Bread Givers

Anzia Yezierska was born in Poland and emigrated with her family to the Jewish Lower East Side of New York City in 1890 when she was nine years old. By the 1920s she had risen out of poverty and become a successful writer of stories, novels--all autobiographical--and a semi-fictional autobiography, Red Ribbon on a White Horse (Persea). Her novel Bread Givers (Persea) is considered a classic of Jewish American fiction and has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies since its reissue in 1975. Persea also publishes How I Found America: Collected Stories and The Open Cage: An Anzia Yezierska Collection (a selection of stories, excerpts from Red Ribbon on a White Horse, and uncollected stories on old age). Yezierska died in 1970.

Alice Kessler-Harris, professor of history at Rutgers University, is author of Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States.