Two Worlds
The old suffused with Jewish ritual, poverty, oppression, and anti-Jewish violence. The new, with poverty and oppression but also new hopes and dreams, new struggles, and the pressures of assimilation and conformity.
This book combines Anna Galstuck's life experiences with stories told to her by her mother, grandmother, and older sisters to create a series of vignettes that stretch from a small city in the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Russian Empire in the early 1860s to New York City in the years before World War I.
It paints a picture of the social conditions of working-class women in Jewish society at the time in eastern Europe and America. She recounts the jobs the women of her family did in the old country, from running a small store to working as cooks, servants, and garment sewers. Anna illustrates illiteracy among Jewish women, which differed based on their social class and changed over the decades she recounts.
A major part of her story is how those conditions, along with the violence of pogroms, compelled her mother, Mirele, to leave her family in 1908. She travelled by herself, an unaccompanied married woman, by horse and cart, train, and steamship to come to New York City. She became a garment sewer and labored to raise the money so her children, mother, and husband could join her. Anna tells how Mirele, inspired to fight against the horrible working conditions she and her coworkers faced, and the tragedy of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, helped lead a strike for union recognition where she worked.
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