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Impetuous is not a word you'd use to describe Claire Bramany. But when an accident in Brooklyn in 1995 takes the life of her lover, Jessie Friedman, Claire's world implodes. While cleaning out Jessie's desk, Claire finds journals that tell long-buried secrets of Jessie's western girlhood. Jessie's account of Tulsa in 1944 appears innocent and playful, at first. Jessie's days are peopled with quirky characters--especially Uncle Jimmy, an honest-to-goodness hero back from war-torn Europe. He's Jessie's favorite, until he makes his move on his nine-year-old niece. No secrets. Secrets kill. This was the promise Claire and Jessie had made to each other. But Claire never heard of any Uncle Jimmy, much less any sexual violation. Shattered, yearning to reconnect with the Jessie she thought she knew, Claire heads out to Oklahoma. Are the journals true? If so, has Claire any other course than to avenge Jimmy's hideous crimes...'

Russia, 1914. Rivka, daughter of a prosperous boot maker, seems destined by tradition for marriage and the humdrum rounds of shtetl life. Then war breaks out, and things go badly for the tsar's army. When demoralized troops begin deserting their posts in the trenches, one unlikely officer recruits a battalion of girls to set an example for the men. Rivka seizes upon this chance for adventure as her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do something great in the world. She signs on, never suspecting the terrors that await her, or the trials that will test her, or the mishaps that will take her from the frozen steppes of Siberia to the hot, dusty hills of Palestine. Based on actual events, Rivka's War is a riveting tale of loss and survival. In vivid detail, it portrays the impact of the Great War on Jewish life, re-creating a vanished world.

Russia, 1914. Rivka, daughter of a prosperous boot maker, seems destined by tradition for marriage and the humdrum rounds of shtetl life. Then war breaks out, and things go badly for the tsar's army. When demoralized troops begin deserting their posts in the trenches, one unlikely officer recruits a battalion of girls to set an example for the men. Can a woman fight successfully in the front lines? Rivka signs on, never suspecting the terrors that await her, or the trials that will test her, or the mishaps that will take her from battlefields in the grip of revolutionary fervor, across the frozen steppes of civil-war-torn Siberia, and finally to the hot, dusty hills of Palestine, site of history's last great cavalry attack and first great air attack. World War I was a disastrous war; it ended in a disastrous peace, the consequences of which are still being felt today. Its effect on Jewish life in Eastern Europe has not often been written about, yet there and in Palestine that effect was profound. Taken from actual events, Rivka's War tells of loss and survival, portraying the impact of the Great War on Jewish life. It is a coming-of-age tale that will satisfy adult readers while being appropriate, as well, for young adults.

Three women...two traditions...one ancient land-- In the Middle East, in 1920, a new era beckoned. Gone was the old, corrupted Ottoman rule, succeeded now by a British authority promising peace, prosperity and order-with the pledge of a better life in Palestine for its Arab inhabitants, plus a homeland there for the Jews. But the next twenty-eight years beheld rapidly worsening strife, with ill feeling all around. The bitterest of triangles provoked widening and fearsome bloodshed. This is the story of ordinary people trying to do what's right in extraordinary times, pitting their best against the fierce turmoil of their days: Rivka, a Jewish farmer-Avram, her militant husband-Leila, her confidante, an Arab laundress-Nellie, her friend, a nurse-Morris, Nellie's husband, a British doctor-and all of their children, born into the seething cauldron that was reshaped in 1948 with the State of Israel's debut.

November 1918: the bloodshed has ended. Here and there among the cheering crowds are lone souls quietly weeping-Eleanor Simons for one. At the age of twenty-two, she has spent the last four years helping to nurse British and French soldiers along the Western Front. She never expected to survive the Great War. Who would, with a fianc� and many friends and colleagues among the millions dead? Having beaten the odds, now she finds herself adrift in Paris, heavy-hearted and unprepared for a long, blank stretch of lifetime ahead of her-while scores of delegates converge on the city to hammer out a peace treaty as quickly as possible. Will she find her way-and the diplomats find the world's way-into the promise of a goodly future?