Barren Island
Carol Zoref
Mar 2018 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Elizabeth Wiley
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Audiobook
13 hr 18 min
Unabridged
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Eligible
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About this audiobook
How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory island in New York's Jamaica Bay, where the city's dead horses and other large animals were rendered into glue and fertilizer from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s. The island itself is as central to the story as the members of the Jewish, Greek, Italian, Irish, and African-American factory families that inhabit it, including those who live their entire lives steeped in the smell of burning animal flesh.
The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930s affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World's Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars.
The story begins with the arrival of the Eisenstein family, immigrants from Eastern Europe, and explores how the political and social upheavals of the 1930s affect them and their neighbors in the years between the stock market crash of October 1929 and the start of World War II ten years later. Labor strife, union riots, the New Deal, the World's Fair, and the struggle to save European Jews from the growing threat of Nazi terror inform this novel as much as the explosion of civil and social liberties between the two World Wars.
How does one remember a world that literally no longer exists? How do the moral imperatives to do so correspond to the personal needs that make it possible? Told from the point-of-view of Marta Eisenstein Lane on the occasion of her eightieth birthday, Barren Island is the story of a factory isla...
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About the author
Carol Zoref is a fiction writer and essayist. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She lives in New York City.
AudioFile Earphones Award winner Elizabeth Wiley is a seasoned actor, dialect coach, theater professor, and dedicated narrator. She brings over twenty-five years of award-winning acting and voice experience to the studio to create memorable, compelling storytelling.
Carol Zoref is a fiction writer and essayist. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She lives in New York City.
AudioFile Earphones Award winner Elizabeth Wiley is a seasoned actor, dialect coach, theater professor, and dedicated narrator. She brings over twenty-five year...
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