He is a gifted artisan, the owner of a granite-carving shop, highly respected by his men and renowned for his lifelike carvings of flowers. Though small in stature, he has a viselike grip. Her husband, with his thick white mustache and his pipe, is silent and distant at first-lost in a grief of his own. Gerbati piles the children’s plates high with food and buys them the first warm clothing they have ever owned.
The Gerbatis appear in the second half of the book, and they’re worth waiting for. Irrationally terrified of being arrested for his father’s abrupt death, Jake sneaks onto the train to Vermont and begs Rosa to say he is her older brother. His desperate circumstances have forced him into callousness he routinely steals and lies to survive. Jake is a 13-year-old illiterate mill worker-child labor in America was common then-who sleeps in the streets to avoid the violence of his alcoholic father.
Since her father’s death, her mother and older sister have worked in the mill for a pittance, sharing their tiny, cold tenement with Lithuanian boarders to make ends meet. Rosa is in sixth grade, the daughter of Italian immigrants. The two protagonists, Rosa and Jake, stay with a memorable older Italian couple, Mr. When the authorities resort to violence, some of the mill workers’ children are sent to volunteer hosts in Vermont to protect them until the strike is over. This absorbing novel takes place during the infamous 1912 “Bread and Roses” strike in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts.
0 kommentar(er)
