Bread Givers' Readers: Anzia Yezierska through the Lenses of "Race" and "Ethnicity"

Shlomi Deloia

This paper will explore the initial reception of Anzia Yezierska's classic immigrant novel Bread Givers (1925) in relation to its rediscovery and republication after more than forty years of neglect in 1975. As I will show, Bread Givers has been used and misused in critical discussions, reviews and advertisements to negotiate identity claims and group boundaries in two key historical periods, each of which was characterized by widespread contention and changing attitudes regarding the "Jewish Question." In a comparative historical perspective, the debate around Yezierska and her work demonstrates an underlying divide between "race" and "ethnicity" as two distinct conceptual paradigms that only rarely converge, but are often conflated and confused in discussions of immigrant experience and its literary representation. This paper examines the discursive triangle of author-work-audience to trace the fluid meanings of race and ethnicity as they emerge in the discussion surrounding Bread Givers. These fluid meanings elucidate the historical context within which conceptions of the Jew's "whitening" and "ethnic-invention" arise and are maintained and contested.

It has become commonplace in literary scholarship about immigration to see the rediscovery of Bread Givers as an important achievement of the emerging ethnic and feminist movements of the 1970s. Since its inception in the mid-1970s, the "ethnicity school" in particular has persistently and predominately focused on ethnic or "cultural" issues in its treatment of Yezierska and her work. Reading Bread Givers as a progressivist narrative of ethnic inclusion, "invention" and voluntary "self-fashioning," scholars of ethnicity have tended to ignore Yezierska's often explicit comments on the indeterminate racial positioning of Jews in the progressive era. These scholars have understandably been reluctant to address the controversial early reception of Bread Givers; a reception in which Jewish commentators accused Yezierska herself of racism in depicting Jewish immigrant life. This paper will argue that these two distinct interpretive trends--reading Yezierska and her work through the lenses of "race" or "ethnicity"--are themselves indicative of the complex ways in which Jewish American cultural identity has been defined and redefined, both by Jews themselves and by others.