Once Upon America

This is a warm collection of stories of the early years of Orthodox Jewish life in America. Together, the stories paint a kaleidoscopic view of the Orthodox community in the New World, and its small personal struggles to cope and grow. These are everyday stories, peopled with everyday heroes and heroines, most of them young, and all of them trying to live Torah lives, applying timeless values of the Torah in their situations on the new, ever-changing American scene. As Naomi comes vividly to life, you cannot help but feel what she is going through in her dealings with the formidable Miss Bailey and her Home Economics class, complete with non-kosher kitchen, in the local public school. Then there is Rena, all alone, stuck in a broken elevator inside an empty museum. In other stories, the struggling owners of a small grocery store in the years of the Great Depression still manage to do kindness and gemillas chesed. Read about the amazing transformation of a girl called Milly;and then for anyone who has ever had a dream, yearning for it to come true, there is the story of Elisheva and a certain special coat. In sum, this is a book of Jewish incidents with Jewish values, down to earth and true to life, that are worth reading and worth remembering. (Originally published in 1983)