Rekindled Fires

New York: Henry Holt and Company. Very Good+. 1918. First Edition. Hardcover. (decorated cloth; no dust jacket) [good-looking book with light shelfwear, small light stain on spine, dust-soiling to top edge]. Novel set in a factory town in New Jersey, centering around the Zabransky family. The father, Michael Zabransky, who has come to the U.S. from Bohemia (the western region of today's Czech Republic), is a truck farmer who has established himself as a local political boss. His authoritarian ways bring him up against the German community in his village, and also against his youngest son, the American-born Stanislaus, whose most overt sign of rebellion is to allow himself to be known as "Stanley Zabriskie" in his high school. Despite his father's attempts to involve him in the family business, Stanley is determined to get an education and ends up going to Rutgers University. Commented one contemporary reviewer: "This is not the stereotyped tale of the immigrant home in the factory town; it is the story of the home life and civic life of a Bohemian family in which stirred the same impulses and emotions that characterize the American home." Another critic praised the book for its humor and also for its "complete absence of any attempt to expound or urge political doctrine and the absence of any strokes painting these newcomers to America as oppressed and miserable." The author, whose first novel this was, was just twenty-one years old at the time; he was also a journalist, wrote several more books, and was a credited screenwriter on nine mostly undistinguished Hollywood movies in the late 1930s. Hanna 96. ***This book is among the nearly 150 items offered in ReadInk's new Catalog Number 4, "Booking Passage: Books on the Immigrant Experience." You can access this catalog and its contents in any one of three ways: (1) email us to request a PDF to be emailed to you; (2) view or download the catalog from the link on our website's main page; (3) browse the books individually (including a few that didn't make the cut for the catalog) on our website under these two subject headings: "Immigration: Fiction" and "Immigration: Non-fiction." .