I share this story about my life from childhood to adulthood while telling how my maternal grandmother that I was not aware existed gave me a locket in secret while visiting me for the very first time when I was twelve years old. I explained here why and how I was able to hide the locket for fifty-five years. I tell my story of the locket through a series of unusual events where things were surprisingly revealed to me about an ancestry that I never knew existed on my mother’s side of the family. I relate how that locket kept silent and never opened itself for years until it was the perfect time to reveal its true meaning to me. I explained the feeling of total joy and excitement I have once I discovered for certain that I have real blood relatives on my mother’s side of the family, not just step relatives, or adopted family members. My desire to help my youngest granddaughter understand the importance of the locket as I pass it down to her compelled me to write about the events surrounding Aunt Sarah’s locket and just how I discovered what I had been given by my grandmother over fifty-five years ago.

"Originally published individually by Renaissance Press in 2008"--Colophon.

A New York Times–bestselling author’s poignant novel of a boy’s coming of age on Manhattan’s Lower East Side in the 1920s. When Benny Kramer’s father came to the United States, he was hungry, broke, and ignorant. Handed a banana and told it was “American food,” he scarfed it down, peel and all. By the time he died, he was no richer, but much wiser, and everything he learned he imparted to his son. Growing up on New York’s Lower East Side between the wars, Benny’s life was just as chaotic as his neighborhood. How many young boys have seen a man decapitated by a horse? How many know blacksmiths who got tangled up in a multiple homicide? How many win an elocution contest, only to find out it was rigged by the mob? For Benny, these are everyday events, and he remembers them with the biting wit that made Jerome Weidman one of the most beloved novelists of his day. This ebook features a foreword by Alistair Cooke.

The beloved bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author brings us a novel that is “funny and lyric and true" (The New Yorker). Through the syncopated rhythms of the ragtime era to the thumping, rocking beats of the 1970s, generations of Pecks have maintained a determined steadiness. Adamantly middle class—Peck-proud, as the family slogan goes—they are quick to sweep under the rug those members who do not live up to their standards. Maybe that’s why Caleb Peck took off with his violincello as a boy? Sixty years later, his brother Daniel is still wondering. No longer willing to live without answers, he turns to his daughter-in-law, Justine, another Peck family eccentric. A studied tarot card reader, Justine comes across one message over and over in the cards: change is coming. With Daniel’s help, she’s hoping to find the courage to embrace whatever happens next. An unlikely pair struggling against a stifling family, Daniel and Justine believe they’ll find freedom in just the right mix of magic, music, and mystery.