The Free Thinkers

Name: The Free Thinkers
Price: 29.99 AUD
Availability: OutOfStock
ISBN: 9781583220757

Layne Silbert

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Paperback

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English

Seven Stories Press,U.S.
01 August 2011

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945); Short stories

Layle Silbert's stories trace struggles and joys of lives overlooked. In The Free Thinkers- Two Novellas, she gives these lost lives a new voice, recovering in exacting detail the world of newly arrived Eastern European Jews in turn-of-the-century-America. Silbert's stories chronicle their arrival in Chicago and New York, and follow them as they trade Yiddish and Russian for English, find work in factories and Jewish newspapers, attend Zionist meetings, and struggle toward the promise of freedom and happiness.

The Free Thinkers tells two tales. The first novella focuses on Ida, an independent woman, a ""freethinker"" devoted to finding her own way in America. A factory forelady, a patron of the theater, and an instinctive feminist, she is determined to find total freedom in a man's world-no matter where it leads her.

The collection's other novella chronicles the lives of three sisters from the Ukraine as they find husbands and start their own families in America. Two masterful chapters at the heart of the novella describe their mother's arrival, after the great war and the revolution, to a small Indiana town. She is ""a vision, in her clothes, her posture, the very air around her, a vision of a sight on a street in the village they'd all come from, suddenly seamlessly transported into this pleasant spring morning to the very middle of America.""

In Layle Silbert's tender Stories of the New World, as in the best stories of Chekov, the slightest gesture carries with it the weight of the world. Nothing happens, everything happens. Silbert's writing is delicate, as if dusted by the wings of a visiting angel, here to present for posterity the way things were.

By: Layne Silbert
Imprint: Seven Stories Press,U.S.
Country of Publication: United States
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 228mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 23mm
Weight: 465g
ISBN: 9781583220757
ISBN 10: 1583220755
Pages: 317
Publication Date: 01 August 2011
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Layle Silbert made her name as a photographer, mostly of writers, and has had over thirty exhibits throughout the world. She has published stories, poems and a handful of personal essays but thinks of herself chiefly as a writer of short stories, more than one hundred of which have been published in literary magazines. She lives in New York.