The Origin of Sorrow

For more than 300 years, from the 15th through the 18th centuries, there existed in the independent European city of Frankfurt an enclosed Jewish ghetto, one street wide and a quarter-mile long, surrounded by high walls and locked gates, overcrowded, teeming with both the stench and the joy of human life. Once notorious, this Judengasse--Jews Lane--a passionate place infused with love and hate, with frustration, ambition and desire, has been largely forgotten. Now, in this dramatic, moving and at times wildly comic novel, Robert Mayer brings to vivid life in fictional form what is essentially a true story: how a 16-year-old girl named Guttle Schnapper married a 26-year-old coin dealer named Meyer Rothschild, bore him ten living children--and how, incredibly, from this sordid ghetto, emerged the richest family in the history of the world, before or since.