According to Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life, between 1880 and around World War I, the vast majority of Jews in Eastern European and Southern Italians came to the United States. The states that populate the neighborhoods of New York and the Lower East Side are the best example. One thing that was common to the immigrant experience is that all immigrants come to the United States as a "land of opportunity." They come to America with different types of expectations conditioned by their origins and their families. But every immigrant comes to America with the desire to become a person, to be an individual, and to become someone. In this case, the author showed in Bread Givers Sarah's desire to transform herself into something and bring America something unique, which only she can bring. This is an effort to understand immigrants, particularly Jewish immigrants, from a woman's perspective. The book shows that this presented a challenge for the children of Jewish immigrants, especially girls, because of the intensity of their family ties and obligations, so critical to immigrant communities. This was true for immigrants who came to settle in neighborhoods like the one where Sarah and her family settled. Bread Givers is a book about Jewish heritage and culture. The plot tells the touching story of a young woman growing up, finding herself, trying to find her way to success, while facing everyday problems. It's about four girls, their caring and gentle mother and their very authoritarian and tyrannical father. The father married them off one by one to men they didn't really love. For the most part, these men turned out to be complete, self-centered assholes... middle of paper ... his goal. Like most first-generation immigrants, the family experienced terrible poverty. Anzia Yezierska did a great job portraying the life of Sarah's family, a sample of immigrant life. As an illustration, when Mashah, who was working, went out and bought herself a toothbrush and a small towel for thirty cents so that she could have her own towel. The rest of the family was horrified. It was like, how dare she spend thirty cents on a toothbrush and a towel, when the rest of the family is starving and they need that money to buy food? The father assumes that it is his absolute right to expect that his four daughters will either never leave home, thus providing for him forever, or that they will leave home and marry someone rich, who will then support him forever. Women of the Smolinsky family were the breadwinners.