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:
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—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)
“The doctrine of those who have denied that certainty could be attained at all, has some agreement with my way of proceeding at the first setting out; but they end in being infinitely separated and opposed. For the holders of that doctrine assert simply that nothing can be known; I also assert that not much can be known in nature by the way which is now in use. But then they go on to destroy the authority of the senses and understanding; whereas I proceed to devise helps for the same.”
—Francis Bacon (1560–1626)