Narratives of America in Yezierska and Steinbeck's works

¶ … Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers and John Steinbeck's Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, discuss what are some narratives of America.

What do they have in Common? What do they highlight as insecurities in our character as Americans? What do the genre and style of the writings say about American character?

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers complicates the traditional immigrant or Horatio Alger story of the immigrant that 'makes good' in America with issues of gender and culture. Specifically, the Jewish, female heroine Sarah must overcome her family's resistance to female achievement. Sarah must cast away her associations with Old World attitudes that prohibit women from working and defying patriarchal authority. She must also reject her father's valuation of study over making enough money to live. Sarah, unlike her sisters and her mothers, does not fear her father. Instead, she works and seeks out an education, and becomes a teacher rather than a bread giver like other women of her ethnic group and class.

There is a paradox in Bread Giver's depiction of the triumph of the American dream of success. For while America values the importance of the family, and the ability of children to have better opportunities life because of the sacrifices of their parents, frequently immigrant families must give up Old World ethnic roots and adopt new attitudes so their children can integrate themselves into the American cultural mainstream. American immigrant women must and often desire to work hard in the public sphere to profit from the American experience, in defiance of the ideology that women should only work in the home, and live as bread givers rather than bread winners. The book thus highlights the contradictions in the competing American dreams of material success and family values, of working hard and the ideology that women should relegate their achievements to the home, not to the commercial sphere. The defiant voice of this revolutionary 1925 work, subtitled "A Struggle Between a Father of the Old World and a Daughter of the New," proudly proclaims its genre of immigrant progress, told in the style of a strident female voice and proto-feminist. Despite the ideal of tolerance, the melting pot in Bread Givers is sacrosanct -- Sarah must melt away her Old World upbringing to fully realize her personal identity and simply to economically thrive and benefit from the full American range of opportunities.

From the immigrant urban experience of progress, to the heartland tale of dust and eradication of the dream of the American farm -- the essays that gave birth John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath seems worlds away from Bread Givers. This is not simply culturally but also because Bread Givers emerges as a far more hopeful work. Steinbeck shows the blood, toil, and tears it takes to produce the grain that the women of the bread givers make for the men studying Torah. Although the Grapes of Wrath became a novel, by reading John Steinbeck's Harvest Gypsies: On the Road to the Grapes of Wrath, the reader gains access to the real-life portraits of the California's white migrant farm workers that inspired the book. These people were denied access to the American dream of the bounty of the family farm and the right of every American to his or her own plot of land in a way that seems far more insurmountable than Yezierska's immigrants. These migrants, rather than moving up in the world, suddenly lose everything and find themselves with no opportunities for social advancement and education.

This occurs because of economic and class-based rather than cultural reasons. The long-time residents of America worry just as much about money as tenement residents, but can see no way out of their economic slavery to wealthy agribusiness capitalists. The migrant workers have little educational opportunities and their old way of life is lost, but no new way of sustainable life offers itself, other than migration and working the land of other people.