Wanda Petronski, a Polish girl in a Connecticut school is ridiculed by her classmates for wearing the same faded blue dress every day. Wanda claims she has one hundred dresses at home, but everyone knows she doesn't and bullies her mercilessly. In winning a medal she is no longer there to receive, a tight-lipped little Polish girl teaches her classmates a lesson.

This is the story of Jacob Kalinsky, born in Koretz, Poland, in 1904 to a mean-tempered tyrant of a father and a sweet and loving mother. At the age of twelve, Jacob's mother, Sarah, dies, and Jacob, along with his nine-year-old brother, is sent to live in the care of a brothel run by a loving madam named Jordanna. It takes Jacob's father three long years to send for his sons. During that time, Jacob suffers many indignities, but when he was raped...

Pears on a Willow Tree is a multigenerational roadmap of love and hate, distance and closeness, and the lure of roots that both bind and sustain us all. The Marchewka women are inseparable. They relish the joys of family gatherings; from preparing traditional holiday meals to organizing a wedding in which each of them is given a specific task -- whether it's sewing the bridal gown or preserving pickles as a gift to the newlyweds. Bound together by...

A twelve-year-old Polish American girl is boarded onto an orphan train in Chicago with fears about traveling to the West and a life of unpaid slavery.

The Lullaby of Polish Girls is a striking and vivid debut novel, absolutely buzzing with energy. Dagmara Dominczyk's freshly observed story about the intertwined lives of three friends is both sexy and sensitive, with a raw, openhearted center. Dominczyk's love for her complicated characters is apparent from the first page to the last, and by the novel's end the reader cares for them just as deeply." - Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont's Life in...

He was hailed as one of the world's great writers and intellectuals, with novels like The Painted Bird and Being There. He was acclaimed as a heroic survivor and witness of the Holocaust. He won high literary awards, made the bestseller lists, taught and lectured in prestigious universities, was feted in high society, and became an intimate of the rich and famous in a jet set world of glitter and glamour. Then, in an expose that sent shock waves throughout...

David Lurie learns that all beginnings are hard. He must fight for his place against the bullies in his Depression-shadowed Bronx neighborhood and his own frail health. As a young man, he must start anew and define his own path of personal belief that diverges sharply with his devout father and everything he has been taught.

Discusses the history, culture, and religion of the Poles, actors encouraging their emigration, and their acceptance as an ethnic group in North America.

This is the story of a Polish-American family from Detroit which is run with an iron fist by a gorgeous, middle-aged matriarch, Jadzia, a proud woman who cleans toilets in order to support her family.

Having left Poland and braved ocean storms to join her father in America, Krysia arrives at Ellis Island on Christmas Eve.