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Mendle's Bargain
Gustav Levine
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Description
I have written a work of fiction that transports readers back to New York City in the early twentieth century, to life among the recently disembarked Jewish immigrants, including starry-eyed idealists and wise guys, romantics and cynics, often on the verge of interrupting each other even when nodding in agreement. The American public is occasionally reminded of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, but rarely gets to read about the women who were active in the early union movement. Those years also spawned the suffragettes, some of them asking for more than just the vote. My novel offers a visit to the productive world these immigrants cobbled together from the culture they carried and the one they found. My novel conveys what women faced in that era, and the different ways they responded. What follows is a brief summary of the novel. NARRATIVE SYNOPSIS: Mendle Rubinski, raised in a European shtetl, was apprenticed as a tailor. A man of slight build, he yearned to be a poet. In 1912 he saw his friends being drafted into the Russian Army and feared he would be next. Pincus Lanksky, who had previously emigrated to America, briefly returned to the old country for the specific purpose of offering Mendle an alternative future: marry Lansky's daughter and have his own tailor shop in New York City. Mendle, hearing everything about the business but little about the prospective bride, hesitated. Lansky sweetened the deal by agreeing to also pay for the passage of Mendle's parents and sister. At that point Mendle reasoned that his mysterious bride, whatever her flaws, would offer lesser impediments to his well-being than the Russian Army. He did not learn the true price he was being asked to pay until his wedding night. In New York City, Mendle developed close friendships with Yiddish writers responsible for the final flowering of poetry in their dying language, and came to know union activists and suffragettes. He struggled to live with the bargain that brought him to America, while his sister, a free-spirited agnostic, confronted the dilemma of falling in love with a rabbi.
