$17.95 / Perfectbound
ISBN: 9781608440245
332 pages
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On a stifling August night in 1906, Karl Bauer fired two shots at his second wife. His sixteen-year old daughter, Minna struggled to wrest the revolver from his hands and the shots went wild. Her father, believing that he had murdered, turned the gun on himself. His wife, the truly wicked step-mother, survived. He died. This true event serves as the fulcrum for the story.  Minna at ninety reveals for the first time this shameful secret to her own daughter, laying bare the mysterious cumulative pent-up anger between them.

Her father’s struggles and eventual defeat provide the context for Minna’s story. Later in life, Minna and her daughter Julie, having exposed the burden of repressed grief and angst, strive to find honesty in their relationship.

“In Our Quiet Village” is historical fiction, inspired by these real events. The setting is Herkimer, a quiet village in New York’s Mohawk Valley, during the burgeoning late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  The nearby infamous Gillette murder case (later the subject of Dreiser’s ‘An American Tragedy’), the rise of the labor movement, the battle for women’s rights and  political figures of the time, provide a rich back drop for the personal dramas. Newspaper accounts of the tragedy and family photographs bring life to their story.

Characters from three generations populate the story. Karl, idealistic but uneducated, arrives in this country from Germany at eighteen, penniless and hopeful. He finds work as a teamster and joins the secret labor union, the Knights of Labor. After years of unrewarded toil and disappointments and the death of his beloved wife, he becomes increasingly disillusioned. In hopes of creating a home for his children, he marries his housekeeper who is revealed to be cruel and mentally unstable. Life becomes a hell. The tragedy ensues. The children, left alone with their mad stepmother, endure loneliness and deprivation.

In her attempt to understand the fractured bond between herself and her mother, Julie writes and publishes her mother’s story. Julie recognizes the terrible silence which surrounded such an event in that day. The imprint of loss becomes visible in the unfolding of Minna’s life. Grief and anger were never far below the surface.

It is only after her mother’s death, when Julie revisits the quiet village, scene of her mother’s sad early life  that  she is at last able to release judgment and to experience peace.

The novel is concerned with the power of familial secrets but also with the complexities and tenaciousness of the human spirit and the redemptive power of love.