Immigrant life in the early 20th century was a picture of pioneering souls making "the American Dream" amid despairing conditions. The Bread Givers follows a teenager named Sara Smolinsky, the youngest daughter in a family of 6 devout Polish Jews in the pre-World War I era.
Sara grows tougher throughout the story after watching the arranged marriages of each of her three sisters to abusive and thoughtless husbands. Each marriage comes at the behest of Sara's devout father who lives by the old ways and insists on the support of his wife and four daughters.
As Sara gets older, she is cast out of the home by her father, and the rest of the story involves Sara going to college and making a life for herself while struggling to be accepted by her peers. When Sara longs to return home to visit her family, she finds her mother dying and her father helpless.
Bread Givers is at once a sad story of one girl's poverty and shame and at another, a story of triumph and success by never giving up. The foreword to the book exclaims that the novel closely mirrors the author's actual childhood. Yezierska was barely known and her books were reprinted several decades after her death by a research at the New York Public Library.
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