Parental influence on Hughes and Yezierska's literary work

¶ … Patriarch

Nothing stays with us in life as powerfully as the images of our parents we take with us into adulthood. A harsh father, a loving mother, a single parent who was on the edge of exhaustion, but always available... The emotions attached to these memories affect our adult decisions. These recollections influence how we see ourselves, who we believe we can be in the adult world, and who we see when we look in the morning mirror.

In the equity of the universe, it seems unfair that the species which spends the most time in its home before heading into the world is most influenced by its parents. When looking across the animal kingdom, lion cubs are ready to hunt for themselves after a number of months. Sea turtles are born on the beaches, devoid of any parental influence.

Those lucky enough to make it back to water are immediately on their own. What about birds that sit in the nest for a few weeks, and then are pushed out, to fly, or fail?

Many young adult homo-sapiens leap into maturity with much the attitude. It's my time to fly. Yet as people, we live in social system infinitely more complex than lions, turtles, or birds. So why, in the cosmic order of things, do human children spend 16-20 years under the care of their parents, only to leap into the world, and still be affected by the images of their parents strengths and weaknesses, sometimes for the rest of their lives?

Langston Hughes and Anzia Yezierska were as different from one another as turtles and lions. Each started their lives in this country as part of poor minority families. Anzia lived in the ghettos of early 20th century Manhattan, and the Langston in the conflict between slave owners and abolitionists of the Midwest. Anzia's father lived in her home, and her family had a strong heritage as Russian Jews who had immigrated to the U.S. with hundreds of others from their homeland. Langston grew up in the care of his grandmother, in a lonely farm in Kansas. His father was a lawyer in Mexico, and his mother made her livelihood on the stages in Kansas City. In the midst of this dissimilarity, these two writers left images of their desires, and their experiences with their parents, particularly their fathers, on the pages they penned. One could say that their fathers were the silent partner, contributing in unseen ways to all their work.

Anzia Yezierska's the Bread Givers

Anzia Yezierka's life rise to popularity, and financial success was a classic retelling of the American dream for a poor immigrant family. Her family immigrated to the United States in the late 1890s. They settled in the lower east side of Manhattan, and set about to both recreate the culture of their homeland, and make a new living in the new world. Much of Anzia's life was a declaration of this same sort of conflict. And to understand the writer and woman she became, one must first examine these skirmishes between old vs. new, and desire vs. reality. She lived in a new world where the land flowed with milk and honey, but in the Manhattan's lower east side, people lived in air ducts, and children sold fish in the streets for pennies. The culture of her homeland was woven into the threads of her family, yet all around this new world offered the promise of a new life for those who could reach out and embrace it. Successful immigrant families pulled themselves up out of poverty, purchased businesses, and eventually left the crowded foul streets, but Anzia's experience was different.

In this swirling maelstrom, where the old and new collided, a family needs its father to chart a course through the confusion. In Anzia's world, the patriarch was the decision maker, and the provider. He is the one who was responsible for bringing the family to the new world, and the family looked to him for guidance. However, in Anzia's case, her father would not take on the role of provider. Her father was a Talmudic Rabbi. His chosen purpose was to study the Hebrew scripture, and pray, and be able to bring the light to the world. The rabbi's did not work, but spent their time studying, and discussing the holy books in the synagogue. The burden of supporting the family was pushed down onto the wife, and children. It was the wife's and children's sacred duty to support the rabbi, and embrace this shift in responsibility regardless of the hardship it brought, because of the blessing the rabbi could bring to the world through the reading, and preaching of the holy books. As Anzia wrote of the patriarch in The Bread Givers, who was also a rabbi, "He has chosen to have his portion in the next world, not in this one."

The culture of Russia accepted this shift of family responsibility. The economic and social influence of a Russian Jewish family very likely limited to the same neighborhood for an entire lifetime. In Russia, the family would know those who were rabbis, and even come together to help a growing family so the rabbi could be free to study, and pray. This environment could meet the emotional and social needs of the family, and life continued in the same pattern for generations. However, in America, each man, woman and child were not only expected to pull his or her own weight, but the promise of a better life was held out like a carrot on a string before them. All around Anzia's family was the evidence that men and women could better themselves. Glistening white buildings on the upper end of Manhattan rose in stark contrast to her family's dirty, dreary apartment. Some men and women had clean clothes, carriages, and enough money to eat in restaurants. The evidence, and the opportunity was a daily reminder of what could be, yet Anzia's own father remained locked in his heritage, and his chosen clerics role.

From this conflict, Anzia's personal experiences splashed onto pages with unusual clarity. The Bread Givers is seen as her finest work, possibly because it flowed from her heart, and her personal experience.

On these pages she was able to argue with her father. She was able to describe in detail the choices her family had to make in order to survive.

She was able, with some sort of finality, to justify her own actions to the world, possibly to herself, but most importantly, to her father. She was able to put her own family onto paper, and look at it from outside the day-to-day experience of begging for bread. She was able to say, "This is what I was, this is what I have become, and this is why."

There are four elements from The Bread Givers that give specific insight into the person Anzia became, and how this formation relates to her father's role in her, and her family's life. Each is a point of conflict is a skirmish between old and new or an emotional battle between what is, what Anzia wanted, and what could be. The first, as already discussed, is the difficult economic situation created by her father's rabbinical duties. Her father was expected to lead, and provided for the family. Anzia's father lead, but did not provide. His time was given to God to study the holy books. So the economic responsibility was passed along to mama, and the children. Thus father was indirectly responsible for the lingering poverty which engulfed Anzia's early life.

Secondly, and adding to this first conflict was that religious life for Anzia's family was not like that of other American's. Many religious practices are more of a club membership. Christians attend church once, or twice a week. Beyond this, their religious involvement is a title. Anzia's Jewish heritage, however, was a lifestyle. Every aspect of life was affected by the Orthodox Jewish tradition. The family followed dietary laws. On the Sabbath, when other children played, the Jewish community closed their doors, and rested. The Jewish calendar has 7 different festivals throughout the year, each of which points them back to ancient times when God forged his personal people form the tribes of the earth, and set them apart as his own.

In a closed social system, such as the one rural Russia provided, this lifestyle was the norm. But in America, this cloistered Jewish culture was accented by the comparison to a fast moving, promising new life. In Russia, life had continued unchanging for generations, but the enticement of America was to find the pledged new life. America was the land of freedom, personal as well as economic. To throw off her past lifestyle, and accept the promises of the new world, Anzia had to discard that which her father devoted his life to, holding onto the Jewish heritage of the past. In choosing to pursue economic progress, she was choosing to reject him. This perceived abandonment of her father, and her father's leadership in her life left Anzia empty. She later wrote that pursuing the obsession to lift herself out of material poverty left her with poverty of the soul.

The magnitude of Anzia's decision to move from her family's heritage toward her own destiny can only be understood from the perspective of the family. And the familial considerations further created emotional strife from which Anzia could never separate herself. In Russia, and in America, the family was the foundation for success. One partner was the bread winner. The other kept the home, and provided a safe haven from which the warrior could come forth, compete in the marketplace, and return to find safety, and shelter. In Anzia's New York, families built successful teams, and rose out of poverty to receive the promise of a better life. Family was also the source of identity. Within the family children received the comfort and nurturing they needed to find courage to step into their own adult lives.

This experience was also the cultural understanding of the Jewish community. It was the hope that a man would rise to a place of economic success, so that his wife could be released from economic responsibility. A successful man's gift to his wife was that she could keep the home and the kids without any other worries. This strong family structure identified the Jewish life, and its continuance was dependant the woman's growing economic dependence. To shed this lifestyle meant that Anzia was further distancing herself from her heritage and a relationship with her father.

A fourth factor that shaped Anzia was in relation to her father's distant involvement was the anger over the conditions which his choices created. This anger, directed at others, family, children, fathers foolish decisions surfaced repeatedly in The Bread Givers.

Mother in the book continually reprimands her children severely for the least transgression. Father buys an empty store, having been swindled by a smooth talking shop keep, and mother unleashes a tirade like water finally forcing its way through a failing dam. But the anger is most clearly seen in a chapter regarding the landlady, and her request for the monthly rent.

The land lady appears at the door one day, requesting her due rent. Father pretends not to hear her, and continues to pray. In frustration, the landlady knocks the holy book from father's hand, steps on it, and demands her late rent. Father's response is to slap her twice, from which she gets a bloody nose, and father is arrested. The whole scene is an amusing juxtaposition of the old values which father holds against the new world necessity of paying the rent. When Reb Smolinsky (the father) says he can't pay because the kids are not able to find work, the landlady explodes "Why don't you go to work?" For this railing accusation, she becomes the villain of the rest of the chapter, but was this not the question burning inside Anzia? She was the character in the story that had to sell fish on the street to buy bread for dinner. She was the one who shared a single toothbrush with her siblings. She was the one who used a piece of torn shirt for a towel, which really had lost its ability to be a towel. "We only had a small piece of one of father's torn shirts as a towel, which we used to wipe the dirt from one or our faced to the other as we washed."

Something happens in the heart of a person when living is reduced to existing. For a while the person will look to themselves for an answer to solve the problems. If none can be found there, he or she will look to the community for reasons for the troubles. Lastly, and reluctantly will a person turn and begin to assess blame to those who should be protecting and providing for them. After a childhood of poverty, Anzia finally turned her blame into anger, and then the anger into a motivation for personal change. This place of personal emotional disorder was the cauldron which forged Anzia fiercely independent spirit. Her decision was that her life would be her own.

She became a self-directed person. Her emotional struggle and the refreshing bluntness with which she caught the details of life on the lower east side of Manhattan earned her attention, and fame, and a steady rise out of poverty's sticky grasp. Yet she was a person caught between two worlds as an adult. She has torn herself from the heritage and cultural identity of her father, yet that heritage left he unsuited to be completely a member of the wealthy caste into which she had ascended. She moved for a short time to the wealthy community of Hollywood, only to return after a year to the neighborhood she called home.

In one of the final chapters of The Bread Givers, Anzia reflected on her leaving, and returning through a poignant story of her mother's death. Her character had left the family, and become a teacher. At the news of her mother's failing health, she returns home to find her sisters gathered. They each have remained in a poverty-strewn life. In the middle of the chapter, the father arrived home, and as they discuss the future without mother, one daughter reminds her father of the joy of having their departed sister home again. "And what will she do?" Cries Reb Smolinsky. "Take her teaching wages, and give them to her father like a good daughter should?" Even in the death of her mother, at her father's moment of greatest need, and in her own emotional watershed, she is unable to have his approval.

A person's process of building self assurance and personal confidence begins in a family, with healthy emotional connectedness to that primary unit. Anzia aborted that process, and left the nurturing relationship within her father's home. She set out on her own dangerous journey of Americanization, and along the way fell victim to the idea that the American dream was reaching for someone else's dreams, or having someone else's values. Her father and mother found their American dream, as did the sisters in the book. Anzia's opinion of her success may have well been captured in the title of another of her books, published in 1932, All I Could Never Be.

Conclusion

There is no other relationship so filled with potential for good, or potential for harm as that of a child without his or her father. Eighty percent of men currently incarcerated in the country grew up on homes without fathers. In cities where there is a high degree of fatherlessness, there is a measurably higher degree of crime. In communities where social and religious agencies, such as the YMCA or Chuck Coleson's Prison Fellowship, have focused on helping rebuild tied between fathers and their children, the crime rates have measurably improved, and the children's scholastic achievement has risen. While some segments of the modern population have challenged the value of a paternal figure in the home at all, the modern and previous centuries experience paints a different picture.

Fathers are the representation of authority in the home. Fathers have a sense of guiding the family in a direction that is for the benefit of every member. It is not that the maternal figure in a home cannot fill these roles, they can. But there is a connectedness between childhood, when all authority and care giving is in the hands of others, and adulthood, when the job of care giving falls at the individual's feet, that must be passed along from parent to child. Perhaps the most important connectedness, that which makes the largest impact in the child is the approval of the father, and the security this will create his son or daughter. Are there any words more desirable for a child to hear from his or her father than "Well done. I'm proud of you?"