THE QUEEN OF NEW YORK

Freed-Thall offers an intricate historical novel that touches on themes of intergenerational political rebellion and personal identity.

In 1958, 17-year-old writer Esther Garry moves into her 86-year-old great-aunt Sera Garry’s Greenwich Village apartment in New York City. A budding journalist, Esther asks Sera to recount her life story—a proposition to which the elder woman agrees, with the condition that Esther will write her own life story, too. Sera’s tale begins in 1881, when she was a young aspiring artist growing up in a Jewish family in Horodno, Russia. She watches as the nation enters a period of political unrest following the czar’s assassination, and Sera’s family is interrogated repeatedly by the Minister of State Security, Gen. Borishenko. In an art class, she meets artist and political rebel Meyer Levinson, and with his support, Sera takes action against Borishenko—an act that haunts her for the rest of her life. Esther’s story begins with her childhood in Strawberry Mansion, Philadelphia, in the 1940s. After her mother and brother are killed in a car accident, her father quickly becomes engaged to Abigail, the clerk who took the family's obituary notices. Tensions rise when Abigail voices her support of racial segregation; Esther, who’s white, has a best friend, Sophie Johnson, who’s Black. Esther later begins to realize that she has romantic feelings for Sophie. Over the course of Freed-Thall’s novel, Sera and Esther’s alternating life stories effectively act as mirrors to each other, demonstrating that while the two women grew up in different times and places, their struggles are similar at heart. The narrative relies heavily on readers already having some familiarity with its settings and events, such as the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Still, the recounting of Esther and Sera’s pasts offers a moving reflection on the difficulties they faced, which were shared by millions of others.

An inspirational and sometimes-heartbreaking tale of two women’s resilience in the face of hardships.