When the author came to Detroit, it was still a little bit of a boomtown. Henry Ford started it over on Piquette Street, 1904-1910. Now, large parts of the city have gone over to urban farming, as symbolized by the Goose Girl and her crowd. In this volume theres folklore as in Granny, fairy tale and myth, even one going back to the Roman Empire and Christianity. There are war poems and a long meditation on technology in the form of the railroads and on creativity. The book is in free verse form.
Part history, part memoir, The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers: A Family Memoir recounts a narrative of lives lived in dramatically changing times. In the background loom author Deborah Hellers distant forebears: a maternal great-great-grandmother, the first Jewish woman in her nineteenth-century German village to refuse to shave her head and wear a wig (sheitel) after marriage, who earned her passage to America by driving geese to market; and a seventeenth-century Talmudic scholar, successively chief rabbi of Vienna, Prague, and Cracow, who wrote an important commentary on the Mishnah and was arrested and imprisoned by the imperial authorities. Echoes of the rebellious Goose Girl and the scholarly rabbi reverberate in the lives of Hellers parents, born at the beginning of the twentieth centuryher mother in Brooklyn, her father in a Russian shtetl. Emerging from very different worlds, they came together as New York schoolteachers, sharing the radical hopes and fears of a generation marked by strong political passions. Drawing on written and oral history, legal records, and her own memories, Heller follows her parents from their early years through the McCarthy years and beyond. Focusing both on individuals and on the worlds in which they lived, The Goose Girl, the Rabbi, and the New York Teachers illuminates significant moments in Jewish and American history.
Feed the Goose tells the colorful, fascinating story of an immigrant couple, Ludwig and Louisa Fischer, who leave Germany in the mid-1800s to find life in a free and peaceful country. As the Fischers begin their new life in Buffalo, New York, readers are soon drawn into the years leading up to World War II, including the devastating era of the Great Depression. Along the way love brings one of the Fischer children to Brookhaven, Mississippi where new adventures await. In a clear voice that issues vividly detailed descriptions of the times, author Kitzy Gayle writes with sensitivity and insight about the strong bonds of love and affection that sustained immigrant families as they became acclimated to their new and sometimes frightening cultural surroundings.
