My Own Ground (Library of Modern Jewish Literature)

Set in the year 1912, My Own Ground is the dramatic portrayal of the spiritual and sexual awakening of Jake Brody, an orphaned fifteen-year-old immigrant on New York's Lower East Side. It is also the story of the love of Hannele Isaacs, the rabbi's daughter, for the Jewish pimp Schlifka, who ruthlessly makes her one of his girls. In the struggle to save Hannele, Jacob comes of age abruptly, discovering violence, perversity, mysticism, sexuality, and death in the bitter reality of life in a turn-of-the-century American ghetto.