#bread givers

Good question, and thanks for the ask!

Longtime followers of this blog can probably predict, correctly, that I’ll answer this question with The Great Gatsby, particularly after my Great Gatsby Obsession of 2019™️, well-documented on this blog. It’s just so well-written, with such lyrical and flowing sentences, and every character is such a flawed disaster in different ways and yet I still love them so much*, and Nick and Jay are so gay for each other, and Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald themselves were such fascinating disasters and I…you don’t understand, I just love this book so much, you guys.

*Except Tom. Tom can go choke and also be yeeted into the sun.

Aside from The Great Gatsby, here are some other favorites, restricting “classic” to “published over ~50 years ago”, with very brief reasoning:

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (made me feel Seen™️ as a high schooler)

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (made me feel Seen™️ as a college student)

Macbeth by William Shakespeare (my favorite Shakespeare play, especially since I have fond memories of performing in it, as King Duncan, in my college’s Shakespeare club production! I also love Hamlet, Richard III, Much Ado [although I’ll admit I’ve never read it, just seen performances of it], and Romeo & Juliet!)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (more disaster humans, gotta love that! We’re also using it as the “foundational text” for one of my grad school modules this semester!)

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (it’s just…really good! I also read it for my 9th grade English class in January 2017, so it felt. Uh. Especially timely)

1984 by George Orwell (did it feel relatable to 14-year-old me because of the internet’s surveillance capitalism, or because I felt scrutinized and like I had no privacy in my home? Uh…yes)

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (particularly the translation by Simon Armitage—it’s so gay and so hilarious)

No-No Boy by John Okada (is it a fascinating, angsty look at Asian American identity post-WWII? Yes. Does it include an “only one bed” scene? ALSO YES)

Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska (honestly, I haven’t reread this one in a while so I don’t remember if it holds up, but I remember loving it when I read it for a college class in 2022!)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (it’s so sprawling and yet so relatable; any human emotion you’ve experienced, Tolstoy’s probably crystallized it and put it to paper with devastating accuracy)

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (this one rewired my brain chemistry a little bit. The rueful humor, the combination of the sci-fi with the psychological, it’s SO good and SO me. I think it’s the single book I’ve referenced the most in all my grad school discussions so far, and I’m using it as a major source of inspiration for my own novel!)

But Mother did not dream always about how good she had it as a young girl. If she had less to worry for the rent, so she had more time to worry for a man for Bessie, who was already nine years older than Mother was when she got married. And there was no sign of a man yet. And no dowry to help get one.

Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska

(paperback, 333 pages; realistic fiction, historical fiction, coming of age)

The stars in their infinite peace seemed to pour their healing light into me. I thought of captives in prison, the sick and the suffering from the beginning of time who had looked to these stars for strength. What was my little sorrow to the centuries of pain which those stars had watched? So near they seemed, so compassionate. My bitter hurt seemed to grow small and drop away. If I must go on alone, I should still have silence and the high stars to walk with me.

Bread Givers is about Sara Smolinsky, the youngest of four daughters to immigrant Jewish parents in New York. Her parents are extremely poor, and Sara grows up watching her three older sisters enter into arranged marriages to support their father's commitment to scholarship over paying work. Drama ensues, and Sara eventually leaves her family home to attend college. She becomes relatively successful, but finds herself back at home for a few different reasons and comes to better understand her parents and their choices. The novel is a reflection of Yezierska's relationship with her own family, and has elements that are considered to be autobiographical.

Frankly, I enjoyed the foreword and the introduction (by Alice Kessler-Harris) more than the actual book. It was an interesting story with good character development, but it was kind of dry. Sara was kind of annoying as a protagonist; she just had no self-awareness whatsoever, even as she got older. The story was an interesting take on immigrant life what what it means to be an American, examining questions of the coexistence of those identities and the potential inherent sacrifice involved in adopting an American identity. I really wanted to like this book, but it was just hard to relate, and I enjoyed the response to and history of the story more than the story itself.

Trigger warnings for illness and character death. I would recommend looking up more detailed trigger warnings because it's been a few months since I finished this book and didn't write any down.

[A] Amor Vincit Omnia

Amor Vincit Omnia means “love conquers all” which was used in the Roman times when Caravaggio created a painting between 1601 and 1603 for Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, one of the wealthiest men in Rome. Gif saved from Wordstruck (tumblr). In this world full of loath, vengeance and negativity A world filled with nothing but pitch darkness and cruelty For a time, hatred is the main vector of why…