Ruhama Veltfort was a young Barnard graduate living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan when she gave up her newborn son for adoption. Thirty-one years later, she discovered that he was living only five blocks away from her home in San Francisco's Mission District. With tenderness and wry humor, these fourteen well-observed stories trace the roots of that cycle of relinquishment and reunion, offering an intimate perspective on the social transformations of the mid-to-late twentieth century. Lovers, husbands, children and a "rag-tag band of seekers and screwballs" wind their way through this...

Ruhama Veltfort's exhilerating debut novel delves into the nature of will and of faith, telling the story of a modern exodus that echoes the American quest for spiritual fulfillment. What begins as a search for a better life by a group of Jewish immigrants in the mid 1800s becomes the embodiment of the longing-physical, familiar, and spiritual-we all feel for a home.