Visceral, moving, and unforgettable.
Zuckerman’s latest captures the grit and hope of Jewish immigrants fighting to carve out new lives in the cramped tenements and unforgiving streets of New York’s Lower East Side. Malka Kaminsky slips out of Grodno with her dowry in hand, chasing the freedom she’s been denied. America greets her not with promise but with the grind of a shirtwaist factory, where every day cuts a little deeper. Yaakov Rogovin, carrying the weight of his family’s slaughter in Valozyn, presses cloaks by day and clings to music by night. When their lives intersect, the collision is anything but ordinary.
There’s a confidence to Zuckerman’s writing, a way he threads violence and tenderness through the same line. Malka bears the scars of survival, Yaakov the ache of loss, and Aunt Leah holds steady while everything else shifts. The minor characters, from workers on the line to the men hired to crush them, are just as sharply etched, each adding to the novel’s depth and tension. The Lower East Side hums with life. The smells of coal smoke and knishes, the press of bodies in the tenements, the endless drone of sewing machines, all of it comes alive. The strikes and picket lines crackle with tension, and the threat of violence is never far away, raising the stakes for the pair.
This, ultimately, is a story about survival and the choices that define it. Zuckerman refuses to romanticize his characters’ struggles, yet he lets hope surface where it is least expected—through acts of courage, through love, through the determination to carve meaning from suffering.
A vivid, emotionally charged novel that is impossible to put down.
Pub date October 21, 2025
Cennan Books of Cynren Press
ISBN 9781947976573
Price $18.00 (USD) Paperback, $9.99 Kindle edition
