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CM . . .
. Volume X Number 2. . . . September 19, 2003
excerpt: "I'm just wondering if you could help me get started. I'm Celia's daughter." She looked up sharply, then looked toward the boss, who was staring at us both. He was holding a book in his hands, pen over it, ready to write. She pressed her lips together and bent back over her machine. I was about to say something nasty when I suddenly remembered something Mama had once told me. She was always ranting and raving about bad working conditions, and I barely listened. But I was sure she'd said something once or twice about the bosses fining the workers for every little thing, even talking. And then I remembered she'd also said that they charge workers for the machines they used if they didn't have their own, the needles, the thread - even the chairs they sat in! What had I gotten myself into? How was I going to do this without help? Rosie Lepidus, an 11-year-old Jewish girl, revels in the joys of childhood: friendship, active, outside games and delicious food. Her life on the East side of New York City in 1910, in a cosmopolitan neighbourhood of pushcart pedlars is exciting and fun. Tall and strong for her age, she competes fiercely at the hiding games of ring-a-levio. Suddenly Rosie's childhood comes to an end as her mother, a union organizer, becomes ill with pneumonia and her father gambles all their savings on a nickelodeon (movie) business. She goes to work illegally in her mother's place at the sewing factory and manages to convince the supervisor that she is 16. Rosie finds herself in the middle of much discontent as the shirtwaist workers, many of them young Jewish women, suffer under the petty, arbitrary rules and receive very low pay in the factories. After the factory across from the one in which Rosie is working collapses, Rosie joins the older girls to go on strike. As the gorillas, thugs employed by the owners to break up the strike, try to get scabs in to work at the factories, Rosie gets caught in the melee and ends up in jail for a few hours until a wealthy benefactor (representing the suffragette movement) pays her bail and fine. Rosie's friend, Maria, has to try to work as a scab because her family needs the money, but Rosie manages to convince Maria's father to let her stay in school. Increasingly caught in a web of lies about where she is going and what she is doing, Rosie has to confront questions about truth, religion and politics. In the end, the strikers at her mother's shop settle with the owner, her mother recovers, and her father's movie business expands to Chicago - Rosie's next adventure. Matas brings alive the rough, teeming life of New York City in 1910. Many Yiddish words are worked effortlessly into the text as Rosie and her friends play a competitive game of hide and seek through the marketplace. The heart stopping fear of illness and the futility of medicine, the tenement life and the religious questioning provide the backdrop to the intolerable factory conditions that set the stage for a strike. Socialism - the support of all working people for each other as a group - was brewing and fermenting at this time, and this novel shows how an ordinary working class family was caught up in the union movement to create better working conditions for all. Rosie is a convincing character who moves from the self-centred, cheery outlook of childhood to the clear eyed, adult understanding of suffering and the necessity of supporting both your family and the wider community. Minor characters, such as Rosie's father and mother, help Rosie clarify her beliefs, while Jenny, a union organizer, and Maria, Rosie's friend, push the plot along. Because Rosie in New York: Gotcha! is told in the first person, the reader sees everything from the point of view of an 11-year-old who, like today's children of that age, is just leaving childhood and beginning to consider the way she will live her adult life. Also, of course, this novel is a page turner as the reader wonders how Rosie will survive the crises that hit her one after the other. There are some very strong scenes: the collapse of the neighbouring factory, the pushing and shoving on the picket lines and the exhilarating game of ring-a-levio. There is a momentum that carries the reader along through the strike that continues until the very end when there is too much "tell" and not enough "show" just to conclude the novel. Even readers of the intended age don't need to have the message pounded in quite so obviously. The theme of the necessity of helping others runs throughout the novel. The pushcart sellers gently tolerate the children; Rosie manages her younger brothers and the cooking; she goes to work as does her friend, Maria, to support the family. The sewing factory workers go on strike for better working conditions for all. Another theme is risk: Rosie's father risks all their savings on the movie business. Rosie risks all in the game of ring-a-levio and later as a picketer. Of course, the theme of risk is underscored by the union movement and its history. This good book of historical fiction will be welcomed by elementary teachers and also by their students who will be caught up in Rosie's life and will incidentally learn much about the early union movement in New York. Recommended. Joan Marshall is the teacher-librarian at Fort Richmond Collegiate in Winnipeg, MB.
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