Breadgivers

Breadgivers

This essay examines the novel Bread Givers with a view toward identifying in its central character, a first-person narrator, the recognition of her identity as an American. The plan of the paper will be to set forth the pattern of ideas in the work that point to the likelihood of Sara Smolinsky’s evolution of identity and to discuss the means by which these ideas surface.
      At first glance, Bread Givers reads a little like an immigration memoir in which a woman is recalling childhood memories of a thoroughly Jewish household in which Yiddish is the language of choice when unfamiliar English simply won’t do. It is a childhood memory of a life very much defined by the traditions associated with the culture of observant Orthodox Judaism to which the household was forever attached before migrating. For the Smolinskys, the power of the tradition is powerful because the narrator Sara Smolinsky’s father is a rabbi and has instilled his beliefs about what rabbis and everybody, over whom the rabbis have jurisdiction, ought to do to his family. As a practical matter, this sets up Rabbi Smolinsky as a practitioner of old-world values and norms, wherein the father of any household but especially the rabbi father, would have authority in the household. What was true in Russia would have been meant to be true in the America to which the Smolinskys had immigrated. That begins with the tradition that in a family where Papa is a scholar, everyone else in the family accommodates and supports the opportunity for the scholar to study and apply himself to the Talmud and other sacred texts. It simply does not occur to the Rabbi that he has an obligation to his family and not the other way around. His only obligation is to himself and, above all, to his devotion to his studies.
      The novel shows that Sara’s rebellion against that attitude comes in the context of the rabbi’s generally successful efforts to replicate the Russian family experience in America. Only Sara...