The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter
The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter

Author: Lipinsky Cochran Joan

Publisher:

Published: 2018-09

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 9780999828007

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Finalist for the Claymore and Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards Since separating from her philandering husband, Boca Raton writer Becks Ruchinsky has struggled to build a closer relationship with her quirky and contentious father, Tootsie, who lives in a retirement home. One evening, as she and her father are relaxing on the home's front porch, an elderly woman accuses Tootsie of having murdered her husband fifty years earlier. Tootsie admits to ratting on the man, who'd cheated their Jewish syndicate boss out of thousands of dollars, but denies killing the widow's husband. He also admits to having friends in the Jewish mafia and shares stories about his experiences. But the more time she spends with her father, the more convinced Becks becomes that Tootsie is lying about his involvement. Determined to discover the truth about her dad's past, she sets out on a journey to undercover his darkest secrets. She learns he worked for the Jewish mafia -running numbers for the Cuban lottery, beating up Nazi sympathizers, and smuggling arms to Israeli independence fighters. When she learns that he murdered his best friend and, possibly, his own brother, she must decide if she can accept his criminal past - or cut him out of her life. The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter also explores the impact our parents' relationships have on our own. Throughout the book, Becks challenges her father on his infidelity toward her mother and becomes frustrated by his refusal to acknowledge that what he did was hurtful to his entire family. She's upset when Tootsie minimizes her husband's affair and encourages her to take him back. Ultimately, Becks realizes that she cannot forgive her husband for cheating until she comes to terms with her father's infidelities...and her mother's willingness to put up with them. A gripping and thought-provoking murder mystery, this award-winning novel explores the colorful and precarious world of the 1940s and 1950s Jewish mafia . . . and the limits of familial love. Praise for The Yiddish Gangster's Daughter . . . an engaging, multi-layered family saga cum mystery where a fifty-something woman and mother of two grown sons suddenly discovers that the comfortable, predictable life she has been living is nothing but a sham. Her attempts to make sense of her impossible new reality are both touching and gripping, making for a truly unique literary experience. Les Standiford, The Last Train to Paradise

The Hasidic Rebbe's Son
The Hasidic Rebbe's Son

Author: Joan Lipinsky Cochran

Publisher: Becks Ruchinsky Mystery

Published: 2020-12-15

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9780999828038

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The murder of an ultra-religious student seeking refuge in her home forces an investigative reporter to explore the seedy underside of South Beach's glitzy nightclub scene and the insular world of Hasidic Judaism to find his killer. Boca Raton reporter Becks Ruchinsky is surprised when her son, Gabe, brings a frightened young man home from college and asks her to hide him. Menachem left his Hasidic community under mysterious circumstances and fears being kidnapped. Grateful to the young man for befriending her son, whose Asperger's makes friendships difficult, Becks takes in the boy. Six days later, he's found floating in a canal. Police insist Menachem's drowning was an accident but Becks isn't buying. Her investigation takes her from the gritty underworld of South Beach to secretive Hasidic communities in Miami and New York. With the help of her ex-gangster father Tootsie and a nosy Hasidic shopkeeper, Becks discovers the leader of a cult-like religious community is subverting rabbinic law to conceal ugly truths. As she uncovers layer upon layer of lies and deceptions, Becks discovers her son's life may depend on her ability to unearth these secrets.

Still Missing Beulah
Still Missing Beulah

Author: Joan Lipinsky Cochran

Publisher:

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 86

ISBN-13: 9780692298350

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Still Missing Beulah: Stories of Blacks and Jews in Mid-Century Miami It's the 1950s and Miami businessman Tootsie Plotnik counts his Bahamian mistress and his black business associates among his dearest friends. But he also refers to his African American employees using the derogatory Yiddish term, schvartz, and comes within inches of murdering an unarmed black teenager. Using linked short stories and brief historical accounts, Still Missing Beulah takes the reader into the heart and mind of an aging Jewish businessman whose prejudices are challenged by the black people who enter his life. Written in the same vein as The Help, this collection documents the struggles Jews and blacks faced during an era when both groups experienced rampant discrimination and signs prohibiting Jews and blacks in hotels and clubs were as pervasive as palm trees and mosquitoes.

Tommy Gun Winter
Tommy Gun Winter

Author: Nathan Gorenstein

Publisher: ForeEdge from University Press of New England

Published: 2015-04-07

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1611684269

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This is the true tale of two brothers, sons of a successful Jewish contractor, who along with an MIT graduate and a minister's daughter once competed for headlines with John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde. The gang was led by the angry, violent, yet often charismatic Murton Millen, a small-time hoodlum and aspiring race-car driver. With his younger brother, Irv, and later joined by neighborhood buddy and MIT graduate Abe Faber, Murt launched a career of increasingly ambitious robberies. But it was only after his sudden marriage to the beautiful eighteen-year-old Norma Brighton that the gang escalated to murder. Their crime wave climaxed at a Needham, Massachusetts, bank on February 2, 1934, when Murt cut down two local police officers - Francis Haddock and Forbes McLeod - with a Thompson submachine gun stolen from state police. The killings, the dogged investigation by two clever detectives, and the record-setting trial with seventeen psychiatrists were national news. In Depression-era America this Boston saga of sex, ethnicity, and bloodshed made the trio and their "red-headed gun moll" infamous. Gorenstein's account explores the Millen, Faber, and Brighton families and introduces us to cops, psychiatrists, newspaper men and women, and ordinary citizens caught up in the extraordinary Tommy Gun Winter of 1934.

Tough Jews
Tough Jews

Author: Rich Cohen

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2013-06-18

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1439142505

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Award-winning writer Rich Cohen excavates the real stories behind the legend of infamous criminal enforcers Murder, Inc. and contemplates the question: Where did the tough Jews go? In 1930s Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who now exist only in legend and in the memories of a few old-timers: Jewish gangsters, fearless thugs with nicknames like Kid Twist Reles and Pittsburgh Phil Strauss. Growing up in Brownsville, they made their way from street fights to underworld power, becoming the execution squad for a national crime syndicate. Murder Inc. did for organized crime what Henry Ford did for the automobile, and Tough Jews is the first in-depth portrait of these men, a thrilling glimpse at the muscle that made possible the success of gangster statesmen such as Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano. For Rich Cohen, who grew up in suburban Illinois in the 1980s taunted by the stereotype of Jews as book-reading rule followers, the very idea of the Jewish gangster was a relief; for once, a Jew in jail did not have to be a white collar criminal. With a clear eye and a comic sensibility, Cohen looks beyond the blood and ultimately encounters each of these ruthless killers’ matzo-ball heart. Tough Jews shows what can happen when a member of the tribe combines brains, heart, and a dangerous determination never to back down.

Newark Minutemen
Newark Minutemen

Author: Leslie K. Barry

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing

Published: 2020-04-28

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 1631950738

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#1 bestseller and soon to be motion picture, Newark Minutemen has bridged generations. The epic based-on-true story of forbidden love and unholy heroism is set against the backdrop of an America ripped apart by the Great Depression and on the brink of war. Newark, NJ, 1938. Millions are out of work and robbed of dignity. A shadow Hitler-Nazi party called the German-American Bund that is led by an American Fuhrer threatens to swallow democracy. In this dangerous time of star-spangled fascism, a romance forms between the Jewish boxer, Yael and the daughter of the enemy, Krista. But 1930s America pulls them apart as Krista’s people want Yael’s dead. Then Yael is recruited by the mob to go undercover for the FBI against her people and bring down the German-American Bund. Author Leslie K. Barry captures an authentic and brave portrait of a lost America searching for identity, preserving legacy and saving its soul. It is a heartbreaking novel that crosses generations as it honors the fragility of freedom.

Moshkeleh the Thief
Moshkeleh the Thief

Author: Sholem Aleichem

Publisher: U of Nebraska Press

Published: 2021-09

Total Pages: 73

ISBN-13: 082761876X

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This first English translation of Sholom Aleichem's rediscovered novel, Moshkeleh the Thief, has a riveting plot, an unusual love story, and a keenly observed portrayal of an underclass Jew replete with characters never before been seen in Yiddish literature. The eponymous hero, Moshkeleh, is a robust chap and horse thief. When Tsireleh, daughter of a tavern keeper, flees to a monastery with the man she loves--a non-Jew she met at the tavern--the humiliated tavern keeper's family turns to Moshkeleh for help, not knowing he too is in love with her. For some unknown reason, this innovative novel does not appear in the standard twenty-eight-volume edition of Sholom Aleichem's collected works, published after his death. Strikingly, Moshkeleh the Thief shows Jews interacting with non-Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement--a groundbreaking theme in modern Yiddish literature. This novel is also important for Sholom Aleichem's approach to his material. Yiddish literature had long maintained a tradition of edelkeyt, refinement. Authors eschewed violence, the darker side of life, and people on the fringe of respectability. Moshkeleh thus enters a Jewish arena not hitherto explored in a novel.

Daughter of the King
Daughter of the King

Author: Sandra Lansky

Publisher: Weinstein Books

Published: 2014-03-04

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 160286215X

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The daughter of one of the most powerful mobsters in America describes growing up amidst the glamour and tragedy of 1940s, 50s and 60s Las Vegas and recounts knowing Bugsy Siegel, Lucky Luciano and Frank Sinatra as a child.

The Third Daughter
The Third Daughter

Author: Talia Carner

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 006289689X

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“In The Third Daughter, Talia Carner ably illuminates a little-known piece of history: the sex trafficking of young women from Russia to South America in the late 19th century. Thoroughly researched and vividly rendered, this is an important and unforgettable story of exploitation and empowerment that will leave you both shaken and inspired.” —Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris The turn of the 20th century finds fourteen-year-old Batya in the Russian countryside, fleeing with her family endless pogroms. Desperate, her father leaps at the opportunity to marry Batya to a worldly, wealthy stranger who can guarantee his daughter an easy life and passage to America. Feeling like a princess in a fairytale, Batya leaves her old life behind as she is whisked away to a new world. But soon she discovers that she’s entered a waking nightmare. Her new “husband” does indeed bring her to America: Buenos Aires, a vibrant, growing city in which prostitution is not only legal but deeply embedded in the culture. And now Batya is one of thousands of women tricked and sold into a brothel. As the years pass, Batya forms deep bonds with her “sisters” in the house as well as some men who are both kind and cruel. Through it all, she holds onto one dream: to bring her family to America, where they will be safe from the anti-Semitism that plagues Russia. Just as Batya is becoming a known tango dancer, she gets an unexpected but dangerous opportunity—to help bring down the criminal network that has enslaved so many young women and has been instrumental in developing Buenos Aires into a major metropolis. A powerful story of finding courage in the face of danger, and hope in the face of despair, The Third Daughter brings to life a dark period of Jewish history and gives a voice to victims whose truth deserves to finally be told.

The Kosher Capones
The Kosher Capones

Author: Joe Kraus

Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press

Published: 2019-10-15

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1501747339

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The Kosher Capones tells the fascinating story of Chicago's Jewish gangsters from Prohibition into the 1980s. Author Joe Kraus traces these gangsters through the lives, criminal careers, and conflicts of Benjamin "Zuckie the Bookie" Zuckerman, last of the independent West Side Jewish bosses, and Lenny Patrick, eventual head of the Syndicate's "Jewish wing." These two men linked the early Jewish gangsters of the neighborhoods of Maxwell Street and Lawndale to the notorious Chicago Outfit that emerged from Al Capone's criminal confederation. Focusing on the murder of Zuckerman by Patrick, Kraus introduces us to the different models of organized crime they represented, a raft of largely forgotten Jewish gangsters, and the changing nature of Chicago's political corruption. Hard-to-believe anecdotes of corrupt politicians, seasoned killers, and in-over-their-heads criminal operators spotlight the magnitude and importance of Jewish gangsters to the story of Windy City mob rule. With an eye for the dramatic, The Kosher Capones takes us deep inside a hidden society and offers glimpses of the men who ran the Jewish criminal community in Chicago for more than sixty years.