Читать книгу The Featherbed - Джон Миллер - Страница 5

My uncle, Bob Kellermann, surely could not have predicted five years ago that a simple birthday gift would lead to all of this. The gift was a book about Jewish immigrants in North America, and reading it sparked my imagination. David Mayerovitch, holding up Shakespeare and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as examples, taught me the importance of building a story good enough to tell. My deepest gratitude goes to novelist Cary Fagan, both for his thoughtful editing and review of early drafts and for helping me to find Rebecca’s voice. Zoe Kende, a talented midwife and good friend, educated me about the wonders, risks, and logistics of pregnancy and childbirth.

Throughout my life, I have been lucky that so many sensitive, powerful, and intelligent women have taken me into their confidence. In writing in the female voice, I hope that I have done them justice. Some of these women read my work critically and offered the kindest encouragement: Linda Bradbeer, Jeanette Browne, Kathryn Drummond, June Galbraith, Judy Godfrey, Sophia Ikura-MacMillan, Janet Killoran, Edda Kirleis, Myra Lefkowitz, Heidi Maroney, Vanessa Russell, Debra Shime, Pam Shime, Carol Toller, Hilary Trapp, Ellen Waxman, Dubravka Zarkov, and especially my mother, Ruth Miller.

Thanks also go to those who, in spite of their Y-chromosomes, offered similar advice and support: my father, Eric, my brothers Daniel and Tony, and friends David Adkin, Adam Arshinoff, Tim Clarkin, Scott Henderson, Onindo Khan, Bryan Patchett and Wolfram Walbrach.

The curators and staff of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York are to be commended for their meticulously reconstructed apartments, which helped me to imagine the possibilities and limitations of tenement life. For bibliographical research, I consulted numerous sources, of which the most influential were: Abraham Cahan’s Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom; Kathy Friedman-Kasaba’s Memories of Migration; Susan Glenn’s Daughters of the Shtetl; Emma Goldman’s Living My Life; Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers; C.W. Hunt’s Booze, Boats and Billions: Smuggling Liquid Gold; A Bintel Brief, edited by Isaac Metzker; Kathy Preiss’s Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New York; Jacob A. Riis’s How The Other Half Lives; Barbara A. Schreier’s Becoming American Women; Kate Simon’s Bronx Primitive; Sydney Stahl Weinberg’s The World of Our Mothers; Lillian Wald’s House on Henry Street; and the novels of Anzia Yezierska.

I am grateful to Dundurn for taking a chance on an unknown author, in particular to my editor, Barry Jowett, for his enthusiasm and his careful stewardship of my final draft, and to Andrea Pruss, for her meticulous copy-editing.

Finally, I must thank novelists Chaim Potok, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Ann-Marie MacDonald, whose exquisite prose and beautifully crafted stories inspired me to become a writer.