Bat-Ami sets her story in a refugee shelter at Fort Ontario in Oswego, New York.

This was a real refugee center, but a littleknown one, established by the United States government in the fall of 1944 to house about one thousand refugees from Italy and help these people escape from Hitler's persecution. The novel begins in the last year of World War II, after Italy has been liberated and the Jewish people have been released. But Adam and the other Jews who left Rome for the shelter in America find nothing liberating about living in the refugee camp in a country they believed to be "the home of the free." Chris and Adam find that persecution against the Jews continues in America, and they discover that they are in for quite a battle as they attempt to nurture a love amidst prejudice and intolerance.

The refugee camp of Two...