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Triangle

di Katharine Weber

UtentiRecensioniPopolaritàMedia votiCitazioni
3851965,591 (3.53)39
Esther Gottesfeld is the last living survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire and has told her story countless times in the span of her lifetime. Even so, her death at the age of 106 leaves unanswered many questions about what happened that fateful day. How did she manage to survive the fire when at least 146 workers, most of them women, her sister and fiancé among them, burned or jumped to their deaths from the sweatshop inferno? Are the discrepancies in her various accounts over the years just ordinary human fallacy, or is there a hidden story in Esther’s recollections of that terrible day?   Esther’s granddaughter Rebecca Gottesfeld, with her partner George Botkin, an ingenious composer, seek to unravel the facts of the matter while Ruth Zion, a zealous feminist historian of the fire, bores in on them with her own mole-like agenda. A brilliant, haunting novel about one of the most terrible tragedies in early-twentieth-century America,Triangleforces us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them, and how history is forged from unverifiable truths.… (altro)
  1. 10
    Triangle: The Fire that Changed America di David Von Drehle (bnbookgirl)
  2. 00
    The Boston Girl di Anita Diamant (BookshelfMonstrosity)
    BookshelfMonstrosity: In these novels, elderly Jewish women -- one from New York's Lower East Side, the other from Boston's North End -- recount their life stories to interviewers, in the process vividly depicting people and places responsible for shaping their identities.… (altro)
  3. 00
    The Daring Ladies of Lowell di Kate Alcott (vwinsloe)
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The Triangle shirtwaist fire and a musician of genetics. Memory and loss and identity. It's wonderful. ( )
  jennybeast | Apr 14, 2022 |
The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire with its eerie resonances to 9/11 and a recent documentary to mark its anniversary, is well-known in New York. But I had never heard of it until it was mentioned in a course about Yiddish Women writers that I took through the Melbourne Jewish Museum. One of the stories we read referenced Jewish girls migrating from the shtetl to work in the garment factories of New York.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood of Manhattan, New York City, on March 25, 1911, was the deadliest industrial disaster in the history of the city, and one of the deadliest in U.S. history. The fire caused the deaths of 146 garment workers – 123 women and girls and 23 men – who died from the fire, smoke inhalation, or falling or jumping to their deaths. Most of the victims were recent Italian or Jewish immigrant women and girls aged 14 to 23; of the victims whose ages are known, the oldest victim was 43-year-old Providenza Panno, and the youngest were 14-year-olds Kate Leone and Rosaria "Sara" Maltese.

The factory was located on the 8th, 9th, and 10th floors of the Asch Building, at 23–29 Washington Place, near Washington Square Park. The 1901 building still stands today and is now known as the Brown Building. It is part of and owned by New York University.

Because the doors to the stairwells and exits were locked—a common practice at the time to prevent workers from taking unauthorized breaks and to reduce theft—many of the workers could not escape from the burning building and jumped from the high windows. The fire led to legislation requiring improved factory safety standards and helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU), which fought for better working conditions for sweatshop workers.

The building has been designated a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark. (Wikipedia, viewed 31/7/21, lightly edited to remove superfluous links and footnotes)

Although based on this real-life historical event, Triangle is not an historical novel nor (despite its back-cover blurb) a 'mystery', (which might account for some of the disappointment seen in Goodreads reviews). It is an exploration of truth, a satire of dour, misdirected feminism, and an homage to the dead.

The book begins with a poem called 'Shirt', followed by the fictional Esther's account of the fire, 'transcribed' from her recollections for a 1961 commemorative booklet. It is is vivid, and horrifying: the sudden explosion, the rapid spread of fire across the overcrowded room, the smell and the smoke and the girls trapped by their long skirts as they tried to crawl under the tables to the door, which could not be opened. The firemen's ladders were too short to reach the ninth floor, and the net with which they tried to catch the girls who jumped from the windows wasn't strong enough. Esther, who remembered another door that the girls were never supposed to use, escaped upstairs and across a perilous ladder to an adjacent building.
I had to sit down on the curb, I was weak, and there was blood running past me over my shoes, it was water from the fire hoses mixed with blood, it was like a river of blood running past me, it was so terrible, and I just sat there letting it run over my shoes and I couldn't even open my mouth anymore like I forgot how to talk English and I just watched. Everywhere on the street there was money. Coins from everyone's pockets, because it was payday and so in their pockets and their stockings they had their money, and it fell out from the pay packets or wherever they were carrying it, and it was all over the street. They told us before we came here, in America the streets are paved with gold, and this day it was true, but so terrible, to see this money in the gutter. For what did they work so hard, but to have this money? (p.12)

Chapter Two, however, brings the reader to the present day. We read about the eccentric genius George Botkin, who composes music which translates molecular structures such as DNA into melodies. George is the long-term boyfriend of Esther's granddaughter Rebecca and he sits and sings with her as Esther comes to the end of her very long life in a nursing home. Rebecca and George are very fond of each other but what holds them back from marriage is George's genetic heritage of Huntingdon's Disease, the consequences of which they know only too well because of Rebecca's counselling work in clinical genetics. The strength of their relationship, however, is what enables them to deal with Ruth Zion, a feminist academic who is determined to shoehorn Esther's horrific experience into her own agenda.

Chapters Four and Seven are 'transcripts' of Ruth's interviews with Esther, fossicking around the inconsistencies in Esther's story. Esther gets quite testy with Ruth, and from her conversations and behaviour with Rebecca, we can see why. Author of "Gendered Space in the Workplace, Past, Present and Future" and her forthcoming 812-page 'Out of the Frying pan: Women and Children last' Ruth is insensitive, bombastic, unprincipled, long-winded and often laugh-out-loud funny though that is not what she intends.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/08/01/triangle-by-katharine-weber/ ( )
  anzlitlovers | Jul 31, 2021 |
2.5 stars

Esther was working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York in 1911 when it burnt down. Her sister and fiancee both died in the fire, but she managed to get out. She was pregnant at the time. In current day, she is 106-years old. A historian, Ruth, has been interviewing her to find out more about the fire. When Esther passes away, Ruth contacts Esther’s granddaughter, Rebecca, to find out how much she knew.

I didn’t find any of the characters likable. The whole music thing with Rebecca’s husband was boring – way too much detail on that, and it really didn’t seem necessary. The info about the fire itself was interesting, but retold a few times in a few different way (interviews, trial transcripts, etc). The very end confused me a little; I may have it figured out, but I’m not positive. The current-day storyline was definitely not one I was interested in, though of course, the fire itself (even if I didn’t like the way it was told), was the best part of the book. ( )
  LibraryCin | Jan 17, 2020 |
Odd, disjointed and chaotic - not unlike a fire. The exposition on math and music is distracting. Not really recommended. ( )
  BookConcierge | Feb 16, 2016 |
Unfocused and repetitive. The author could not decide what story to tell: George the composer's or Esther the fire survivor's. So she mashed them up into one incohesive mess. And then it seems like she realized that she didn't have enough of Esther's story to fill the book, so she just told it over and over again. Very disappointing, given what could have been a riveting topic for a novel. ( )
  VenusofUrbino | Sep 9, 2013 |
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Poem entitled :Shirt" by Robert Pinsky
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In Memory of my grandmothers: Pauline Gottesfeld Kaufman (1887-1969), who finished buttonholes at the Triangle Waist Company in 1909, and Kay Swift (1897-1993) who made wonderful music.
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Esther Gottesfeld is the last living survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire and has told her story countless times in the span of her lifetime. Even so, her death at the age of 106 leaves unanswered many questions about what happened that fateful day. How did she manage to survive the fire when at least 146 workers, most of them women, her sister and fiancé among them, burned or jumped to their deaths from the sweatshop inferno? Are the discrepancies in her various accounts over the years just ordinary human fallacy, or is there a hidden story in Esther’s recollections of that terrible day?   Esther’s granddaughter Rebecca Gottesfeld, with her partner George Botkin, an ingenious composer, seek to unravel the facts of the matter while Ruth Zion, a zealous feminist historian of the fire, bores in on them with her own mole-like agenda. A brilliant, haunting novel about one of the most terrible tragedies in early-twentieth-century America,Triangleforces us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them, and how history is forged from unverifiable truths.

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Katharine Weber è un Autore di LibraryThing, un autore che cataloga la sua biblioteca personale su LibraryThing.

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