The Buddha Rat

My Amazon Review:

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers is, in a sense, two overlapping stories. The first half of the book is the melodramatic tale of an impoverished Jewish immigrant family living in the New York ghetto, a family suffering under the tyrannical and hypocritical piousness of the father. At times the foolishness and ineptitude of the father is almost comic, but the suffering inflicted on his family is harrowingly poignant. The second half is a psychologically and sociologically astute feminist coming-of-age tale, as the youngest daughter breaks from her family to re-define herself as an Americanerin, leaving for college and eventually becoming a teacher in her old neighborhood. The broader strokes of the novel's opening give way to provocative considerations of the difficulties inherent in the narrator's at times ambivalent desires for assimilation within an alien culture and for a self-respecting independence from her own patriarchal family.