Wonderful, inspirational book

This book is an amazing journey of a woman who is willing to have the courage to follow her heart and the more arduous, but more rewarding, path.

Not meant to spark a feminist movement

This book is terrific! However, it was never meant to spark some sort of feminist movement. I believe the author's purpose was to inspire people everywhere to rise above those traditions and habits that keep them chained to a purposeless life. Inspiring! Written with great detail but not too much as to bore...

Great, quick read

I was assigned this book as extra reading for a class this semester. I have to admit that I read the book in two days. It is a quick read and a nice story. It's just a plain story about a family. One can identify with the characters feelings toward her family.

Bread Givers feeds the soul

The Bread Givers reachs out from a dark and tragic past, is a timeless story of an immigrants story of transition from old world to new. The setting is the Lower East Side of New York in the early 1900's but it could be the story of immigrants coming to this country today.

It is not great literature because of the tight construction of the story which is loosely written and easy to read but because it tells the tale of a young girl growing up in a family dominated by an autocratic father in a way that we feel her desire for a better life and we gather strength with her as she uses her experiences to achieve the goals she sets for herself.

eloquent, though a bit melodramatic

In the first decades of the 20th century, millions of Jews moved to the United States from Eastern Europe. This semi-autobiographical book, set in the Jewish slums of Lower Manhattan, described a daughter's attempt to escape from her tyrannical, fanatically religious father [though his idea of Judaism seems limited to studying Torah and then twisting it to justify his view that women have no value other than to serve men]. Eventually she succeeds- only to find that life in the secular world is a bit lonely.

This book is especially resonant for me because it reminds me of my ancestors' lives. The heroine of this novel moves away from traditional Judaism primarily because of the sexism of her father. Her father used religion to demean and degrade his wife and daughters- and by refusing to educate them in Torah, he did not give them the tools to find alternatives within the tradition. So to find a decent life, his daughter had to go outside the tradition. All of this occurred, in much milder form, among my ancestors.

So this book is useful in reminding us that in the early 20th century, traditional Judaism declined not just because of the attractions of the New World, but also because something in Judaism's attitude towards women had become perverted - not everywhere, but perhaps among the semi-educated masses of observant Jews. And traditional Judaism did not recover until it began to educate women and to at least meet their desire for dignity halfway.