Shulamit S. Magnus

Wild Grapes

Fiction

“This historical novel is set in the unusual context of rural Ohio in the early twentieth century, giving readers a new and refreshing take on Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe to the US outside of the teeming cities. Told through the voice of the family matriarch, it gives us an unvarnished view of a woman’s experience of displacement and accommodation, marital and family strife, maternal devotion, economic struggle, and determined survival in the New World, including continued holiday, culinary, and birthing traditions from ‘the Old Home,’ and the use of Yiddish, liberally reproduced in the narrative. Written lucidly, with care to historical accuracy and to the realities of concord grape growing and wine making, home weaving, and immigrant hopes and disappointments, Wild Grapes is both an engrossing read and an authentic entree to Jewish historical experience in America.”