Bread upon the Waters.
Pesotta’s First Book, Inscribed
Pesotta, Rose. Bread Upon the Waters. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1945.
8vo.; few pages occasionally darkened, most pages bright; red cloth covered boards, stamped in black; covers bright; spine lightly faded; tips a touch bumped; front hinge tender; all in all, a quite good copy.
First edition of Pesotta’s first book, a 400+-page text in which she describes in detail her “years afield as a labor organizer” (p. v); Pesotta’s only other book, Days of Our Lives, did not appear until 13 years later. A presentation copy, inscribed: To Ida Sashkin with kindest regard Rose Pesotta.
Rose Pesotta (1896-1965) came to the U.S. in her teens from the Jewish Pale of Settlement in the Ukraine. Upon arrival in New York she began working as a shirtwaist maker, one of the few occupations open to young immigrant women. Pesotta joined the legendary International Ladies Garment Workers Union just after their “Great Uprising” of 1909, the mass strike which unionized more than 30,000 women in New York City alone. Pesotta, a significant figure in the history of labor activism, drew her energies from her experience as a garment worker. She dedicated her life to the struggle to improve conditions for working women, and spent the better part of three decades lobbying and traveling nationwide as a union organizer. She was eventually elected National Vice President of ILGWU, one of the first women to hold such a post. Under Pesotta’s leadership the ILGWU membership ranks increased by 300 %(!); Pesotta was also the chief engineer of a series of extremely effective strikes in the mid-1930s which resulted in reduced working hours and increased wages (often by as much as 50%).
In Bread Upon the Waters Pesotta spins a fascinating narrative of her trials and tribulations, her set-backs and her successes, as the nation’s foremost Jewish female union organizer. When the book starts Roosevelt had just been inaugurated and the New Deal just put in place; Pesotta was in Los Angeles, having just been fired for pro-union activity. At the book’s close, Pesotta, then in Manhattan, expressed hope for the Allied cause and for all those fighting abroad, including her two brothers. Bread Upon the Waters is dedicated to Pesotta’s parents and “to the pioneer builders of our union, whose vision and idealism inspired me; to the victims of the Triangle fire, whose martyrdom aroused me; to the shirtwaist makers and dressmakers, those unselfish devotion lighted my path; and to those organized working men and women in America who battle for a place in the sun for all their kind...” Bread Upon the Waters is a scarce and moving account of the early days of labor activism, and an important document of the lives of women workers in the early part of this century.
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