“If being a vamp meant that men like those at Paddy’s would snort and leer at me, I was no longer sure I wanted to emulate Theda Bara” (On the Shore). In this WWI coming-of-age novel, a young girl in a Lower East Side tenement in 1917 looks with distaste at the drunks stumbling out of a nearby saloon. Three years later, from 1920 to 1933, prohibition would be the law of the land in the U.S. But in Russia, the government sale of vodka had been banned in 1914. Ten years earlier, the Japanese had easily overcome the Russians in the Russo-Japanese War because the Tsar’s troops were too inebriated to fight. So, although a third of the government’s revenues came from the sale of vodka, Tsar Nicholas II banned it when the country entered WWI. Anger over prohibition from peasants, workers, and the military was a contributing factor in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, which brought down the Tsar’s empire. Read more about On the Shore, a touching immigrant tale that spans time, place, and culture in NOVELS.
