An account of the tragic fire on March 25, 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company which killed 145 people most of whom were Jewish young women between the ages of 16 and 25. The fire was preceded by a bitter strike which is laid out with an ear for what actually occurred.
The setting is Washington Square in Greenwich Village, dominated by the Arch and elegant pink townhouses on the north side, homes of the well-to-do of old American stock. The time is the early 1900s, when the horse and carriage were gradually giving way to the automobile...and residential windows shone either blue from electricity or yellow from gas lights.
Around this historic spot of green, Nancy Bogen interweaves the lives of four people:
Martha Ferber, daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, who goes against Papa's wishes and idealistically chooses employment as a sewing mAchine operator in a factory when she can do better.
Mammeh or Bertha, her mother, who shows herself surprisingly in advance of her time by advcoating her daughter's right to determine her own destiny.
Young Jerrold Vanderlynn, a Yankee through and through, who comes to bustling manhattan from rural tarrytown to look for a job in an office, and finds his lodgings at Mme. Catherine Branchard's now-famous boarding house for artists and "misfits" at Number 61 Washington Square South.
Hippolyte Havel, an anarchist and ex-lover of Emma Goldman, who runs (as he did in real life) a basement eatery on nearby Macdougal Street, where of a night one can find gathered "Red Emma" and her circle, Mary Dreier, Helen Marot, and their stalwart associates in the newly-formed Women's Trade Union League, as well as a host of other colorful Greenwich Village hangers-on like Max Eastman, then a suffragette symptahizer.
Factory girl, mama, new guy in town,anarchist--their stories unfold against the background of the Great Shirtwaist Strike of 1910, in which 20,000 Jewish and Italian young women took on the cockroach bosses and literally put the International Ladies Garment Workers Union on the map, and the Triangle Fire, a tragic sequel to those glorious moments, which claimed 145 of their lives.
But BOBE MAYSE (which is Yiddish for "old wives' tale") is more than a meticulously researched historical novel. Through all its characters, but most especially through Martha, it is the story of you and me and the people next door.
Suffused with a keen understanding of the human heart, it is, in a word, the story of every person in any season.
