous Bread Givers is up this morning at Jewish Ideas Daily. You will notice that I dissent from the standard feminist reading of the novel, preferring to locate it instead in the Yiddish tradition of farvaylung-literatur.

Abraham Cahan’s Rise of David Levinsky has been called the first Yiddish novel in America, although it was written and published in English. The title more deservedly goes to Yezierska’s 1925 masterpiece.

Far more effectively than any other American novelist—and that includes Henry Roth and Bernard Malamud—Yezierska, who was born in Russian Poland and emigrated to the United States around the age of twelve or thirteen, captures the rhythms of Yiddish syntax. Her English is a first-generation English: the sentence structure bends under the weight of her native Yiddish. The recovery of Yiddish in later English-language writers is strikingly different: while the vocabulary may reach for Yiddish, the syntax remains natively English.

But Yezierska’s mame-loshn (mother tongue) is Yiddish. Not only do her characters speak with a Yiddish inflection. The narrative voice also slips into a Yiddish lilt. Bread Givers is written in the first person, narrated by the youngest of four immigrant daughters, but I cannot tell for sure whether Yezierska is brilliantly aping the sound of a native Yiddish speaker or whether she herself is writing in a Yiddish-flavored voice.

The principal difference is in the use of prepositions, which will be immediately recognizable to anyone with ultra-Orthodox friends who grew up in Brooklyn with Yiddish as a first language. We stayed by them rather than with them, a Yiddish speaker will say. But the word-order also betrays the non-native speaker of English. “How could I come into their homes,” Sara asks when she is away at college (Yezierska herself attended the University of Wisconsin), “exchange with them my thoughts, break with them bread at their tables?” An American, who grew up monolingual in English, would defer the phrases with them till after the nouns.

In its language, therefore, Bread Givers may just be the most Jewish novel in American literature.

By the way, the novel has been reissued by Persea Books, which claims on the cover verso that “[t]he definitive text has been reset in readable type with pagination preserved.” Yet the text is riddled with typographical errors. Before claiming that a text is definitive, the publisher needs to make damn sure that it is definitive. Nor is the novel’s father an “Ortho­dox rabbi,” as the publisher claims.

Trust the novelist, not the publisher. Bread Givers is a ripping good read.