?Slippery as an unreliable witness, Triangle maps the gap between memory and history. Out of the most unlikely materials, Katharine Weber has fashioned a generational mystery that plays as both academic farce and real-life tragedy.??Stewart O?Nan, author
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
June 2006
Featuring: Esther Gottesfeld; Rebecca Gottesfeld; George Botkin
256 pages ISBN: 0374281424 Hardcover Add to Wish List
Esther Gottesfeld is the last living survivor of the notorious 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist fire and has told her story countless times in the span of her lifetime. Even so, her death at the age of 106 leaves unanswered many questions about what happened that fateful day. How did she manage to survive the fire when at least 146 workers, most of them women, her sister and fiance among them, burned or jumped to their deaths from the sweatshop inferno? Are the discrepancies in her various accounts over the years just ordinary human fallacy, or is there a hidden story in Esther's recollections of that terrible day?
Esther's granddaughter Rebecca Gottesfeld, with her partner George Botkin, an ingenious composer, seek to unravel the facts of the matter while Ruth Zion, a zealous feminist historian of the fire, bores in on them with her own mole-like agenda. A brilliant, haunting novel about one of the most terrible tragedies in early-twentieth-century America, TRIANGLE forces us to consider how we tell our stories, how we hear them, and how history is forged from unverifiable truths.
Media Buzz
Fresh Air - NPR - December 7, 2006 Weekend Edition Sunday - July 16, 2006 Fresh Air - NPR - June 27, 2006
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