This audiobook was such a pleasure to listen to. I've read a fair amount of classic Jewish literature, but I had no idea this novel existed until recently. Imagine a Jewish woman, who emigrated from Russian Poland with her parents as a child, writing a novel about Jewish life on NY's Lower East Side in the 1910s-1920s, and she's writing it in the 1920s.

What's obviously striking is that the women are well-developed characters, which I don't think happened again until Tillie Olsen came along, and the father is a tyrant who uses the Talmud to justify his selfishness.

My generation grew up with Jewish mother jokes, but there was always this disconnect about how little input anyone but Jewish men had in creating the image of Jewish families. Here, we see all the work that goes into raising a family, cleaning, and cooking with only the tools and ingredients poverty allows, and any desire for input into the family budget, marriages, or other major decisions derided as nagging.

My mother's family emigrated from a different part of eastern Europe, were more political than religious, and arrived in the U.S. later than the family in this novel, but Bread Givers hit the spot in terms of the uniquely Jewish cadence, stories, and culture I've been missing in the time since the last of my parents' friends and siblings were alive. TBH, sometimes I just miss the non-ironic sprinkling of Yiddish into English and the use of “be a person.” But seeing this part of Jewish life in the form of a novel feels like such an unexpected gift.

The protagonist's adult life is more than a touch melodramatic—and by now, it's a story most of us have seen and read before, but I'm floored that this was published in 1925. A Jewish woman immigrant writing a Jewish woman immigrant protagonist who is willing to fight to have agency!

I loved Bread Givers, and I am so grateful it exists. Gabra Zackman's narration of the audiobook is gorgeous and perfect in every way.