THREADBARE

A young girl gets married in an attempt to secure her freedom from domestic drudgery in Rubin’s prequel to In the Hands of Women (2023), set in the late 19th century.

In 1879, Tillie Isaacson is growing up on her father’s chicken farm in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood; she’s the daughter of Sam and Sarah Isaacson, Jewish people who emigrated from antisemitic Germany. Tillie is brimming with intellectual curiosity and academic ambition, and her mother encourages her to pursue lofty aspirations. But her life changes drastically when Sarah suddenly dies and Sam marries Rebecca,who wants Tillie to abandon her dreams of attending high school to help her run the household. Also, as farmland dwindles in Manhattan, Sam moves the family to Sullivan County, north of the city—the beginning of the end of their way of life, which author Rubin elegiacally portrays. As Sam melancholically puts it, “Our farming world’s shrinking fast.” Tillie figures she can stay in Manhattan and attend school if she finds a husband, so she marries Abe Levine, an enterprising businessman who sells buttons to dressmakers. Her strategy backfires, however, since her home is prohibitively far from the high school, and the arrival of children brings precisely the domestic burdens she wanted to avoid. She comes to find the city a “vile place,” rife with squalor and filled with people who feel “faceless, empty of hope, full of desperation.” Over the course of this novel, Rubin thoughtfully chronicles Tillie’s indefatigable efforts to make her life livable, first by becoming a teacher of English, and then a devoted mother and successful businesswoman. The best aspect of this novel is the tableau it paints of New York City at the turn of the century: infinitely expanding and modernizing, while also overwhelmed by bigotry and misogyny. Readers will find the author’s prose to be unembellished and largely bland. Nonetheless, the plot is dramatically powerful, and Tillie is a memorably dauntless protagonist.

A striking novel of a changing New York City.