“fanny Herself And The Bread Givers”

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In ‘Fanny Herself’ and ‘The Bread Givers’, both authors deal with a similar theme: the personal development of the main character, culminating in her achieving sufficient autonomy and self-reliance to embark on marriage. The structure of the narratives, and the presentation of the protagonists, however, are not treated in the same way in the two novels; Batker (2000) suggests that this difference is exacerbated by the fact that critics have “placed immigrant and acculturated Jewish women novelists in opposition to each other . . Jewishness and Americanism are still being figured as antithetical” (Batker, 2000, 81).
We can, though, trace common themes not only in Ferber and Yesierska, but in other works dealing with the struggles of immigrant and minority women coming to terms with the clash between home culture and that of the mainstream. Lourdes, in Garcia’s (1992) ‘Dreaming in Cuban’, for instance, adopts a mainstream lifestyle but subconsciously identifies herself, not as Cuban, but simply ‘not-American’. Sofia, in Alvarez’s (1991) ‘Garcia Girls’, does not become reconciled to ‘old country’ traditions until she bears a son, who forges a...

References:
  • Alvarez, J. How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. 1991.
  • Bolton-Fasman, J. Review of Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska. 2004. [7 Dec 2008] available: http://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/+10146
  • Ferber, E. Fanny Herself. 1917.
  • Garcia, C. Dreaming in Cuban. Ballantine. 1992.
  • Yezierska, A. The Bread Givers. 1925.

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