BREAD GIVERS
By ANZIA YEZIERSKA
Bread Givers
By Anzia Yezierska
Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7232-0
eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-7233-7
This edition copyright © 2021. Digireads.com Publishing.
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Cover Image: a detail of “Lower East Side, New York, 1890s” / Lebrecht History / Bridgeman Images.
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CONTENTS
Chapter II. The Speaking Mouth of the Block
Chapter III. The Burden Bearer
Chapter V. Morris Lipkin Writes Poetry
Chapter VI. The Burden Bearer Changes Her Burden
Chapter VII. Father Becomes a Business Man in America
Chapter XVII. My Honeymoon with Myself
Chapter XVIII. Death in Hester Street
Chapter XXI. Man Born of Woman
TO
CLIFFORD SMITH
TO WHOSE UNDERSTANDING CRITICISM
AND INSPIRATION I OWE MORE
THAN I CAN EVER EXPRESS
BOOK I. HESTER STREET
Chapter I. Hester Street
I had just begun to peel the potatoes for dinner when my oldest sister Bessie came in, her eyes far away and very tired. She dropped on the bench by the sink and turned her head to the wall.
One look at her, and I knew she had not yet found work. I went on peeling the potatoes, but I no more knew what my hands were doing. I felt only the dark hurt of her weary eyes.
I was about ten years old then. But from always it was heavy on my heart the worries for the house as if I was mother. I knew that the landlord came that morning hollering for the rent. And the whole family were hanging on Bessie’s neck for her wages. Unless she got work soon, we’d be thrown in the street to shame and to laughter for the whole world.
I already saw all our things kicked out on the sidewalk like a pile of junk. A plate of pennies like a beggar’s hand reaching out of our bunch of rags. Each sigh of pity from the passersby, each penny thrown into the plate was another stab into our burning shame.
Laughter and light footsteps broke in upon my dark thoughts. I heard the door open.
“Give a look only on these roses for my hat,” cried Mashah, running over to the looking glass over the sink. With excited fingers she pinned pink paper roses under the brim. Then, putting on her hat again, she stood herself before the cracked, fly-stained mirror and turned her head first on this side and then on the other side, laughing to herself with the pleasure of how grand her hat was. “Like a lady from Fifth Avenue I look, and for only ten cents, from a pushcart on Hester Street.”
Again the door opened, and with dragging feet my third sister Fania came in. Bessie roused herself from the bench and asked, “Nu? Any luck with you?”
“Half the shops are closed,” replied Fania. “They say the work can’t start till they got a new president. And in one place, in a shirt factory, where they had a sign, ‘Girls Wanted,’ there was such a crowd of us tearing the clothes from our bodies and scratching out each other’s eyes in the mad pushings to get in first, that they had to call two fat policemen with thick clubs to make them stand still on a line for
