Bread Givers
Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1925. Octavo, original black ribbed cloth stamped in gold. Title page printed in red and black. Signed by Anzia Yezierska on front free endpaper. No dust jacket. Intermittent foxing to text block, foxing to edges.
Signed first trade edition of one of the great American immigrant novels, the story of the clash between a poor Talmudic scholar and his headstrong youngest daughter in New York's Jewish ghetto: “Should I let him crush me as he crushed them? No. This is America, where children are people." Bread Givers is in large part based on Yezierska's own struggle for independence: she was born in a Polish shtetl, and settled with her large family on the Lower East Side as a child. At seventeen, she left home to work her way through school, and began to publish the stories that launched her writing career as “the Cinderella of the sweatshop." Trade editions of Bread Givers signed by Yezierska are less common than examples of the signed limited edition, a run of five hundred copies produced for booksellers. A very good copy of a high spot of both Jewish and feminist fiction, signed by Yezierska.
Price: $950.00