Misfits

Often undervalued by her male contemporaries in the early twentieth-century Yiddish press, Rachel Luria was a short fiction writer focused on telling perceptive, albeit often brief, stories of the ordinary New York men and women who sparked her imagination. An immigrant from Lithuania, Luria’s writing gravitated toward those she saw most often: factory workers and married couples, writers and artists, rebels and dreamers, finding insight in the shared struggles of the everyday.

Misfits is a collection of lively, tragic, and humorous stories depicting the conditions, aspirations, and challenges faced by members of the left-wing, often radical, Jewish working classes in clear-eyed prose. The engaging volume also includes five stories told in the oral tradition and set in a fantastical nineteenth-century Lithuania that existed only in Luria’s memories and imagination. Now, one hundred years later, audiences can appreciate her ironic perspective on relationships and her sharp focus on the political, economic, and social realities that affected the early twentieth-century working class.