Vera's Will

Vera Steiner lives through pogrom, poverty, epidemic ... but how can she go on after she loses everything? In a time before anyone dares dream that love is a right, Vera pays for her deviance with lifelong loneliness. Yet this is not a throwback to the old doomed-lesbian tale. Vera survives. Fifty years later, in a new era, her granddaughter Randy comes of age and comes out of the closet. Randy throws herself into the struggle to do away with shame and secrecy--never knowing her own grandmother's secret shame until it's too late. Sweeping across the miles and over the years--from czarist Russia to sweatshop New Jersey, from the 1960s Motor City to the Manhattan of LGBTQ protests--VERA'S WILL takes the reader on a grand journey. Set against the backdrop of war, depression, McCarthyism, civil rights, AIDS, this is a novel of the 20th century. This is a family saga. Most of all, though, this is Vera's story, and Randy's: a story about the human heart, and the unbreakable human will to love.