TRAIN FROM THOMPSONVILLE

A slice-of-life novel focuses on an upstate New York factory town during the 1940s.

Readers meet Joanna Ludak in autumn 1940 as she sits in the basement fifth grade classroom of St. Stephen’s, known colloquially as the “Polish School.” Sister Mary Cantabilia, a new teacher at St. Stephen’s, is ruling the class with an iron fist. Soon enough, she turns her wrath on the wistfully imaginative Joanna for an undecipherable transgression. In these first few pages, through Joanna’s musings, readers begin to see the first hint of her still-silent rebellion against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Over the next few years, she increasingly longs for a life more exciting than what is available in Thompsonville, a typical New York company town. The Thompson Shoe Company’s Eastern European community of immigrants and their first-generation descendants makes up much of the business’s blue-collar workforce. Joanna’s father, Joe, spends his life working for Thompson. He; his wife, Bertha; and Joanna live in the first-floor flat of Bertha’s mother’s house. Joanna’s grandmother Babcia resides in the second-floor flat with her daughter Albina and Albina’s husband. Joanna’s great-aunt Ciotka lives in the attic apartment. Moses’ narrative meanders through the ’40s, during and after World War II, painting a vivid portrait of Thompsonville’s Russian and Polish immigrant population, including the minutiae of family life, religious rituals, traditional foods, and daily hardships and frustrations. The melancholy novel focuses on its captivating characters rather than significant dramatic action. Joe, a good man, is perpetually frozen in place at the shoe factory, emotionally hindered by his difficult childhood in Pennsylvania and his resentment over the dominance of Bertha’s family. Meanwhile, the more proactive Bertha scores a position as an inspector in the newly opened Rand propeller factory, finally escaping the dead-end Thompson work. But Joanna is the central protagonist, and her initially constrained world widens considerably when she attends the town’s best junior high school, filled with students from Thompsonville’s wealthy districts. Here, she begins to find her voice. The author’s prose is graceful and elaborate, albeit hampered by the narrative’s languid pace, which requires considerable patience.

A historically intriguing and evocative, if slow-moving, family tale.