In Panait Istrati's 1929 novella, now translated into English, fourteen-year-old Adrien Zograffi begins an apprenticeship in a toolmaking workshop on the docks of the Danube River port in Braila, Romania. Progress, in the form of floating grain elevators, threatens to destroy the livelihoods of a large community of dockworkers.

Genre: novella

Panait Istrati (1884-1935) was a Romanian with little more than a grade-school education who, for some ten years, beginning in the early nineteen-twenties, was among the most popular writers in Europe.

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