Threads and Flames (42 page)

In the far corner of the dining room, the door to the kitchen passage opened. Glukel stepped through it and held out her hands. By the leaping light of the welcoming flames, with her long hair coming loose and tumbling down, Raisa rushed into Glukel's arms, filling them with roses.

I
first heard about the Triangle fire by chance. While channel-surfing one day, many years ago, I happened to catch a story on a New York City news station that showed a gathering of people marking the anniversary of the tragedy. I was fascinated and deeply affected by the brief account of the fire, then horrified as I watched a fire engine extending its tallest ladder to demonstrate that even with modern equipment, the victims trapped on the upper floors of the Asch Building could not have been reached.

Who knows why certain stories claim us? All I can say is that somehow, after having seen that news item, I felt that I both wanted and
needed
to learn more. I bought Leon Stein's book
The Triangle Fire
and read it. The more I learned, the more I felt that I
had
to write a book of my own. It would not be a history book—as much as I love reading about history, I'm no historian—but a novel whose characters and story would make my readers know and remember the horrors of that day, its aftermath, and the social conditions that let such a devastating event happen.

Why remember? There are always people who are ready to argue that remembering the past is unimportant, irrelevant, over and done with, that the Triangle fire belongs to the last century. There might even be some cold-souled enough to say, “Why care about it? We've got our own troubles. It's over. By now, everyone involved is dead.”

True, in part, but . . . not exactly. It's
not
over; not even though the Triangle fire ignited, burned, and was extinguished on a single spring day a hundred years ago. Everyone involved is not dead. The Asch Building still stands—it is a fireproof structure and survived the blaze, even if the people trapped inside did not. It is now a part of New York University and no longer houses a clothing factory where workers labor under dangerous conditions. However, though a hundred years have passed since the fire, and the Triangle Waist Company is gone, sweatshops are not. They still exist, and not just in third world nations, but in the heart of Manhattan.

While such things exist, the core of the Triangle fire—human life demeaned, exploited, and lost—is still with us.

I wrote
Threads and Flames
because I think we should remember not just the Triangle fire, but what it really meant to the people who were there; the
people
. When you read about it in history books and see how many men and women died, it's only a number. Numbers have no faces, no families, no lives before the fire, no one to mourn them after the last ember has been extinguished. Through Raisa's story—and the stories of Brina, Zusa, Luciana, Gavrel, and all the rest—I want to help my readers remember that more than just a list of numbers vanished that day.

Threads and Flames
is a novel, not a history book. There are moments in the course of recounting Raisa's adventures—such as certain points concerning her experiences coming to America—where the immigration procedures of the time would have shackled the plot. I do not regret the choices I made, since I took only minor liberties with bureaucratic procedures that were not important to the main focus of Raisa's story. I took no such liberties when recounting the events of the Triangle fire and its aftermath (based on the best information I could find).

I wanted to tell a story about an event that is still important to me, in the hope of making it important to you. I hope that I've succeeded.