On Thanksgiving Day, a Persian Jew honors her mother, called Bibi by her children. Raised in the Muslim holy city of Mashhad, Bibi had to pretend to be of Muslim faith in honor to survive. As her daughter recalls Bibi’s dangerous and fascinating life story and all the secrets and Thanksgivings ...

Screenwriter David Chiu, the son of a Chinese immigrant and a Lithuanian Jewish mother, encounters unexpected racism at a Hollywood pitch meeting when a powerful man tells a joke about a Chinese restaurant using a racist accent. As David debates what to do, he makes a decision that both haunts h...

Before she leaves for the Peace Corps, a 56-year-old woman begins to get her body in shape for her challenging upcoming assignment in Africa as an agribusiness specialist. She carries heavy gallon jugs of water up and down steep hills to prepare her. But her physical strength is not all she wor...

A woman who discovers she can’t bear children adopts a Russian toddler. As his special needs become apparent, she doubts whether she can successfully meet the challenge of raising a son with severe developmental delays. When the suggestion is made that she should “send him back to Russia,” she ...

A medevac rescue worker arrives at a highway accident scene via helicopter, where she finds two cars “crumpled like tin cans.” Doubting whether anyone in the accident could have survived, she finds a couple in one of the cars who are barely alive and are still holding hands. The following shabb...

The daughter of African-American and Jewish parents, Courtenay wonders if she will ever find a mate, since she is “too black for Ashkenazi Jews and too Jewish for African-Americans.” She has always wanted to follow her father’s commitment as a former foster child and adopt foster children of her...

A school social worker is assigned the task of finding out why eight Russian pupils are always absent from school. To learn the reason, he tries in vain to contact their parents and even drives around the area they live in to see if he can spot them. Once he locates them, he carefully approache...

Albert Kallis is one of the founders of a well-known American eatery. This moving origin story starts with the question, “Could a menu devoted entirely to pancakes from around the world fill a need in 1950s America?” When Al’s friend asks him to invest in this novel, high-risk concept, Al, an a...