The Cigar Factory

Two women kept apart by segregation at a Southern cigar factory forge a powerful alliance in the labor rights movement in this historical novel. With evocative dialect and remarkable prose, The Cigar Factory tells the story of two entwined families—the white McGonegals and the African American Ravenels—in the storied port city of Charleston, South Carolina, during the World Wars. Moore’s novel follows the parallel lives of family matriarchs working on segregated floors of the massive Charleston cigar factory, where white and black workers remain divided and misinformed about the duties and treatment received by each other. Cassie McGonegal and her niece Brigid work upstairs in the factory rolling cigars by hand. Meliah Amey Ravenel works in the basement, where she stems the tobacco. While both suffer in the harsh working conditions of the factory and endure the sexual harassment of the foremen, segregation keeps them from recognizing their common plight until the Tobacco Workers Strike of 1945. Through the experience of a brutal picket line, the two women discover how much they stand to gain by joining forces, creating a powerful moment in labor history that gives rise to the Civil Rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” Moore’s historical research includes interviews with family members who worked at the cigar factory, adding nuance and authenticity to her empowering story of struggle, loss, and redemption. Foreword by New York Times best-selling author Pat Conroy Winner of the 2016 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize

In 1932, Isay Rottenberg, a Jewish paper merchant, bought a cigar factory in Germany: Deutsche Zigarren-Werke. When his competitors, supported by Nazi authorities, tried to shut it down, the headstrong entrepreneur refused to give up the fight. Isay Rottenberg was born into a large Jewish family in Russian Poland in 1889 and grew up in Lodz. He left for Berlin at the age of eighteen to escape military service, moving again in 1917 to Amsterdam on the occasion of his marriage. In 1932 he moved to Germany to take over a bankrupt cigar factory. With newfangled American technology, it was the most modern at the time. The energetic and ambitious Rottenberg was certain he could bring it back to life, and with newly hired staff of 670 workers, the cigar factory was soon back in business. Six months later, Hitler came to power and the Nazi government forbade the use of machines in the cigar industry so that traditional hand-rollers could be re-employed. That was when the real struggle began. More than six hundred qualified machine workers and engineers would lose their jobs if the factory had to close down. Supported by the local authorities he managed to keep the factory going, but in 1935 he was imprisoned following accusations of fraud. The factory was expropriated by the Deutsche Bank. When he was released six months later thanks to the efforts of the Dutch consul, he brought a lawsuit of his own. His fight for rehabilitation and restitution of his property would continue until Kristallnacht in 1938. The Cigar Factory of Isay Rottenberg is written by two of Rottenberg’s granddaughters, who knew little of their grandfather’s past growing up in Amsterdam until a call for claims for stolen or confiscated property started them on a journey of discovery. It includes an afterword by Robert Rotenberg, criminal defense lawyer and author of bestselling legal thrillers.

"El Lector will find a broad and appreciative audience and will become a landmark in the study of Cuban and Latin American cultures." —Roberto González Echevarría, Yale University The practice of reading aloud has a long history, And The tradition still survives in Cuba as a hard-won right deeply embedded in cigar factory workers' culture. InEl Lector, Araceli Tinajero deftly traces the evolution of the reader from nineteenth-century Cuba To The present and its eventual dissemination to Tampa, Key West, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. In interviews with present-day and retired readers, she records testimonies that otherwise would have been lost forever, creating a valuable archive for future historians. Through a close examination of journals, newspapers, and personal interviews, Tinajero relates how the reading was organized, how the readers and readings were selected, and how the process affected the relationship between workers and factory owners. Because of the reader, cigar factory workers were far more cultured and in touch with the political currents of the day than other workers. But it was not only the reading material, which provided political and literary information that yielded self-education, that influenced the workers; the act of being read to increased the discipline and timing of the artisan's job.

Thirteen-year-old Bella wants to be a lector just like her grandfather, who sits on a special platform in the cigar factory, reading great novels, the newspaper, and union news to workers as they roll the cigars. Being a lector is an important role in their immigrant community. But the hard times of the Depression mean that Bella must go to work in the factory; her hope of getting the education a lector needs seems impossible. Meanwhile, the factory workers and owners clash. People lose jobs, innocent workers are arrested, and the Ku Klux Klan prowls the area. And then there are those amazing new radios showing up all over town. Could the radio take the place of the lector? Bella must decide her own future and help her people preserve their history. Bella's lively, warmhearted story captures the color and flavor of Ybor City as it explores an intriguing part of our American history.

Winner of the 2003 Pulitizer Prize for Drama . . . there are many kinds of light. The light of fires. The light of stars. The light that reflects off rivers. Light that penetrates through cracks. Then there’s the type of light that reflects off the skin. —Nilo Cruz, Anna in the Tropics This lush romantic drama depicts a family of cigar makers whose loves and lives are played out against the backdrop of America in the midst of the Depression. Set in Ybor City (Tampa) in 1930, Cruz imagines the catalytic effect the arrival of a new "lector" (who reads Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina to the workers as they toil in the cigar factory) has on a Cuban-American family. Cruz celebrates the search for identity in a new land. "The words of Nilo Cruz waft from the stage like a scented breeze. They sparkle and prickle and swirl, enveloping those who listen in both specific place and time . . . and in timeless passions that touch us all. In Anna in the Tropics, the world premiere work he created for Coral Gables’ intimate New Theatre, Cruz claims his place as a storyteller of intricate craftsmanship and poetic power."—Miami Herald Nilo Cruz is a young Cuban-American playwright whose work has been produced widely around the United States including the Public Theater (New York, NY), South Coast Repertory (Costa Mesa, CA), Magic Theatre (San Francisco, CA), Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCarter Theater (Princeton, NJ) and New Theatre (Coral Gables, FL). His other plays include Night Train to Bolina, Two Sisters and a Piano, Hortensia and the Museum of Dreams, among others. Anna in the Tropics also won the Steinberg Award for Best New Play. Mr. Cruz teaches playwriting at Yale University and lives in New York City.

Full information and facts of the decline of cigar production, indicating what steps may be taken for comparative recovery.

This is a poetic visual journey on the birth and rise of Joya de Nicaragua, Nicaragua's first Premium Cigar Maker. This book is intended to shed light on the collective evolution of the Nicaraguan people, of the country, and the company through the lens of one singular product: the most Nicaraguan cigar, a product that has become a means to share that evolution with the world and has transformed the lives of thousands of Nicaraguans and millions of cigar lovers around the world.