“…One of the ways you can get into my cast of characters is by leaving a very detailed written record. Because that’s what we historians have to work from, you’re not allowed to make stuff up like a novelist can….And of course, it skews to some extent the way history is written. Because the rich […]
Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes
Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes
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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781094145501 |
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Publisher: | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
Publication date: | 03/03/2020 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 1.50(h) x 5.00(d) |
About the Author
Hometown:
San Francisco, CaliforniaDate of Birth:
October 5, 1942Place of Birth:
New York, New YorkEducation:
A.B., Harvard College, 1963Read an Excerpt
Tsar and Queen Until the First World War redrew national borders in Europe, Augustów, a trading center for cattle and the region’s small, wiry horses, lay in imperial Russia. Today it is in the far northeast corner of Poland. Augustów was a garrison town when RoseRaisel in Yiddish—Wieslander was born there in 1879. “I slipped into the world,” she would later claim, “while my mother was on her knees, scrubbing the floor.” One of her earliest memories was of the clatter of iron horseshoes on cobblestones as the tsar’s cavalry swept across the town’s wide market square. “One voice, ringing steel, commands. Men and horses swing and whisk and turn and gallop, stop suddenly, race, and disappear with a cra-kerra! Kerreka-Kerreka! ” Throughout the sprawling Russian Empire, there were often more troops in places with restive populations that were not ethnically Russian. In Augustów, that meant Poles and Jews. The latter had long been the officially sanctioned scapegoats for all the ills of the creaky realm of the Romanovs, with its corrupt and inefficient bureaucracy. Famine deaths? Jewish grain dealers hoarding all the wheat. Debt? Jewish moneylenders. Disease? Spread by the Jews, of course. Defeats on the battlefield? The Jews were spying for the enemy. Though they often prospered in business, Russia’s Jews faced almost insuperable barriers to obtaining a university education or a government job. Only one of the empire’s five million Jewish citizens, for example, managed to become an army officer. With rare exceptions, Jews were restricted to the Pale of Settlement, a swath of territory spreading mostly across parts of what today is Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. And even there, they were banned from certain districts and cities without special permission. Augustów lay in a region of lakes, rivers, and a long canal. On these waters Rose’s grandfather, known as Berl the Fisherman, plied his trade. She remembered his “thinly-bearded rugged face, with its high cheek-bones, generous mouth, and kindly grey eyes.” He lived near a public well in a hut with a thatched roof, which held the traditional large Russian tiled oven used for both cooking and heating. “Some of my earliest recollections,” Rose wrote, “are of a boat and oars and a wide expanse of shining water.” She recalled her grandfather fishing from the boat with nets, women dressed in soft white muslin laughing as they bathed and washed their sheets in a river, and more women chatting as they rolled loaves of dough at a bakery. In the town’s synagogue, there was “sunlight streaming in through a tall, high window, and a bird flying in the rafters.” When her grandmother died in a typhus epidemic, her body was laid out on the dirt floor of Berl’s hut, under a Persian shawl that had once been a wedding gift. Despite those kindly grey eyes, Berl seems to have been a tyrant to his family of six children. He rudely broke up a romance between his daughter Hindl and a young Pole, forcing her instead to marry a Jewish bootmaker, a widower with a small child. The 17-year-old Hindl resisteddirtying her face and dress when the bootmaker came courting, and fleeing to her father’s hut when it was time to stand under the huppah, the wedding canopy, already surrounded by waiting guests. Berl slapped her face and dragged her to the ceremonyor so Rose heard. It was this loveless union that produced Rose. Before long, the bootmaker departed for America, leaving behind his resentful wife, their new daughter, and the small son from his previous marriage. From New York, he finally agreed to a divorce. Above the bed where Rose’s beloved grandmother died hung the only piece of artwork in the hut, a portrait of Tsar Alexander II. He was the reformer tsar, the emperor renowned for liberating Russia’s serfs, millions of peasants who had been living in a state akin to slavery. Making a few additional cautious moves to modernize his country, he had shown considerably more tolerance for Jews than his predecessors, ending some anti-Semitic measures including the harshest, a decree that sent tens of thousands of Jewish boys away for 25 years of military service. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli called him “the kindliest prince who has ever ruled Russia.” The Pale of Settlement and most other restrictions on Jews, however, remained in place. In 1881, the year Rose turned two, on the very day he put his signature to a new set of reforms, Alexander was being driven along the embankment of a canal in St. Petersburg, the capital, when a revolutionary threw a bomb at him. The tsar was not harmed, but the bomb killed or wounded several Cossack guards and bystanders.
Table of Contents
Prologue: Tumult at Carnegie Hall 1
1 Tsar and Queen 9
2 Magic Land 15
3 City of the World 27
4 Missionary to the Slums 41
5 Cinderella of the Sweatshops 54
6 Distant Thunder 66
7 Island Paradise 80
8 A Tall, Shamblefooted Man 90
9 By Ballot or Bullet 104
10 A Key to the Gates of Heaven 117
11 Not the Rose I Thought She Was 136
12 I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier 151
13 Let the Guilty Be Shot at Once 168
14 All My Life I Have Been Preparing to Meet This 191
15 Waves Against a Cliff 200
16 The Springtime of Revolution? 211
17 No Peaceful Tent in No Man's Land 226
18 Love Is Always Justified 241
Acknowledgments 247
Notes 249
Bibliography 273
Photo Credits 281
About the Author 283
Index 285