Title:
The Locket: Surviving the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
Genre:
Middle Grade Historical Fiction
Author:
Suzanne Lieurance
Website:
www.suzannelieurance.com
Publisher:
Enslow Publishers, Inc.
Purchase on Amazon
Galena,
an eleven-year-old Russian-Jewish immigrant, lives in New York City with her
family and works at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory with her older
sister Anya. The factory pays low wages and has terrible working conditions,
making Anya yearn to join a union. Soon a horrible fire guts the factory
leaving Galena with painful, horrific memories. Follow author Suzanne Lieurance
in this dramatic historical fiction novel, as she describes how Galena uses the
support of friends, family, and Jewish traditions to inspire her to fight for
workers’ rights.
Chapter 1
It was an early spring morning in New York City
but already the day promised to be warm and sunny. I gazed out the window of
our tiny apartment on Orchard Street.
Sunlight was straining to poke its way between
our towering tenement and the one next to it. But the two buildings were so
close and so tall, it was impossible for me to get a decent glimpse of the sky.
Oh,
well. It doesn't matter. I'll be outside in the sunshine soon.
Mama and my older sister, Anya, were arguing
again. Their angry words gave a chill to our apartment, and I shivered as I
pulled my dress on over my head and smoothed it down to get ready for the
workday.
I tied back my curly dark brown hair with a
green ribbon that matched my dress, then checked my appearance in the small
mirror hanging over the creamy white ceramic washbowl and pitcher set resting
on the washstand.
I'll
never be as beautiful as Anya.
I thought as I looked at myself.
Still, with my dark eyes and lashes, full lips, and
straight nose, I knew some people thought I was pretty. And that was good
enough. I smiled at my reflection,
then moved away from the mirror.
A curtain separated our sleeping area from the
rest of the single room that made up our apartment. On the other side of the
curtain, Anya was trying to make a point with Mama. But it was impossible to
have a private conversation in a room that would have been crowded for one
person, much less a family of four like ours. The walls were so thin, and so
many families were crowded into one building, that it was not unusual for us to
hear the neighbors arguing or talking loudly in our Lower East Side tenement.
Yet, although our apartment was only one room, Mama
tried to make our home as cozy and as cheerful as she could. Framed photographs
of family members left behind in Russia were displayed atop pretty crocheted lace
doilies that decorated a pine dresser next to the door to the outside hallway.
The smallest photograph of the group was actually the one Mama treasured the
most. It was a photo of her older sister, Tatiana, who had died when she was a
teenager and Mama was just a child.
Our sleeping area consisted of two feather
mattresses (one for Anya and me to share and one for Mama and Papa) on wooden
frames, along with the washstand and a line of pegs on the wall for our
clothes.
I pulled open the curtain just as a teakettle
whistled on the old cast-iron stove where Mama stood.
"But, Mama..." protested Anya. “Dmitri
thinks…”
“Hush now, Anya. I don’t care what Dmitri
thinks,” Mama said in Yiddish. She lifted the kettle from the stove and poured
hot water onto a pile of crumbled tea leaves nestled inside an old chipped
teapot. “He should stop filling your head with foolish notions.”
Anya sat at a small wooden table in a corner of
the room across from the stove. A large white sink on the wall completed our
small kitchen and living area. Anya answered in English. “But, Mama, they are
not foolish notions. Dmitri says the working conditions and pay are much better
for those who belong to the garment worker’s union. Did you know that if the
Triangle factory hired union workers, as Dmitri’s does, I would only have to
work half a day on Saturdays?”
“It pains me that you have to work on the
Sabbath,” Mamma said. She cut a thick slice of heavy brown bread and handed it
to Anya. “But we need the money, and a half day’s work would mean only a half
day’s wages. Besides, if the union is so powerful, why do union members work at
all on the Sabbath?”
I walked over to the wooden cabinet along the
wall of the kitchen area and reached up to remove two teacups as I listened to
Mama's protests.
No
wonder Mama’s English is so poor. It will never improve if she refuses to use
it.
From the time our family had immigrated to New
York City from Russia over a year ago, Anya and I both had been trying very
hard to become “real” Americans even though it would be a while before we could
apply for actual citizenship. We spoke only English now and Anya (who was
almost eighteen) wore more stylish American clothes. Mama said I was too young
for the cotton shirtwaists that were currently so popular among Anya and other
young women in New York City.
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