cover image Bobe Mayse: A Tale of Washington Square

Bobe Mayse: A Tale of Washington Square

Nancy Bogen. Twickenham Press, $21.95 (321pp) ISBN 978-0-936726-03-8

This uninspired historical novel attempts to recreate the colorful atmosphere of Greenwich Village in the early 1900s by following three characters; it culminates with the infamous fire at the Triangle shirtwaist factory. Martha, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, drops out of secretarial school and goes to work at the factory because she wants to ``return to our basic common human denominator.'' She happily participates in union organization and goes on strike. Jerrold is a farm boy, descended from Dutch settlers, who migrates to New York City and finds work as a floater in the factory. Hippolyte Havel is a historical figure, Emma Goldman's one-time lover and owner of a restaurant off Washington Square where radicals gather. Despite a comfortable narrative style and copious background information, the characters are one-dimensional. In a prologue that has more verve than the body of the novel, Bogen's ( Klytaimnestra Who Stayed at Home ) narrator explains how she came to tell these three stories, at the same time describing the class conflict between her mother, a former factory worker, and her aunt, who married a furrier and moved out to upscale Forest Hills. (Oct.)