When orphaned Dave is sent to the Hebrew Home for Boys where he is treated cruelly, he sneaks out at night and is welcomed into the music- and culture-filled world of the Harlem Renaissance.

"In Ashkenazi Jewish folklore, a golem is a humanoid being created out of mud or clay and animated through secret prayers. Its sole purpose is to defend the Jewish people against the immediate threat of violence. It is always a rabbi who makes a golem, and always in a time of crisis. But Len Bronstein is no rabbi--he's a Brooklyn art teacher who steals a large quantity of clay from his school, gets extremely stoned, and manages to bring his creation...

“A grand, sweeping panorama . . . richly written, finely detailed . . . vivid and memorable.”—Daily News (New York)
Yearning for a better life, Anna Friedman fled Poland for New York at the turn of the century. Finding work as a maid for the Werner family, Anna discovers an elegance beyond her dreams—and the passion of Paul Werner, a man beyond her reach, even when she is in his arms. But it is Joseph Friedman...

When Hadassah Morfawitz flees Nazi Germany with her siblings and arrives in New York, she is determined to turn the city into her own Mount Olympus at any cost. In choosing orphaned concentration camp survivor Zev Kretinberg as her husband and accomplice ensuring his loyalty with the promise of riches and the burial of a dark past she begins a ruthless journey toward the upper echelons of Park Avenue synagogue society. Their combined ambition knows...

The story of four generations of Jewish women narrated by those who survived persecution and--from the grave--by those who did not. The characters include a woman who sleeps with a Cossack to allow her brother to emigrate to America.

Panoramic in scope, Away is the epic and intimate story of young Lillian Leyb, a dangerous innocent, an accidental heroine. When her family is destroyed in a Russian pogrom, Lillian comes to America alone, determined to make her way in a new land. When word comes that her daughter, Sophie, might still be alive, Lillian embarks on an odyssey that takes her from the world of the Yiddish theater on New York’s Lower East Side, to Seattle’s...

Twelve-year-old Zippy, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, keeps a diary account of the first eighteen months of her family's life on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1903-1904.