Two young immigrant women. One historic strike. And the fire that changed America.
In 1909, shy sixteen-year-old Rosie Lehrer is sent to New York City to earn money for her family’s emigration from Russia. She will, but she also longs to make her mark on the world before her parents arrive and marry her to a suitable Jewish man. Could she somehow become one of the passionate and articulate “fiery girls” of her garment workers’ union?
Maria Cirrito, spoiled and confident at sixteen, lands at Ellis Island a few weeks later. She’s supposed to spend four years earning American wages then return home to Italy with her new-found wealth to make her family’s lives better. But the boy she loves has promised, with only a little coaxing, to follow her to America and marry her. So she plans to stay forever. With him.
Rosie and Maria meet and become friends during the “Uprising of the 20,000” garment workers’ strike, and they’re working together at the Triangle Waist Company on March 25, 1911 when a discarded cigarette sets the factory ablaze. 146 people die that day, and even those who survive will be changed forever.
Carefully researched and full of historic detail, “Fiery Girls” is a novel of hope: for a better life, for turning tragedy into progress, and for becoming who you’re meant to be.
Seamstresses Rosie, a Jewish girl from Russia, and Maria, a Catholic girl from Italy, are sent to New York to financially assist their families. Their individual stories run parallel until eventually the two girls meet. They become best friends, united by their concern about the working conditions of female workers in the garment industry. Excitable Maria becomes a powerful speaker for the unions; Rosie wishes to be like her friend but speaking in public terrifies her. Instead, she works tirelessly in quiet ways to help fellow immigrants and fellow workers.
Very cleverly, we follow the development of the girls’ identities in this new land. How they coped with the freedoms they never would have known in their home countries. How they managed their money. How they found work and friends. The entertainments they enjoyed. All is very skilfully portrayed through the eyes of the girls and their friends.
The author paints a vivid picture of the unsafe and abusive conditions suffered by workers in pre–union days, told through the eyes and experiences of the two young women. The description of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company Fire (when 146 people died) is terrifying and deeply moving. The historical details never intrude but a skilfully woven into the story, and the fictional central characters are well-developed and believable.
It’s a powerful story and reminds us not to take for granted the freedoms and safety standards we now expect as of right. Very well researched and a gripping page-turner. I highly recommend it.
In 1909, two very different young women arrive at the immigration portal of Ellis Island: Rosie Lehrer, tasked with the responsibility of earning enough money to help her Jewish family leave Czarist Russia, and Maria Cirrito, who along with her brother is supposed to spend four years in America before returning to Italy with cash to fund her parents’ dream of opening a bigger restaurant. Shy and lacking in confidence, Rosie nonetheless finds her sudden independence enthralling, while the vivacious Maria longs for the day when the young man she loves will keep his promise to follow her to America. Skilled at sewing, the newcomers soon find their way to New York’s garment factories, where each is drawn into the labor movement and, fatefully, to employment at the Triangle Waist Company.
Narrated in the first-person present by Rosie and Maria, Fiery Girls vividly depicts, as one might expect, the harsh conditions faced by easily exploited workers when labor laws were still in their infancy and the ruthlessness of the men who ran the factories that churned out ready-to-wear garments. Yet there’s another side to the novel as well: the exhilaration of being young with a little money to spend on oneself, the fun of an afternoon at the moving pictures or at Coney Island, the satisfaction of picking up American slang. While there’s plenty of grimness here, there’s also a lot of grit in the shape of its two memorable heroines, who are worthy of that description in all senses of the word.
