Chapter Two Blues Diva Bayla could never say when she first heard the blues. Perhaps their wail and words penetrated thin apartment walls in her tenement building overrun with German and Hungarian immigrants. Or maybe during Augusts' stifling heat, the deep soulful sounds of the blues oozed from a radio or a record player out an opened window. Blues came to her gentle and easy with a certainty in their lingering, and a mounting up that spoke to her the more …
Novel
The Artfulness of Women – a forthcoming novel by Naomi Weiss
~ Synopsis ~ Determined to escape New York City tenement life, Bayla Szabo born of Jewish Hungarian immigrants yearns to be a blues singer like her heroines, Bessie Smith and Mar Rainey Abandoned by her father, she supports herself and her mother by sewing in a factory during the Depression, but at night, sexy and seductive, she performs to rowdy male audiences in a former speakeasy on Manhattan's West Side. While her mother's Old Country superstitions threaten her resolve, Bayla marries into a …