Needle and Flame

She crossed an ocean on a dead girl's name. She had no idea she'd stay to change the world.

Spring, 1909. Seventeen-year-old Raizel Lindner steps off the boat at the Battery carrying everything the pogroms left her: her murdered sister's papers, her mother's good dressmaking shears, and a lie she will wear like a second skin. On the books of the United States she is Bella now, the daughter who lived. Raizel — the wrong sister, the one the family could only spare — folds herself small and goes quiet, the way she learned to go quiet in a root cellar with her hand pressed over her own mouth.

The Lower East Side is a roar of pushcarts and airshafts, of nine floors of strangers breathing the same stale air. Raizel's aunt has already arranged her life: clean sitting work at the Pearl Shirtwaist Company, a widowed butcher for a husband, and above all, silence. A girl with no real name of her own does not get to be particular. She gets to be safe.

But the ninth floor teaches other lessons. The foreman fines the girls for breathing and bolts the doors against theft. A fierce Italian finisher named Caterina teaches her that bread is sweeter when it's shared. A union man teaches her one dangerous word — enough. And when twenty thousand women walk off the job into the cruelest winter in memory, Raizel discovers what ordinary hands can build together, and how much a borrowed name can cost when everyone is finally looking.

Told in prose as rich and precise as her mother's shears, Needle and Flame is a sweeping, intimate portrait of the immigrant women who stitched the modern world and refused to burn quietly for it. It is a story of hunger and courage, of chosen sisters and impossible choices, of the fire that is coming — and the girl who will have to decide, at last, whose name she means to answer to.

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