Traces the author's upbringing in the Satmar Hasidic community in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York, describing the strict rules that governed her life, her arranged marriage at the age of seventeen, and the birth of her son, which led to her plan to leave and forge her own path in life.

Mort Zachter's childhood revolved around a small shop on Manhattan's Lower East Side known in the neighborhood as "the day-old bread store." It was a bakery where nothing was baked, owned by his two eccentric uncles who referred to their goods as "the merchandise." Zachter grew up sleeping in the dinette of a leaking Brooklyn tenement. He lived a classic immigrant story-one of a close-knit, working-class family struggling to make it in America. Only...

A “complex and heart-wrenchingly compelling” exploration of Hasidic Jews struggling to live within, or outside, their restrictive communities—for viewers of Unorthodox and One of Us (Boston Globe)
When Hella Winston began talking with Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn for her doctoral dissertation in sociology, she was surprised to be covertly introduced to Hasidim unhappy with their highly restrictive...

"From the James Beard Award-winning author of Poor Man's Feast comes a powerful, heartfelt, and insightful story of one Jewish American's quest for identity in an unkosher world."--

Give me your tired,  your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free...Who wrote these words?  And why? In 1883, Emma Lazarus, deeply moved by an influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, wrote a sonnet that was to give voice to the Statue of Liberty.  Originally a gift from France to celebrate our shared national struggles for liberty, the Statue, thanks to Emma's poem, slowly came to shape our hearts, defining us as a nation that welcomes...

Vividly and lovingly recreates a city kid's summer in the Catskills in the 1950s. The year is 1958. Philip, a twelve-year-old kid from the Bronx, is getting ready for his family's annual trip upstate, where he'll spend the summer in a bungalow colony in the tiny village of Loch Sheldrake, New York, a faraway fairyland of mountains, lakes, starry nights, and dewy mornings. With his colony friends, he'll explore the woods and fields, have an array...

Annette Libeskind Berkovits thought her attempt to have her father record his life's story failed. But in 2004, three years after her father's death, she was going through his things and found a box of tapes-several years' worth-with his spectacular life, triumphs, and tragedies told one last time in his baritone voice. Nachman Libeskind's remarkable story is an odyssey through crucial events of the twentieth century. With an unshakable will and a...

"A rare glimpse into what it was like for a Jewish refugee to come of age in America during World War II, this unique memoir focuses on the struggles of assimilation. After a grueling and dramatic escape from occupied Poland, eight-year-old Julian and his mother arrive penniless in America in 1941 with big plans. Julian's beautiful, former socialite mother Barbara wants to regain her former social status, while Julian just wants to fit his war-ravaged...

When Samuel G. Freedman was nearing fifty, the same age at which his mother died of breast cancer, he realized that he did not know who she was. Of course, he knew that Eleanor had been his mother, a mother he kept at an emotional distance both in life and after death. He had never thought about the entire life she lived before him, a life of her own dreams and disappointments. And now, that ignorance haunted him. So Freedman set out to discover the...