Helene Cohen Bludman

Caroline Goldberg Igra's From Where I Stand explores the challenge of being a mother, the frustration of being a daughter, and the heart-wrenching complexity of being both.

Outraged by the social inequities in her neighborhood of Down River, 16-year-old Willow Zimmerman, a Jewish high school student, devotes her free time pursuing tikkun olam.

Fradl Shtok (1890-1990) was a Yiddish writer from Ukraine who has languished in obscurity. With this splendid collection of 23 of her stories (Northwestern University Press), she may now rightly be recognized as among the best Yiddish writers of her day.

Margarita Gokun Silver was 20 years old when she left her homeland, the former USSR, to live in the United States. She relates her experiences as a Jewish refugee in a series of darkly funny essays about life in the Soviet Union, family dynamics, and culture shock upon entering "Amerika," as Silver and her high school friends referred to the U.S.