The Free Thinkers: Stories of the New World

Layle Silbert’s stories, like those of Grace Paley or Tillie Olson, trace the life lines of struggles and joys overlooked - familiar lives led in a time now past. In this collection Silbert gives these lost lives a new voice, describing in exacting detail the world of Eastern European Jews newly arrived in turn-of-the-century-America. She chronicles their arrival in the New Worlds of Chicago and New York, follows them as they trade Yiddish and Russian for English, find work in factories and Jewish newspapers, attend meetings and struggle toward the promise of freedom.