As you sew masks in the battle against COVID-19, listen to the story of a woman whose wartime needlework was literally magical.
Author Deborah Gaal, a former St. Louisan, narrates the newly released audiobook of The Dream Stitcher, a historical novel that’s also a thriller. The novel has garnered prestigious awards: Finalist 2018 National Jewish Book Awards, the BlueInk Review Best Books of 2019, and the 2019 winner of the Indie Reader Discovery Award for Literary Fiction.
Stay up-to-date with the local arts scene
Subscribe to the weekly St. Louis Arts+Culture newsletter to discover must-attend art exhibits, performances, festivals, and more.
“Throughout history, women have sewn goods for the war front,” said Gaal in a telephone interview from her home in Newport Beach, California. “Many women tell me they are sewing masks while listening to The Dream Stitcher.“
Gaal’s book weaves together the stories of two women trying to survive cataclysmic events 65 years apart. Maude fears she’ll lose her beloved home during the Great Recession of 2008. She’s forced to take in her mother, who brings along a copy of the Bayeux Tapestry. The needlepoint is more than it appears. Within the stitches is a clue to a family secret. It concerns a Jewish freedom fighter in WWII Poland named Goldye who is passing as Aryan.
Goldye is known as The Dream Stitcher among the Christian brides in Warsaw. With her magical needle, she embroiders symbols on their wedding gowns that make their dreams come true. She takes their money and uses it to buy guns to launch the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. No one suspects Goldye is Jewish.
Certainly not the Nazis who take her to France where the Bayeux Tapestry is stored. They want her to interpret the symbolism of the medieval artwork celebrating the Norman Conquest.
Gaal had no experience in embroidery nor needlepoint. The former chair of the board of the Repertory Theatre and a drama major at Washington University in St. Louis, she does have a sense of theater that heightens The Dream Stitcher and her mother, Sara Goldstein, who did copy a portion of the Bayeux Tapestry. When she sold the family home, she sent it to her daughter. “My husband, Chris, hadn’t realized he married ‘The Tapestry Heiress,’ but we enjoyed living with my mother’s artwork. It inspired me to write The Dream Stitcher.”
The Dream Stitcher is now available as an audiobook, as well as a paperback.
