Children's fiction

Dreams in the Golden Country: the Diary of Zipporah Feldman, a Jewish Immigrant Girl, New York City, 1903

by Kathryn Lasky

188 pages · First published 1998

Twelve-year-old Zipporah Feldman lives with her Jewish immigrant family on New York’s Lower East Side in 1903. Her diary records crowded tenement life, school, work, family traditions, labor concerns, and the tensions between adapting to America and preserving Jewish identity. Zipporah dreams of opportunities that would have been difficult for girls in the world her parents left behind. Kathryn Lasky’s Dear America novel uses one girl’s coming-of-age story to explore immigration, urban poverty, assimilation, and the cultural energy of turn-of-the-century New York.