The Gostynin Shul

The Gostynin Shul - A Yiddish history mystery

Dr. Joanna Adelman leads a quiet life. She takes walks with her seeing-eye dog, Delilah, and tries to survive her Grandmother's cooking. Her work as a Yiddish translator adds small details to the story of Jewish immigration to Boston, but has never been the most exciting of careers. Until the Zielinski documents. They arrive in her office one morning – a jumble of handwritten pages in a cardboard box. Suddenly Joanna finds herself fending off an enraged Hasidic group intent on preserving its reputation, and a Boston society matron desperate to preserve her family's wealth and status.

With the help of Ming Leibowitz, her Chinese-Israeli assistant, and Dr. Phillipa Henderson, a colleague specializing in African-American culture, Joanna delves into the layered history of Boston's Beacon Hill and the fight over a small plot of land once owned by former slaves.

The centuries-old struggle of Boston's marginalized Jews and African-Americans to find a place to call home reignites in modern-day Boston, and old hatreds threaten to break a community apart.