THREADBARE

Threadbare recounts the story of Tillie, an innocent but tenacious young girl who chooses to marry Abe, a lonely widower, rather than follow her farming community north as urban development transforms rural Harlem. Convinced Abe will help her attend high school on the Lower East Side, Tillie faces a rude awakening amidst the filth and disease of the tenements. Through the following decades, she turns her energy and intelligence to partnering with Abe as he builds a thriving button business while she and her neighbor Sadie launch a unique garment company. Pushing back against anti-Semitic Victorian values dominating the time, Tillie acquires wealth only to have her life upended by a devastating, unforeseen challenge.

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"Rubin’s novel, Threadbare, is a classic, delicious immigrant story with a twist. Set in 19th century New York City— not the 20th— it’s loaded with history, and its protagonist, Tillie, is a headstrong, visionary teenage girl. Although Tillie becomes a woman far too fast, her indomitable spirit prevails. Her compelling story is one of resilience in the face of discrimination, economic hard times, and epidemics— and it resonates for the 21st century."

~ Susan Jane Gilman, bestselling author of The Ice Cream Queen of Orchard Street

In Threadbare, Rubin weaves a vivid tapestry of hope, heartbreak, and resilience amid breath-stopping challenges, opening a window to a transformative time in women’s history.

• Audrey Blake, USA bestselling author, The Girl in his Shadow, The Surgeon’s Daughter.

Jane Rubin’s Threadbare harkens back 150 years stylistically and thematically to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, echoing exquisitely. Universal matters such as the power of family ties, the conflict women face between marital and childrearing responsibilities versus vocational ambition, sisterhood, and emotional resonance, are richly enhanced by compelling narrative layers involving the fin de siècle German Jewish immigrant experience, NYC farming and tenement life, the development of the garment industry, access to healthcare and the agony of loss from epidemic and cancer, and women’s reproductive rights. Rubin’s loom weaves a plush pile, in fact—not threadbare—and is as rich and inviting to the touch as a tapestry of classical antiquity from which one loathes to part.

• Peter Bolo, MD; Chair Psychiatry, Overlook Medical Center, Summit, NJ

Jane Loeb Rubin wins us over again in Threadbare, the captivating prequel to her earlier novel, In the Hands of Women. Readers follow resilient Tillie Isaacson Levine from her adolescence on a farm in 1879, through her marriage and move to a Manhattan tenement, and finally to her work in the city’s garment business in the 1890s. Against all odds, given biases against women and Jews, she starts a business while raising a family. Readers will race through Threadbare, rooting for Tillie in every chapter.

• Marlie Parker Wasserman, author of Inferno on Fifth