Symbols and Characters of Bread Givers. Essay -- Essays Papers

Symbols and Characters of kail Givers.One of the significant features of Judaic hi tommyrot by means ofout mevery centuries was migration. From the ancient pre-Roman times to medieval Spain to the present days the Jews were expelled from the countries they populated, were hale out by political, cultural and religious persecution, and sometimes were motivated to croak simply to escape economic hardship and to find better sustenance for themselves and for their children. One of the interesting pages of Jewish history was a massive migration from east Europe to America in the closure between 1870 an 1920. In that period more than two million Jews left their homes in Russia, Poland, Galicia, and Romania and came to the New World. The heaviest hoi polloi of that wave of Jewish emigration came between 1904 and 1908, when more than 650 thousand Jewish emigrants came to the US. The Eastern European Jews fled from pogroms, religious persecution and economic hardship. We can lea rn almost those times from history text books, but a better behavior to beneathstand the tonusings and popular opinions of the struggling emigrants is to learn a story from an insider, who herself lived there and undergo first hand all the challenges and hardships of the emigrants life. Anzia Yezierskas novel Bread Givers is a story that lets the reader to learn about the life of Jewish Emigrants in the proto(prenominal) Twentieth Century on Manhattans lower East Side through the eyes of a poor progeny Jewish woman who came from Poland and struggled to demote out from poverty, from tyrant old traditions of her father, and to find happiness, security, love and understanding in the wise coun bear witness. The book is rich with symbolism. Different characters and situations in the novel exemplify different parts of the emigrants community and challenges that they faced. The characters range from the father, the symbol of the Old World, to the nonplus who symbolizes str uggles and hopelessness of the women of the Old World, to the sisters and their men, who together represent the choices and opportunities that opened before the young generation of the Jewish emigrants in the New World.The father of the storyteller, Sarah Smolinsky, is an orthodox rabbi, Mosheh Smolinsky, with unmitigated old-fashioned conceptions, who cannot or simply does not make an effort to sympathize himself in America and spends his days poisoning lives of his ... ...e them. And they, with all their education, are under my feet, just because I got the money.Through the lives of different characters the author tells about struggles and sacrifices that any emigrants stick to face when they come to a new country and try to get on their feet. The first generation usually gains the least, because older hatful already have deeply rooted cultural traditions and language hindrance that do not let them to assimilate and to feel fully at home in the new place. Just like Sarahs parents in Bread Givers the majority of first generation older emigrants that I know feel somewhat alienated and disadvantaged in America. Many of them were nave and thought that America was a Golden Amadina where money grows on the trees. Many were nimble enough to realize that they were going to a tough land of opportunities where they would have to fight and struggle for a spot under the sun. But those who were true to life(predicate) came here anyway, because they hoped for a better future for their children who could fully benefit from new opportunities, ethnic equality, and democracy that the New World had to offer.BibliographyBread Givers by Anzia Yezierska