Setting
The text takes place in the 1910s and early 1920s. By the 1920s, 2.2 million Eastern European Jews had immigrated to New York City, creating a culture clash between the Americanized Jews and the Eastern European Jews. The Eastern European Jews were typically perceived as more conservative and traditional than the Americanized Jews. The 1910s and early 1920s were marked by problems of immigration and poverty, unsafe working conditions, sweatshops and the beginning of the women's movement. For Jewish Americans, the 1910s and early 1920s signaled the beginning of the Jewish women's movement, the beginning stages of movement into the middle class and a flight toward secular Judaism.
The story takes place in three distinct settings: the tenements on New York's Lower East Side, the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Sara's college. The tenements on New York's Lower East Side supplied an instant Jewish-American community for the tenants. They housed the working-class Jews and the floor a family lived on often told of their financial status, with the top floor of these walk-up buildings representing the lowest status. People from the same culture tended to dominate sections of tenements, creating an island of sorts in the midst of New York City in which they were surrounded by their familiar culture. In Elizabeth, New Jersey, the family is somewhat more exposed to the American culture as they interact with white customers. The move is particularly tough for Sara and her mother as the community of women in the New York City tenements is absent in Elizabeth. Sara becomes entirely isolated from her culture when she leaves for college.
Read more about this topic: Bread Givers
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“The supreme, the merciless, the destroyer of opposition, the exalted King, the shepherd, the protector of the quarters of the world, the King the word of whose mouth destroys mountains and seas, who by his lordly attack has forced mighty and merciless Kings from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same to acknowledge one supremacy.”
—Ashurnasirpal II (r. 883–59 B.C.)
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“One of my playmates, who was apprenticed to a printer, and was somewhat of a wag, asked his master one afternoon if he might go a-fishing, and his master consented. He was gone three months. When he came back, he said that he had been to the Grand Banks, and went to setting type again as if only an afternoon had intervened.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)