New York, 1918. One fateful winter night, Miriam Eidelberg finds herself strolling across the Williamsburg Bridge with her literary hero, the man whose poems she knows by heart. Nyezhiner, a star of his Yiddish artistic clique, is beguiled by the wistful girl at his side. But Miriam is married with a young daughter, while Nyezhiner, who is ten years her senior, has a wife, five children, and a womanizing reputation. Can these lovers find in each other the fulfillment they yearn for- and at what cost?

This headily bittersweet novel takes us into the " Jewish tumult" of early 20th-century Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, where recent immigrants from Eastern Europe toil as shoemakers and tailors by day and cultivate a lively intelligentsia by night. An indelible portrait of a milieu and a timeless mapping of desire and freedom, Hand in Hand lays bare the human heart in all its frailty, tenderness, and tyranny.