Overview

It's 1918, and Bluma Rappaport can't wait to set sail for America where her husband has gone to start a new life--ostensibly for their whole family. But when Sender fails to send money for their passage, Bluma takes matters into her own hands. She and her three daughters show up on his doorstep, which turns out to be broken, just one of the problems with the derelict farm he purchased. Though inspired by the Jewish back-to-the-land movement, Sender has been spending more time studying Torah than he has plowing and harvesting. Worse, Bluma's hopes for her daughters are soon shaken. Can she protect them from the hollow marriage and lack of education that have been her own fate? Facing challenges such as the Spanish flu pandemic, the anti-Semitism of a resurgent Ku Klux Klan, and the Great Depression, Bluma relies on her wits and her wry sense of humor to pull the family through.

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Reviews

""Wild Grapes, set among Jewish immigrants-turned-farmers in early twentieth-century Ohio, is a story of resilience, faith, and grudging reinvention. Miriam Flock's courageous, unsparing matriarch, Bluma Rappaport, is driven to help her daughters escape the circumscribed life that has been her lot; they should root and prosper in the unfamiliar soil of a new country. In our twenty-first-century culture, when populations are still besieged with displacement and bound together with fragile hope, Wild Grapes reminds us how families can cultivate belonging even in the most unyielding ground."" --Michael J. Rosen, author of Elijah's Angel ""Wild Grapes does not feel like a debut novel. It is beautifully written, and I was immediately absorbed by this riveting story of an immigrant Jewish family intent on making it in early twentieth-century America. I grew to love the characters. Their hardships and their joys brought me to tears and laughter. An accomplished poet and editor, Miriam Flock was a trusted reader for my writing. No one will be disappointed reading this compelling writing of her own."" --Sheldon Lewis, author of Torah of Reconciliation ""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."" --Shulamit S. Magnus, author of Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother

Author Information

Miriam Flock, an award-winning poet and non-fiction writer, begins a new phase of her writing life as a novelist with Wild Grapes, about the remarkable group of Jewish grape farmers who settled in Geneva, Ohio, between the turn of the century and the Great Depression. She is also the author of the poetry chapbook The Scientist's Wife (Finishing Line Press). Formerly COO of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, Miriam helped to found one of the most popular websites on ethical issues in the world. A product of the Stanford University Master's in Creative Writing Program, Miriam also has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia.

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