Make Me the Sky: A Novel by Joan Wexler

“This remarkable novel takes us through a girl’s struggles with adversity from midteen age on an early twentieth century shtetl to womanhood through encounters with abusive uncles, consignment to a Budapest brothel and escape to Manhattan’s teaming poverty stricken lower east side, all rendered with rich attentiveness to family and peer relations and exquisite, historically accurate descriptions of her surrounds. A diary takes the place of an ailing twin as confidante, letters as family interactions. Development has never been more compellingly described than in this gracefully handled account; and one will find no better source for acquainting readers both male and female with the impact and significance of family and friends in the formation of a woman. Nor is there a better account of artistry’s taking root as the protagonist moves from an unskilled but literate person through the needle trades to becoming a clothing designer. Wexler notes that this novel sprang from first having tried to recreate pasts of older characters in her recent memoir A Pot from Shards and then deciding instead to let herself freely imagine other pasts and other characters – just as her protagonist moves from sewing what is presented to her to designing on her own.”

—DAVID CARLSON, MD, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine; Training and Supervising Analyst emeritus, Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.

Joan Wexler has created a vivid portrait of a sixteen-year- ld Eastern European girl, who flees to New York’s Lower East Side before

World War I. Fannie’s path is the journey of those millions who went down into “steerage” and after one trial after another—made safe landings, new lives. Although Fannie’s story is told in diary and letters—the most personal, remarkably, becomes universal.”
—LINDA GRAVENSON is a writer and developmental editor. She is coeditor of Simon & Shuster’s In the Fullness of Time: 32 Women on Life after 50. (lindagravenson.com) 

“Make Me the Sky is a beautifully written, moving, and compelling new novel about nine years in the life of a midadolescent girl, Fannie, who leaves her family in Galicia four years before the onset of World War I, and who immigrates alone to the Lower East Side of New York City. Expected and unexpected hardships and suffering, poverty, the need to make potentially lifealtering decisions quickly, frequent losses of loved ones but also the realization that one may find love again, profound sadness and hope all characterize Fannie’s journey and her transition into young adulthood. Joan Wexler paints an historically accurate and riveting picture of the lives of many poor young female Jewish immigrants who left Eastern Europe alone during the few years before and after World War I, and who came to the United States. As Fannie understands the nature of personal freedom and its meaning to her, she can love again. In the end love and family triumph in a manner that underscores human decency, resilience, and our adaptive capacities. It is a terrific book.”

—STANLEY POSSICK, MD, Psychiatrist & Psychoanalyst, Yale Medical School