Escaping religious persecution and desperate to take him to safety in New York where her brother lives, she, her nephew, fiancé and future mother-in-law join a caravan of refugees on a dangerous trek through the backroads and forests of Russia and Poland. While en route Shayna falls victim to rapists.  Wrenched from her native soil, penniless and pregnant, her dreams of a new life begin to fade in the face of poverty and exploitation on the Lower East Side. Though their story took place 100 years ago, Shayna is a timeless account of refugees, immigration, and above all, the resilience of the human spirit.  A chapter of American history told through the story of one family.    

Shayna was inspired by my father’s life. Orphaned at four years old after the murder of his entire family in a pogrom, he walked west across Europe with relatives who brought him to America. When I saw images of Syrian refugees trudging across Europe to reach safety, I saw my father as he must have been a hundred years before, a hungry, frightened and despairing child. Beyond the fear and the physical deprivation was the grief of losing his mother, a loss which never left his heart. These elements stirred within me and emerged as fiction in the novel, Shayna. Only after I finished did I realize I’d been attempting to give my father a better life, to replace, if only through fiction, the family he had lost. 

It’s also a novel steeped in the Yiddish language and culture of my childhood. The current revival of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish reflects the renewed interest in the world of the shtetl, in the traditions and travails of our ancestors. Shayna’s timely focus on immigration, the plight of refugees and the current interest genealogy will draw a wide ranging audience, particularly appealing to book clubs with an appreciation of stories of family ties and struggles.