August 1924 – January 1937 Chapter Two Blues Diva Crazy for Tin Pan Alley songs, and Broadway musicals, blues were Bayla’s favorite. Maybe their wail and whine penetrated flimsy walls in their tenement building on East 89th Street. Or during an Augusts' stifling heat the sounds oozed out of a radio from an open window as she sat on the front stoop. Blues came to her gentle and easy with a …
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Between blues and bloodlines, she found her own song.
From impoverished Eastern Europe immigrants in the early 1900s to Depression-era New York City and 1970s Broadway stardom, three generations of mothers and daughters dare to achieve the lives they long for. Bayla Szabo yearns to be a blues singer like her heroine, Bessie Smith. She sews in a sweatshop, but at night, her heartaches and longings run rampant as she performs for rowdy male audiences in a former speakeasy. Bayla’s daughter, Leena, facing unconventional love, defaults to married life, but waits to live true to herself. Leena’s precocious daughter, Jackie, inherits her grandmother Bayla’s talent and chases Broadway dreams. The bonds that divide and ultimately unite these mothers and daughters are woven into a legacy of ambition, courage, and resilience.
Amid war, racial prejudice, the women’s movement, and sexual liberation, this is a tender, unflinching, and profoundly human story about the cost of dreams and the artfulness required to survive, love, and endure.
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Amid war, racial prejudice, the women’s movement, and sexual liberation, this is a tender, unflinching, and profoundly human story about the cost of dreams and the artfulness required to survive, love, and endure.
Order from Open Books: Paperback | E-Book
CLICK HERE to read a sneak-peek.
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