Bread Givers

Ten-year-old Sara Smolinsky, the youngest Smolinsky sister, is peeling potatoes in the kitchen of her immigrant family’s apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side when her older sister Bessie comes home looking dejected, having failed to find work that day. Sara’s other sisters, Mashah and Fania, were also unsuccessful. When Mother returns and sees the mound of potato skins Sara has peeled, she scolds her for wasting what precious little food then family can afford.

Father, a deeply religious Orthodox Jewish rabbi, arrives later and admonishes Mother for her dour mood. Mother retorts that the family is just barely scraping by—they haven’t been able to afford rent in months. Meanwhile Father refuses to work outside the home, arguing that a job would take away from his time studying the Holy Torah and that it’s daughters’ responsibility to support him. Just then, the collector lady drops by and demands rent. When she insults Father, he angrily slaps the woman and accuses her of disrespecting the Holy Torah. The collector lady calls the police on Father, who is later arrested. The community, however, pools their funds together to hire a well-regarded lawyer to represent him, and the court drops the charges against Father. When he returns home a free man, the older members of the Jewish immigrant community hail him as a heroic defender of the Jewish faith.

The Smolinsky family’s new fame in the community makes it easy for them to find boarders to rent the front room of their apartment, so the family’s financial situation temporarily improves. But Mother still worries about finding someone to marry Bessie, who is nearly a decade older than Mother was when she married Father. Bessie becomes smitten with Berel Bernstein, a garment cutter from Bessie’s shop who aspires to start his own business. But Father forbids Berel from marry Bessie without first paying Father—an arrangement Berel angrily rejects. Bessie, unwilling to marry a man who doesn’t respect her father, calls off the relationship.

Later, Mashah falls in love with Jacob Novak, a pianist from a wealthy family. Jacob doesn’t work but instead spends his days practicing and taking lessons on the piano in preparation for a big solo recital. When Jacob’s father, a wealthy businessman, finally visits the Smolinskys’ home with Jacob to meet Mashah’s family, he takes one look at their derelict apartment and obvious poverty and orders Jacob to stop seeing Mashah. Mashah is heartbroken, and Father berates her for being foolish.

One day a letter arrives for Fania from Morris Lipkin, her sweetheart, a struggling poet. Enclosed is a love letter and a book of his collected poetry, “Poems of Poverty,” which he has dedicated to Fania. Mother and Father scoff at the ridiculousness of writing poetry about poverty and about Morris’s lack of ambition. Father warns Fania that she’ll have a miserable life if she marries a poet who writes useless poems instead of working. Then he boasts that he can easily get all his daughters married off.

He starts with Fania, whom he marries off to Moe Mirsky, a supposed wealthy jewelry store owner. For Mashah, he finds Abe Schmukler, a man from Los Angeles who is in the cloaks-and-suits business and in town for a couple weeks on business and to find a wife. Both Mashah and Fania marry the respective suitors Father found for them—both of whom turn out to be dishonest crooks and unsuitable husbands (Moe isn’t wealthy like he claimed to be, and Abe has a gambling problem).

Father betroths Bessie to Zalmon the fish-peddler, a recently widowed neighbor who desires a new wife to care for his six children and help him in the fish shop. At first Bessie coldly resists Zalmon’s advances, but she eventually relents and marries him—and from then on spends her days caring Zalmon’s children and working grueling hours alongside Zalmon in the fish shop.

After Father has successfully (for him at least) married off his three eldest daughters, he decides to try his hand at business and responds an ad in the paper placed by a man looking to sell his grocery store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, for an impossibly good price. But when Mother arrives and inspect the place more closely, she angrily informs Father—who is still over the moon about the great business deal he thinks he just made—that the supposedly fully stocked store is in fact full of empty boxes and rotting food: the man scammed him. And because Father paid in cash and didn’t demand a receipt, there’s nothing the family can do to seek justice.

Sara and Mother try to keep the store afloat, but Father’s angry demeanor and poor business sense drive customers away. This is the last straw for Sara, and she leaves home to try to make a life for herself on her own terms in New York. With nowhere to go and hardly any money to her name, she tries to seek shelter first with Bessie and then with Mashah, but neither sister has the money or space to house her. And when Sara responds to various For-Rent signs, person after person bitterly informs her that they don’t accept solo female tenants. At long last she finds a landlady willing to rent a room to her when she offers to pay that month’s rent up front. The room is cramped, grimy, and depressing—but it’s a room of Sara’s own, and she relishes the independence and solitude it affords her.

Sara struggles to support herself, battling moments of doubt and deep loneliness as she juggles work with night school, but she is elated when she is eventually accepted to college. At first she struggles to relate to her classmates, whose relative privilege and inexperience makes them seem impossibly young and naïve. But her dream of becoming a teacher and achieving independence fuels her resolve, and she ultimately excels in her studies and graduates.

Sara returns to New York and starts working as a public-school teacher. She takes pride in the small apartment she rents with her own income and with the good-quality clothing she can now afford to buy. She also sets out to find her parents, whom she hasn’t communicated with in a while. Sara finds her mother gravely ill. Feeling ashamed and deeply remorseful for the years she prioritized her studies above her family, Sara vows to hire the best doctors to care for Mother, and she starts dropping by after work each day to care for her. But despite Sara’s care, Mother soon dies.

Sara and her sisters have hardly had time to grieve when Father abruptly marries the widow Mrs. Feinstein, claiming he needs a wife since he has never had to care for himself and doesn’t know how. Sara is disgusted, and she and her sisters cut off contact with him for a time.

Father’s marriage sours when Mrs. Feinstein realizes her new husband is unwilling to go to work to support her. She lashes out at Sara and her sisters for the immoral, heartless choice to abandon their father in his old age.

Sometime later, Sara is headed to a café to meet Hugo Seelig, the principal from her school with whom she is in a relationship, when she encounters Father on the street. He’s ill and seemingly near death. Sara takes a leave from school and spends her days caring for Father, gradually nursing him back to health. He confides in Sara about his unhappy marriage and says he plans to divorce Mrs. Feinstein and move into an Old Men’s House. Unwilling to send her father to live in such a cold, sterile place, Sara decides to invite Father to move in with her and Hugo.

On her next visit to Father, she brings Hugo with her and introduces him to Father. Father is impressed and touched when Hugo asks to learn Hebrew from Father.