<p>My copy arrived today - ready to start reading this weekend. Also - for those without HBO - on public television there is a show called “American Experience” and they have an episode on the Triangle fire. Here in MD - it is on WETA on 3/31 - and will repeat on MPT. Hopefully it will be on other public tv stations as well.</p>
<p>There is also a special on CNN tomorrow night. It sounds like the same special that is airing on HBO. Nice for those of us without premium cable!</p>
<p>Well, Bread Givers just came in at the library. </p>
<p>What do y’all think of going ahead and choosing the book that will be next after Triangle, so that everyone has plenty of time to get a copy and read it before the group discussion?</p>
<p>My wife and I were in NYC this evening and visited the site of the triangle fire. There were numerous flowers and tributes on the sidewalk. A list of the victims gave their ages–it was heartbreaking to see how many were under 20 while standing where many leapt to their deaths.</p>
<p>Re Deborah T’s suggestion, if a thought is to go in chronological order, some possibilities would be something dealing with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and its impact on the founding of Israel; the horribly titled but interesting “An Empire of their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood” which deals with how the Hollywood studios were virtually all founded by such Jews as the Warner Brothers, Samuel L. Goldwyn and others; or a book on the Holocaust.</p>
<p>Deborah T - sounds like something we need to consider! There was not a lot of response to Bread Givers - so it seemed best to move things along. It’s a quick read - there’s no reason why you can’t go ahead and read it now and revive the Bread Givers discussion. We probably would not find people ready to start discussing the Triangle book until early April. And sure - we can start picking the book after Triangle earlier to give people time to get it from the library.</p>
<p>Hi Guys, just checking in for the first time, I’ve read my first few pages of the Triangle Book. May I toss in a few tidbits of my own regarding the the last one?</p>
<p>In our house it was always Yiddishe Kupf, like the German Kopf. And when you got a bump on your head or were told to lay it down on the pillow it was a Kapella, which I think in Yiddish and German was a borrowing from the Latin caput or caputus from which we get lots of words in English like Capitol. Oddly enough, I don’t think Kippah is related but rather comes from the same Hebrew root as Chuppah, the marraige canopy.</p>
<p>When my grandfather came to the US and was looking for a job he saw an ad in the Yiddish Daily Forwards for a Ford Delivery driver. Being as the paper was written in Yiddish, he mistook the word Ford for the Yiddish word ferde or horse and thought to himself, “I know how to drive a horse wagon.”,having done so in the Czar’s Army in WWI. So he applied for the job and eventually talked his way into driving a truck for a sour cream company called Sodus that many years later was sold to Breakstone.</p>
<p>mhc: Great story and interesting discussion about language. I think one of the best thing about reading Bread Givers is that it gives us an opportunity to reflect and share our own family histories.</p>
<p>I’m enjoying the idea of the book club but I am itching to go to a book about the founding of Israel. My knowledge is sketchy and understanding this is at the root of so much of the discussion that our kids may have to deal with in college. My vote would be to make that the next topic. Any thoughts?</p>
<p>mhc - congratulations on finding your way over here! I’m with Spectrum2 - love the anecdotes about family history. We always relate the one where my grandfather - a teenager with no English and fresh off the boat - overheard someone ordering a ham sandwich. So - he went into some type of deli on the lower East Side and proudly ordered a “ham sandwich”. The deli owner realized that he had no idea what he was saying and brought him something more appropriate! My grandfather was a huge lover of deli - corned beef, pastrami, etc. - but we always kidded him - “What, no ham sandwich?”.</p>
<p>I would suggest that we take turns selecting the topic and book going forward. Yabeyabe has made a good suggestion about the Hollywood book - if someone else wants to suggest something on the Holocaust or the founding of Israel - topics I am sure we will cover in time if this book group keeps going - just make your suggestions - volunteer to be the discussion promoter for that month - and we will go from there. Very flexible - I don’t want anyone to feel rushed. It does not necessarily have to be a book every month if that is too much.</p>
<p>i just went to the CNN website to find the time of the Triangle Fire program and this is what I found:</p>
<p>CNN is scheduled to air the HBO documentary “Triangle: Remembering the Fire” on Saturday night, March 26 at 11 p.m., eastern time; 8 p.m. pacific time.</p>
<p>spectrum2, my kids read the Dershowitz book in school, “The Case for Israel”, it would give you a lot of the facts about Israel’s founding but I don’t think it would be a great selection for the club.</p>
<p>Just finished watching this special - very sad - very poignant. I think watching the special was a good intro to the book. It also connected with the story in “Bread Givers” regarding tenement life and working conditions - so it kind of all fits together. The special featured a number of family members who had a grandparent or great aunt or other relative who either survived the fire or died in it - and you could see how deeply this tragedy still affected their descendants today. It also addressed the labor unrest and strikes leading up to the fire and the enormous workplace and fire safety changes that followed. The role of women in the events leading up to the fire, the fire itself and the aftermath was also very pivotal.</p>
<p>It was also so eerie watching these young women jumping to their deaths from the burning building - the parallels to 9/11 are startling.</p>
<p>If you have a chance to catch this special on CNN or HBO - it is an hour well spent.</p>
<p>I saw the HBO documentary the other day, is the one on CNN the same?</p>
<p>When I started reading the first few pages of book I was afraid that the special might have ruined it for me, but as I’ve been going on, it is much fuller and goes into other directions too. One thing which really surprizes me (although I 'm still not far along) is how many of the factory owners were themselves Jewish and also relatively recent immigrants. I’d always taken it as an article of faith (until recent years anyway) that Jews, even business owners were Liberal or even further left leaning and such staunch Union supporters. It’s jarring to read how many of the factory owners were Jewish and hired strike breakers.</p>
<p>The description of Clara Lemlich and her friends certainly makes it clear why many established Americans of the time were so scared of the radical ideas of socialist immigrants.</p>
<p>mhc - I know - I did not realize that the factory owners themselves were Jewish either. Makes the situation even more sad - in that they had relatives working for them in these horrible conditions. It was very interesting to hear from a descendant of one of the factory owners - his granddaughter - in the HBO special. She was glad that her grandfather survived - but also felt that had he not been her grandfather - and had she lost a daughter in the fire - she would have wanted to kill him.</p>
<p>And yes - the HBO documentary is the one also available on CNN.</p>
<p>Interesting article about a woman from my area whose great-grandfather was killed in the Triangle fire. Unusual twist in that his widow married his brother - and many secrets were kept.</p>
<p>Interesting, rockvillemom!
I have not seen the TV special, but I did start this excellent book which gives a lot of context, describing political corruption, the Socialist movement, and more.
I need to read more before I can really discuss this book, but a somewhat humorous thing is that I never knew that the Daily Foreward, which my grandfather read every single day of his life, was a Socialist paper! (I know I keep talking about my grandfather, but this thread is making me think about him a lot!) This shouldn’t really surprise me, as this was the same grandfather that was the 12 year old lookout for the Trotsyites when they held their meetings in Russia, but I just never knew! I mentioned this to my D2, and she said, “Of course it was a Socialist paper, Mom!”
She probably knows more about this paper because her student newspaper, which is for a school with a large Jewish population with a largely Jewish staff, has been aptly named “The Foreword” since 1927! The non-Jews at the school probably just think this is because one of the streets bordering the school is Foreward Avenue, and then there is the pun that it is “The Foreword” with an “o”. But those of us who know about the “Daily Foreward” make this connection every time we see an issue.</p>
<p>I read more of the book while flying back from Elon and was blasted back to a time over 40 years ago.</p>
<p>It suddenly occurred to me as I read the section on the life of Rosie Friedman, that while in college, I had lived for two years very close to where she and others in the book had. My apartment was on 13th street between Avenues B & C. It was one of those “dumb bell” tenement apartments described in the book and I paid $35 a month rent for a 5 room apartment we called a railroad flat. (LOL, it was still a slum). I’d always wondered back then why the front room was so big, while the three back roooms were so tiny, dark and windowless. By then (1968 -70) there was a private bathroom, but the flush was a pull chain from a unit up on the wall. And as in the time of the book, my bathtub was still in the second room from the street - the kitchen. It and the next room faced a dark narrow air space. </p>
<p>And I also used to pass Grace Episcopal Church while walking to NYU, the site of the fire. Sometimes I attended to concerts or political lectures at the red brick Judson Memorial Church. The public library I used to take books out of had once been the castle-like Judson Market Courthouse where all the strikers had been taken to after their arrests. It was converted a few years before I moved there to a public library.</p>
<p>Despite thinking myself a “radical” and participating in the 1968 NYU and Columbia demonstrations and school shut downs, I was blissfully unaware of sites of Jewish and Labor Movement history I walked through every day.</p>
<p>Very cool story - I like how we make connections from the history we read to our own experiences. And levirm - I like hearing about your grandfather and everyone else’s family stories - it’s part of our collective history. mhc - the book is going with me when we drive down to Elon.</p>
<p>A number of years ago - my younger son and I participated in a program at Hebrew School that had to do with family history and stories about our grandparents and their trips through Ellis Island, etc. And the Hebrew School director - a woman in her 60s - dressed up as if she has just arrived off the boat - old clothing, shawl around her head, etc., and she acted out an immigrant story. She had a great Yiddish accent and the inflections just right - sounded like my grandmother. And she said to me afterward - and this still brings tears to my eyes - that we are the last generation to have that memory of the Yiddish-speaking Old World grandmother. Her impersonation surely affected the parents in the group more than the children. So by all means - share the stories - that’s our Jewish history.</p>
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